Tara Calishain

I dream in data flows

Current Projects

ResearchBuzz – In 1996 I wrote the first edition of Official Netscape Guide to Internet Research. In 1998 I wrote the second edition, and with the idea of creating some kind of ongoing update ResearchBuzz was born. The format has changed somewhat over the last 25+ years, but at the moment ResearchBuzz is a usually-twice-daily, sometimes-once-daily emailed newsletter covering updates in the world of archives, information collections, social media, disinformation, OSINT, etc etc. Also occasional articles on searching better and useful search tools. It’s free.

ResearchBuzz Firehose – In 2015, I started ResearchBuzz Firehose to index the individual items that make up the ResearchBuzz newsletters. Indexing the individual items makes very precise keyword and tag monitoring possible; click here for an article on how to make the most of it. In addition to the ResearchBuzz content, there is also an index of about 13,800 articles related to Covid-19 that were collected between March 2020 and early 2023. Finally, there is a index of about 1000 articles related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These items are focused on cyberwarfare, disinformation, propaganda, information warfare, destroyed and endangered cultural heritage, drones, OSINT, etc. This collection is still being updated but much more slowly than it was in early 2022.

Search Gizmos – In April 2022, I took a course on learning JavaScript and got through 50 of the 59 lessons before getting distracted by all the things I wanted to make. A year later there’s Search Gizmos, a collection of over 60 tools that offer different ways of exploring and searching Wikipedia, the Web, and more. Everything’s free. A few tools require API keys but the API keys are also free.

SearchTweaks — As I get better at handcoding HTML I’m collecting the tools I make into their own sites. Handcoded HTML is less messy and makes the JavaScript mobile-compatible. Anyway, SearchTweaks is a collection of 16 (at this writing) tools to make the Google search experience better. I’m sure I’ll more over time.

RSSGizmos — Hurrah for RSS! It’s an amazing tool for keeping up with information online and I literally could not do my job without it. This is a collection of RSS tools and utilities I started in May 2023. More will be added over time.

MastoGizmos — I used to spend a lot of time on Twitter, but I started moving away in November 2022. Now I spend a lot more time on Mastodon. I’ve made a collection of tools that for browsing and searching Mastodon across the fediverse, along with a couple of utilities for RSS and Wikipedia integration.

MegaGladys — MegaGladys aggregates several tools for searching Wikipedia people and presents them in one interface. I wanted to do this one for a long time but it took me a while to get a good enough grip on CSS.

Nosy Raleigh — I love my hometown of Raleigh North Carolina. One of the things I love about it is that it offers a lot of government information as open data. In March 2023 I started this Web site as an ongoing experiment in blending traditional web monitoring tools like RSS with open government data. It’s also a static site to keep my HTML skills tuned.

ResearchBuzz on GitHub — A bunch of random scripts/bookmarklets/etc I’ve made for various things. At the moment it’s Mastodon-heavy.

Old Projects

Me: (Tries To Work) — Many years ago I worked a quite demanding job. I got very little sleep and my brain insisted on having weird conversations with me at all hours of the day and night. I wrote the funnier ones down.

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