Facebook's de facto terms of use

If you are thinking of collecting and distributing data from social media sites, you should read
Pete Warden's account of how Facebook responded to his activities.. Facebook appears to be keen to exert more control than one would think they are entitled to, and certainly more than is convenient for academics. Nobody knows how this would play out in court… Twitter is looking better than ever as a data source.

XML and Corpora

I just got asked to advise on tutorial materials about XML for a computer scientist starting a corpus encoding project. To get started with the very basics I like Greg Wilson's Software Carpentry lecture. For more advice on how to go about building up a corpus, see Developing Linguistic Corpora: a Guide to Good Practice, by Martin Wynne and a bunch of Humanities Computing luminaries.

The project is going to work with childrens' books. That led me to find the Comic Book Markup Language provides a tool for adding analytical markup to (wait for it) Comic Books. It uses TEI, which is great, but heavy-duty.