NEW RESOURCES

State Archives of North Carolina: CollectionBuilder: A New Way to Browse Our Digital Collections. “CollectionBuilder is exciting because it allows us to take items that were already digitized and living in the North Carolina Digital Collections (NCDC) and present them to you in new ways. Our She Changed the World pilot project pulls from various digital collections and includes state publications, photographs, letters, oral histories, posters, and more all relating to the subject of women’s history in North Carolina. Think of it almost like a digital exhibit, using a curated selection of records from our collections to highlight a specific topic.”

Herald-Tribune: New website promotes Florida arts groups. “Arts groups across Florida, particularly those in the Sarasota area, are getting a little promotional help from WUSF Public Media, the Tampa-based public radio station that has launched a new streaming hub of performances and behind-the-scenes activities…. Most of the Sarasota-area performing arts organizations are featured on the site, from Asolo Repertory Theatre and Florida Studio Theatre, to the Sarasota Orchestra, Sarasota Opera, The Sarasota Ballet, The Venice Symphony, Urbanite Theatre, Theatre Odyssey, The Players Centre for Performing Arts and New Music New College.”

Ursinus College: Digital Archive of Collegeville’s First Newspaper Now Available Online. “In cooperation with Historic Trappe, Ursinus College’s Library & Information Technology Department has been working to digitize and make available Collegeville’s first newspaper, The Providence Independent, which ran from 1875 to 1898.”

San Francisco Chronicle: S.F. Public Defender’s Office launches website for searching cop records. “The San Francisco Public Defender’s Office on Wednesday launched a website where members of the public can search for police records of misconduct, shootings, civil suits and certain officer complaints.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

CNN: Facebook and Twitter chart out different paths for Congress on internet regulation. “In a Senate hearing on Tuesday that stretched on for more than four hours, the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter sought to recalibrate their relationship with Congress, apologizing for past mistakes while trying to set the tone for future regulation of their industry that’s expected to see a bigger push in 2021.”

CNET: TikTok boosts parental controls with new additions to its Family Pairing tools. “The Chinese company, which has been under constant pressure from the Trump administration and US government officials over the past year, is boosting its Family Pairing controls. It will allow parents greater control on what their teens can search for, who can comment on their videos (everyone, friends or no one), and whether their kids’ page is private (where the teen choose who can see the content) or public for the world to see.”

Gizmodo: Chrome’s Latest Update Makes it Heaps Faster, According to Google. “If it took you several seconds to load this article in Google Chrome, rest easy knowing there’s some very good news about the web browser’s latest update. After releasing a few big updates to the browser this year, Google’s Chrome director Matt Waddell announced the search giant’s last update for Chrome for 2020 would be dropping today on the company’s blog.”

USEFUL STUFF

SupChina: Navigating Chinese academia: A rough guide to CNKI, China’s JSTOR. “Whether at school or in your career, I suspect that you have used a service like JSTOR, which is a digital library of books, newspapers, academic publications, and more. China’s version of JSTOR is called CNKI, the China National Knowledge Infrastructure, hosted by Tsinghua University with support from the Chinese government. There is a lot inside CNKI. Like JSTOR, it serves as a repository for articles, patents, government documents, and other reference materials. For the purpose of this walkthrough, I’m only going to explain how to search through top academic journals, but many aspects of this walkthrough should be applicable to other parts of the CNKI portal.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Techdirt: Twitch Continues To Trip Over Itself In Response To DMCA Apocalypse. “What a few weeks for Twitch. You will recall that the platform went about pissing a ton of its talent and viewers off by nuking a metric ton of video content on the site in response to a flood of DMCA takedown notices, most of them from the RIAA. And this truly was the nuclear option, far different from the notice/counternotice system most platforms use. In fact, it was so extraordinary that it arguably lost Twitch its DMCA safe harbor.”

Vice: How the U.S. Military Buys Location Data from Ordinary Apps. “The U.S. military is buying the granular movement data of people around the world, harvested from innocuous-seeming apps, Motherboard has learned. The most popular app among a group Motherboard analyzed connected to this sort of data sale is a Muslim prayer and Quran app that has more than 98 million downloads worldwide. Others include a Muslim dating app, a popular Craigslist app, an app for following storms, and a ‘level’ app that can be used to help, for example, install shelves in a bedroom.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Phys .org: Los Angeles and Google partner on ‘Tree Canopy’ project. “Los Angeles and Google have struck a partnership to track canopy density in the huge metropolis to determine which neighborhoods need more trees as a means of fighting extreme temperatures. Vegetation, notably tree canopy coverage, plays a key role in offering the kind of relief that Los Angeles needs: The city is the state’s biggest urban heat island thanks in no small part to thousands of miles of roads and parking spaces.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Creative Boom: A new tool by Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson-Powell grows letterforms from fungi. “We thought we’d seen it all. Until that is, Pentagram partners Luke Powell and Jody Hudson-Powell designed an interactive web tool that allows us to cultivate and download letterforms (and much more) by stimulating the mycelium growth found in fungi.” Good morning, Internet…

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