---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message-ID: <dcc6398c6ab1c48bfa967fc150acc393.squirrel@email.fatcow.com> Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2016 21:53:40 -0500 From: "Neal McLain" <nmclain.remove-this@and-this-too.annsgarden.com> Subject: 'Decoding the Civil War': Tech unlocks Union telegrams By Rob Verger, FoxNews.com, September 28, 2016 Papers of Thomas T. Eckert (1862-1877), an extensive and extraordinarily rare collection of nearly 16,000 Civil War telegrams. (The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.) Today we use our digital devices to text, tweet, and email, but during the Civil War, telegrams were deployed to do things like request artillery or even to say "We have met with a serious disaster." Now, a new project is bringing thousands of telegrams that carried information between Union officers, Abraham Lincoln, and his cabinet into the digital age. The work is being done by "citizen archivists" on the Zooniverse website, which is a place for the public to help with large projects that need crowdsourcing, like identifying animals captured by cameras on the Serengeti. The fascinating trove of documents came to the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in 2012, and contains almost 16,000 telegrams. Many were written in code, which remained unbroken by the Confederates throughout the war, according to the Huntington. "The archive was thought to have been destroyed after the war and includes crucial correspondence that has never been published," the Huntington explained in a statement. "Among the materials are 35 manuscript ledger books of telegrams sent and received by the War Department, including more than 100 communiques from Lincoln himself." Volunteers who log onto Decoding the Civil War to help transcribe the archive might see a page from a codebook; one line, for example, contains the typed words "Republic" and "Refute" with the handwritten phrase "Secretary of State" written in between them. A volunteer could also see the contents of a telegram or the cover image of a book. The project, launched on June 20, is 47 percent complete, according to a statistics page for the project, and nearly 45,000 classifications have been made. Huntington Library press release: http://www.huntington.org/WebAssets/Templates/content.aspx?id=22131 Foxnews story: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2016/09/28/decoding-civil-war-tech-unlocks-union-telegrams.html Photo: http://annsgarden.com/telecom/foxnews.jpg For more information about the Zooniverse project see: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zooniverse/decoding-the-civil-war Neal McLain ------------------------------ Message-ID: <1f3e20ac549c54a2ea3a10f8139b963b.squirrel@email.fatcow.com> Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2016 14:02:22 -0500 From: "Neal McLain" <nmclain.remove-this@and-this-too.annsgarden.com> Subject: Rural Broadband Bill Introduced by Senators By Laura Hamilton, CED, Thu, 09/29/2016 U.S. Senators Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) introduced a bill on Wednesday they say could help close the digital divide in rural areas in the U.S. It would allow for federal grants of up to 50 percent of a project's cost, and up to 75 percent for remote, high-need areas, to be awarded in combination with loan funding already available through the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service. It also would double the authorized funding for the Rural Utilities Service's Broadband programs to $50 million per fiscal year. https://www.cedmagazine.com -or- http://tinyurl.com/zd3p2m8 Neal McLain ------------------------------ ********************************************* End of telecom Digest Sun, 02 Oct 2016