NEW RESOURCES

Deseret News: The Wilford Woodruff Papers website is live. Here’s what you need to know. “Very few in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints kept records like Wilford Woodruff. Starting in 1828, Woodruff’s meticulous records document his extensive ministry and missionary service, the teachings of Joseph Smith and other leaders, daily happenings, his witness of the church’s Restoration and other significant events until his death in 1898. That roughly translates into more than 11,000 pages in 31 daybooks and journals. The fourth president of the church also penned over 13,000 letters, receiving more than 17,000 in return.”

Boing Boing: Database of police settlements. “Five Thirty Eight published a database of police settlements at Github—a unique body of information that reveals the financial costs incurred by America’s excessively violent cops. But it cautions against using the information to draw comparisons between jurisdictions.”

The Guardian: UK public urged to find statues of women for gender gap database. “People are being urged to find female statues in their local areas as part of a campaign to record the sculptures and busts of ‘real-life women’ and redress the gender imbalance in civic monuments. The campaign group Public Sculpture and Statues Association (PSSA) has so far recorded 100 sculptures in the UK as part of its new public database. Its co-chair Joanna Barnes said the list was not comprehensive and new submissions were being made.”

USEFUL STUFF

Search Engine Journal: 44 Free Tools to Help You Find What People Search For. “It’s important to know what people are searching for and why. Check out these tools to help target keywords easily and understand users better.” As with all Search Engine Journal articles, it’s extensive, well screenshot, and filled with links.

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

South China Morning Post: Bringing saris back: the Indian social media influencers celebrating ‘six yards of freedom’. “Eshna Kutty carries her clothes as effortlessly as she does her dance routines. She pirouettes to the popular Bollywood song ‘Genda Phool’ as she spins a hula hoop around her body, twirling it in the air, jumping through it and generally defying the laws of physics as she contorts her limbs through it. Eye-catching though the routine in the video clip is, it is not Kutty’s dance moves that have captured India’s attention, but what she is wearing. For, rather than her blue sports bra, sneakers and tights she is wearing a maroon sari.”

CNET: Google workers explain why they unionized. “Organized labor came to Silicon Valley earlier this year when employees of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, formed the Alphabet Workers Union. It’s the first union to be open to any Alphabet employee anywhere in the world, including the temporary workers, vendors and contractors who make up more than half the company’s workforce. With a membership of over 800 people, the union represents less than 1% of Alphabet’s current employees, but the union’s relatively small size hasn’t stopped it from taking action and achieving results.”

Toronto Star: Digital archive to help National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation access Residential School Survivor stories. “The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) received $2,411,773 to restructure and decolonize its digital archival records to promote innovative research meaningful to Indigenous communities. Funding was provided through the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) grant which will enable archivists to build a digital architecture for their archives, allowing for better access to the stories of Residential School Survivors.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

NPR: ‘More Dangerous And More Widespread’: Conspiracy Theories Spread Faster Than Ever. “An NPR/Ipsos poll in December found that a significant number of Americans believe disinformation about the coronavirus and about settled historical facts….That poll found that nearly one in 10 respondents don’t believe humans actually landed on the moon. Even higher numbers were under the misapprehension that mass shootings in recent years were staged hoaxes or that Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. On top of that, another 20% of respondents say they didn’t know what’s true in each case.”

MIT Technology Review: How to poison the data that Big Tech uses to surveil you. “In 2019 Kashmir Hill, then a reporter for Gizmodo, famously tried to cut five major tech giants out of her life. She spent six weeks being miserable, struggling to perform basic digital functions. The tech giants, meanwhile, didn’t even feel an itch. Now researchers at Northwestern University are suggesting new ways to redress this power imbalance by treating our collective data as a bargaining chip. Tech giants may have fancy algorithms at their disposal, but they are meaningless without enough of the right data to train on.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Phys.org: Sports information on social networks leaves out women, disabled and minority disciplines. “Researchers from the University of Seville and Pompeu Fabra University argue that sports information on social media is dominated by men and football. This leaves out women’s sports, sports featuring athletes with disabilities and minority disciplines, thus repeating the reality of the traditional media. That is the main conclusion of a study analyzing more than 7,000 tweets published by the profiles of four public media in four European countries.” Godo evening, Internet…

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