Month: November 2018

Here’s Perma’s November stats as of Nov 28th, per Westlaw:

• 40 state and federal court opinions, including the highest courts in:
  • Hawaii
  • Iowa
  • Michigan, as well as
  • The U.S. Appeal Court, Third Circuit, and
  • Appellate courts in New York, Colorado, Illinois, Washington, California and more.
• 417 law review articles
• 23 briefs, and
• 7 additional court filings, including trial court documents and trial court orders.

Sign up here to use Perma.cc to ensure your own linked sources are safe. We are also now offering individual unlimited-use accounts!

The LIL team is a freewheelin’ one, always looking for new people to collaborate with, new ideas to connect to our current projects, and welcoming a little bit of chaos – so, naturally, Mozilla’s annual MozFest was a great fit for us to attend! Held this year in London, the event spanned over a week culminating in a large scale conference over the weekend. By their own description, MozFest is “a seven day celebration for, by, and about people who love the internet” and they certainly delivered on the enthusiasm. Over the weekend Ravensbourne University was transformed on all nine floors into the home of six distinct spaces designated for varying facets of the web. Decentralisation, Digital Inclusion, Openness, Privacy & Security, Web Literacy and a Youth Zone were the main “spaces”, each with its own set of speakers, session leaders and artists.  Attendees were set free to visit each of these floors and facilitators encouraged to move away from lectures and towards hands-on workshops.

The Perma.cc session fell, appropriately, in the Web Literacy space, which took over the Ravensbourne library for Saturday and Sunday. We had a great discussion with internet users who were both familiar with the concept of link-rot and those who were seeing it in a new light. We created a physical web to help us visualize the ripple effect of a website going down. Here are some of us in the process of creating it:

Throughout the rest of the weekend, I was able to attend and experience some other great sessions:

• In the web literacy space, an augmented reality view of the front page of the NYTimes: Users would hold iPads up to this large scale installation to see commentary on headlines. The augmentations ranged from funny to slightly off-putting, highlighting the experience of reading the news in the era of misinformation.

• In someone else’s shoes: the prevalence of mobile-only internet access, and implications for users who are underserved in many other ways. The group gathered together and were all given user personas and a task to complete using only our mobile phones. Then, we were asked to map out our experiences on a large piece of paper. My partner and I put ourselves into the shoes of a middle-aged mother whose children had been her computer help until they both left for college. She now uses her sister’s smartphone when she needs to access the internet, and needed to apply for a government service. A lot of times, we think of online or digital solutions as simplifiers, but that’s not always the case. Here’s our visual representation of that experience:

• Creating a feminist data set: Artist Caroline Sinders presented her work creating a dataset that would be capable of informing a responsibly programmed AI with a feminist perspective. Her work is concerned with how bias can trickle into technologies that are often viewed as objective. Her project seeks to create a dataset that is representative of intersectional feminism. 

There were countless other sessions happening, including installations by our friends from MetaLab, a talk by Tim Berners-Lee on his latest work, and a conference-wide LARP event.

Thanks to all the facilitators and organizers! And long live a healthy internet!

For the last couple of months, the Digital Press at the University of North Dakota has been using Perma.cc to archive links they come across for their work in both paper and digital publications. According to Director Bill Caraher:

“The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota is a small publisher that produces both paper and open access digital publications. As a result we are simultaneously concerned with the economy of space and the need for archival links especially for projects that draw heavily on digital objects. Perma.cc offers both with tidy links and a robust library-supported archiving of web content.”

Recently, the Digital Press published “Protesting on Bended Knee: Race, Dissent, and Patriotism in 21st Century America,” which involved more than 500 links to websites that provide historical evidence about the issues and controversy surrounding Colin Kaepernick’s well-known protests and the reaction to them.  

“By using Perma.cc,” Caraher says, “we preserved the integrity of the relationship between arguments and (digital) evidence and a contextualized body of ephemeral evidence for the history of race, dissent, and patriotism in the 21st century.”

Get your own Perma.cc account here – and email us at info@perma.cc to request information on getting a shared company-wide account for your organization.

Perma.cc keeps popping up: per Westlaw, in the past two weeks Perma.cc Links have showed up in:

• 27 state and federal court opinions, including the highest courts in:
  • Vermont
  • Illinois
  • Washington
  • Michigan
  • Montana
  • Colorado
• 119 law review articles
• 15 court filings, including briefs and trial court documents

Sign up here to use Perma.cc to ensure your own linked sources are safe. We are also now offering individual unlimited-use accounts!