…but censorship using the DMCA is common online. The act allows web hosts a certain amount of immunity from claims of copyright infringement through what is known as the “safe harbour” rules: in essence, a host isn’t responsible for hosting infringing material provided they didn’t know about it when it went up, and took it down as soon as they were told about it.
In practice, however, this means that web hosts (and the term is broadly interpreted, meaning sites like YouTube, Twitter and Google count) are forced to develop a hair-trigger over claims of copyright infringement, assuming guilt and asking the accused to prove their innocence.
97% of Research Library Searches Leak Privacy… and Other Disappointing Statistics.
Over the weekend, I decided to try to quantify the extent of privacy leakage in public-facing library services by studying the search services of the 123 ARL libraries. These are the best funded and most prestigious libraries in North America, and we should expect them to positively represent libraries. I went to each library’s on-line search facility and did a search for a book whose title might suggest to an advertiser that I might be pregnant. (I’m not!) I checked to see whether the default search linked to by the library’s home page (as listed on the ARL website) was delivered over a secure connection (HTTPS). I checked for privacy leakage of referer headers from cover images by using Chrome developer tools (the sources tab). I used Ghostery to see if the library’s online search used Google Analytics or not. I also noted whether advertising network “web beacons” were placed by the search session.
From Go To Hellman: 97% of Research Library Searches Leak Privacy… and Other Disappointing Statistics.
How Big Data Creates False Confidence
In the case of language and culture, big data showed up in a big way in 2011, when Google released its Ngrams tool. Announced with fanfare in the journal Science, Google Ngrams allowed users to search for short phrases in Google’s database of scanned books—about 4 percent of all books ever published!—and see how the frequency of those phrases has shifted over time. The paper’s authors heralded the advent of “culturomics,” the study of culture based on reams of data and, since then, Google Ngrams has been, well, largely an endless source of entertainment—but also a goldmine for linguists, psychologists, and sociologists. They’ve scoured its millions of books to show that, for instance, yes, Americans are becoming more individualistic; that we’re “forgetting our past faster with each passing year”; and that moral ideals are disappearing from our cultural consciousness.
From How Big Data Creates False Confidence – Facts So Romantic – Nautilus
In the case of language and culture, big data showed up in a big way in 2011, when Google released its Ngrams tool. Announced with fanfare in the journal Science, Google Ngrams allowed users to search for short phrases in Google’s database of scanned books—about 4 percent of all books ever published!—and see how the frequency of those phrases has shifted over time. The paper’s authors heralded the advent of “culturomics,” the study of culture based on reams of data and, since then, Google Ngrams has been, well, largely an endless source of entertainment—but also a goldmine for linguists, psychologists, and sociologists. They’ve scoured its millions of books to show that, for instance, yes, Americans are becoming more individualistic; that we’re “forgetting our past faster with each passing year”; and that moral ideals are disappearing from our cultural consciousness.
From How Big Data Creates False Confidence – Facts So Romantic – Nautilus
Supreme Court rejects challenge to Google book-scanning project
he U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a challenge by a group of authors who contend that Google’s massive effort to scan millions of books for an online library violates copyright law.
The Authors Guild and several individual writers have argued that the project, known as Google Books, illegally deprives them of revenue. The high court left in place an October 2015 ruling by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York in favor of Google.
A unanimous three-judge appeals court panel said the case “tests the boundaries of fair use,” but found Google’s practices were ultimately allowed under the law.
From Supreme Court rejects challenge to Google book-scanning project | Reuters
he U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a challenge by a group of authors who contend that Google’s massive effort to scan millions of books for an online library violates copyright law.
The Authors Guild and several individual writers have argued that the project, known as Google Books, illegally deprives them of revenue. The high court left in place an October 2015 ruling by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York in favor of Google.
A unanimous three-judge appeals court panel said the case “tests the boundaries of fair use,” but found Google’s practices were ultimately allowed under the law.
From Supreme Court rejects challenge to Google book-scanning project | Reuters
ALA, Google launch “Libraries Ready to Code”
Today, the American Library Association (ALA) and Google, Inc. are launching the “Libraries Ready to Code” project to investigate the current nature of coding activities in public and school libraries for youth and broaden the reach and scope of this work.
“Libraries today are less about what we have on our shelves and more about what we do for and with people in our schools, campuses and communities,” said ALA President Sari Feldman. “Learning for children and youth today is more flexible, more self-directed, and with greater opportunities to not just use content, but to create and collaborate digitally. Library professionals are committed to facilitating both individual opportunity for all and advancing community progress. This new project with Google sits squarely in our modern public mission.”
From ALA, Google launch “Libraries Ready to Code” | News and Press Center
Today, the American Library Association (ALA) and Google, Inc. are launching the “Libraries Ready to Code” project to investigate the current nature of coding activities in public and school libraries for youth and broaden the reach and scope of this work.
“Libraries today are less about what we have on our shelves and more about what we do for and with people in our schools, campuses and communities,” said ALA President Sari Feldman. “Learning for children and youth today is more flexible, more self-directed, and with greater opportunities to not just use content, but to create and collaborate digitally. Library professionals are committed to facilitating both individual opportunity for all and advancing community progress. This new project with Google sits squarely in our modern public mission.”
From ALA, Google launch “Libraries Ready to Code” | News and Press Center
21st Century Librarians; Losing The Bun And Cardigan
Changes in communication technologies could mean the end of libraries as we know them. Or does it? Hampshire College opened in 1970 — heralding academic innovation. Library director Jennifer Gunter King says school founders wanted everything re-invented, including the library. Today, bolstered by a one-point-two million dollar grant from the Mellon Foundation, Hampshire’s re-tooling the library, again. and it’s not alone. many libraries are getting 21st century makeovers.
Caro Pinto’s a librarian at Mount Holyoke College. NEPR’s Susan Kaplan met her there, in the library, where they kept their voices down. That’s still the rule, even in this age of declining book circulation, Google Scholar and, well, Google Books. Something else that hasn’t changed: most people’s perception of the slightly old fashioned L word — librarian. Pinto says that includes her childhood librarian.
From 21st Century Librarians; Losing The Bun And Cardigan
Changes in communication technologies could mean the end of libraries as we know them. Or does it? Hampshire College opened in 1970 — heralding academic innovation. Library director Jennifer Gunter King says school founders wanted everything re-invented, including the library. Today, bolstered by a one-point-two million dollar grant from the Mellon Foundation, Hampshire’s re-tooling the library, again. and it’s not alone. many libraries are getting 21st century makeovers.
Caro Pinto’s a librarian at Mount Holyoke College. NEPR’s Susan Kaplan met her there, in the library, where they kept their voices down. That’s still the rule, even in this age of declining book circulation, Google Scholar and, well, Google Books. Something else that hasn’t changed: most people’s perception of the slightly old fashioned L word — librarian. Pinto says that includes her childhood librarian.
The Future of Academic Style: Why Citations Still Matter in the Age of Google
Academic style, however, is another thing entirely. This is not to say that there is not “style” in academic writing, contrary to both popular belief and a lot of self-skewering academic jokes. Academic style is dull, jargon-filled, overly ornate, hubristic, timid, and generally bad, and no one says so more than academics themselves. Eric Hayot dug into this reflexive disdain in a recent essay in the journal Critical Inquiry, exploring the oddities of the ways that literary scholars seem to think about scholarly writing, pointing out that “it’s weird for a profession to have one theory of language for its objects and another for its products.” If scholars genuinely care about academic writing, Hayot suggests, we might begin by giving up our contempt for the aspects that make it uniquely our own.
Academic style, however, is another thing entirely. This is not to say that there is not “style” in academic writing, contrary to both popular belief and a lot of self-skewering academic jokes. Academic style is dull, jargon-filled, overly ornate, hubristic, timid, and generally bad, and no one says so more than academics themselves. Eric Hayot dug into this reflexive disdain in a recent essay in the journal Critical Inquiry, exploring the oddities of the ways that literary scholars seem to think about scholarly writing, pointing out that “it’s weird for a profession to have one theory of language for its objects and another for its products.” If scholars genuinely care about academic writing, Hayot suggests, we might begin by giving up our contempt for the aspects that make it uniquely our own.
Google BigQuery Public Datasets Includes GDELT HathiTrust and Internet Archive Book Data
Google BigQuery Public Datasets
A public dataset is any dataset that is stored in BigQuery and made available to the general public. This page lists a special group of public datasets that Google BigQuery hosts for you to access and integrate into your applications. Google pays for the storage of these data sets and provides public access to the data via BigQuery. You pay only for the queries that you perform on the data (the first 1 TB per month is free, subject to query pricing details). It includes the GDELT HathiTrust and Internet Archive Book Data. This dataset contains 3.5 million digitized books stretching back two centuries, encompassing the complete English-language public domain collections of the Internet Archive (1.3M volumes) and HathiTrust (2.2 million volumes).
From Google BigQuery Public Datasets — Google Cloud Platform
Google BigQuery Public Datasets
A public dataset is any dataset that is stored in BigQuery and made available to the general public. This page lists a special group of public datasets that Google BigQuery hosts for you to access and integrate into your applications. Google pays for the storage of these data sets and provides public access to the data via BigQuery. You pay only for the queries that you perform on the data (the first 1 TB per month is free, subject to query pricing details). It includes the GDELT HathiTrust and Internet Archive Book Data. This dataset contains 3.5 million digitized books stretching back two centuries, encompassing the complete English-language public domain collections of the Internet Archive (1.3M volumes) and HathiTrust (2.2 million volumes).
From Google BigQuery Public Datasets — Google Cloud Platform
LibraryBox & Google Summer of Code
I am thrilled to be able to announce that The LibraryBox Project has been invited to be one of the projects included in the Berkman Center for Internet & Society’s Google Summer of Code.
If you aren’t familiar with the Google Summer of Code, it is a program that gets undergraduates connected to open source projects via mentor organizations. The goal is to give the students experience working on useful open code, while projects benefit from their skills to set and meet development goals. Google pays the students a stipend, and the whole open source community wins.
From LibraryBox & Google Summer of Code | Pattern Recognition
I am thrilled to be able to announce that The LibraryBox Project has been invited to be one of the projects included in the Berkman Center for Internet & Society’s Google Summer of Code.
If you aren’t familiar with the Google Summer of Code, it is a program that gets undergraduates connected to open source projects via mentor organizations. The goal is to give the students experience working on useful open code, while projects benefit from their skills to set and meet development goals. Google pays the students a stipend, and the whole open source community wins.
From LibraryBox & Google Summer of Code | Pattern Recognition
You Could Look It Up
Book that has just been released: You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia
“Knowledge is of two kinds,” said Samuel Johnson in 1775. “We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.” Today we think of Wikipedia as the source of all information, the ultimate reference. Yet it is just the latest in a long line of aggregated knowledge–reference works that have shaped the way we’ve seen the world for centuries.
You Could Look It Up chronicles the captivating stories behind these great works and their contents, and the way they have influenced each other. From The Code of Hammurabi, the earliest known compendium of laws in ancient Babylon almost two millennia before Christ to Pliny’s Natural History; from the 11th-century Domesday Book recording land holdings in England to Abraham Ortelius’s first atlas of the world; from Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language to The Whole Earth Catalog to Google, Jack Lynch illuminates the human stories and accomplishment behind each, as well as its enduring impact on civilization. In the process, he offers new insight into the value of knowledge.
See: http://amzn.to/1Q05Jj5
Book that has just been released: You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia
“Knowledge is of two kinds,” said Samuel Johnson in 1775. “We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.” Today we think of Wikipedia as the source of all information, the ultimate reference. Yet it is just the latest in a long line of aggregated knowledge–reference works that have shaped the way we’ve seen the world for centuries.
You Could Look It Up chronicles the captivating stories behind these great works and their contents, and the way they have influenced each other. From The Code of Hammurabi, the earliest known compendium of laws in ancient Babylon almost two millennia before Christ to Pliny’s Natural History; from the 11th-century Domesday Book recording land holdings in England to Abraham Ortelius’s first atlas of the world; from Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language to The Whole Earth Catalog to Google, Jack Lynch illuminates the human stories and accomplishment behind each, as well as its enduring impact on civilization. In the process, he offers new insight into the value of knowledge.
See: http://amzn.to/1Q05Jj5
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