Library as Laboratory: A New Series Exploring the Computational Use of Internet Archive Collections

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From web archives to television news to digitized books & periodicals, dozens of projects rely on the collections available at archive.org for computational & bibliographic research across a large digital corpus. This series will feature six sessions highlighting the innovative scholars that are using Internet Archive collections, services and APIs to support data-driven projects in the humanities and beyond.

Many thanks to the program advisory group:

  • Dan Cohen, Vice Provost for Information Collaboration and Dean, University Library and Professor of History, Northeastern University
  • Makiba Foster, Library Regional Manager for the African American Research Library and Cultural Center, Broward County Library
  • Mike Furlough, Executive Director, HathiTrust
  • Harriett Green, Associate University Librarian for Digital Scholarship and Technology Services, Washington University Libraries

Session Details:

March 2 @ 11am PT / 2pm ET

Supporting Computational Use of Web Collections
Jefferson Bailey, Internet Archive
Helge Holzmann, Internet Archive

What can you do with billions of archived web pages? In our kickoff session, Jefferson Bailey, Internet Archive’s Director of Web Archiving & Data Services, and Helge Holzmann, Web Data Engineer, will take attendees on a tour of the methods and techniques available for analyzing web archives at scale. 

Read the session recap & watch the video:

March 16  @ 11am PT / 2pm ET

Applications of Web Archive Research with the Archives Unleashed Cohort Program

Launched in 2020, the Cohort program is engaging with researchers in a year-long collaboration and mentorship with the Archives Unleashed Project and the Internet Archive, to support web archival research. 

 Web archives provide a rich resource for exploration and discovery! As such, this session will feature the program’s inaugural research teams, who will discuss the innovative ways they are exploring web archival collections to tackle interdisciplinary topics and methodologies. Projects from the Cohort program include:

  • AWAC2 — Analysing Web Archives of the COVID Crisis through the IIPC Novel Coronavirus dataset—Valérie Schafer (University of Luxembourg)
  • Everything Old is New Again: A Comparative Analysis of Feminist Media Tactics between the 2nd- to 4th Waves—Shana MacDonald (University of Waterloo)
  • Mapping and tracking the development of online commenting systems on news websites between 1996–2021—Robert Jansma (University of Siegen)
  • Crisis Communication in the Niagara Region during the COVID-19 Pandemic—Tim Ribaric (Brock University)
  • Viral health misinformation from Geocities to COVID-19—Shawn Walker (Arizona State University)

UPDATE: Quinn Dombrowski from Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) will give an introductory presentation about the team of volunteers racing to archive Ukrainian digital cultural heritage.

Read the session recap & watch the video:

March 30  @ 11am PT / 2pm ET

Hundreds of Books, Thousands of Stories: A Guide to the Internet Archive’s African Folktales
Laura Gibbs, Educator, writer & bibliographer
Helen Nde, Historian & writer

Join educator & bibliographer Laura Gibbs and researcher, writer & artist Helen Nde as they give attendees a guided tour of the African folktales in the Internet Archive’s collection. Laura will share her favorite search tips for exploring the treasure trove of books at the Internet Archive, and how to share the treasures you find with colleagues, students, and fellow readers in the form of a digital bibliography guide. Helen will share how she uses the Internet Archive’s collections to tell the stories of individuals and cultures that aren’t often represented online through her work at Mythological Africans (@MythicAfricans). Helen will explore how she uses technology to continue the African storytelling tradition in spoken form, and she will discuss the impacts on the online communities that she is able to reach.

Read the session recap & watch the video:

April 13  @ 11am PT / 2pm ET

Television as Data: Opening TV News for Deep Analysis and New Forms of Interactive Search
Roger MacDonald, Founder, TV News Archive
Kalev Leetaru, Data Scientist, GDELT

How can treating television news as data create fundamentally new kinds of opportunities for both computational analysis of influential societal narratives and the creation of new kinds of interactive search tools? How could derived (non-consumptive) metadata be open-access and respectful of content creator concerns? How might specific segments be contextualized by linking them to related analysis, like professional journalist fact checking? How can tools like OCR, AI language analysis and knowledge graphs generate terabytes of annotations making it possible to search television news in powerful new ways?

For nearly a decade, the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive has enabled closed captioning keyword search of a growing archive that today spans nearly three million hours of U.S. local and national TV news (2,239,000+ individual shows) from mid-2009 to the present. This public interest library is dedicated to facilitating journalists, scholars, and the public to compare, contrast, cite, and borrow specific portions of the collection.  Using a range of algorithmic approaches, users are moving beyond simple captioning search towards rich analysis of the visual side of television news. 
In this session, Roger Macdonald, founder of the TV News Archive, and Kalev Leetaru, collaborating data scientist and  GDELT Project founder, will report on experiments applying full-screen OCR, machine vision, speech-to-text and natural language processing to assist exploration, analyses and data-visualization of this vast television repository. They will ​​survey the resulting open metadata datasets and demonstrate the public search tools and APIs they’ve created that enable powerful new forms of interactive search of television news and what it looks like to ask questions of more than a decade of television news.

Read the session recap & watch the video:

April 27  @ 11am PT / 2pm ET

Analyzing Biodiversity Literature at Scale
Martin R. Kalfatovic, Smithsonian Library & Archives
JJ Dearborn, Biodiversity Heritage Library Data Manager

Imagine the great library of life, the library that Charles Darwin said was necessary for the “cultivation of natural science” (1847). And imagine that this library is not just hundreds of thousands of books printed from 1500 to the present, but also the data contained in those books that represents all that we know about life on our planet. That library is the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) The Internet Archive has provided an invaluable platform for the BHL to liberate taxonomic names, species descriptions, habitat description and much more. Connecting and harnessing  the disparate data from over five-centuries is now BHL’s grand challenge. The unstructured textual data generated at the point of digitization holds immense untapped potential. Tim Berners-Lee provided the world with a semantic roadmap to address this global deluge of dark data and Wikidata is now executing on his vision. As we speak, BHL’s data is undergoing rapid transformation from legacy formats into linked open data, fulfilling the promise to evaporate data silos and foster bioliteracy for all humankind.

Martin R. Kalfatovic (BHL Program Director and Associate Director, Smithsonian Library and Archives) and JJ Dearborn (BHL Data Manager) will explore how books in BHL become data for the larger biodiversity community.

Watch the video:

May 11  @ 11am PT / 2pm ET

Lightning Talks
In this final session of the Internet Archive’s digital humanities expo, Library as Laboratory, you’ll hear from scholars in a series of short presentations about their research and how they’re using collections and infrastructure from the Internet Archive for their work.

Watch the session recording:

Talks include:

  • Forgotten Histories of the Mid-Century Coding Bootcamp, [watch] Kate Miltner (University of Edinburgh)
  • Japan As They Saw It, [watch] Tom Gally (University of Tokyo)
  • The Bibliography of Life, [watch] Rod Page (University of Glasgow)
  • Q&A #1 [watch]
  • More Than Words: Fed Chairs’ Communication During Congressional Testimonies, [watch] Michelle Alexopoulos (University of Toronto)
  • WARC Collection Summarization, [watch] Sawood Alam (Internet Archive)
  • Automatic scanning with an Internet Archive TT scanner, [watch] Art Rhyno (University of Windsor)
  • Q&A #2 [watch]
  • Automated Hashtag Hierarchy Generation Using Community Detection and the Shannon Diversity Index, [watch] Spencer Torene (Thomson Reuters Special Services, LLC)
  • My Internet Archive Enabled Journey As A Digital Humanities Citizen Scientist, [watch] Jim Salmons
  • Web and cities: (early internet) geographies through the lenses of the Internet Archive, [watch] Emmanouil Tranos (University of Bristol)
  • Forgotten Novels of the 19th Century, [watch] Tom Gally (University of Tokyo)
  • Q&A #3 [watch]

New additions to the Internet Archive for January 2022

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Many items are added to the Internet Archive’s collections every month, by us and by our patrons. Here’s a round up of some of the new media you might want to check out. Logging in might be required to  borrow certain items. 

Notable new collections: 

Books 40,695

This month we’ve added books on varied subjects in more than 20 languages. Click through to explore, but here are a few interesting items to start with:

Audio Archive 79,099

The audio archive contains recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users.

The LibriVox Free Audiobook Collection 98

Founded in 2005, Librivox is a community of volunteers from all over the world who record audiobooks of public domain texts in many different languages.

 

78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings 6,849

The Great 78 Project! Listen to this collection of 78rpm records, cylinder recordings, and other recordings from the early 20th century.

Summertime
by
Jack Dieval
Nevada
by
Donald Peers
Leavin’ Tonight
by
Jesse Powell Orchestra

Live Music Archive 799

The Live Music Archive is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format, along with the convenience of on-demand streaming (all with artist permission).

Greensky Bluegrass Live at The Flynn Theatre on 2022-01-26
by Greensky Bluegrass
The Chops Live at The Stone Church on 2022-01-21
by The Chops
Donna the Buffalo Live at City Winery on 2022-01-06
by Donna the Buffalo

Netlabels 486

This collection hosts complete, freely downloadable/streamable, often Creative Commons-licensed catalogs of ‘virtual record labels’. These ‘netlabels’ are non-profit, community-built entities dedicated to providing high quality, non-commercial, freely distributable MP3/OGG-format music for online download in a multitude of genres.

[A022] Minc – 2022 – “Span”
by
minc
Even a Canary Can Hold a Peg
by
Jazzaria.com
Ciberpajé x Diavolos – Desdogmas (EP)
by
Ciberpajé x Diavolos
[ENDE144] The Flimsy – Extended Play
Builders Of Dystopia
by
Gypsy

Artist in Residence Casey Gray Exhibits New Work at Hashimoto Contemporary

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SAN FRANCISCO – Hashimoto Contemporary is pleased to present Wild Animal, a solo
exhibition by San Francisco-based artist Casey Gray, his third with the gallery. Utilizing
his signature process of complex masking techniques and acrylic spray paint, the
artist’s latest body of paintings, sculptures and works on paper are a meditation on the
vibrancy of life as seen through the animal kingdom.

Drawing from his experience as a new father, and the chaotic stasis of the last two
years to reconsider both subject and audience, Gray narrows his vision into a singular,
charming topic; a colorful world of dynamic animals in action. Eight highly stylized
portraits of solitary animals make up the majority of the show; Eagle, Bear, Horse, Tiger,
Pelican, Crocodile, Trout and Duck. The figures are flat, graphic and modernist, painted
with a variety of competing treatments and textures, and set amidst dreamy, gradient
backgrounds.

Gray describes his inspiration for the work, “Raising a toddler has my life overrun with
animal themes, from children’s books to toys, clothing, television, trips to the zoo. You
name it, they’re everywhere. It was a natural evolution for me to move in this direction
because animals seem to be everything I’m looking at, and simply put, I can’t separate
my life from my work.”

The exhibition is a direct extension of the artist’s recent residency at The Internet
Archive in San Francisco from 2020-2021. During his residency, Gray used the
Archives’s vast magazine cover art collection as a source for representation, specifically
focusing on the dramatic Adventure and Nature Magazine illustrations of the early 20th
century. Gray re-contextualizes the animals from the covers, instead imagining them as
plastic children’s toys, into two obsessively composed window box paintings central to
the show. In the first, a meticulously rendered feral herd of mammals, snakes and birds
intermix around a large bonsai tree with a heightened sense of alert. In the second, a
school of fish, sharks and other aquatic creatures clash with a deep sea diver in a
powerful fight for survival. Each layered still life arrangement offers a sense of
excitement, bewilderment and sentimentality for the outdoors in their theatre and
spectacle. The interactions the wildlife and their placement in space create a narrative
tension that mirrors the emotional turmoil of this day and age.

Wild Animal will be on view February 5th – 26th with an opening reception on Saturday,
February 5th from 1pm-7pm. For more information please contact gallery director
Vanessa Indies at sf@hashimotocontemporary.com.

Virtual Gathering Welcomes Creative Works from 1926 into the Public Domain

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Free from copyright restrictions, the public can now enjoy unlimited access to creative works from 1926 including A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, classic silent films with Buster Keaton, and jazz standards by Jelly Roll Morton.

A virtual party hosted by the Internet Archive, Creative Commons, and many other community co-sponsors on January 20 celebrated the availability of the newly released material. This year’s festivities also welcomed nearly 400,000 sound recordings from the pre-1923 era into the public domain as a result of the Music Modernization Act passed by the U.S. Congress.

“What a big win for our country, especially for libraries and archives that preserve our cultural history,” said U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) of the newest crop of creative work entering the public domain, including the early sound recordings. “It’s also a big win for our artists, who can now freely use these classic recordings and transform them into new works.” [WATCH the segment with Senator Wyden.]

Wyden has supported groups that advocate for balanced copyright laws that support public access. In the recent federal legislation addressing compensation in the music industry, he pushed back against a provision that would have locked up older recordings for almost 150 years from their publication.

“These restrictions defied common sense, and they would have been a major disadvantage for historians, academics and American cultural heritage,” said Wyden, who helped secure a better deal that allowed sound recordings to be public property each year. “The Music Modernization Act was not our first rodeo, and I’m certain it is not going to be our last. I look forward to working with all of you closely in the days ahead, continuing the fight for balanced IP laws that work for all Americans.”

Meredith Rose, senior policy counsel with Public Knowledge, a consumer advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C., said the new federal legislation is a “huge game changer” for libraries. For the first time, sound recordings before 1972 can be made available for noncommercial and educational uses with no restrictions or threat of statutory damages. [WATCH this segment.]

Also speaking at the event was Jennifer Jenkins of Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School. She shared a video highlighting the range of work becoming open this year from Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises to the film “For Heaven’s Sake” with Harold Lloyd and poetry by Langston Hughes. [WATCH this segment.]

“Public domain enables both creativity and access to preservation,” Jenkins said, noting some classic works have been lost to history. “For those that have survived, it’s time to discover or rediscover and breathe new life into them.”

A musical part of the program featured performances by Citizen DJ and Roochie Toochie and the Ragtime Shepard Kings.  There was also an interview with Colin Hancock, a musician and historian who has built his career playing early jazz, blues and ragtime music and using period technology to record it. [WATCH this segment.]

Professor Jason Luther of Rowan University explained how his students research 78rpm records from the early 20th century through the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project to create podcasts. Two of his students shared their excitement in being able to access these vintage recordings and make connections to artists’ work of today. (Read more about Luther’s project in this blog post.) [WATCH this segment.]

The work of writers, musicians, filmmakers, scientists, painters should be consumed, built upon and enjoyed, said Catherine Stihler, chief executive officer of Creative Commons: “I see the public domain as a gift. A package of time, wrapped in excitement of discovery and revitalization that sheds light on the past and enriches the present.” [WATCH this segment.]

The Public Domain Day event was organized by the Internet Archive and co-sponsored by SPARC, Creative Commons, Library Futures, Authors Alliance, the Bioheritage Diversity Library, Public Knowledge, ARSC, the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain, and the Music Library Association.

[Cross-posted blog with SPARC]

Join Us For A Celebration of Sound: Public Domain Day

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1/21/22: Registration is now closed for the event. Watch the recording above or at https://archive.org/details/a-celebration-of-sound-public-domain-day-2022

Join us today for a virtual party at 1pm Pacific/4pm Eastern time with a keynote from Senator Ron Wyden, champion of the Music Modernization Act and a host of musical acts, dancers, historians, librarians, academics, activists and other leaders from the Open world! This event will explore the rich historical context of recorded sound from its earliest days, including early jazz and blues, classical, and spoken word recordings reflecting important political and social issues of the era.

Additional sponsoring organizations include: Library Futures, SPARC, Authors Alliance, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, Public Knowledge, ARSC, the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain, and the Music Library Association.

REGISTER FOR THE VIRTUAL EVENT HERE!

Scanning periodicals for patrons with print disabilities

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The Internet Archive has increased periodical digitization of purchased and donated print and microfilm resources to enhance our services for our patrons with print disabilities. Those patrons can receive priority access to the collections, bypassing waitlists and borrowing materials for longer circulation periods. These periodicals will also be made available to the EMMA and ACE projects to support student success. Some of these materials are also available to researchers via interlibrary loan, digital humanities research, and other ways. 

The Internet Archive has a longstanding program serving patrons with print disabilities. The modern library materials that we digitize are first made available to qualified patrons, including affiliated users from the National Library Service, Bookshare, and ACE Portal. For more than ten years, thousands of patrons have signed up through our qualifying program to receive special access to the digital books available in our collection. 

Organizations can sign up for free to be a Qualifying Authority to be able to authorize patrons, and individual patrons can sign up.

Our patrons share inspiring stories with us about the impacts of the service. Pastor Doug Wilson said it’s been a “profound gift” to discover books in our digital theology collections. The breadth of materials is also compelling. “You never know what you will come across. You can search for something specific, but also just wander the virtual shelves,” said musician and graduate student Matthew Shifrin. In addition to serving our own patrons, we partner with the EMMA and ACE projects, which support students with print disabilities at schools across the US and Canada.

We have resources online to help you learn more about the Internet Archive’s program for patrons with print disabilities, including how to qualify. Please contact our Patron Services team with additional inquiries.

Thank you to the Mellon Foundation, the Institute of Museum & Library Services, the Arcadia Fund, the Kahle/Austin Foundation, and donors for their support of these services.

International patrons speak out: “Access to knowledge shouldn’t be for the rich and privileged.”

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Last fall, we invited our patrons to share how you use the Internet Archive. The response was overwhelming, and gave us exactly the kinds of testimonials and messages of support we were hoping to gather.

As we worked through the responses, we were struck by the number of patrons from all over the world who use our collection. Here now, we’d like to share some of the powerful stories we received from our international users.

If you haven’t already done so, please share your story.

Editorial note: Statements have been edited for clarity.

Lisa M., Educator, England – “Internet Archive helped me help a student! I have students in one class that attend from around the globe. One student was unable to find the required texts and our university did not have digital copies that could be lent. If she were to order the book – not carried in any local stores – it could take up to 3 months for them to arrive, long after the course was over!”

Claudia G., Researcher, Romania – “Even before the pandemic, depending on the topic of my essay and thesis, it was difficult to find books on certain topics in local libraries or bookstores…Access to knowledge shouldn’t be for the rich and privileged.”

Ana S., Communications assistant, Brazil – “I borrowed a book about Stephen Sondheim. Sondheim’s story and body of work is definitely an inspiration for me as someone always trying to learn ways to exercise my creativity. I just wanted to browse one section, and it was really amazing. I’m really thankful you had it available, for anyone in the world, and the borrowing process was really easy to follow through.”

Mike D., Librarian, New Zealand – “I’m a Digital Librarian in a public library in the small town of Hokitika, New Zealand, whose job is making local history more accessible to the community – many of the New Zealand history works in our public library collection are rare or reference-only. It turns out many works of New Zealand history have been digitised by the Internet Archive from US collections”

Callum H., Yard operative, Scotland – “As a non-academic with interests in literature, history, and philosophy, the IA gives me access to books I can’t otherwise afford or access.”

Yuri L., Educator, Brazil – “I spent months of 2020 bed-ridden, and was able to view items from your digitized collection. I would not have been able to go to any physical place for my books, and the titles I was looking for were sometimes available only on the Internet Archive. There are no other means for me, in my part of South America, to have access to limited-circulation ancient newspapers of other continents without digitizing and digital libraries. Without the Internet Archive and other libraries like it, I would have no alternatives.”

Simay K., Researcher, Turkey – “Living in a developing country with so many political and economic turmoils, I believe that the Internet Archive provides a huge service and a unique platform for dissolving the injustice and inequality of [access] to knowledge between disadvantaged countries and classes.”

Lydia S., Student, Canada – “I’ve used materials from the Internet Archive many times throughout my time as an undergrad studying history…There are many primary and secondary sources on the IA that I was unable to find anywhere else online or in physical copies through my university’s library. Many of the books I’ve accessed through the IA have been out of print for many years, so it’s incredibly helpful to have [access] to titles that would otherwise be nearly impossible to track down.“

Kim C., Librarian, Canada – “I use the materials on the Internet Archive often on a personal and a professional level. I have been able to help patrons access books that we have not been able to procure for them in other ways, for reference material for every school level from primary to masters degree research. I have used the collection on many occasions to access local history or genealogical material unavailable elsewhere.”

Richard G., Poet, Canada – Richard used books within the Internet Archive’s library, “to reference other author’s prose and poetry for quotations and references.”

Chloe J., Student, Canada – “It has given me access to material that I would not otherwise have access to.”

Shehroze A., Educator, Pakistan – “I am surprised that books pertaining to learning the Urdu language are available on archive.org, and those which were used for preparation in the civil services. These books are just not available in the country anymore and are immeasurably useful as far as the history of the colonized area is concerned. These are not published anymore, and finding a copy is exceedingly rare. This is why archive.org is important and we should endorse and support it.”

Stephen C., Graduate student, Canada – “The Internet Archive has been an invaluable resource for a research project I am involved in. We have been able to access numerous historical travel narratives that are essential for our project. We have been able to view books that we could not access in archives due to travel restrictions and lending policies during the pandemic.”

Simon H., Printing press operator, Switzerland – “I often find interest in old and niche books, sometimes from parts of the world far away from me. In those cases, I have two options for accessing such a book:
1.   I order a physical copy of the work and let it ship to my home. That is incredibly expensive, harmful to the environment and occasionally damaging to an old and fragile book, conserved for such a long time with care and passion.
2.   I’m lucky enough to find a digital reproduction of a work, which can be accessed for free and “shipped” eco-friendly through wires and antennas.
The difference between those two possibilities is so pronounced, that the latter almost seems like an utopian fairy tale. But it is not! It is 21st century’s technology at work.”

Imagining a Better Online World: Exploring the Decentralized Web

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The World Wide Web started with so much promise: to connect people across any distance, to allow anyone to become a publisher, and to democratize access to knowledge. However, today the Web seems to be failing us. It’s not private, secure, or unifying. The internet has, in large part, ended up centralizing access and power in the hands of a few dominant platforms.

What if we could build something better—what some are calling the decentralized web?

In this series of six workshops, “Imagining a Better Online World: Exploring the Decentralized Web,” we’ll explore the ways in which moving to decentralized technologies may enhance your privacy, empower you to control your own data, and resist censorship. Join us to hear from experts in the leading peer-to-peer technologies, from identity to data storage. We’ll see demonstrations of how decentralized tech is being used in publishing, data management and preserving cultural assets. Learn how the decentralized web might yet create systems that empower individuals by eliminating central points of control.

This series is a partnership between Internet Archive, DWeb, Library Futures, and presented by the Metropolitan New York Library Council.

Sessions Include:

Colorful dashes dance across a black bacground. The Title "Decentralized Web: an Introduction" sits atop the image, in white text.

The Decentralized Web: An Introduction
What is the decentralized web, why is it important, and where is it along the path of development? What are the problems the decentralized web seeks to solve? Who are the players working to realize this vision? Why is the Internet Archive, a library, a leader in the decentralized web movement?
Thursday, January 27th, from 4:00pm to 5:00pm EST
Watch Video

In an Ever-Expanding Library, Using Decentralized Storage to Keep Your Materials Safe
Libraries understand the headache of storing materials. How do you create room for an ever-expanding collection? What if you don’t want to weed materials to make room? Enter decentralized storage—a network of P-2-P servers that store materials across a global network of storage nodes. What problems does this solve? What problems does this create? Where is the state of decentralized storage today? We ‘ll see media collections and how they are preserved in Storj, Filecoin, and beyond.
Thursday, February 24th, from 4:00pm to 5:00pm EST
Register

Keeping Your Personal Data Personal: How Decentralized Identity Drives Data Privacy
Want your FedEx package? Now you must allow the company to scan your ID. Check into a hotel? Hand over your passport. Rent an e-bike? Key in your driver’s license, which includes your address, birthdate, and weight. What if you could maintain control over your personal identity and share only what is needed? Enter decentralized or self-sovereign identity (SSI). In the future, we believe each person will hold an e-wallet and control his/her/their own personal information.
Thursday, March 31, from 4:00pm to 5:00pm EST
Register

Goodbye Facebook, Hello Decentralized Social Media? Can Peer-to-Peer Lead to Less Toxic Online Platforms?
Facebook, Twitter… we’ve seen them go awry when faced with the scourges of misinformation and trolling. In authoritarian regimes, entire platforms are easily blocked. Would decentralized social media, where there is no central controlling entity, be better? How do you take down damaging posts when there is no central command center? We walk you through some of the top decentralized social media platforms, from Matrix to Twitter’s Blue Sky initiative. Demonstrations of how to get on some of these systems.
Thursday, April 28, from 4:00pm to 5:00pm EST
Register

Decentralized Apps, the Metaverse and the “Next Big Thing”
Why did Facebook rename itself for the Metaverse? What is the metaverse & how are people experiencing it? How are artists, nonprofits, even the NBA are racking up seven-figure payouts for otherwise mundane pieces of media called NFTs (non-fungible tokens)? Why are they so despised? In this session, we look at the crazy breakthrough apps and items populating decentralized web. Plus demonstrations of how people are working, trading & creating in the metaverse.
Thursday, May 26, from 4:00pm to 5:00pm EST
Register

Ethics of the Decentralized Web & Uses for the Law, Journalism and Humanitarian Work
Web 1.0 and 2.0 started out full of idealism, too. What is to prevent the decentralized web from being corrupted by profit, market domination, and bad actors? What is the normative or social layer we need to build alongside the tech?
Thursday, June 30, from 4:00pm to 5:00pm EST
Register

DWeb Holiday Fair – December 2021 Meetup Recap

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At the December 2021 DWeb Meetup, dozens of booths gathered in gather.town for a fun, virtual, get-to-know-you holiday fair. There were 30+ booths of DWeb projects, foundations, start-ups, organizations and protocols sharing their vision for the decentralized web. Attendees were able to stroll through, chat, listen and learn from each other. Presenting projects came from every part of the world!

The Holiday Fair was inspired by the festive holiday fairs of Europe. They were an opportunity for participants to see what is happening in the DWeb space, learn about new technologies, find partners, supporters, team members or funding. Projects welcomed feedback and ideas, and explored opportunities for collaborating!

Booths present at the fair included:

  • Agregore, a minimal web browser for the distributed web. It integrates peer to peer protocols with the web to simplify creating and sharing apps without the internet. Its goal is to make local-first software easy to make, and to make technology more resilient and easier to make.
  • Anwen/Dweb Lab which is a DWeb content community exploring Dweb Lab, Dweb Search, Dwebverse: open-source mmo 3d and vr game.
  • Blue Link Labs & Paul Frazee which is developing a new project building a decentralized, self-hostable cloud using Hypercore Protocol and other Web3 technologies
  • Briar, a messaging app designed for activists, journalists, and anyone else who needs a safe, easy and robust way to communicate. Unlike traditional messaging apps, Briar doesn’t rely on a central server – messages are synchronized directly between the users’ devices.
  • Decentralized Future Council, a new initiative committed to educating policymakers in Washington about the future of decentralized and interoperable protocols that will transform the Internet as we know it.
  • Earthstar Project, a P2P protocol and accompanying library of APIs for building collaborative and social applications, designed for human-sized (1-100) groups that already know and trust each other. This project is ideal if you want an online space where you can just be yourself, someplace safe where strangers won’t hassle you, or a place to build tools that are really tailor-made for your community, with a simple, blockchain-free API.
  • eQualitie builds free and open source software on decentralized infrastructure and protocols in support of free speech and access to knowledge. It also showed its CENO (short for Censorship No!) Browser, a mobile browser for storing and sharing blocked web content, as well as the team’s newest project, OuiSync – a tool for securely synchronizing and sharing files. Both projects have been developed with the backend support of the open source Ouinet library for enabling peer-to-peer functionality, which can be integrated into many other third-party applications. 
  • Filecoin Foundation presented about its grants program seeking to: A) Accelerate the adoption of open, decentralized technologies; B) Build communities of practitioners, users, and champions that are mutually supporting and self-sustaining; and C) Communicate the values and benefits of open, decentralized technologies to wider audiences
  • Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web which welcomed conversations about a vision for a better, re-decentralized internet, and how the Foundation might be able to help.
  • Fluence Labs, a peer-to-peer application platform which allows the creation of applications free of proprietary cloud providers or centralized APIs. Fluence provides a peer-to-peer development stack that allows for programming p2p applications, workflows, and compose services, APIs without relying on centralized intermediaries. Fluence’s p2p platform provides a complementary compute layer to IPFS, enabling a wide variety of decentralized use cases.
  • Handshake, a naming protocol that is backwards compatible with the existing DNS system. Every peer in the Handshake network cryptographically validates and manages the root zone, which completely removes the need for the Certificate Authority system (CAs). Names are logged on the Handshake blockchain, which is essentially one big distributed zone file to which anyone can add an entry.
  • The Hyper Hyper Space project aims to make decentralized applications easy to build and accessible by everyone. At the booth, participants could discuss how to power Dapps with data objects that can be instantiated anywhere (even inside a web browser), used offline and easily synchronized over the net!
  • ImageSnippets – discussing metadata delivery service layers around art/imagery within the context of decentralized protocols.
  • IndiView, a personal interest project in privacy which built an app and a decentralized network for communicating with friends and family. The network node is designed for self-hosting and implements a digital identity API. The mobile app supports sharing of contact details, photos, videos and chatting through the network.
  • The Internet Archive, the Library of Alexandria for the digital era, which is experimenting with storing web pages, film and audio in decentralized storage –at scale! Participants could meet team lead, Arkadiy Kukarkin.
  • Jolocom which is looking to empower every individual, organization, and entity capable of identity to freely communicate. Jolocom provides universally accessible and useful solutions for decentralized identity management.
  • Least Authority, a technology company supporting people’s right to privacy through security consulting and building secure solutions. A leader in the security of distributed systems, Least Authority offers consulting services, develops privacy-enhancing products, and contributes to the advancement of related open source and human rights projects.
  • Mask Network which aims to bridge the Web 2.0 users to Web 3.0 by bringing the decentralized application ecosystem onto traditional social networks, the Mask extension provides a decentralized option for features Web 2.0 users are familiar with. Users can enjoy secure, decentralized social messaging, payment networks, file storage, and file sharing without leaving mainstream social media networks.
  • The Matrix Foundation which is the Foundation responsible for the Matrix protocol and its healthy evolution. Matrix is a federated protocol which is mostly used for instant messaging, but not exclusively. One of the other applications is full mesh VoIP. They are investing into Matrix P2P as well to have portable identities, completely independent from servers, so people are in full control of their account.
  • Media Enterprise Design Lab, University of Colorado. Nathan Schneider’s CommunityRule is a governance toolkit for great communities. How does your community work? Are you ready to make hard decisions? Too often, we leave the most basic questions unstated and unanswered. CommunityRule makes it easier to clarify the basics so you can focus on other things. They showcased their prototype Web app and gathered ideas for the next-stage revision now in progress.
  • Mysterium Network, an open-source, Swiss-based Web3 project making the internet borderless and accessible for all. Their decentralised ecosystem of protocols, tools and web infrastructure provides more privacy, anonymous expression, and equal access to information. The project’s flagship product, the decentralised Mysterium VPN, is available for Android, Windows and Mac. Anyone can join the peer-to-peer marketplace to rent their unused bandwidth and IP address to a global community.
  • OneCommons, an early-stage startup dedicated to building a free and open cloud. The open-source platform lets you build, share and fork open cloud services that are location independent and support built-in funding mechanisms. Its mission is to realign economic incentives to nudge the Web away from the Attention Economy — based on maximizing a user’s attention at whatever cost — to an Intention Economy, where participants fund what they find worthy.
  • Peergos, a p2p, E2EE secure file storage, social network and application protocol built on IPFS. Peergos is building the next web – the private web, where end users are in control. Imagine web apps being secure by default and unable to track you. Imagine being able to control exactly what personal data each web app can see. Imagine never having to log in to an app ever again. You own your data and decide where it is stored and who can see it.
  • plan.tools, a community-centric content creator platform for collaboration, world building, and immersive experiences. PLAN is bridging together previously siloed industries using distributed ledger technology (DLT), p2p infrastructure, 3D graphics, open protocols, and realtime collaboration interfaces. Its vision is that the future internet will be powered by collaborative spaces built on a framework that is community-centric, off-grid capable, inclusive, as well as private and secure by default.
  • Quark, the browser that shows paths across the internet. It incentivizes the expansion of Web 3.0 to users at large with an interaction design approach. Imagine if you can bump into people looking at similar online content or search results, see where they’ve been, tag along to discover content together, and even monetize it via live stream. With Quark, you can build a collective map of the internet.
  • SHER, the decentralized live audio platform. That’s right, with SHER you can create your own shows. Have multiple streamers, play files and more. You don’t have to install anything, it works on your browser! Take the broadcast studio with you.
  • Skynet Labs, an open protocol for hosting data and web applications on the decentralized web using the Sia blockchain. Skynet decentralizes “the cloud” so that user and application data is not stored by (and only accessible to) a single, central authority and allows users to access it without any specialized software or cryptocurrency.
  • Socialroots enables functional cross-group communication, decreasing the time it takes to manage work and partnerships, and increasing engagement and productivity. Wicked Co-op LCA is an NSF funded worker owned co-op building enabling software technology for DAOs and decentralized networks of organizations to coordinate more effectively. 
  • Starling Lab. The USC | Stanford Starling Lab is the first academic research center in the world dedicated to exploring how Web3 technology can transform human rights. They work with historians, journalists, lawyers to securely capture, store, and verify human history using decentralized technologies.
  • Sutty, a worker-owned cooperative developing a FLOSS platform for managing and hosting static websites and e-commerce. We work for and with NGOs and grass-root organizations in Latin America and we want to share with you why we think this is an opportunity for DWeb’s growth!
  • Virtual Chair facilitates the organization of efficient and effective virtual events by focusing on three priorities: interaction among participants, dissemination of materials, and broadening participation. With Virtual Chair, organizers can easily take full advantage of best practices for virtual events.
  • Webrecorder. Webrecorder’s goal is to make it easier for anyone to create, store and access web archives using open source tools. One of our current efforts, supported by the FIlecoin Foundation, is to standardize a format that can be used to create and render web archives directly in the browser. The format makes it possible to load web archives from IPFS as well as a local file system, or any online storage, decentralized or centralized. Webrecorder’s motto is “web archiving for all” and we are working on several tools to enable decentralized web archiving using the browser itself, allow anyone to create personalized archives of their own web browsing.

Visit GetDWeb.net to learn more about the decentralized web. You can also follow us on Twitter at @GetDWeb for ongoing updates.

Welcoming Recorded Music to the Public Domain

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Every January we feature works that are entering the public domain. And this year the big story is in recorded music.

Recorded Music from 1922 and earlier

Approximately 400,000 sound recordings made before 1923 will join the public domain in the U.S. for the first time due to the Music Modernization Act (read more at copyright.gov). You can peruse about 38,000 of them in our collection of digitized 78rpm records.

By 1922 we were solidly in the Jazz Age – F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age was published in 1922, and the term was already in popular usage. Jazz migrated from Black American communities in New Orleans into the rest of the United States, having evolved from its roots in rag time, blues and Creole music.  In fact, 1922 was the year Louis Armstrong left New Orleans to join King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in Chicago.

Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1911) written by Irving Berlin and performed by Collins and Harlan

Peruse the collection to hear early jazz classics like Don’t Care Blues by Mamie Smith and her Jazz Hounds, Ory’s Creole Trombone by Kid Ory’s Sunshine Orchestra, and Jazzin’ Babies Blues by Ethel Waters.

Early recordings by Bert Williams (the first Black American on Broadway and the first Black man to star in a film), Fanny Brice (the real-life ‘Funny Girl’), Enrico Caruso (the legendary Italian operatic tenor), and so many others give life and flavor to our imaginings of the early 20th century.

Here are some of the top songs from 1922, to give you a taste:

But personally when I “flip through” these records I’m always drawn to the novelty songs. 

There’s a whole genre of sound imitations, like Violin Mimicry where a violin is used to imitate people talking, Jingles from the Marsh Birds with a man imitating birds imitating popular songs (just as confusing as it sounds), and A Cat-astrophe with people imitating rather catastrophic cats to music.

You can also skip the jokes and go straight to laughing just for the sake of it with these gems:  Laughs You Have Met, Gennett Laughing Record, and The Okeh Laughing Record, or choose to have a little music with laughing choruses like Ticklish Reuben, She Gives Them All the Ha-Ha-Ha, Stop Your Tickling, Jock! or And Then I Laughed.

And perhaps my favorite of the bunch is Fido is a Hot Dog Now which seems to be about a dog who is definitely going to hell.

Fido is a Hot Dog Now (1914) by Billy Murray

Other Media from 1926

As usual, we are also welcoming some new books, movies, journals, and sheet music – this time from 1926! (Read about 1925, 1924, and 1923 in previous posts.)

Some popular first edition books from 1926:

The Clothes We Wear (1926) by Frank and Frances Carpenter

Other interesting books from 1926 that you might want to explore include Show Boat by Edna Ferber which was made into the musical Show Boat in 1927 with music by Jerome Kern, The Clothes We Wear by Frank and Frances Carpenter which is a child friendly exploration of how clothes are made all the way from the field through weaving and into sewing, or The Art of Kissing by Clement Wood which is pretty self explanatory.

We invite you to explore some of the other items dated 1926 in our collections to find your own fun items that may now be in the public domain.

Virtual Party for the Public Domain

Please join us for a virtual party on January 20, 2022 at 1pm Pacific/4pm Eastern time with a keynote from Senator Ron Wyden, champion of the Music Modernization Act and a bunch of musical acts, dancers, historians, librarians, academics, activists and other leaders from the Open world! (And yes, we DO have a book from 1926 about how to throw the world’s best party.)

 Event on January 20th, 2022

REGISTER FOR THE VIRTUAL EVENT HERE!