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“The Library of Babel is a place for scholars to do research, for artists and writers to seek inspiration, for anyone with curiosity or a sense of humor to reflect on the weirdness of existence – in short, it’s just like any other library. If completed, it would contain every possible combination of 1,312,000 characters, …
Women’s Representation in Science Predicts National Gender-Science Stereotypes – David I. Miller and Alice H. Eagly – Northwestern University; Marcia C. Linn, University of California, Berkeley “In the past 40 years, the proportion of women in science courses and careers has dramatically increased in some nations but not in others. Our research investigated how national …
“The Verification Handbook for Investigative Reporting is a new guide to online search and research techniques to using user-generated content and open source information in investigations. Published by the European Journalism Centre, a GIJN member based in the Netherlands, the manual consists of ten chapters and is available for free download. We’re pleased to reprint below chapter 5, …
By Lyonette Louis Jacques & Mary Rumsey: “When we need to jumpstart our research engines to help others find information, a world of people can help us. Working as part of a global legal information community can be pretty nifty! So, if your foreign, comparative, and international law (FCIL) research engine won’t start, find some …
Information Retrieval with Verbose Queries – Manish Gupta and Michael Bendersky, March 2015. “Recently, the focus of many novel search applications shifted from short keyword queries to verbose natural language queries. Examples include question answering systems and dialogue systems, voice search on mobile devices and entity search engines like Facebook’s Graph Search or Google’s Knowledge …
Psychology of the Searcher – Patterns on How Searchers Formulate Queries – Blue Nile Research, April 28, 2015. “Marketers see visitors from a wide variety of search queries coming to their site. This data is valuable in guiding a search strategy, but it has existed in a vacuum, with little known about how searchers make …
“Librarians, archivists, computer scientists, and other professionals interested in modeling bibliographic descriptions as linked data are invited to attend this webinar in which the authors will describe the conceptual and technical challenges involved in publishing linked data derived from traditional library metadata. This transformation is urgent because it is now common knowledge that most searches …
EPIC – “The DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General released a report this month detailing the FBI’s use of Section 215 and warning that “significant oversight” is required. The Inspector General describes the FBI’s expanding use of 215 to collect electronic information in bulk and criticized the agency for taking seven years to develop minimization …
Carlson, Keith and Livermore, Michael A. and Rockmore, Daniel, A Quantitative Analysis of Writing Style on the U.S. Supreme Court (March 11, 2015). Washington University Law Review, Vol. 93, No. 6, 2016; Virginia Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper No. 3. Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2554516 “This paper presents the results of a …
Tracking Federal Funds: USAspending.gov and Other Data Sources. Merete F. Gerli, Information Research Specialist. May 13, 2015. “Finding data on federal grants and contracts awarded to states and congressional districts, local governments, nonprofit organizations, contractors, and other eligible entities may present challenges. The official website, USAspending.gov, at http://www.usaspending.gov, collects data on grants, loans, insurance, assistance, …
OCLC Research Report – “Key highlights: Institutions should undertake an accurate census of their archival collections as a foundation for acting strategically in meeting user needs, allocating available resources, and securing additional funding. Accurately describing unprocessed and therefore hidden collections is a daunting but important task that is a necessary prerequisite for discovery. Practitioners should …
“Human evolutionary scholars have long supposed that the earliest stone tools were made by the genus Homo and that this technological development was directly linked to climate change and the spread of savannah grasslands. New fieldwork in West Turkana, Kenya, has identified evidence of much earlier hominin technological behaviour. We report the discovery of Lomekwi …
