Kim Sacks, Ph.D.
Research notes

Research notes on art, media, design & technologies

Welcome to my research notes.
Here I write down all the random things I might forget if I don't write them down.
Some could be helpful, some are just really random readings I need to keep noted.

Notes on the Shoah

For my research, I've been looking for open data on the Shaoh.
Here are a couple of links that I thought might be of interest.

Auschwitz drone footage

Footage was taken 70 years after the liberation of the concentration camp.
Empty.

First Holocaust film

Filmed in Auschwitz With Former Prisoners, First Holocaust Feature Film Was a Feminist Triumph

Ancestry's shoah survivor search engine

Another access to Arolsen's archives, except through the most popular family try web app.
Does make us think about the fact that Ancestry proposes a service of dna testing in order to profil your personal family tree. Not free nor open source that is.

Arolsen archives

Arolsen Archives – International Center on Nazi Persecution, in collaboration with Yad Vashem, released more than 13 million documents including files from concentration camps.
They can be accessed online, via a very complete search engine.
No Apis.

Memorial de la shoah

Portail du Centre de Documentation du Mémorial de la Shoah.
Website giving access to the french Shoah Memorial database of ressources, including book references, articles, monographies, recordings, photographies, films etc.
Also includes a search engine for people.

The digital survivors

Searching for Apis from Yad Vashem, I was facing a wall. It seems as I'm not the only one. Yoav Teper (data analyst) used a python script to extract the data from Yad Vashem's hidden Apis.
No open data Apis are available from Yad Vashem.

Sexualized Violence Against Jewish Women During the Shoah

A tool for teachers.
Map & testimonies of women victims of sexual violence during the Shoah.
Testimonies recorded and made public by the University of California, Shoah Fondation, Visual History Archives.

JewishGen

Database of databases on the Holocaust.
Provides a huge collection of references to accessible archives and materials.

Notes on Bauhaus documents

I participated in setting up a seminar at the Sorbonne celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus School.
Found some interesseting ressources.
Check it out.

Designers : what Bauhaus means to them

Interviews of famous designers answering the question : "what Bauhaus means to me'

Paul Klee notebooks

Paul Klee Gestaltungslehre - archives containing Paul Klee's notebooks.
Drawings, sketches, notes.
Only in german.

Bauhaus revues

Bauhaus books. All texts from 1925 to 1930.

Notes on graphic design & typography

Looking into typography, especially for webdesign.

Brand guidelines

One direction margin declaration

Interesting method of css margin declaration.

Graphic Design Thesis, KABK

Online vestions of Graphic Design Thesis from students at Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten.

Gutenberg

Open Lib.
Guttenberg is a web typography starter kit by Matej Latin, very usefull for handling leading and baseline-grid.

International Typographic Style in CSS

A CSS recreation and animation from classical International Typographic Style posters. Hans Neuberg, Joseph Müller-Brockmann, Burton Kramer, Pierre Keller, Markus Bruggisser, Anton Stankowski.
By Jon Yablonski.

I wrote the book on user-friendly design. What I see today horrifies me

Critical article by Don Norman. On designing accessibility, and the failure of major companies to properly implement human-centered design.

The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes

Article about how the world is designed for men.

History of LGBT+ design

Brief historical article focused on how the rainbow flag became a symbol.

Notes on cybernetics

Some documents useful in order to understand the origins of cybernetics theory.

Ada Lovelace's Notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine

Digital facsimile of 1843 first edition of Sketch of the Analytical Engine with Ada Lovelace's Notes.
Ada Lovelace's translation of Federico Menabrea Notions sur la machine analytique de M. Charles Babbage with hand written notes.
Harvard University Library.

Sketch of The Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage

Full copy of the text by Federico Menabrea translated by Ada Lovelace

Gordon Pask's Conversation theory in two pages

This piece was written at the request of Frank Galuszka, President, American Society for Cybernetics, in May 1996, and published in monograph format as Communication and Anti-communication.

Gordon Pask & Ressources

Review papers, PDFs and other ressources on Pask's research.
Including Heinz von Foerster Understanding understanding.

13pt - Revisiting Cybernetic Serendipity

50th anniversary of the 1968 Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition, which examined relationships between computing and the arts.

Critical thinking

Articles, readings, theoritical material and other stuff.
Things I think are relevant, mostly for my research on contemporary forms of coercion and alienation.

Awful AI

Open source - curated list of scary usages/sources of AI projects/algorithms.
Includes racist bots, deep fakes, fake news bots etc.

How Less Alienation Creates More Exploitation?

Article by Eran Fisher, published in Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism

Cyber War Will Not Take Place

Article by Thomas Rid, published in Journal of Strategic Studies.
Rid, Thomas. (2012). Cyber War Will Not Take Place. Journal of Strategic Studies. 35. 5-32. 10.1080/01402390.2011.608939.

Artists

Artists, projects and others designed objects I find interesting.

Couple of random findings

Richard Vijgen

Richard Vijgen
Studio Richard Vijgen is a design studio for contemporary information culture.

  • WiFi Impressionist
  • Immersive Media

Giulio Sven Barresi

GiulioGiulio Sven Barresi.
Designer graduated from ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne.

Theoretical papers

Other papers of theoretical work.

A Relational View of Information Seeking and Learning in Social Networks

Stephen P. Borgatti, Rob Cross
Published in Management Science 2003
DOI:10.1287/mnsc.49.4.432.14428

Surveillance

Notes on means of crowd control and technological coercion.
Bulk collection. Population surveillance. Systematic data gathering.

Realtime github data potential breach

Website that automatically scrapes github, gitlab and others for open source files giving access to potential security breachs. Such as Api key, Env et.

About XKEYSCORE

Article from the intercept (notably Glenn Greenwald) on the functioning of XKEYSCORE, the tool developed and used by the NSA and revealed by Snowden's leaks.

XKEYSCORE source excerpt and analysis

Small sample of the source of the XKEYSCORE software has been analyzed by German public broadcaster NDR.
It shows the ties between a german Tor server and automatic IP flagging.

Osint

Notes, links and tools about open source intelligence and data analysis.

Wigle

WiFi collaborative database, with map, tools and