In this week’s edition of “What We’re Reading” you’ll find articles on new technology that is helping piece together the past, news on another foreign scholar denied entrance to the U.S., and a new “open book” that explores the impact of all things Google.

• Piecing History Together
  The Economist explains how “pattern-matching technology” is being used to piece together 16,000 bags of shredded documents from Stasi files and uncover “East Germany’s dark past.”
• Another Professor Denied Entry
  This article from Inside Higher Ed examines the case of Marixa Lasso, a native of Panama and an assistant professor of Latin American history at Case Western Reserve University, who has been denied re-entry to the U.S. Inside Higher Ed notes that our own Barbara Weinstein, president of the AHA, has written to the State Department in Lasso’s defense.
• The Googlization of Everything
  At this site Siva Vaidhyanathan experiments with the "open book" form, writing "about Google and all they ways that Google is shaking up the world" from perspective of a "fan and a critic." It is an interesting model—essentially writing a book in public, using the blog form as a medium. Siva merits an added mention because some of his preliminary work on these questions helped to inspire an earlier AHA Today blog posting, Google Books: What’s Not to Like?

– Contributions from Miriam Hauss, Elisabeth Grant, Robert Townsend

This post first appeared on AHA Today.