Archives

The Association for Computing Machinery is rolling out open access to its back catalog, as Ernie Smith reports.

JOSS

A new journal has been launched, to serve as a repository of open source research software, as the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS). Daniel S. Katz et al. have the details.

Links roundup: 4

• Flavio Ribeiro et al. have released components of the video processing workflow at the New York Times to the open source community.
• Adam Conner-Simons describes Gitless, developed at MIT. The tool is intended as a gentler introduction to the Git mindset—no stashing required.
• Phil Sturgeon makes a succinct comparison between REST- and RPC-based APIs. One isn't better than the other; they're just different.

  • RPC-based APIs are great for actions (that is, procedures or commands).
  • REST-based APIs are great for modeling your domain (that is, resources or entities), making CRUD (create, read, update, delete) available for all of your data.

You could look it up

dominic introduces the new read-write API for the U.S. National Archives' online catalog. Plus-one from me for providing (rate-limited) access without an API key or authentication -- quick start mode, if you will. I also like defaulting to pretty-print.

And search results return a field queryTime, which looks like it's the number of milliseconds that it took to execute the query (the interactive documentation isn't clear about this): of some value to client software, but very useful for developers maintaining and performance-testing the API itself.

Poop bot

Melody Kramer talks to Sara Simon, who wrote a Twitter bot to mirror sewage spill reports in Vermont for Vermont Public Radio.

Sherborn

Using regular expressions to crack the inconsistencies of a century-old bibliography and bring an important compendium of zoological taxonomy into the semantic web: Suzanne C. Pilsk et al., "Unlocking Index Animalium: From paper slips to bytes and bits."

Credit where credit is due

Dalmeet Singh Chawla introduces Depsy, a service that seeks to measure the contributions made by researchers to the body of software that powers science.

Resources

I meant to turn Melody Kramer's post about tutorials for GitHub and Python and other good thingsinto a Serendipity Days project (and maybe that will still happen), but for now I'll just drop the link here.

The end of tote bags?

Melody Kramer argues that the current business model for public media stations (radio and TV), i.e., "member" = "financial contributor," needs some shaking up. She offers six novel ways to engage with the community, ways for people to engage with and provide valuable support to a station that don't involve monetary pledges. Interesting, thought-sparking stuff.

Breaking out of the black box

Sylvia Tippmann offers a brief introduction for scientists to the programming language R and its ecosystem.

Any color is a good choice, so long as it's black

Nicolas P. Rougier et al. offer "Ten Simple Rules for Better Figures." The one that I tend to forget: Captions Are Not Optional. And the TL;DR version of the paper is captured by the first two rules: Know Your Audience and Identify Your Message.