A Very Big List of Very Good Tumblrs
You told LJ about over 390 of your favorite Tumblrs. Here they are, from most to least popular:
- thelifeguardlibrarian, with 29 mentions
- libraryjournal, with 16 mentions
- fishingboatproceeds, with 13 mentions (sorry John Green, Kate & LJ won this battle)
- librarianproblems, with nine mentions
- nypl, with six mentions
- oupacademic
- schoollibraryjournal
- todaysdocument
- motherjones, with five mentions
- neil-gaiman
- slaughterhouse90210
- theatlantic
- theparisreview
- therumpus
- betterbooktitles, with four mentions
- bookriot
- chicagopubliclibrary
- darienlibrary
- doctorwho
- edwardspoonhands
- ilovecharts
- johndarnielle
- laura-in-libraryland
- libraryadvocates
- mentalflossr
- nprfreshair
- shortformblog
- theartofgooglebooks
- unypl
- wilwheaton
FJP: What a great list of Tumblrs. Some we know, others that we look forward to following.
Also, thanks to whoever recommended The FJP. If you squint just right you can see us down among the small print.
And, if you’ve made it this far, programming note: The first FJP photo contest is going on. We’re accepting submissions on Facebook until May 31. Details and contest page here.
German IT Firm Seeks Autistic Workers
Via The Guardian:
Declaring its eagerness to find workers that “think differently”, a German software giant has announced it plans to recruit hundreds of people with autism within the next few years…
…People with autism have a neural development disorder that often undermines their ability to communicate and interact socially, and their brains process information very differently to people who are not autistic, leading to repetitive and restricted behaviour.
But in the world of computers the tendencies they often display such as an obsession for detail and an ability to analyse long sets of data very accurately can translate into highly useful and marketable skills.
The move was welcomed by Germany’s largest organisation for people with autism, Autismus Deutschland. “This is the first major company to make such a commitment, and from that point of view alone it’s groundbreaking for sufferers of autism,” said Friedrich Nolte, of the group. “We will be watching closely to see that they follow through and also looking to see that these workers are not being exploited.
The Guardian reports that the program is underway with a few employees with autism hired in both India and Ireland.
SAP is an international enterprise application developer with approximately 65 thousand employees.
Google Streetview Comes to the Galapagos
There are some good gigs in the world. Say, for instance, being part of the Google Streetview or Charles Darwin Foundation teams that are collecting panoramic images of Galapagos islands for inclusion in Streetview later this year.
Via the Google Lat Long Blog:
It’s critical that we share images with the world of this place in order to continue to study and preserve the islands’ unique biodiversity. Today we’re honored to announce, in partnership with Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF) and the Galapagos National Parks Directorate (GNPD), that we’ve collected panoramic imagery of the islands with the Street View Trekker. These stunning images will be available on Google Maps later this year so people around the world can experience this remote archipelago…
…Our 10-day adventure in the Galapagos was full of hiking, boating and diving around the islands (in hot and humid conditions) to capture 360-degree images of the unique wildlife and geological features of the islands with the Trekker. We captured imagery from 10 locations that were hand-selected by CDF and GNPD. We walked past giant tortoises and blue-footed boobies, navigated through steep trails and lava fields, and picked our way down the crater of an active volcano called Sierra Negra.
…Life underwater in the Galapagos is just as diverse as life on land. We knew our map of the islands wouldn’t be comprehensive without exploring the ocean that surrounds them. So for the second time we teamed up with the folks at the Catlin Seaview Survey to collect underwater panoramic imagery of areas being studied by CDF and GNPD. This imagery will be used by Catlin Seaview Survey to create a visual and scientific baseline record of the marine environment surrounding the islands, allowing for any future changes to be measured and evaluated by scientists around the world.
Image: Shooting a group of Sea Lions at Champion Island in Galapagos. Via Google Lat Long and Catlin Seaview Survey.
Why It’s Time to Rethink Web Video Entirely
Producer Adam Westbrook recently built an essay called The Web Video Problem about how cinematic video content is wrong for the web, and that we can and ought to recreate the visual storytelling experience on the web entirely. Toward that end, he’s working on web publishing house (Hot Pursuit).
He writes:
In visual storytelling on the web we are still talking about images in deliberate sequence. We are juxtaposing these images, either over time (in a linear audio/visual way) or in space (like a web comic might).
If we accept this definition of visual storytelling (in the purest sense) then it doesn’t matter if it’s video, a web comic or even an animated GIF - or a combination of all these and more.
Combine this with the growing capabilities of the web browser, and the connectedness of the internet, and potentially we have the ability to tell dynamic, visual stories in a way that hasn’t been done before.
This excites me very much.
The essay is nicely built and designed with bold, scrolling visuals (using the curtain jquery plug-in, which yes, is very popular these days and can be downloaded here for your own building pleasure) so that you can choose to read the whole thing or just get the highlights. It’s worth checking out.
Bonus: He provides some great resources on visual storytelling:
A good briefing on the principles of visual storytelling are featured in the second issue of Inside the Story Magazine, available here. If you don’t want to pay for the whole thing, this free articlecovers a lot of the same ground. Scott McCloud’s comic book on comic books is an essential read for visual storytellers. Craig Mod’s essay on Subcompact Publishing informed some of the ideas about thinking web-natively, as did this article by John Pavlus and this piece by Bryan Goldberg. Finally, Steven Benedict’sanalysis of Spielberg’s cinematic storytelling skills demonstrate what visual narrative can acheive, and let Steven Soderbergh tell you why this new thing shouldn’t become like the movie business.
Image: Screenshot from The Web Video Problem
Banksy on Advertising
Via Upworthy. Select to embiggen.
The Editorial Observations of a URL Shortener
Definition of “journalist” could pose problem for shield bill
Bipartisan momentum is building for legislation that would give reporters new legal protections from government authorities who want them to reveal their confidential sources. But it’s far from clear whether the effort can overcome the objections that derailed similar bills in the Senate in 2007 and 2009.
Reps. Ted Poe, R-Texas, and John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., appeared with a group of lawmakers from both parties Wednesday to announce growing House support for “media shield” legislation (HR 1962) that would create a judicial process to ensure that reporters are not compelled to identify their sources unless certain conditions are met. The conditions include requiring government investigators to prove that “the public interest in compelling disclosure outweighs the public interest in gathering or disseminating news or information.”
via Rollcall
And I am not advising younger women (or any woman) to tough it out. You can lash back, which I have done too often and which has rarely served me well. You can quit and look for other jobs, which is sometimes a very good idea. But the prejudice will follow you. What will save you is tacking into the love of the work, into the desire that brought you there in the first place. This creates a suspension of time, opens a spacious room of your own in which you can walk around and consider your response. Staring prejudice in the face imposes a cruel discipline: to structure your anger, to achieve a certain dignity, an angry dignity.
The Webby Awards are proud to honor Steve Wilhite with a Lifetime Achievement Webby Award in recognition of inventing the GIF file format. The GIF has had an immeasurable impact on the way users interface with the Web and how designers and developers present visual data and imagery. From its humble beginnings in the early days of the Netscape logo, the GIF has continually proven a dynamic format for Net artists and advertisers alike. Despite developments in moving image and animation technology on the Web, the GIF remains a staple among image formats used to spread news and information. The proliferation of the GIF within today’s meme-powered, Tumblr-driven pop culture, proves it a lasting format still among the most celebrated on the Web (despite the hotly contested controversy over its correct pronunciation). With 2012 being the 25th anniversary of the GIF we think the 17th Annual Webby Awards is a most fitting event to honor and celebrate Steve Wilhite and this historical achievement.
The Webby Awards honors Steve Wilhite for his creation of the GIF file format while at Compuserve in 1987.
Fun Fact 01: So is it pronounced with a soft or a hard G? These guys say soft, we always go hard. Let’s agree to disagree.
Fun Fact 02: While Wilhite created the GIF file format, he’s never created an animated GIF. He does say, though, that the 1997 “dancing baby” is his favorite.
Gender Balance in News
Open Gender Tracking Project is a software program that collects digital content from news sources and analyzes gender balance within news organizations. The project was created by Irene Ros and Adam Hyland of Bocoup and Nathan Matias of the MIT Center for Civic Media.
The program collects data on who is writing the articles and who the articles are written about. It also measures audience response data directly associated with specific articles (like how many times a post is shared in social media). The goal of the program is to make news sources aware of content diversity (or lack thereof) so organizations can work toward maintaining a balanced set of voices.
For the most part, women are currently being underrepresented in digital media.
Via Guardian:
In the UK, newspaper front pages rarely include women, and women write a minority of articles. Women are prominent at the Daily Mail, where they write most of the celebrity news, fewer news articles, and almost no sport. Even when publications do include women, they’re often at the mercy of their audiences. 20% of Telegraph opinion articles are written by women, but women’s opinion articles attract only 14% of the Telegraph’s shares and likes on social media.
And according to studies done by the Women’s Media Center, in both legacy and newer news sites, women are too often relegated to writing about “pink topics” like fashion, relationships, and food, rather than urgent and/or international issues.
On a positive note, Global Voices, an international citizen media news site, is one of the only news organizations currently known to have equal gender participation. According to The Guardian, 764 women wrote 51% of all articles from 2005-2012.
Related: Gender balance is the new rage. I just wish somebody had spread the word to the Wikiverse: Wikipedia Bumps Women From ‘American Novelists’ Category. — Krissy
Image: Screenshot of graph from Open Gender Tracker
To Strongbox or Not to Strongbox
Last week we noted that the New Yorker launched Strongbox, an online system meant to preserve the anonymity of leakers submitting sensitive material to the magazine.
Strongbox is based on the work of Aaron Swartz and Kevin Poulsen and, as Amy Davidson noted when announcing its implementation, “Even we won’t be able to figure out where files sent to us come from. If anyone asks us, we won’t be able to tell them.”
Which is a good thing given recent news about the Justice Department’s surveilling of journalists and news organizations.
But can it be be a newsroom boon?
Writing at CSO Online, John P. Mello argues that while Strongbox “provides strong protection of the identity of a source, it removes an important element in the process: authentication.”
Here’s what he means:
A system where anonymous leakers are dropping documents into a folder has advantages when government investigators start probing a story’s sources, but it also creates tremendous disadvantages. “The government can’t come after you to find out who gave you the document because you have no way of knowing,” [Northeastern University assistant journalism professor Dan] Kennedy said.
“That gives more protection to the source, but it makes it harder to vet the document because you don’t know who gave it to you,” he said…
…”All sources, anonymous or not, have to be evaluated. That’s impossible to do without context. “Knowing your source’s motivations helps contextualize the information,” said Mark Jurkowitz, associate director for the Pew Research Project for Excellence in Journalism.
“A solution that prevents the news organization from knowing the identity of a confidential source has value, but it’s not an ideal solution because it is important to know the identity of the source to weigh the information,” he told CSO.
“Information supplied by a confidential source needs to be evaluated, weighed and understood in the same way that information of somebody speaking on the record does,” he added.
FJP: A tool is a tool. While Mello illustrates important drawbacks, if the alternative is no documents to work with then you work with the tools available. It’s just important to know going in what their limitations are.
Images: Independent Twitter posts via Nicholas Thomson and Kevin Anderson.
![The Geography of Hate Speech on Twitter
Dr. Monica Stephens, professor at Humboldt State University in California, worked with undergraduate researchers to create The Geography of Hate Map. The map geographically tags and plots homophobic and racist statements tweeted all over America from June 2012 - April 2013.
In Stephens’ introduction to the map, she explains that HSU collected the data with DOLLY (Data On Local Life and You), a University of Kentucky project that maps social media geography for research.
The Geography of Hate Map suggests that out of 150,000 mapped tweets, most haters reign from the Midwest to the East Coast. Is this accurate? Sort of.
Via Time:
Stephens herself notes, “Even when normalized, many of the slurs included in our analysis display little meaningful spatial distribution,” and as she later tweeted, “in the east coast the counties are smaller so if a word is used in adjacent counties it appears as a hotspot,” which accounts for some of the East Coast / West Coast disparity.
What about hate words that are used in a joking way? As Chris Rock points out in his stand-up: ”It’s not always the word [that’s offensive], it’s the context in which the word is said.” To account for such varying intent, the researchers read each “hate-tweet” individually to determine a tweet’s sentiment as positive, negative, or neutral — and only negative tweets are shown on the map.
Though the study accurately depicts the hate of those Tweeters that managed to make it into the study, the map isn’t a perfect depiction of Twitter hate in the US. As Matt Peckham notes: people who haven’t enabled geotagging aren’t included in the study, meaning there could be more hateful tweets out there that haven’t been plotted. Also, more hate words exist than those Stephens chose to incorporate; when those other hate words aren’t counted, results are skewed.
FJP: When social media becomes social meanie-a… - Krissy
Image: Screenshot of The Geography of Hate Map](http://25.media.tumblr.com/2b6fec57ad7f74b36c4670438dbde10f/tumblr_mn6blll9nv1qedj2ho1_400.png)
The Geography of Hate Speech on Twitter
Dr. Monica Stephens, professor at Humboldt State University in California, worked with undergraduate researchers to create The Geography of Hate Map. The map geographically tags and plots homophobic and racist statements tweeted all over America from June 2012 - April 2013.
In Stephens’ introduction to the map, she explains that HSU collected the data with DOLLY (Data On Local Life and You), a University of Kentucky project that maps social media geography for research.
The Geography of Hate Map suggests that out of 150,000 mapped tweets, most haters reign from the Midwest to the East Coast. Is this accurate? Sort of.
Via Time:
Stephens herself notes, “Even when normalized, many of the slurs included in our analysis display little meaningful spatial distribution,” and as she later tweeted, “in the east coast the counties are smaller so if a word is used in adjacent counties it appears as a hotspot,” which accounts for some of the East Coast / West Coast disparity.
What about hate words that are used in a joking way? As Chris Rock points out in his stand-up: ”It’s not always the word [that’s offensive], it’s the context in which the word is said.” To account for such varying intent, the researchers read each “hate-tweet” individually to determine a tweet’s sentiment as positive, negative, or neutral — and only negative tweets are shown on the map.
Though the study accurately depicts the hate of those Tweeters that managed to make it into the study, the map isn’t a perfect depiction of Twitter hate in the US. As Matt Peckham notes: people who haven’t enabled geotagging aren’t included in the study, meaning there could be more hateful tweets out there that haven’t been plotted. Also, more hate words exist than those Stephens chose to incorporate; when those other hate words aren’t counted, results are skewed.
FJP: When social media becomes social meanie-a… - Krissy
Image: Screenshot of The Geography of Hate Map
MySpace was where you went in the past, WordPress and Movable Type were where people went if they had the patience and writing output to maintain a traditional blog, Facebook was where you went to define yourself by schools and checkboxes, and Tumblr was where you went to make your own identity and express your creativity.
What Our Words Tell Us
This is interesting.
David Brooks sifts through findings based on Google’s database of books published between 1500 and 2008 to see how frequently particular words were used at different epochs and then tells a story about how this reflects society’s cultural changes over time.
For example:
The first element in this story is rising individualism. A study by Jean M. Twenge, W. Keith Campbell and Brittany Gentile found that between 1960 and 2008 individualistic words and phrases increasingly overshadowed communal words and phrases.
That is to say, over those 48 years, words and phrases like “personalized,” “self,” “standout,” “unique,” “I come first” and “I can do it myself” were used more frequently. Communal words and phrases like “community,” “collective,” “tribe,” “share,” “united,” “band together” and “common good” receded.
And:
A study by Pelin Kesebir and Selin Kesebir found that general moral terms like “virtue,” “decency” and “conscience” were used less frequently over the course of the 20th century. Words associated with moral excellence, like “honesty,” “patience” and “compassion” were used much less frequently.
The Kesebirs identified 50 words associated with moral virtue and found that 74 percent were used less frequently as the century progressed. Certain types of virtues were especially hard hit. Usage of courage words like “bravery” and “fortitude” fell by 66 percent. Usage of gratitude words like “thankfulness” and “appreciation” dropped by 49 percent.
FJP: Granted the narrative he constructs based on these findings—that society has becoming more individualistic and less morally aware, for example—is prone to confirmation bias (which he admits), but it’s interesting to think about nonetheless.
Bonus: Explore the Google Books Ngram View here.
- Page 1 of 341
- Next »
