Random Site of the Week Archive (2017)

Where some ideas are stranger than others...	RANDOM SITE ARCHIVE at the Moonspeaker
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PREVIOUS RANDOM SITES OF THE WEEK The links below all open in the same window or tab as this page by default. Clicking the star (★) at the end of the entry will open the headline link in a new window or tab instead. This seems to me to be the best way to make it a bit more convenient to visit random sites without closing or losing this page while not making it a surprising or annoying default. Based on my tests so far, the new tab should pop up to the right of the parent tab, and the new window on top of the parent window. Another thing to draw attention to is that this feature began in 2018, and so some sites have changed a great deal over the past several years. If you want to be sure to get a sense of the version of the site that originally featured on The Moonspeaker, it is worth looking the link up on the wayback machine and dialling back to at least the year of the random site date. This is especially important for multi-author, political projects and their associated blogs, which will inevitably reflect changes in personnel and other outside pressures. With politics also come accusations of various types of malfeasance, which may or may not be well-grounded when made or at the time the site was encountered, so it is all the more important to check the source. Current \| 2008-2014 \| 2015-2016 \| 2017 \| 2018 \| 2019 \| 2020 \| 2021 \| 2022 \| 2023 \| 2024 \| 2025 CitizenLab (2017-12-27) : the respected multi-disciplinary research laboratory focussed on communication technologies, human rights, and global security. It is based in toronto at the munk school of global affairs, university of toronto. Their research articles and blog updates are a key information source for anyone concerned about their privacy and security. ★ Kontinónhstats Mohawk Language Custodian Association Mohawk Language Lessons (2017-12-20) : A set of 37 web based lessons in the Mohawk language in parallel english and french segments. The learner will "after learning these lessons, have a good base vocabulary, should you decide to learn more you will know where the vocabulary is coming from, so when the grammar rules are applied you will be able to follow changes to the vocabulary." ★ Ada Lovelace Day (2017-12-13) : A website pulling together documentation and other resources pertaining to the funding of Ada Lovelace day and an ongoing effort to raise the profile of women science, engineering, technology and mathematics fields. Cleverly, the corporate supporters, who remain as hypocritical on the subject of women in these fields in terms of their cultures and hiring practices as ever, are placed in the footer of the site pages. ★ Decolonial Atlas, The (2017-12-06) : A volunteer-run project engaged in producing maps and digitizing maps that work to counter the colonizing methodologies and motivations involved in the most current common types of mapping, which were all developed and applied within the context of european empire building. It's an intriguing site, with a somewhat troubling and internally contradictory Decolonial Media License 0.1. Love the concept, concerned about the current implementation. ★ QGIS (2017-11-29) : I originally stumbled on a reference to this free software based geographical information system while reading about something quite different, and of course had a look around the web for it. The software is mature and available for the usual suspects, MacOSX, Linux, and Windows, and the not so usual suspects such as BSD and Android. ★ privacytools.io (2017-11-22) : Another addition to the set of sites that deal with how to improve the security of your computer and browser set up. It is technically a bit of a stretch to call this a site since it is basically one extremely long page at the moment, a set up that I am observing more and more often these days. This does make page navigation a bit fiddly, so be ready to use the spacebar and arrow buttons a bit. ★ ibiblio.org (2017-11-15) : Not quite "the public's library and digital archive" but a real contribution to that goal, among the more or less famous items on the site are the first two webpages from the advent of the world wide web, and a remarkable archive of linux kernel projects. In fact, this site is probably best known for its software repositories since they make up the bulk of its materials. Nevertheless, keep an eye out for the diverse and growing range of other projects, such as Mutopia, "similar in spirit to Project Gutenberg – but consists of a growing collection of free sheet music." ★ Atlas of the Underworld (2017-11-08) : A remarkable ongoing project by three geophysicists, D.G. Van der Meer, D.J.J. van Hinsbergen, and W. Spakman which maps the positions inside the Earth of ancient continents that have been subducted in the course of plate tectonics. For those wondering how this is done, it is based on the data collected from earthquakes with deeper source points in the Earth. ★ Centre for Studies in Oral Tradition (2017-11-01) : An open access journal founded by John Miles Foley, with most papers including links to sound files and other auxiliary materials including recordings and videos. It is also an access point for digitized portions of a range of materials collected during ethnographic fieldwork intended to reveal more about oral tradition and its workings. ★ Orlando Project, The (2017-10-25) : An online history of women's writing in the british isles, initiated by Patricia Clements, Isobel Grundy, and Susan Brown in the early 1990s, and under development and continuous revision, as all good websites should be, ever since. It is far from just texts, including a variety of resources in other electronic media and is fully searchable. It is not a text archive, although it is possible to access many of the texts considered in it via subscription or of course the various online archives of now public domain materials. ★ Digital Classicist, The (2017-10-18) : An independent website providing a venue for discussion and development of computerized approaches to working with data from the "ancient world." Despite the strong ancient greek and latin predominance, there does not appear to be anything denying a place for say, ancient hebrew or akkadian materials and discussions. A few parts of the site have been translated into multiple modern languages on a volunteer basis. ★ Pleiades (2017-10-11) : A scholarly crowd-sourced "gazetteer and graph of ancient places" using open source software and providing data freely in comma-separated and JSON formats. It is a relatively well established "digital humanities" project in the category of tools and resources that make information available and easy to search. ★ Euler Archive, The (2017-10-04) : For the happy math geeks out there, this is a treasure trove of digitized papers and other original documents, references, research, and transcripts. It went live in 2011, and is supported by the Euler Society (which oddly enough, is based in the u.s.) among other organizations that support ongoing digitization and translation work. Euler was extremely prolific, so there is plenty to see. ★ Passion In Practice (2017-09-27) : Ben Crystal, David Crystal's son's theatre company that works on a range of quirky projects, not the least being new performances of Shakespeare and other plays and poetry from the same period in the original pronunciation. There are numerous sound and video clips well worth listening to, as well as descriptions of the original performance conditions for many of the plays that are clear and succinct. ★ Original Pronunciation (2017-09-20) : A central place founded and managed by David Crystal to find information on how to perform Shakespeare's plays and works from the same period in something far closer to its actual pronunciation. The english accent of "OP" has a distinct and surprisingly approachable tone to it that has already been a hit in several full performances of Shakespeares plays in it. Even if your interest in the Shakespeare and related works aspect is low, the detective work used to recreate the accent is well worth reading. ★ Internet Sacred Texts Archive (2017-09-20) : Another long-time archive of public domain texts, though it is not nearly as old as project Gutenberg which began in 1971, digitization and posting effort has been steady for nearly twenty years. The central focus is on non-mainstream materials, with a notable effort to include works of non-european origin, which makes it quite complementary to project Gutenberg. ★ Alpheios (2017-09-13) : A set of firefox extensions intended to support reading of ancient greek and latin texts (among others) right in the web browser, with the ability to handle texts that you code up yourself, always a pleasing option to have available. An updated version of the suite of extensions is in development, and is now available for all major browsers. ★ Diogenes Text Viewer (2017-09-06) : Ancient greek and latin language instructors are divided about how good or bad it is for students to use offline viewers like Diogenes or online projects like the Perseus Project to help them as they learn to read and compose in those languages. Personally, I have little sympathy for the naysayers, because it is not possible to read effectively just from a viewer that allows you to quickly and easily look up vocabulary, but the viewer won't hold you back either. In any case, Peter Heslin's free to download program is a great service to anyone reading those languages, even if they only use its dictionaries. ★ Hudson's Bay Company Archives (2017-08-30) : Few countries are as overshadowed by a single company as canada is by the hudson's bay company, now owned by americans and undergoing an eery to watch downward spiral. Most of the materials currently available online are indices and guides to working for specific types of documents. A subset of documents is available electronically, and there is a microfiche (?!) service. It is hard to say when or if a greater digitizing effort is likely, and it would not be surprising if the city where the archives are located, winnipeg, had mixed feelings about the idea. ★ Book and Sword (2017-08-23) : Sean Manning's corner of the web, where he writes posts dealing with ancient warfare and weapons, table top gaming, and speculative fiction. Like many excellent bloggers, his lengthy posts are well researched and often include many relevant photographs and full references. The commenters and discussions are generally constructive and well worth the time spent reading them. ★ Hummingbird Music Notation (2017-08-16) : An alternate take on music notation that attempts to render it more consistent and easier both to read and to write, even when not printed in the best conditions. The emphasis on how "soft and bubbly" it looks is a rather silly argument, but it is a genuinely interesting new system, with exemplar music provided for free download – many of the pieces should be immediately familiar from music appreciation class selections. ★ Women Composers (2017-08-09) : One of the many projects of the Kapralova Society, itself named for composer Vitezslava Kapralova. The project is an ongoing database of basic information about at least a portion of the 6 000 or so known women composers in predominantly europe and north america. Well worth perusing to find some other composers than the usual 20-30 that can be found most easily on CD and other lists of classical music. ★ Unwritten Histories (2017-08-02) : Founded by Andrea Eideinger to share knowledge of the highways and biways of canadian history "as a field, discipline, and profession." She draws extensively on social media discussions by historians specializing in canadian history and the many related areas, as well as providing a range of major features, most regularly best new articles each month, upcoming books being released roughly monthly, and "history round ups" of a range of news articles and blog posts each week. UPDATE: This site will shut down entirely at the end of april 2026, but the complete site archive will remain on the wayback machine. ★ ActiveHistory.ca (2017-07-26) : Part of the burgeoning "digital humanities" movement, in this case a website intended as a platform for historians to share their work beyond journals and conferences to a greater part of the general public via multiple formats. It is explicitly intended not only to insist that history is important and responsive, but that historians have a responsibility to act on what they know and contribute to current debates. ActiveHistory also has a french language counterpart (it is not a translation), HistoireEngagée.ca. ★ Métis Treaties Project, The (2017-07-19) : A legal-historical research project looking into the treaty relationships between canada and the Métis Nation. Some communities within the Métis Nation became signatories to specific treaties, including the famed Métis adhesion to treaty 3, but there are many questions to consider including whether other agreements were in fact treaties, and how treaty relations interact with Métis rights. ★ Peel's Prairie Provinces (2017-07-12) : A portal and index of documents and related materials on the history of western canada. It apparently began as a paper project collated and documented by Bruce Peel at the university of alberta, and reflects the excellent records available at that university and its counterpart in saskatchewan among others. ★ Akropolis World News (2017-07-05) : In the ongoing search for interesting online sources of additional ancient greek texts to read, here is another that I have known about for some time but have not featured yet. Juan Coderch writes several articles in ancient greek each week, covering various events without a strong theme or viewpoint other than the desire to provide some additional reading material for the practice-hungry student. Unfortunately the site submenus seem to be broken, but the news articles remain accessible. ★ Suppressed Histories Archives (2017-06-26) : For some reason I was sure I had already added Max Dashu's amazing site to the Random Sites list, but on checking to be sure I see that I have been remiss. Dashu is an incredible, dedicated historian who has written multiple books, made dvds, and curated a huge archive of potent imagery that she has fundraised to digitize and make more widely available. She teaches courses, gives talks, and is an all round historian powerhouse. Her site is not to be missed. ★ Donella Meadows Project (2017-06-19) : The online face of a major effort to preserve, make available and keep available Donella Meadows' visionary work on social systems that contribute to complex problems in human society and where to work to change those systems to achieve positive and persistent change. She passed away unexpectedly in 2001, just as she was finishing Thinking in Systems: A Primer, which was published in 2008 and appears to have just had a second printing. ★ Feminist Current (2017-06-12) : Founded and edited by the brilliant, brave, and unfailingly determined Meghan Murphy, Feminist Current originally provided a truly unique, Radical Feminist perspective on news affecting women that is hard to find anywhere else on the internet with as much profile. The site reader numbers have been leaping upwards over the past several months. Comments are moderated, so trolls are not permitted to overrun the boards, while diverse opinions remain firmly in evidence, based on longterm observation. Since this site was first added seven years ago, Murphy has bounced between specific surprisingly anti-woman positions and an on average Radical Feminist position overall. ★ Listening2Lesbians (2017-06-05) : This site can be a difficult read, because it is a news service covering "women's experiences of being abused or silenced as lesbians and of being subjected to misogyny and lesbophobia within and outside the community." This is tough work that absolutely needs to be done, and includes important investigative work from stuff that might seem less important (frackbook and its latest misogynistic attacks on lesbian speech and participation) and the viscerally critical (recent murders of lesbians). ★ I Blame the Patriarchy (2017-05-29) : At turns hilarious, infuriating, and invigorating, Twisty Faster skewers more than a few nonsensical claims about Feminism and the supposed wide openness of everyone's choices in this day and age. Alas, Twisty has not been posting much for the past several years, probably because like so many women she is responsible not only for herself but other people and other than human animals in her life. Any post is a great place to start, though a non-traditional way to get introduced is via Twisty's description of her blog. ★ Open Book Publishers (2017-05-22) : A scholar-run social enterprise that publishes a range of academic textbooks and monographs that are creative-common licensed, free to download, and available as print-on-demand items. It's an intriguing approach to "bespoke" publishing, with an impressive range of texts. Some authors are also adding more information about the different price ranges for photo licensing and calling out archives and universities with pricing so excessive their collections are effectively closed, a bit of transparency commercial publishers are not known for. ★ Beaker Browser (2017-05-15) : An intriguing addition to the ongoing project of reimagining the web as something other than a massive surveillance and advertising apparatus. Its approach is based on peer-to-peer sharing, which cuts out web hosting services, and includes its own apis to support applications. Sharing can be completely private, and it is possible to fork any given site, which has intriguing possibilities, especially since this approach is not indexed, making vandalism difficult to propagate. ★ A DIY Guide to Feminist Cybersecurity (2017-05-08) : Unfortunately a much needed resource nowadays, this guide is thorough. It is well-written and provides information at both basic and intermediate levels alongside recommendations of mainly free tools to help Feminists keep safe on the internet via a judicious selection of web plug ins and other options. This isn't the only option for information on the topic either; alternatively you can check DIY Online Security Guide For Every Woman, though it is a bit more fiddly to page through. ★ Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (2017-05-01) : As long as the reader bears in mind that many of the entries haven't had much added since the 1967 edition, this is a fun romp through the range of terms in multiple Indigenous languages as well as english, french, and probably a range of other european languages in current use at one time or another in one or more regions of "canada." Some of the most interesting entries are for what seem to be ordinary english terms that have mutated in interesting ways and probably cause a great deal of confusion when talking with americans. ★ ifixit.com (2017-04-23) : The premiere site on the web for helping you enact your right to understand and repair the many devices, and not just computers. The ifixit team provides over 26 000 free manuals covering the details of nearly 8 000 devices as well as selling a wide range of repair kits, tools, and parts. Even if you don't want to try to repair your own cracked screen, it is well worth finding out just what the repair would consist of before paying somebody else to do it, as it will help you determine whether you're paying a reasonable price for the parts and labour. ★ Liberation Collective (2017-04-16) : Collective blog of six Radical Feminist thinkers who, "hope to provide an online space for radical feminist commentary around issues of interest to our community." Besides the six principle writers, who hold and express diverse views, they welcome guest writers. Posts are generally lengthy and carefully written with good footnotes, and the comment moderation is judicious. ★ Judy Grahn (2017-04-09) : Judy Grahn is a well-known poet and activist, this site effectively serves as a lightly annotated catalogue of Grahn's books and recordings, and occasionally purchasing information. There are some curious omissions, such as The Highest Apple, a valuable though flawed study of lesbian poetry, so it is worth checking the online catalogues of second hand bookstores as well as your local library for more of her work. ★ Language - A Feminist Guide (2017-04-02) : The personal blog of linguist Deborah Cameron, whose published books include Feminism and Linguistic Theory, which is not nearly so dry to read as its title may suggest. Her blog is accessible to general readers, and deals mostly with english from multiple angles, including movie reviews, deconstructions of various types of linguistic pedantry, and reflections on current events. ★ Women's Health in Women's Hands (2017-03-27) : Central website of the ongoing work of the women's health specialists led by Carol Downer. Currently the women taking part in the project are located in northern california. The site itself provides basic information on the female reproductive system, including clear diagrams and descriptions and a list of books visitors may purchase. There is a great deal more to women's health than taking care of their reproductive organs of course, but in this time of resurgent hostility to women managing their own fertility and reproductive health, its relevance is critical. ★ Tradfem Collective de traduction de textes féministes radicaux (2017-03-20) : A collective of translators working to make Radical Feminist essays and books available in languages besides english. So far the majority of works have been translated into french and german, starting with a selection of articles by Andrea Dworkin. New translations are posted each week. ★ Open Access Directory (2017-03-13) : The site description declares that the OAD is "a compendium of simple factual lists about OA to science and scholarship, maintained by the OA community at large." This is true, but it is also an excellent place to start if you are looking for a clear explanation of what "open access" means and some examples of different approaches to implementing it. Start here for some great mythbusting about how many approaches to OA there are for example. The Directory of Open Access Journals and the Directory of Open Access Books are independent projects from this one. ★ Le Blog de Christine Delphy (2017-03-06) : Distinguished Feminist theorist and scholar Christine Delphy posts articles in both french and english, taking a firmly intersectional perspective. She is often most cited for her work on the journal "Nouvelles Questions Féministes," and her 1982 book Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women's Oppression, but she has many more recent works, from Familiar Exploitation: A New Analysis of Marriage in Contemporary Western Societies to Separate and Dominate: Feminism and Racism After the War On Terror. ★ Middle English Dictionary (2017-02-26) : A useful online source provided by the University of Michigan, comprising 15 000 pages of entries digitized into a database that can be searched by word or quotation. The site is not as visually busy as other electronic dictionaries, and it is impressively fast. A small drawback of using it is that it does not provide links to related resources at UMichigan or elsewhere. ★ Working Class Movement Library (2017-02-19) : A major archive of over 200 years of records of organizing and campaigning by working class women and men primarily in england. It started out, as many archives that don't follow a mainstream topic do, as a personal collection collected and maintained by Ruth and Edmond Frow. They have a range of ongoing projects, including oral histories, a lecture series, and linking together otherwise hard to access collections. It has few digitally available materials, but a helpful photocopying and scanning service. ★ Indian and Cowboy Podcast Network (2017-02-19) : A listener-supported Indigenous podcast network founded by Ryan McMahon in October 2014. All of the podcasts are excellent, and as unafraid of taking up difficult political and social questions as they are of making the listener laugh. Among them is the already featured here Métis in Space, Red Man Laughing, and The Henceforward. ★ Victorian Web, The (2017-02-12) : A remarkable site that precedes the world wide web, organized with an emphasis on links rather than searching. So this means that the huge collection of images, papers, and books is extensively cross-referenced. Articles are not written from the faux neutral standpoint endemic to encyclopedias, so it is possible to find multiple viewpoints on the same item with full evidence and original research. ★ TheOneRing.net (2017-02-05) : Still going after its original founding in 1999 not long after Peter Jackson revealed there would be movie versions of Lord of the Rings at long last, TheOneRing.net also remains a fairly busy place. There are many original essays and an astonishing archive of original art, and often the best place to start is not the main page due to the many (inevitable) product announcements, but the Library. ★ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2017-01-29) : Founded in 1995, this open access "dynamic reference work" is a distant cousin of wikipedia in that it is continuously being added to and edited. Unlike Wikipedia, this work is carried out by recognized experts in the field under the guidance of an editorial team. The effort to expand beyond european and american male philosophers is ongoing. ★ Marxist Internet Archive (2017-01-22) : A non-profit, volunteer-run website providing access to a major collection of marxist and marxist-relevant works. The materials are provided mainly in pdf format, although the number of doc, epub, and audio versions is growing all the time. The combination of primarily pdf versions and a clear citation policy makes this archive especially scholar friendly. ★ Fordham University Internet History Sourcebooks Project (2017-01-15) : A well-organized and formatted archive of public domain and what the webmasters refer to as "copy permitted" historical texts. The team has been making a concerted effort to go beyond europe and the usual suspects, including themed sections for women's and science history, as well as a start on including materials from the rest of the world. ★ OpenCulture.com (2017-01-08) : Founded in 2006 to catalogue and describe the burgeoning range of free educational materials on-line, OpenCulture may have started by cataloguing massive on-line courses, but has gone on to index podcasts, free textbooks, and annotated links to numerous library and museum collections. ★ Jedisabre.com eBooks Tutorial (2017-01-01) : One thing that is coming soon to the Moonspeaker is ebooks, because I think they're cool and think this is a far more sensible way to make things available offline than a shitty app. They are actually quite simple to make, and this is the tutorial that tells you everything you need to know to make your own. ★	How Random Is The Selection, Really? Mathematically speaking, not random at all. I bump into websites or webpages that strike me as cool, interesting, useful, or daft enough to have lots of fun with, and feature them. Being as I have eclectic interests, there will always be some thematic randomness, at least until there are enough sites picked out to be in obvious categories, which won't happen for awhile. I suppose you could consider this a hybrid of the blog roll that often resides on one side or the other of the screen on most wordpress blogs that I have read or touched on, and the old time "Links" page that used to be the backbone of the "web" part of the internet. Nowadays I am not sure whether webmasters and contributors spend much time anymore on thinking about how to add to the interconnections between websites online versus waiting for search engines to do much of the work, on top of rss feed subscriptions and the dreaded "social media." UPDATE 2018-07-16: Well, based on the sites I have been pulling together here, I think it is fair to say there are a few categories now. Science, math, and computer applications for a start. I have been adding more and more links to sources that in my view people should be able to read for themselves and decide whether or not they share the usual way the writer or group in question is depicted in the mainstream media. Publishing, Indigenous rights, history, and a smattering of linguistics, anthropology and archaeology. What Happens to Very Old Random Site Listings? If the site is still going strong, nothing really. Blogs and similar sites that have been switched into archives and no longer receive new posts or comments are marked as such once confirmed in their new state. A few sites and blogs now vanished from the internet are replaced by their archived versions at the internet archive. There were two links to pages rather than websites which at long last were rooted out. One was to a profile of Douglas Hofstadter formerly on the stanford university website, now only accessible via the internet archive. Protip, the profile gives far too much prominence to a book Hofstadter cobbled together while grieving for his wife who had died of a fast-moving cancer. The book is not very good and does not compare well to his most famous text, Gödel, Escher, Bach. Alas, Hofstadter has no real affinity for the web and the vagaries of united statesian copyright seem to have stymied most potential responding or homaging works in the vein of the online Library of Babel, which is too bad. The other link is to one of comedian Aamer Rahman's sketches, Fear of a Brown Planet – On Reverse Racism (alt source). This is a link to youtube from before it was served with https, and so does not properly redirect. Interested readers will be best served by searching for Rahman's channel instead. UPDATE: In a blur of unusual search engine success, I have tracked down Rahman's channel. I had no idea he had been on hiatus for seven years, and he has some great new material up.
Copyright © C. Osborne 2026 Last Modified: Friday, January 02, 2026 21:04:06