It’s summer break at iDPI! That means it’s time to peel ourselves away from the computer and escape into the exciting world of bug bites and sunburn.

But it was a busy spring at the lab!

Freq is now open source

The past spring, Mike opened up his Freq project to a beta test—and if you want to check out a cool community project for music discovery, go ahead and sign up for an account.

And this week, we open sourced the code for the software powering it: superFreq. It’s super Freqy, yow. While it was designed specifically for talking about and cataloguing music, you might have fun experimenting with the code for other music or social projects.

Relatedly, Mike has been writing up some of the historical research that went into the Freq project on a blog called Low Frequency, where he recently published a 3-part series on a group of punks who ended up having a uniquely huge impact on the way the Internet was used to organize and advocated for independent musicians in the first decade and change of the new millennium.

This week in Ryan McGrady

Our lab’s powerhouse social web and data researcher Ryan McGrady has been receiving a lot of rightful praise and attention for his work. His YouTube research was the subject of a second pieces published by the BBC. That lead to an interview with Moncrieff on the Newstalk show in Ireland and featured story on Future Tense on the ABC in Australia. And those were followed by a pair of articles covering that work in the Hindustan Times.

And then last month, Ryan published a fantastic piece in Tech Policy Press: “What Attacks on Wikipedia Reveal about Free Expression."

This has been your week in Ryan McGrady

A Taxonomy of Middleware

One of the pet projects in the lab the past year and change has been trying to understand the future of middleware, or software that gives users better control over their data and experience of various places online.

In April, the lab’s Isaac Brickman pulished his overview of the current middleware landscape: “A Taxonomy of Middleware: How User Tools Can Improve Social Media.”

And for another look at middleware, Ethan interviewed Redact’s Dan Saltman on a recent episode of Reimagining the Internet.

Recently on Reimagining

I’m sad to say it, but as I (Mike) am leaving the lab, we’re winding down the current incarnation of Reimagining the Internet. It’s been an incredible run, and we’re closing this out with a killer run of episodes:

• Evelyn Douek gave us a run down of the Internet’s First Amendment concerns in the Trump era.

• Nathan Schneider joined us to talk about the present and future of governing social spaces on the Internet.

• Erin Kissane sat down with us for a two-parter on Facebook’s devastating impact on the humanitarian situation in Myanmar and her extensive research into governance in the Fediverse.

• Eric Gordon gave us a look into his new work trying to understand how AI tools can empower communities to advocate for themselves in their local governments using data.

• And one more very special forthcoming interview with one of our country’s most important social scientists.

Mike signing off

It’s been a great run at iDPI. I’m excited to stay in the extended family for a long time. Thanks for all these years or reading the newsletter and listening to Reimagining. Stay curious!