Some 79 percent of U.S. 13- to 18-year-olds surveyed said they have a Snapchat account, more than any other type of social media. Of that age group, 73 percent have an Instagram account and just 57 percent say they are on Facebook.
Respondents had to choose only one social network they could keep if they were “trapped on a deserted island.” This time, 44 percent of teens picked Snapchat, ahead of Instagram (24 percent) and Facebook (14 percent). One year ago, for RBC’s same survey question, the percentage of teens who insisted on keeping Snapchat on a desert island led with 28 percent — suggesting the app is still growing in necessity/popularity among young people.
the institution announced it will no longer archive every one of our status updates, opinion threads, and “big if true“s. As of Jan. 1, the library will only acquire tweets “on a very selective basis.”
The library doesn’t say how many tweets it has in its collection now, but in 2013, it said it had already amassed 170 billion tweets, at a rate of half a billion tweets a day.
Tweets can now be longer, too: This fall, Twitter rolled out 280-character tweets to most users across the platform.
Another issue: Twitter only gives the library the text of tweets – not images, videos, or linked content. “Tweets now are often more visual than textual, limiting the value of text-only collecting,” the library says.
The library also has to figure out how to effectively manage deleted tweets, whicharen’t part of the archive.
“They were taking both sides of the argument this past weekend and pushing them out from their troll farms as much as they could to just raise the noise level in America and make a big issue seem like an even bigger issue as they’re trying to push divisiveness in the country,” as Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., said in the fall.
Tools such as the German Marshall Fund’s “Hamilton 68” dashboard track Russian-linked accounts in real time to show what links, phrases and hashtags are circulating.
The Trump administration detailed the threat — without any specific mention of the 2016 interference — in the new National Security Strategy it released at the end of December.
The Republicans might have been tarnished by the St Petersburg troll factory, but Democratic fantasies about social media were rubbished in the process
The ads in question were memes, manufactured and posted to a number of bluntly named, pseudo-American Facebook accounts in 2016 by workers at a troll farm in St Petersburg, Russia. There were thousands of these ads, it seems, plus parallel efforts on Instagram and Twitter. Between them, they reached over 100 million people.
The memes were big news for a while because they showed what Russian interference in the 2016 election actually looked like, in vivid color. Eventually the story faded, though, in part because it was superseded by other stories, but also, I think, because the Russian ad story was deeply distasteful to both sides of our atrophied political debate.
The ads were clumsily written. They were rife with spelling errors and poor grammar. Their grasp of American history was awful. And over them all hovered a paranoid fear that the powerful were scheming to flip the world upside-down in the most outlandish ways: to turn our country over to the undocumented … to punish the hardworking … to crack down on patriots and Christians … to enact Sharia law right here at home.
The social media platforms aren’t neutral arbiters, selflessly serving the needs of society. As is all too obvious now, they are monopolies that manipulate us in a hundred different ways, selecting our news, steering us towards what we need to buy. The corporate entities behind them wield enormous power in Washington, too, filling Democratic campaign coffers and keeping the revolving door turning for trusted servants. Those who don’t comply get disciplined.
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Russia calls for answers after Chechen leader’s Instagram is blocked
Internet watchdog demands explanation after Ramzan Kadyrov claimed Facebook also suspended him without explanation
Kadyrov has accused the US government of pressuring the social networks to disable his accounts, which he said were blocked on Saturday without explanation. The US imposed travel and financial sanctions on Kadyrov last week over numerous allegations of human rights abuses.
The former rebel fighter, who is now loyal to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, is a fan of social media, particularly Instagram, which he has used in recent years to make barely veiled death threats against Kremlin critics.
Leonid Levin, the head of the Russian parliament’s information technologies and communications committee, suggested the move by Facebook and Instagram was an attack on freedom of speech.
Dzhambulat Umarov, the Chechen press and information minister, described the blocking of Kadyrov’s accounts as a “vile” cyber-attack by the US.
Neither Instagram nor Facebook had commented at the time of publication.
In 2015, Kadyrov urged Chechen men not to let their wives use the WhatsApp messaging service after an online outcry over the forced marriage of a 17-year-old Chechen to a 47-year-old police chief. “Do not write such things. Men, take your women out of WhatsApp,” he said.
The law has been criticized as encouraging censorship.
The companies will also be forced to introduce an official complaint structure, obliging platforms to monitor their content and improve their real-time reporting protocols.
Platforms failing to react within 24-hours face €50 million fines. The challenge to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, VK, Vimeo, Flickr and the like are facing a major technological challenge which could come with significant costs.
The law adopted in June 2017, went into force in October 2017 and will be enforced from January 2018. The new law implies hiring hundreds of more employees.
“The reason we are inundated by culturally alien [kulturfremden] peoples such as Arabs, Sinti and Roma etc. is the systematic destruction of civil society as a possible counterweight to the enemies-of-the-constitution by whom we are ruled. These pigs are nothing other than puppets of the victor powers of the Second World War….” Thus begins a 2013 personal e-mail from Alice Weidel, who in this autumn’s pivotal German election was one of two designated “leading candidates” of the Alternative für Deutschland (hereafter AfD or the Alternative). The chief “pig” and “puppet” was, of course, Angela Merkel.
Xenophobic right-wing nationalism—in Germany of all places? The very fact that observers express surprise indicates how much Germany has changed since 1945. These days, we expect more of Germany than of ourselves. For, seen from one point of view, this is just Germany partaking in the populist normality of our time, as manifested in the Brexit vote in Britain, Marine le Pen’s Front National in France, Geert Wilders’s blond beastliness in the Netherlands, the right-wing nationalist-populist government in Poland, and Trumpery in the US.
Like all contemporary populisms, the German version exhibits both generic and specific features. In common with other populisms, it denounces the current elites (Alteliten in AfD-speak) and established parties (Altparteien) while speaking in the name of the Volk, a word that, with its double meaning of people and ethno-culturally defined nation, actually best captures what Trump and Le Pen mean when they say “the people.”
Like other populists, Germany’s attack the mainstream media (Lügenpresse, the “lying press”) while making effective use of social media. On the eve of the election, the Alternative had some 362,000 Facebook followers, compared with the Social Democrats’ 169,000 and just 154,000 for Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
Tiresomely familiar to any observer of Trump, Brexit, or Wilders is the demagogic appeal to emotions while playing fast and loose with facts. In Amann’s account, the predominant emotion here is Angst.
For eight of the last twelve years, Germany has been governed by a so-called Grand Coalition of Christian Democrats—Merkel’s CDU in a loveless parliamentary marriage with the more conservative Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU)—and Social Democrats. This has impelled disgruntled voters toward the smaller parties and the extremes. The effect has been reinforced by Merkel’s woolly centrist version of Margaret Thatcher’s TINA (There Is No Alternative), perfectly captured in the German word alternativlos (without alternatives). It’s no accident that this protest party is called the Alternative.
10. The Virtualized Library: A Librarian’s Introduction to Docker and Virtual Machines
This session will introduce two major types of virtualization, virtual machines using tools like VirtualBox and Vagrant, and containers using Docker. The relative strengths and drawbacks of the two approaches will be discussed along with plenty of hands-on time. Though geared towards integrating these tools into a development workflow, the workshop should be useful for anyone interested in creating stable and reproducible computing environments, and examples will focus on library-specific tools like Archivematica and EZPaarse. With virtualization taking a lot of the pain out of installing and distributing software, alleviating many cross-platform issues, and becoming increasingly common in library and industry practices, now is a great time to get your feet wet.
(One three-hour session)
11. Digital Empathy: Creating Safe Spaces Online
User research is often focused on measures of the usability of online spaces. We look at search traffic, run card sorting and usability testing activities, and track how users navigate our spaces. Those results inform design decisions through the lens of information architecture. This is important, but doesn’t encompass everything a user needs in a space.
This workshop will focus on the other component of user experience design and user research: how to create spaces where users feel safe. Users bring their anxieties and stressors with them to our online spaces, but informed design choices can help to ameliorate that stress. This will ultimately lead to a more positive interaction between your institution and your users.
The presenters will discuss the theory behind empathetic design, delve deeply into using ethnographic research methods – including an opportunity for attendees to practice those ethnographic skills with student participants – and finish with the practical application of these results to ongoing and future projects.
(One three-hour session)
14. ARIA Basics: Making Your Web Content Sing Accessibility
https://dequeuniversity.com/assets/html/jquery-summit/html5/slides/landmarks.html
Are you a web developer or create web content? Do you add dynamic elements to your pages? If so, you should be concerned with making those dynamic elements accessible and usable to as many as possible. One of the most powerful tools currently available for making web pages accessible is ARIA, the Accessible Rich Internet Applications specification. This workshop will teach you the basics for leveraging the full power of ARIA to make great accessible web pages. Through several hands-on exercises, participants will come to understand the purpose and power of ARIA and how to apply it for a variety of different dynamic web elements. Topics will include semantic HTML, ARIA landmarks and roles, expanding/collapsing content, and modal dialog. Participants will also be taught some basic use of the screen reader NVDA for use in accessibility testing. Finally, the lessons will also emphasize learning how to keep on learning as HTML, JavaScript, and ARIA continue to evolve and expand.
Participants will need a basic background in HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript.
(One three-hour session)
18. Learning and Teaching Tech
Tech workshops pose two unique problems: finding skilled instructors for that content, and instructing that content well. Library hosted workshops are often a primary educational resource for solo learners, and many librarians utilize these workshops as a primary outreach platform. Tackling these two issues together often makes the most sense for our limited resources. Whether a programming language or software tool, learning tech to teach tech can be one of the best motivations for learning that tech skill or tool, but equally important is to learn how to teach and present tech well.
This hands-on workshop will guide participants through developing their own learning plan, reviewing essential pedagogy for teaching tech, and crafting a workshop of their choice. Each participant will leave with an actionable learning schedule, a prioritized list of resources to investigate, and an outline of a workshop they would like to teach.
(Two three-hour sessions)
23. Introduction to Omeka S
Omeka S represents a complete rewrite of Omeka Classic (aka the Omeka 2.x series), adhering to our fundamental principles of encouraging use of metadata standards, easy web publishing, and sharing cultural history. New objectives in Omeka S include multisite functionality and increased interaction with other systems. This workshop will compare and contrast Omeka S with Omeka Classic to highlight our emphasis on 1) modern metadata standards, 2) interoperability with other systems including Linked Open Data, 3) use of modern web standards, and 4) web publishing to meet the goals medium- to large-sized institutions.
In this workshop we will walk through Omeka S Item creation, with emphasis on LoD principles. We will also look at the features of Omeka S that ease metadata input and facilitate project-defined usage and workflows. In accordance with our commitment to interoperability, we will describe how the API for Omeka S can be deployed for data exchange and sharing between many systems. We will also describe how Omeka S promotes multiple site creation from one installation, in the interest of easy publishing with many objects in many contexts, and simplifying the work of IT departments.
(One three-hour session)
24. Getting started with static website generators
Have you been curious about static website generators? Have you been wondering who Jekyll and Hugo are? Then this workshop is for you
But this article isn’t about setting up a domain name and hosting for your website. It’s for the step after that, the actual making of that site. The typical choice for a lot of people would be to use something like WordPress. It’s a one-click install on most hosting providers, and there’s a gigantic market of plugins and themes available to choose from, depending on the type of site you’re trying to build. But not only is WordPress a bit overkill for most websites, it also gives you a dynamically generated site with a lot of moving parts. If you don’t keep all of those pieces up to date, they can pose a significant security risk and your site could get hijacked.
The alternative would be to have a static website, with nothing dynamically generated on the server side. Just good old HTML and CSS (and perhaps a bit of Javascript for flair). The downside to that option has been that you’ve been relegated to coding the whole thing by hand yourself. It’s doable, but you just want a place to share your work. You shouldn’t have to know all the idiosyncrasies of low-level web design (and the monumental headache of cross-browser compatibility) to do that.
Static website generators are tools used to build a website made up only of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Static websites, unlike dynamic sites built with tools like Drupal or WordPress, do not use databases or server-side scripting languages. Static websites have a number of benefits over dynamic sites, including reduced security vulnerabilities, simpler long-term maintenance, and easier preservation.
In this hands-on workshop, we’ll start by exploring static website generators, their components, some of the different options available, and their benefits and disadvantages. Then, we’ll work on making our own sites, and for those that would like to, get them online with GitHub pages. Familiarity with HTML, git, and command line basics will be helpful but are not required.
(One three-hour session)
26. Using Digital Media for Research and Instruction
To use digital media effectively in both research and instruction, you need to go beyond just the playback of media files. You need to be able to stream the media, divide that stream into different segments, provide descriptive analysis of each segment, order, re-order and compare different segments from the same or different streams and create web sites that can show the result of your analysis. In this workshop, we will use Omeka and several plugins for working with digital media, to show the potential of video streaming, segmentation and descriptive analysis for research and instruction.
(One three-hour session)
28. Spark in the Dark 101 https://zeppelin.apache.org/
This is an introductory session on Apache Spark, a framework for large-scale data processing (https://spark.apache.org/). We will introduce high level concepts around Spark, including how Spark execution works and it’s relationship to the other technologies for working with Big Data. Following this introduction to the theory and background, we will walk workshop participants through hands-on usage of spark-shell, Zeppelin notebooks, and Spark SQL for processing library data. The workshop will wrap up with use cases and demos for leveraging Spark within cultural heritage institutions and information organizations, connecting the building blocks learned to current projects in the real world.
(One three-hour session)
29. Introduction to Spotlight https://github.com/projectblacklight/spotlight http://www.spotlighttechnology.com/4-OpenSource.htm
Spotlight is an open source application that extends the digital library ecosystem by providing a means for institutions to reuse digital content in easy-to-produce, attractive, and scholarly-oriented websites. Librarians, curators, and other content experts can build Spotlight exhibits to showcase digital collections using a self-service workflow for selection, arrangement, curation, and presentation.
This workshop will introduce the main features of Spotlight and present examples of Spotlight-built exhibits from the community of adopters. We’ll also describe the technical requirements for adopting Spotlight and highlight the potential to customize and extend Spotlight’s capabilities for their own needs while contributing to its growth as an open source project.
(One three-hour session)
31. Getting Started Visualizing your IoT Data in Tableau https://www.tableau.com/
The Internet of Things is a rising trend in library research. IoT sensors can be used for space assessment, service design, and environmental monitoring. IoT tools create lots of data that can be overwhelming and hard to interpret. Tableau Public (https://public.tableau.com/en-us/s/) is a data visualization tool that allows you to explore this information quickly and intuitively to find new insights.
This full-day workshop will teach you the basics of building your own own IoT sensor using a Raspberry Pi (https://www.raspberrypi.org/) in order to gather, manipulate, and visualize your data.
All are welcome, but some familiarity with Python is recommended.
(Two three-hour sessions)
32. Enabling Social Media Research and Archiving
Social media data represents a tremendous opportunity for memory institutions of all kinds, be they large academic research libraries, or small community archives. Researchers from a broad swath of disciplines have a great deal of interest in working with social media content, but they often lack access to datasets or the technical skills needed to create them. Further, it is clear that social media is already a crucial part of the historical record in areas ranging from events your local community to national elections. But attempts to build archives of social media data are largely nascent. This workshop will be both an introduction to collecting data from the APIs of social media platforms, as well as a discussion of the roles of libraries and archives in that collecting.
Assuming no prior experience, the workshop will begin with an explanation of how APIs operate. We will then focus specifically on the Twitter API, as Twitter is of significant interest to researchers and hosts an important segment of discourse. Through a combination of hands-on and demos, we will gain experience with a number of tools that support collecting social media data (e.g., Twarc, Social Feed Manager, DocNow, Twurl, and TAGS), as well as tools that enable sharing social media datasets (e.g., Hydrator, TweetSets, and the Tweet ID Catalog).
The workshop will then turn to a discussion of how to build a successful program enabling social media collecting at your institution. This might cover a variety of topics including outreach to campus researchers, collection development strategies, the relationship between social media archiving and web archiving, and how to get involved with the social media archiving community. This discussion will be framed by a focus on ethical considerations of social media data, including privacy and responsible data sharing.
Time permitting, we will provide a sampling of some approaches to social media data analysis, including Twarc Utils and Jupyter Notebooks.
Codeless Coding: “Writing” Bootstrap HTML without Coding, Randal Harrison, University of Notre Dame
Using Social Media in the Classroom, Jennifer Joe, Western Kentucky University
Integrating EDS into the Curriculum: Using Search Queries to Enrich Information Literacy Endeavors, Angie Pusnik, Indiana University Kokomo, Rachael Cohen, Indiana University Bloomington
The Librarian Publisher: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly, Heather Rayl, Vigo County Public Library
Nebel, S., Schneider, S., & Rey, G. D. (2016). Mining Learning and Crafting Scientific Experiments: A Literature Review on the Use of Minecraft in Education and Research. Journal Of Educational Technology & Society, 19(2), 355-366.
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