NEW RESOURCES

Jerusalem Post: Italian Jewish communities look to digitize 35,000 Jewish texts. “A new initiative aims to digitize some 35,000 Jewish texts sitting in the hands of 14 different Jewish community organizations and 25 state institutions across Italy. Around 10,000 volumes have already been digitized as part of the Italya Books project, an initiative of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, the National Central Library of Rome, the National Library of Israel and the Rothschild Hanadiv Europe Foundation.”

MassLive: ArtsHub to provide online resource for Western Mass. artists, public. “The ArtsHub platform has been designed to organize existing arts-related information in the region and put it into one central, easy-to-find place. Included is an online database of artists and creative entities, feature articles, events calendar and resources such as job opportunities, calls for art, professional development opportunities and space for rent.”

Jewish News: Rabbi Lord Sacks digital archive launched. “Sections on the website allow visitors to explore Rabbi Sacks’ life and impact, books and audio, Torah teachings, and thoughts on morality and ethics. An extensive series of educational resources will help bring Rabbi Sacks’ teachings into the informal and formal education arenas.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

9to5 Google: ‘Aloud’ from Area 120 wants to make dubbing YouTube videos just a minutes-long process . “The latest project from Area 120, Google’s house incubator, is called ‘Aloud,’ and it lets YouTube creators ‘quickly and easily dub their videos into multiple languages.’…Aloud leverages Google’s audio separation, machine translation, and speech synthesis capabilities to create a dubbed voice track.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

ZDNet: Amazon’s new Amp app transforms you into a radio DJ. “Amazon today revealed Amp, its new application and platform. Amp combines features of popular voice chat apps like Clubhouse with Amazon’s vast library of tracks licensed through Amazon Music to allow users to create their own ‘radio shows.'”

EdTech Magazine: K–12 Digital Resource Libraries Continue to Engage Students Returning to In-Person Classes . “As the name implies, digital resource libraries can provide a wide array of digital resources to students. While some schools stood up these sites in response to the pandemic to give students a central hub of resources for remote learning, others have been using them for much longer.”

Bay Area Reporter: Political Notes: CA state library announces $750K in LGBTQ history grants . “LGBTQ history projects across the Golden State, from digitizing periodicals and films to preserving archival material related to gay rodeos and Santa Cruz’s LGBTQ community, are receiving $750,000 in grant funding from the California State Library. It is the second time since 2019 that the state has allocated funds to such projects.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Courthouse News Service: European rights court grapples with ‘right to be forgotten’. “In 2021, the European Court of Human Rights upheld a ruling by a Belgian court which ordered the newspaper to remove the name of a man who killed two people in a car crash in 1994. Le Soir publisher Patrick Hurbain has been fighting the order for years, making a final appeal before the Strasbourg-based rights court’s Grand Chamber on Wednesday. The case has pitted privacy advocates against media defenders in a legal battle that has lasted more than a decade. Following a 2012 complaint by the driver who caused the car accident, the Belgian high court ordered the country’s top French-language newspaper to anonymize its online archive.”

Reuters: U.S. Supreme Court spurns Google bid to avoid shareholder lawsuit. “The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear Alphabet Inc’s attempt to nix a lawsuit by shareholders accusing the Google parent company of fraudulently concealing a security glitch that left private user data exposed. The justices left in place a lower court’s ruling that revived the lawsuit brought over the 2018 incident that the company was slow to disclose, turning away Alphabet’s appeal.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Nature: Restoring and attributing ancient texts using deep neural networks. “Ancient history relies on disciplines such as epigraphy—the study of inscribed texts known as inscriptions—for evidence of the thought, language, society and history of past civilizations1. However, over the centuries, many inscriptions have been damaged to the point of illegibility, transported far from their original location and their date of writing is steeped in uncertainty. Here we present Ithaca, a deep neural network for the textual restoration, geographical attribution and chronological attribution of ancient Greek inscriptions.”

The Conversation: Social media is being misused in Kenya’s political arena. Why it’s hard to stop it. “There is no evidence that disinformation and misinformation practices can on their own influence the outcome of elections. Nevertheless, they pose a danger to democratic processes. They also poison an important space in which deliberative politics should take place. In politically charged environments, such as Kenya’s, they have the capacity to exploit long-held divisions with the potential to trigger violence.”

Phys .org: Review finds big blind spots in research on social media and crisis communications. “A team of communication experts calls for researchers and organizations to take a global view when assessing how to use social media for crisis communication efforts, particularly in view of the COVID-19 pandemic. The call stems from a detailed assessment of almost 200 studies spanning 15 years, which found large swathes of the social media landscape essentially unstudied.” Good morning, Internet…

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