NEW RESOURCES

Daily Bruin: Armenian Image Archive aims to illuminate Armenian experience via photography. “The Promise Armenian Institute at UCLA partnered with a film foundation to create an image archive to recognize and celebrate decades of Armenian photography. The Promise Armenian Institute signed an official memorandum of understanding with the Armenian Film Foundation in April, said Hasmik Baghdasaryan, deputy director of the Promise Armenian Institute, in an emailed statement. This led to the creation of the Armenian Image Archive.” Six virtual exhibitions are currently available; the archives are still being populated.

University of New South Wales: Digital archive reimagines cultural heritage in unique spatial experience. “The Shoei Yoh Archive, an online interactive showcase developed by designers from UNSW’s School of Built Environment, recreates the iconic architecture of Japanese architect and pioneer of digital design, Shoei Yoh, in an immersive virtual environment.”

Hyperallergic: A Portal Tracks Objects Acquired by German Institutions Through Colonialism. “Newly launched by the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library), the Collections from Colonial Contexts (CCC) portal tracks artifacts in German institutions acquired under conditions of colonialism. So far, over 8,000 objects from 25 institutions have been listed.” This is separate from the Benin bronzes database.

Washington University in St. Louis: Center creates user-friendly Missouri Medicaid Enrollment Tracking tool. “The Center for Health Economics and Policy at the Institute for Public Health has launched the Missouri Medicaid Enrollment Tracking Dashboard, as a resource for the community to track the impact of Medicaid expansion on Missouri Medicaid enrollment.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Mass Live: Merriam-Webster names ‘vaccine’ as Word of the Year for 2021; ‘Insurrection,’ ‘woke’ and ‘cicada’ follows as top lookups. “Merriam-Webster has named “vaccine” as its Word of the Year for 2021, a tribute to scientific advancements that aimed to end the COVID-19 pandemic and the heated arguments over inoculation mandates that the shots brought on.”

CNET: Spotify Wrapped 2021: How to see your ‘audio aura,’ top songs and more. “Spotify’s 2021 Wrapped experiences, which tap into your personal data to recap your musical tastes for the year, launched Wednesday in its mobile apps worldwide. This year’s Wrapped includes new features like divining your ‘audio aura,’ playing ‘two truths and a lie’ with your 2021 trends and making you the hero of your own movie soundtrack.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Government of Australia: Preserving Australia’s at-risk collections with $47 million. “The Morrison Government is investing more than $47 million to digitise and preserve collection material held by the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA), and seven other National Collecting Institutions, and to maintain the National Library of Australia’s (NLA) Trove website. The NFSA will receive $41.9 million over four years to fund a major program to digitise and store at-risk audio-visual collection material held across the eight National Collecting Institutions.”

The Guardian: Who is Parag Agrawal? The new Twitter CEO replacing Jack Dorsey. “A 37-year-old immigrant from India, Agrawal comes from outside the ranks of celebrity CEOs, which include the man he’s replacing as well as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla’s Elon Musk. But his lack of name recognition, coupled with a solid technical background, appears to be what some of Twitter’s biggest backers were looking for in the company’s next chapter.”

Vancouver is Awesome: Massive photo collection from historic Vancouver photographer donated to city (PHOTOS). “A massive collection of photos from Vancouver’s history spanning four decades has been donated to the city’s archives. The collection is the work of Yucho Chow, one of the earliest photographers in Vancouver. As such, the variety of photos in the archive is broad, ranging from family portraits to notable events to celebrity sightings.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

NPR: Ex-Google workers sue company, saying it betrayed ‘Don’t Be Evil’ motto. “Three former Google employees have sued the company, alleging that Google’s motto ‘Don’t be evil’ amounts to a contractual obligation that the tech giant has violated.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Stanford University: Are Voice Assistants a Reliable Source of Health Information?. “In recent work published by Annals of Family Medicine, [Grace] Hong and her colleagues found that, in response to questions about cancer screening, some voice assistants were unable to provide any verbal answer while others offered unreliable sources or inaccurate information about screening.”

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya: Twitter, the social network most resistant to conspiracy theory beliefs. “A recent study, published in the open access journal New Media & Society and authored by a researcher from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) working with 19 other universities, has examined the role that social media play in the dissemination of conspiracy theories, and the relationship between how these platforms are used and their users’ belief in this type of misinformation.” Good morning, Internet…

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