Sunday, June 26, 2011

Week in Review

It's been eight months, and I am unsure whether or not I will be returning to doing this regularly.  But below are some noteworthy news stories and blog posts I have read in the past week that deal with my overlapping interests in Genealogy, History, Heritage, and Technology.

Genealogy Research
  • James Tanner at Genealogy's Star begins to address the topic of Evidence and Proof from the perspective of a lawyer, and continues by discussing the difference between probative and non-probative facts in Digging into Evidence.  The connections to genealogy research are clear.
Poetry
    Digital Archives 
      • Meredith D. at NARAtions announced the addition of Tagging for he National Archives "Online Public Access Prototype" 
      Recent uploads to the National Archives Flickr set
        • Executive Order 9981 in which President Harry S. Truman bans the segregation of the Armed Forces., 07/26/1948, Page 1/2, Page 2/2
        Technoloy/Internet
        •  ICANN announced that they will begin accepting applications for unlimited new Top Level Domains in January of next year. Currently TLDs include .com, .net, .org, etc  If there is interest from more than one source for a TLD it will be auctioned.  (Do you think Ancestry.com or FamilySearch will bid highest for .genealogy ?  Will anyone bid for the misspelled .geneology ?)  One of the interesting features of this announcement I've noticed, is that they will allow different language sets.  So there could be a TLD using Hebrew or Chinese characters.
        •  Dick Eastman reviews  the ABBYY TextGrabber app for iPod/iPad2/iPhones. While the application looks useful, and I may test it out myself, the review is also a great illustration of the weaknesses of Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

          1 comment:

          Greta Koehl said...

          Glad to see this feature back here, even if only temporarily or sporadically - you add a unique perspective and often cover things I missed out on reading or did not pay enough attention to when I originally saw them.