Berkman Buzz: April 26, 2013

Today is launch day for the DPLA. Hooray! So many people have worked so very hard in the past two years to get the plan down, the services built, the data in, and the site up and running. It’s just a start. There’s vastly more to be done. And it’s not the launch day we had in mind; the in-person celebration will have to wait until the fall. But the team got to the launch date on time and on budget. I’m so grateful to everyone who has put their shoulder to this wheel together, across institutions, time, and space.

When The Associated Press appeared to tweet Tuesday that there were two explosions in the White House, we were right to believe the news, even though it turns out that the AP Twitter account had been hacked. There were no explosions; the tweet was false. But believing the AP is not where we went wrong. Our occasional believing false reports should awaken us to the dangers of literalism.

"When Your Twitter Friend Turns Out To Be The Boston Bomber" - analysis of Dzhokhar's network by @gilgul: http://bit.ly/14TPb7S
—danah boyd (@zephoria)

This is a hard day to write about issues other than sudden, unexpected disasters – the bombing in Boston, the earthquake in Iran – and horrific ongoing disasters of continuing violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. But I’ve been trying to get my head around a complicated situation in Bangladesh that’s become very dangerous for bloggers and activists in that country: the aftermath of the Shahbagh protests and the arrest of Bangladeshi bloggers for alleged atheism.

In conjunction with the launch of the DPLA, metaLAB at Harvard is pleased to share Library Observatory, a web-native graphical search tool for discovering the DPLA’s growing collection of millions of digital books, images, maps, and archival treasures. It’s available at libraryobservatory.org, as well as through the DPLA’s App Library.

actually pretty smart: RT Companies Should Be Fined If They Get Hacked, Regulator Says http://huff.to/XZP6u4
—Lawrence Lessig (@lessig)

The online world has much more in common with the mythological world than you might expect. A look at Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks, and Anonymous and their corresponding roles in mythology.