Categories
Encylopedia internet

Contributing to Wikipedia

If you are interested in getting your feet wet supporting Wikipedia’s mission to maintain a current and accessible encyclopedia, consider making some some quick edits using this feature: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Growth/Tools/Suggested_edits

This guide has a helpful explanation of how to turn on the suggested edits widget if you do not already have it activated on your user homepage: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Growth/Tools/Enable_the_Homepage

Categories
Digital Humanities France internet research

Parisian Parliamentarians

I am pleased to announce the launch of The Parisian Parliamentarians Projet as a collection on the Internet Archive!

Internet Archive collection

Website

Categories
Digital Humanities France research Text Analysis

Researching France

This society may be of interest to those pursuing digital humanities projects on a topic in French history: https://h-france.net/. The index of (digital) primary sources it maintains is particularly comprehensive: https://h-france.net/professional-resources/research-tools/.

Categories
economics internet

Cybercrime as an Environmental Risk

An interesting article about the prevalence of cybercrime and the costs of defending against it: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-cybersecurity-cybercrime-hack-canada/. It is interesting that the move to remote work has created business opportunities for hackers, security consultants, and the cloud providers that host virtual private network access. Corporations and governments are almost guaranteed to lose money to crime, to security measures, or both. Should the costs of managing cyber risks be passed on to consumers/taxpayers? Or are they more like maritime shipping hazards that should be handled primarily by insurers? If so, digital services could only be delivered economically by the largest multinationals, much as in the maritime shipping industry.

To complicate the picture further, there are high environmental costs to maintaining all the processing power that supoorts AI-driven hacking and real-time security monitoring. But so are the costs of pushing the office workforce to commute more regularly. Should customers be asked to pay for carbon offsets for security measures, or should taxpayers and drivers be asked to pay for road maintenance, tolled roads, energy efficient vehicles, and so forth?

Categories
ancient greece Encylopedia internet research

Archived Internet History

This site is a blast from the past of the educational internet: Hellenic History. All the page copyrights seem to be pre-2000, but the graphic design is pretty retro. I have been finding the subtopics on the Archaic age particularly useful. I ran into a similar resource when I was writing my MA thesis: it explained the basic engineering problems faced by Roman aqueduct builders very handily, but didn’t serve as a rigorous source because it didn’t have any citations. I have the sense that twenty or twenty-five years ago people were excited to host encyclopedia entries on their personal websites, and that some of these people just kept paying the ISP fees. These articles are somehow easier to digest then Wikipedia entires and also evoke a lot of nostalgia!