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5 min read 48

UofWinds 400, Week 48 2024: A Man of Parts and Learning / Why I have resigned from the Royal Society, Archive Webpage / Replay Webpage, Here's What Happens When You Buy from a Gift Guide


Good morning. I'm not entirely sure where my cats are because for this 400th issue of the University of Winds, I am writing this from elsewhere; among my family but with other people's cats. We're heading out shortly into the city so that the kiddos can engage in the thrill of the hunt of thrifting.

Also: 400 issues!

400 may refer to:

A Man of Parts and Learning / Why I have resigned from the Royal Society


Over the last week or so, I kept coming across recommendations to read an essay from the London Review of Books called, A Man of Parts and Learning. There were assurances that there would be twists and turns within in it, and to discuss the contents any further would spoil the experience. After about the fourth cajoling, I took the time to read the work, and yes, it is very good storytelling of a very good story of a man named Francis Williams. Williams was born a slave on a Jamaican plantation in the 1690s. I will let author Fara Dahholwala tell his story, but I will drop one fact: his life story will include this:

The Royal Society’s rejection of Williams on racial grounds happened in the autumn of 1716. It was a scandal. It was still being talked about as a scandal in the 1720s. It was still remembered in the 1770s. It’s a significant fact. But there’s a more fundamental fact: Williams’s abilities were such that he was considered worthy of election. And that meant he had serious support among senior members of the society.

For those unfamiliar with The Royal Society.

In the mid-17th century, informal gatherings of London- and Oxford-based intellectuals coalesced to form a chartered organisation. Its name would be The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge.

The Royal Society still exists. We can look at its Wikipedia entry to see what it has been up to recently.

To show support for vaccines against COVID-19, the Royal Society under the guidance of both Nobel prize-winner Venki Ramakrishnan and Sir Adrian Smith added its power to shape public discourse and proposed "legislation and punishment of those who produced and disseminated false information" about the experimental medical interventions.

I mention this because Elon Musk is a member of the Royal Society. I admit I only learned this fact when I read that Oxford Emeritus Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology, Dorothy "Deevy" Bishop, had recently resigned from the Royal Society because the Society ruled that Musk's behaviour did not contravene its Code of Conduct.

As an aside, Codes of Conduct have been held up in (Canadian) court as a corrective to unprofessional harmful public behaviour.

Archive Webpage / Replay Webpage


We can still read the earliest correspondence of the Royal Society because they were carefully kept and then digitized. And we all have access to the earliest issues of the first scholarly journal, The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London through JSTOR. But without major investments into academic libraries and scholarly infrastructure, millions of research papers are at risk of disappearing from the Internet as "more than one-quarter of scholarly articles are not being properly archived and preserved".

Years ago, I used Webrecorder to capture the years of writings I have shared to the world that, for the moment, still reside on blogger.com, tumblr, and various wordpress instances. From the Wikipedia entry for Rhizome (organization):

In August 2016, the organization launched the public release of a more fully realized Webrecorder.io tool, which was a free web archiving tool that allowed users to create their own archives of the dynamic web.[20] Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Webrecorder.io was targeted towards archiving social media, video content, and other dynamic content, rather than static webpages. Webrecorder.io was an attempt to place web archiving tools in the hands of individual users and communities. It used a "symmetrical web archiving" (browser-based) approach, meaning the same software is used to both record and play back the website.[21] While other web archiving tools run a web crawler to capture sites, Webrecorder.io took a different method, recording network traffic while a user browsed the site to capture its interactive features...

In June 2020, Rhizome renamed their Webrecorder.io project to Conifer while Ilya Kreymer split Webrecorder off to become a separate entity.

From what I can tell, Conifer is a web archiving platform that still uses webrecorder, which is managed separated at Webrecorder.net. But what I can tell you for certain is that it is now much easier to use webrecorder than in years past. . Now, you just need to visit archiveweb.page to capture pages into an archival file format and then, to read these archived website files, you can do so by going to replayweb.page. I learned this from a DIY web archiving workshop that was put on by SUCHO, ACH, and Webrecorder earlier this week. SUCHO is Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online) and ACH is the Association for Computers and the Humanities).

In 2022 SUCHO organized a large-scale effort to archive at-risk Ukrainian cultural heritage bringing together librarians, technologists, and children to do web archiving. It is a good reminder that there are many reasons to hold on to things you love.

Here's What Happens When You Buy from a Gift Guide


What? Were you expecting a University of Winds 2024 Black Friday Gift Guide?

From Shop Rat's Here's What Happens When You Buy from a Gift Guide

What the heck are affiliates? In short, affiliate marketing is a business arrangement in which a person/entity is incentivized to share something because they get a commission for every sale or signup they generate. The individual profits may seem small, but they can add up. Publications like the NYTimes, for example, likely rake in at least a million dollars in affiliate revenue every year. Maybe you’ve seen the FTC-required disclaimer at the top of any Wirecutter shopping article, casually letting you know that the website “may earn a commission” from your clicks. This newsletter has one. So do most shopping and fashion-related newsletters if you read the fine print. (Minus Blackbird Spyplane, which does not use affiliates and explains why here, and the same forTotally Recommend, Opulent Tips, and others.)

Now the NYT's $30 million dollar acquisition of Wirecutter makes more sense 🎁.

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