I like to cap off each month with a few links I’ve found from my research or around the web. Here’s some cool links I found this month.
The Other Art History: The Forgotten Cyberfeminists of ’90s Net Art
Loney Abrams takes us back to the early ’90’s, when the ubiquity and accessibility of the web enabled artists to publish and distribute their work to the masses with very little friction. Specifically, Abrams focuses on women of the Cyberfeminist movement who merged code and art to create some incredibly stunning and out-there works of interactivity and motion that were years ahead of their time.
April 7th will mark the 50th anniversary of the Request for Comments, more commonly known as the RFC, a way for tech projects to organize and collect knowledge. To commemorate the occasion, Darius Kazemi, who some of you likely know from Tiny Subversions, is documenting the first 365 RFCs, one each day this year. The project is as ambitious as it is fascinating for history wonks like you and me, so if want to learn about what software projects were like 50 years ago, go ahead and dive in anywhere.
Part deep dive into Machine Learning, part tech thriller, data scientists Jasmine Greenway and Burke Holland have put their skills to the test to uncover one of social media’s most enduring mysteries: who is behind the @horse_js Twitter account. If you’ve ever wondered the answer (or even if you haven’t) you can follow Greenway and Holland as they walk you through the process of how a machine can tease out a digital identity. And… the answer made my jaw drop.
A reader recently reached out after my recent post about early blogs to point me to a list he’s been compiling for a little while. In the spirit of the many “awesome” lists that have been started on Github, Ben Read has been collecting his own list of some truly great developer blogs. If you’re looking for some new reading material, it’s worth a browse. And if you have something to add, you can submit a PR to add it to the list.
Fn 11: Social Media, 20 Years Ago
Anil Dash takes on the early days of social media on his new weekly podcast Function, from the team at Glitch. For their 11th episode, Dash brought together the stories of a few people that were on the web 20 years ago, experimenting with the very first social media tools, like LiveJournal, Pitas, and Open Diary. They have some fascinating insights into what the social web could have been, and the limitations that came with building for the early web.
2 Girls 1 Podcast featuring… Me!
If you haven’t heard it yet, I got a chance to go on Daily Dot’s 2 Girls 1 Podcast, to talk to Alli and Jen about the way I do my research and to talk about web communities, where they’ve been, and where they might take us next (and a few other cool stories as well).
Until next month!
