Washington Secretary of State: 41 Years of SGN now online at Washington Digital Newspapers; historic content available free to the public. “Washington State Library, a division of the Office of the Secretary of State, recently digitized 1,745 issues of the Seattle Gay News (now known as SGN), as part of the Washington Digital Newspapers (WDN) program.”
University of Washington News: Q&A: UnlockedMaps provides real-time accessibility information for urban rail transit in six metro areas. “While many people use Google Maps and other navigation tools to plan their rail transit trips across a city, these apps and websites often lack important information about how accessible a specific station is…. Researchers at the University of Washington developed UnlockedMaps, a web-based map that allows users to see in real time how accessible rail transit stations are in six metro areas: Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle, Toronto, New York and the California Bay Area.”
Capitol Hill Seattle Blog: Google Street View has gone dark for parts of Capitol Hill. “Maybe it is testament to the area’s nightlife bonafides. Maybe it is a momentary glitch in massive scale tech. But for some reason, large stretches of Capitol Hill are being rendered in fuzzy, overexposed nighttime scenes in the Google Street View system. It’s not an April Fools’ Day prank. The murky scenes appeared in December following an update to the neighborhood’s imagery. A Google spokesperson initially responded to our inquiry about the issue weeks ago but we haven’t heard back from her since.”
KOMO News: State officials to fight Trump plan to sell Seattle archives building. “State officials say they intend to fight a plan by the Trump administration to immediately sell a Seattle archives building containing extensive tribal records and other priceless historical documents.”
The New Yorker: Seattle’s Leaders Let Scientists Take the Lead. New York’s Did Not. “Epidemiology is a science of possibilities and persuasion, not of certainties or hard proof. ‘Being approximately right most of the time is better than being precisely right occasionally,’ the Scottish epidemiologist John Cowden wrote, in 2010. ‘You can only be sure when to act in retrospect.’ Epidemiologists must persuade people to upend their lives—to forgo travel and socializing, to submit themselves to blood draws and immunization shots—even when there’s scant evidence that they’re directly at risk. Epidemiologists also must learn how to maintain their persuasiveness even as their advice shifts. ”
GeekWire: Two Seattle tech workers stick it to coronavirus with virtual ‘Gumwall’ to benefit restaurant workers. “Seattle’s famously gooey Gum Wall tourist attraction was scrubbed of an estimated 1 million pieces of chewing gum back in 2015. In 2020, visitors to a new website called Gumwall can spend a buck to remove a single piece of virtual ‘gum,’ and cleaning the wall this time will benefit restaurant and hospitality workers affected by the coronavirus outbreak.”
Crosscut: Seattle may lose its National Archives. That should concern more than local historians. “…the news that the National Archives at Seattle is considering closing its vast facility in Sand Point should send a shudder not just through the community of historians — which it has — but through those who believe in Seattle’s regional exceptionalism. The government is eyeing cashing in on the property the archives sit on, but also in apparently zeroing the facility out of its budget. The archives here are a repository of records that make up our historical record, dating back to the mid-19th century. And they do this for the entire Cascadia region — Washington, Oregon, Alaska, Idaho — plus Hawaii.” One of those editorials where I just wanted to quote the whole thing.
Seattle Times: New tool helps you track all kinds of transit through the Seattle region, from buses and trains to ferries. “Have you ever run to a bus stop just in time for its scheduled arrival only to end up waiting for the bus to show up University of Washington junior Kona Farry has, so he built a website, unveiled late last month, that lets transit users track the whereabouts of all the buses, ferries, streetcars and light-rail trains in service in the Seattle region.”
The Stranger: Facebook Discloses Hundreds of Ads Aimed at Seattle’s Last Election. “Today, two weeks after Google moved to comply with Seattle’s unique law on political ad transparency, Facebook delivered what it’s calling ‘supplemental information’ to the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission. ‘Supplemental,’ because back on February 2, the company, in its first attempt at complying with local law, offered the Ethics and Elections Commission a seriously flawed and far-too-minimalist spreadsheet relating to Facebook ads that targeted this city’s 2017 municipal elections.”
Seattle Times: New online archive lets you explore Seattle’s 50-year-old ‘Freeway Revolt’. “What do University of Washington students, Montlake homeowners, the League of Women Voters and the Black Panther Party have in common? Their coalition resisted a Seattle plan in the late 1960s for freeways through the Central Area, Rainier Valley, South Lake Union and Lake City, during the golden age of automobile travel and three years after new Interstate 5.”
My Ballard: Hundreds of 1970s Ballard photos added to Seattle Municipal Archives. “If you’re like us, you love Ballard history. So when Seattle City Photo Archivist Julie Irick told us about 738 new Ballard photos from the 1970s — including businesses, houses and landmarks in high resolution — we were thrilled. And it’s all available online.”
Reuters: Seattle says Facebook is violating city campaign finance law. “Seattle’s election authority said on Monday that Facebook Inc is in violation of a city law that requires disclosure of who buys election ads, the first attempt of its kind to regulate U.S. political ads on the internet.”
In development: an archive of local TV programming in Seattle, Washington. “The archive’s stated mission is to be an open-ended, publicly accessible research project ‘aimed at recovering, archiving and publicizing the local history of television in Seattle’ and to serve as a site for original scholarship on the history of television.”
Wow! Check out this cool digital archive of photos taken during the construction of the Space Needle in Seattle, Washington. There are 2,400 photos here, taken by the same person, George Gulacsik. The vast majority are of the Space Needle construction, though as you’re browsing you’ll come across other random things, like a group of kids hanging out in a field.
The Seattle Police Department is putting its bodycam footage on YouTube. “Nearly all of the videos on the YouTube channel have been redacted. The police department has currently uploaded 2,591 videos to the channel. Many are only a few minutes long, but some last 15 minutes or longer.”
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