tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9624474658563972842024-02-22T06:54:49.031+00:00Melissa Terras' BlogAdventures in Digital Humanities and digital cultural heritage. Plus some musings on academia.Melissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.comBlogger349125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-55576364040086240332015-07-14T11:35:00.001+01:002015-07-14T11:35:07.107+01:00New digs!After 8 years here over at blogger, its time to take my blogging a little more seriously and make sure I own the content and how it is presented: its one of these things, when you a choose a platform, that you don't know how it is going to grow, or develop, and occasionally you need to make the leap.<br />
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I’ve been quiet from a bloggy point of view over the last few months –
but behind the scenes I’ve been working hard with UCLDH’s designer at
large, <a href="https://twitter.com/rkammann">Rudolf Ammann</a>, on a shiny new blog space, all of my very own, which you can peruse over at:<br />
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<a href="http://melissaterras.org/">melissaterras.org</a></h2>
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for all your ranty bloggy digitally culturally heritagey needs. I've decided to keep this blogger space live, to prevent link-rot, but all of the content (including comments) has been ported over to <a href="http://melissaterras.org/">melissaterras.org</a> and I'll post new content from now on over there. I hope to see you over at the new space, and thanks for reading. Melissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-70715735057473553622014-10-29T01:26:00.000+00:002015-06-14T13:58:04.433+01:00Reuse of Digitised Content (4): Chasing an Orphan Work Through the UK's New Copyright Licensing Scheme<h3>
An (<a href="http://dhawards.org/dhawards2014/results/">award winning</a>!) <strike>regularly updated </strike> concluded blog post in which I document trying to get a license to reuse an item for which no copyright information exists, under the UK Government's new legal framework. </h3>
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Diary Entry 1: Weds 29th October, 1.16am UK time. </h3>
Well, today's the day! Wednesday 29th October, the day the UK law changes to allow licenses to be granted for "orphan works" - items whose copyright owners cannot be located. This is a thorny problem - as a recent government publication explains<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
If an individual wants to use a copyright work they must, with a few<br />
exceptions, seek the permission of the creator or right holder. If the right holder – or perhaps one of a number of right holders – cannot be found, the work cannot lawfully be used. This situation benefits neither the right holder, who may miss opportunities for licensing, nor potential users of those works. This is not a situation peculiar to the UK; other countries face the same issues [<a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/copyright-uk-orphan-works-licensing-scheme">source</a>]. </blockquote>
A new framework was announced as part of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013, and has been implemented after a <a class="external-link" href="https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/copyright-uk-orphan-works-licensing-scheme">consultation process</a> earlier in 2014. The UK government also <a class="external-link" href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2014/9780111117682/pdfs/ukdsi_9780111117682_en.pdf">introduced regulations</a> to ensure that they comply with the <a class="external-link" href="http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/copyright/orphan_works/index_en.htm">EU Directive on Orphan Works</a>. This new scheme will be administered by the UK's <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/intellectual-property-office">Intellectual Property Office</a>. <br />
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In my previous blog post I introduced a lovely orphan work, from the mid 1960s: a"lantern" interval slide tempting patrons to buy an ice lolly, used at the Odeon Cinema, Eglinton Toll, Glasgow.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGn2mw5nFd3GTFHuJo_2kNnWzV61sNnAsz9b7UMHIYx37yZSIDYUdFphxYaRsF0HDDm48kJ_is6KwXesBqeJFY-08yl_ioceO0caoGSRGIKCYYkUFBjqyzM0RifsI3bk67UilPMVlXwDs/s1600/LollyTime_tidied_forblog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGn2mw5nFd3GTFHuJo_2kNnWzV61sNnAsz9b7UMHIYx37yZSIDYUdFphxYaRsF0HDDm48kJ_is6KwXesBqeJFY-08yl_ioceO0caoGSRGIKCYYkUFBjqyzM0RifsI3bk67UilPMVlXwDs/s1600/LollyTime_tidied_forblog.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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The image is used here with permission from the <a href="http://ssa.nls.uk/">Scottish Screen Archive</a>, <a href="http://www.nls.uk/">National Library of Scotland</a>. It's part of a collection of Lantern Slides, with no individual collections record. It has a small identifying note to say it was made by Morgans Slides Ltd, which is no longer trading. The Odeon cinema were contacted, but their records dont go that far back for design so they cannot prove they
own copyright, but they gave me permission to use it if they do, with
the caveat that a copyright owner, whom they cannot speak for, may come
forward at some future date. It's an orphan.<br />
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I want to adopt it, so I can use it widely, but also, to investigate how easy? hard? costly? problematic? easy? it is to get a license for orphan works under this new scheme. <br />
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So let's go! This blog post will expand over time as I update on the process. I have all the data I can get on the item gathered, and am ready to roll. I contacted the IPO last week via email, and they promise that "all the relevant information on how to apply for a license and the due diligence needed will appear on the website on Wednesday morning". There's nothing up there yet (I'm on Australian time writing this, in Melbourne, and its only just past midnight in the UK)... but will check back later, come UK business hours.<br />
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Diary Entry 2: Weds 29th October, 11am UK time</h3>
It's online! Here we have the <a href="https://www.gov.uk/apply-for-a-licence-to-use-an-orphan-work">process and the system</a> of how to apply for a license for an orphan work. It's an online form - I'll get cracking with it...<br />
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Diary Entry 3: Weds 5th November</h3>
Its taken me a week to update this - not because I'm not interested, but because I'm over in Australia just now on a lecture tour, and its been a jolly whirlwind of lectures, lunches, masterclasses, flights, trains, dinners, and kangaroo spotting. Excuses excuses. I'm now in a hotel room in Sydney with a few hours spare of an evening and an actual internet connection: lets get to it.<br />
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The first thing to report is that the IPO read this nascent blogpost and contacted me! The Head of Copyright Delivery, from the Intellectual Property Office, thought my blog was interesting, and we've already exchanged an email or two: they are interested in the needs of our sector, and want to assist in this. Isn't that interesting (and slightly scary - that's social media for you) - and I assured them that I wasn't doing this out of "lets see what is wrong with the process" but in the spirit of genuine exploration. The process is clearly flagged as in Beta, so lets all proceed in manner of mutual respect, and give some feedback as we go. I'm happy to be a guinea pig. (I'll flag up recommendations to the IPO with a bold <b>IPO:</b> for easy scanning). <br />
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The <a href="https://www.gov.uk/apply-for-a-licence-to-use-an-orphan-work">process</a> itself seems relatively straightforward (check list from the IPO website):<br />
<ul>
<li>check that the work you want to copy is still in copyright because if it isn’t, you don’t need a licence to use it </li>
<li>check whether the use falls within one of the copyright <a href="https://www.gov.uk/exceptions-to-copyright">exceptions</a> </li>
<li>read the <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/orphan-works-overview-for-applicants">guidance</a>
on orphan works and take this <a href="https://www.orphanworkslicensing.service.gov.uk/eu-eligibility" rel="external">short questionnaire</a> to find out if you are eligible to use an orphan work under the EU Directive</li>
<li>carry out a <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/orphan-works-diligent-search-guidance-for-applicants">diligent search</a> for right holders in accordance with <abbr title="Intellectual Property Office">IPO</abbr> published guidance</li>
<li>complete the diligent search checklist(s) and convert these to one PDF document to upload as part of the application process</li>
</ul>
Then, work out what license you want. So lets go through this check list, to get that first phase out of the way. <br />
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1. Check that the work you want to copy is still in copyright because if it isn’t, you don’t need a licence to use it.<br />
TICK! we have an orphan item right here.<br />
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2. Check whether the use falls within one of the copyright <a href="https://www.gov.uk/exceptions-to-copyright">exceptions</a><br />
UNTICK! exceptions are for Non-commercial research and private study; Text and data mining for non-commercial research; Criticism, review and reporting current events; Teaching; Helping disabled people; Time-shifting (eh? Dr Who a go-go); Personal copying for private use; Parody, caricature and pastiche; Certain permitted uses of orphan works (which allows the GLAM sector to digitise orphan works and make them available online); Sufficient acknowledgment, and Fair Dealing.<br />
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Now, I'm no lawyer, but none of these are me: what do I want to do? I want to take an orphan work, and make some fabric with it using it as the basis for a pattern, and perhaps make a few items of things, which I might want to sell on etsy, or put the pattern up on spoonflower, etc. Yes, there is a teaching and research element to this, but by the same token, the teaching and research is in the fact of making it available, and chasing through the process. It's not commercial a la huge superstores, but its certainly not uncommercial, even though the chance of making a profit is slim. I'd say that there were no exceptions to copyright for me in this case, so we (un)tick the item, and proceed to the next in the checklist.<br />
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3. Read the <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/orphan-works-overview-for-applicants">guidance</a>
on orphan works and take this <a href="https://www.orphanworkslicensing.service.gov.uk/eu-eligibility" rel="external">short questionnaire</a> to find out if you are eligible to use an orphan work under the EU Directive.<br />
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Read it (interesting read). The checklist for the EU Directive the first thing where I go... wait a minute, Gov. See screenshot.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRLMIoSTnV9VZNmbnPQvslXvCBFjMdTOaJytTwcFpNmYwHSJiN5NoAY0Sp3Q3Ah9OiwdHwAE23rgxdm9isMGU6lATCvwFPwlZ0oUHDph0qZCvjWJYYtSwHIpc0QNDbKqasmAbQFJhZ5z4/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-11-05+at+16.05.42.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="287" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRLMIoSTnV9VZNmbnPQvslXvCBFjMdTOaJytTwcFpNmYwHSJiN5NoAY0Sp3Q3Ah9OiwdHwAE23rgxdm9isMGU6lATCvwFPwlZ0oUHDph0qZCvjWJYYtSwHIpc0QNDbKqasmAbQFJhZ5z4/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-11-05+at+16.05.42.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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Problem number 1: I'm not an organisation. I'm just a person. If I wanted to start trading and selling this stuff, I'd be starting off as a <a href="https://www.gov.uk/set-up-sole-trader">sole trader</a>, which is still not really an organisation. So I already dont know if I've met this check list or not, given I've been asked what categories my organisation falls under (so, <b>recommendation 1: IPO</b> I'd be putting in some thing about being an individual person on that screen). I'm very much "none of the above" so lets tick that, which gets you to:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTmR0kn1r4TZUQMJIB6LgBfoZwZC1aWKpjpeZXcmu2efBq3n5rjUeZeNvVwbn1ya9l9j2L4bjr8NyzQbktC-vhngvA2PrQHMAPwNJfE3ez8iWve5yCmd8emrawr1PjWqJRODqPL4_x988/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-11-05+at+16.10.35.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="142" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTmR0kn1r4TZUQMJIB6LgBfoZwZC1aWKpjpeZXcmu2efBq3n5rjUeZeNvVwbn1ya9l9j2L4bjr8NyzQbktC-vhngvA2PrQHMAPwNJfE3ez8iWve5yCmd8emrawr1PjWqJRODqPL4_x988/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-11-05+at+16.10.35.png" width="400" /></a></div>
I'm not exempt, as I thought, although who knows because of the organisation thing... so lets crack on with the licensing scheme. <br />
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4. Carry out a <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/orphan-works-diligent-search-guidance-for-applicants">diligent search</a> for right holders in accordance with <abbr title="Intellectual Property Office">IPO</abbr> published guidance<br />
TICK! I have all my info here, good to go!<br />
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5. Complete the diligent search checklist(s) and convert these to one PDF document to upload as part of the application process.<br />
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The form is a bit of a funny beast. First, you have to select from a <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/orphan-works-diligent-search-guidance-for-applicants">list of different forms</a>, choosing one which may apply to you. As ever, its really hard to make up a list that covers everything, so it took me a bit to decide that I should file my request under "<a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/367357/orphan-works-still-visual-art.doc">still visual art</a>" which is the closest there is to it. Then you get to filling out the form, which mostly a list of places you should check to see whether the item is listed or found - first page screenshot:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVPZ8C0ue2R0GuDXmL7Ufa7cPwb6KDCkEglOO6B8SE3JRTLGIZdnsn2oWul97lURSyxYwr5JVsrAYI-NN0rpTCP3zUyqJHl71GvxIqXsekcUm8-y8lrC_-qGUJ5rIdcuuiFx7cSKhKeMI/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-11-05+at+16.18.53.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVPZ8C0ue2R0GuDXmL7Ufa7cPwb6KDCkEglOO6B8SE3JRTLGIZdnsn2oWul97lURSyxYwr5JVsrAYI-NN0rpTCP3zUyqJHl71GvxIqXsekcUm8-y8lrC_-qGUJ5rIdcuuiFx7cSKhKeMI/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-11-05+at+16.18.53.png" width="385" /></a></div>
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The list of places to check goes on and on: British Society of Underwater Photographers (BSUP), Bureau of Freelance Photographers (BFP), Chartered Institute of Journalists (CIOJ), Editorial Photographers UK (EPUK), Master Photographers Association (MPA)... I make it 55 different places you have to check to claim that it is an orphan work, which is fine: you want to be diligent about this (the clue is in the title). But, <b>recommendation 2: IPO</b> it would really help if you said exactly where you wanted people to check (giving URLs would help a lot) and how - for example, "water mark search or image recognition software" is quite a broad church. Another thing <b>recommendation 3: IPO </b>is that a lot of the places are societies, and I'm not sure what they thought you could do there, or what they have that is relevant. For example, if you go to the <a href="http://procartoonists.org/">Professional Cartoonist's Association</a> website, you can browse portfolios, but I cant seem to search for "lolly time", and its much more a membership organisation than a repository for content. So I'm not sure what I'm being asked to check: that I had a quick look at the website? that there was nothing of relevance because they dont have a repository? that I was supposed to email them and ask? Guidance on that would be super useful.<br />
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But I worked though the list diligently - and I know how difficult it must have been to put together that list of things, as one size wont fit all, and I tried not to get frustrated by demonstrating why Its Lolly Time isnt probably going to be relevant to the Society of Wedding and Portrait Photographers, but it is what it is. MS word was probably the easiest way to go, but it would be nice <b>recommendation 4: IPO </b>if there could have been a slightly more interactive way to choose which evidence you want to present (where do I attach my emails from the National Library of Scotland, or the Odeon, for example?)<b></b><br />
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Now on to choosing a license that you are applying for! And it is here that the fun starts! Because that's where you get to play with the cost calculator to buy the license.<br />
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First, you name the item, and choose carefully my friends! as that will go in the register:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcF7kbeqqwaErhG1ZTkxgSILUo5K1V5ekh-vicR1jGhjya6lxnjVWuygYWv2stys3y7hKdfgEKa45ljF0P2gO9qFqLWMwIEca_NmundRFpsGpLi2Oa4SVgW9OgO2zA5a8OA8fas17zPaU/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-11-05+at+16.37.42.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcF7kbeqqwaErhG1ZTkxgSILUo5K1V5ekh-vicR1jGhjya6lxnjVWuygYWv2stys3y7hKdfgEKa45ljF0P2gO9qFqLWMwIEca_NmundRFpsGpLi2Oa4SVgW9OgO2zA5a8OA8fas17zPaU/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-11-05+at+16.37.42.png" width="400" /></a></div>
Then you choose a category:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-_xevTLAKUXqMmIcfPy8kcMWvmBuUZRfkXVav3YJ-1ALiOXIHo71z_kUM-81PP7HkrmiLIZGKRlWitr1dBGN2ENwY2vggCE4H044JCHiNd52Inkq39t-DiQ5eCaCPv7l4Ygeg5qBZyV8/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-11-05+at+16.41.52.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-_xevTLAKUXqMmIcfPy8kcMWvmBuUZRfkXVav3YJ-1ALiOXIHo71z_kUM-81PP7HkrmiLIZGKRlWitr1dBGN2ENwY2vggCE4H044JCHiNd52Inkq39t-DiQ5eCaCPv7l4Ygeg5qBZyV8/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-11-05+at+16.41.52.png" width="381" /></a></div>
Again, its hard to come up with these categories, and "my" <i>objet</i> doesnt really fit anything, but lets go with still image (<b>recommendation 5: IPO </b>you may want to expand on that list a little?) And then you choose subcategory:<br />
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Umm... I dont know. Illustration? Maybe?<br />
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And then comes the killer question... DA DA DAAAA!<br />
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Well. I want to get a license that means I can put something up on etsy or spoonflower, so technically is that commercial? I dont know (<b>IPO: I'll be emailing you about this!</b>). Their further information would seem to think so:<br />
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So even selling one thing = a commercial license needed. Ok. Lets got the nuclear option, and choose monetary compensation! For...<br />
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Let's go with retailing and merchandising? And with checking that, I know that one does not simply walk into Mordor. As individuals who are interested in making one or two things are suddenly being lumped into the same categories as large chains that want to sell tens of thousands of items...<br />
<br />
There's some more granularity and some more drop down menus - what is the exact use of this work? erm... On apparel? that's scarves, right? and for spoonflower? (further gulp. We are not in Kansas now, Toto). There is a prompt to contact the IPO if the exact use is not listed, and I think we need to come back to this idea of individuals and small businesses using content, versus massive clothes manufacturers because once you see the costs, in a minute...<br />
<br />
But first, I have to choose how much surface the item will cover?<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8OzBkNO5vnDpQxnKW97-_mew_gdwl15Qoj44ME9RElWihP2HDXwwVcz-qRiJC-uTVHQ-T6bei9hJeKlaqbPwU3uDz6qrNZzmZk-I1SbHYkdw2dGY2_ROJdzSYo2dQujHOrzxKygrm4xc/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-11-05+at+16.54.08.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="316" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8OzBkNO5vnDpQxnKW97-_mew_gdwl15Qoj44ME9RElWihP2HDXwwVcz-qRiJC-uTVHQ-T6bei9hJeKlaqbPwU3uDz6qrNZzmZk-I1SbHYkdw2dGY2_ROJdzSYo2dQujHOrzxKygrm4xc/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-11-05+at+16.54.08.png" width="400" /></a></div>
<b>IPO recommendation 6: I'd suggest this is a nonsensical list.</b> Why? Well, repeating patterns are pretty common. How do they relate? My <a href="http://melissaterras.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/reuse-of-digitised-content-2-heres-one.html">scarf</a> is bigger than a "page". So what does this mean? And what is a page? A4? A3? A0? you might want to revisit this. My orphan image will cover as much fabric as you can print out, as its repeated. But lets go the nuclear option, and tick "more than a full page" for a commercial license, for apparel!<br />
<br />
You are then asked to choose how many things you are going to make to sell. I'm thinking of making two or three, just to test the waters (starting up as a sole trader, remember!) but the minimum item load you can make, in the licensing structure, is.... 5000!<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHXMXvkPAXphRPA5wzKwQSoK7H2R8jytd17NVCjkQDGRaaB5rM4IxNKEiErbbPGhLZUXkVCC3jSK35EVwYOCm2hWm9_V8V2SlWJEbrjPcf_BVXAyCLDwvayOe1VKAjM8nuTbVXzXqL-Mo/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-11-05+at+16.57.23.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="283" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHXMXvkPAXphRPA5wzKwQSoK7H2R8jytd17NVCjkQDGRaaB5rM4IxNKEiErbbPGhLZUXkVCC3jSK35EVwYOCm2hWm9_V8V2SlWJEbrjPcf_BVXAyCLDwvayOe1VKAjM8nuTbVXzXqL-Mo/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-11-05+at+16.57.23.png" width="400" /></a></div>
<b>IPO recommendation 7:</b> its clear that these structures are geared towards large corporations, rather than individuals or sole traders. I'd revisit this: you want to help bootstrap creative making, not treat everyone like Walmart? But I'll click 5000 or less for now.<br />
<br />
Then you have to choose how long the license is going to last for. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX1yBNdooi4-8DJLzVRiyKVGT8Euk-sZO-HvgfPwOUzCh8c3mBeTILfK6hgX7R2kaEe6K5t1iCzk_JwllvSVS1oWTexCpmYTezyeHX1jjJDYoEHCwxR4NiHhcUH5n0SgptNUkfMcphMBM/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-11-05+at+17.03.11.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhX1yBNdooi4-8DJLzVRiyKVGT8Euk-sZO-HvgfPwOUzCh8c3mBeTILfK6hgX7R2kaEe6K5t1iCzk_JwllvSVS1oWTexCpmYTezyeHX1jjJDYoEHCwxR4NiHhcUH5n0SgptNUkfMcphMBM/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-11-05+at+17.03.11.png" width="400" /></a></div>
Shortest is 3 months, longest is 7 years... hmmm. Well, selling these two or three items is going to pay for my early retirement, so lets go for 7 years (<b>IPO recommendation 8:</b>
it would be good to know if once you have licensed an item, noone else
can? Or if multiple people can license the same thing? just a thought)<br />
<br />
So here we are. A 7 years license to use an image on a repeating pattern for apparel that I can sell, less than 5000 items. And the cost comes to.... drumroll!!!!!<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhv4ALFmOxflHJB2CsvjvKFXFUg05l80L9EzBnReDEVlvtwJxg8xWdaFb_S50Z5ADSkR6PK5iqKnE9LgDUrOqmcuPuo13cqdknl8GjONN6ZWP8nXn0pitte4vqwDJsvg8EwSCgLdJqRDs0/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-11-05+at+17.04.30.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="316" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhv4ALFmOxflHJB2CsvjvKFXFUg05l80L9EzBnReDEVlvtwJxg8xWdaFb_S50Z5ADSkR6PK5iqKnE9LgDUrOqmcuPuo13cqdknl8GjONN6ZWP8nXn0pitte4vqwDJsvg8EwSCgLdJqRDs0/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-11-05+at+17.04.30.png" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
Did your eyes go as big as mine did when that figure popped out?<br />
<br />
Now, its clear that I've stumbled into the commercial sector line here, and this is probably a fine amount for an image license if you are a major clothing retailer. But there is no way that I can stump up over £2.5k to allow me to put some scarves on etsy, or fabric up on spoonflower. I need to email the IPO and ask about this, which I will do next, and report back, but before I do ... I wonder who is benefiting from these license costs? Where does the money go to? I'll ask the IPO about that and update the blog with the info they supply.<br />
<br />
Of course, we could go back to the start of the process, and I could decide that I'd make things and donate any profits back to the NLS, in which case I would check the no commercial gain box. The process (and costs) are then significantly reduced:<br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
A mere ten pence for non commercial use (hurrah!). But I'm not sure if what I want to do is covered under this list. Perhaps "personal use" - it could be argued that I am just making the digital files available for people via spoonflower (or I could make the digital files available to print up a scarf, and tell people where to go and get one if they do), but my dreams of etsy stardom reusing digitised content have been dashed.<br />
<br />
It's clear that I need to talk to the IPO about this and ask the best way to proceed - and I'm aware that I started a very public conversation right from the get go - but it does seem to me that the licensing structure, as is stands in Beta, allows reuse for freebies but doesnt really allow people to make <i>products </i>out of orphan material, unless they are for personal use only - and to be fair, I got that license from the NLS in the first place, so I'm not sure what is to be gained here, appart from the fact I could now share the source files of the item I made for personal use with everyone else. The licensing costs do hamper anyone wanting to start making and selling at a cottage industry scale, which is the majority of the online marketplace over at places like etsy, and probably a major source of reuse for this content: it should be opened up for everyone to use? Or am I being naive or utopian? <br />
<br />
So I'll take this back to the <b>IPO, and ask them to think about how this helps or hinders uptake </b>of this material so you can actually <i>do</i> something with it if you are not a corporation, and report back. I'll also ask for the <b>table of licensing costs from the IPO</b>, which must exist somewhere, so that I dont have to spend ages with the online tool manually drawing that up myself. The online tool is pretty straightforward (save the baffling question about pages?) and usable, given the complexity of the range of uses people must be asking them for, and its great that it went up on the day the legislation changed.<br />
<br />
The orphan works scheme - especially the 10p non-commercial license - is fantastic for the heritage sector as it does clear up a lot of issues with reusing content for not for profit usage, but I was hoping I could do something more... I'll be right back when I have more to report, travel and poor internet access notwithstanding. <br />
<br />
<h3>
Diary Entry 4: Friday 28th November</h3>
<br />
The delay to updating is all my fault, due to catching up on life and work (and sleep) upon my return from Australia. The IPO were really very quick to respond to my query, and it has sat in my inbox for a couple of weeks (sorry for being so tardy IPO, and thanks for being so speedy yourself). <br />
<br />
Here is what I asked, and how they responded. I quote directly from an email to me from the Head of Copyright Delivery at the IPO.<br />
<br />
1. I asked: Where does the money from the licenses go?<br />
<br />
They said: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The application fee covers the cost of processing your application. The licence fee (minus the VAT of course, as that will have been transferred over to HM Treasury) is held in case the right holder for the work comes forward. They have a period of 8 years to do so, and if we are satisfied that they are the right holder, we will pay out the licence fee. If they do not come forward in 8 years, we can use the money to pay for the set up of the licensing scheme, and also for ‘social, cultural and educational activities’ (regulation 14 of The Copyright and Rights in Performances (Licensing of Orphan Works) Regulations 2014 - <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2014/2863/contents/made">http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2014/2863/contents/made</a>).</blockquote>
2. I asked: Even if you only sell one or two things, do you need a commercial license?<br />
<br />
They said:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
As you set out in your blog, if there is any money changing hands for the use you are making, it counts as commercial. If you are going to put the pattern on Etsy or similar for free, it would be non-commercial.</blockquote>
3. I asked: Can I get a copy of all the licensing costs?<br />
<br />
They said:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Our pricing structure runs to literally thousands of possibilities for licences, so it is not possible to send you all costs for commercial content – it really depends on the type of orphan work and the use you want to put it to.</blockquote>
4. I asked: How were the licensing costs worked out? Were commercial costs used as a model?<br />
<br />
They said:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We undertook a detailed analysis of prices for non-orphan works, taking into consideration both the type of work and the use. This used information from a wide range of sources, both commercial and non-commercial providers. We had always committed to ensuring that orphan works do not distort the market unduly against non-orphan works, which provides a certain level of reassurance for right holders and licensors in the market.</blockquote>
5. I asked: Is a license exclusive? So if you pay all that money, could someone else also get a license?<br />
<br />
They said: <br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The licence is non-exclusive, so someone else could apply to use the work for a similar or different use at the same time as you using it. This is because we have no way of knowing whether the right holder would negotiate an exclusive licence or not.</blockquote>
They also directed me (and you, dear readers!) to the scheme overview guidance on gov.uk: <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/orphan-works-overview-for-applicants.">https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/orphan-works-overview-for-applicants.</a> <br />
<br />
This makes it much clearer for me, and I can see the reasoning behind such decisions, although I'm going to ask them to offer a significantly smaller run of items (the minimum you can get a license for is 5000 at the moment, which really does stop small businesses experimenting: a minimum license of 20? items, with a license fee reduced in ratio to the number of items would bring the license costs way down, whilst allowing our kitchen-table makers to use orphan works in items offered for sale at a small scale). I'll ask them, and brb, honest.<br />
<br />
I also have an issue about orphan works being offered for sale at the same licensing rates as commercially available art is... although I can see why you dont want to flood the market with low cost design materials and put today's beleaguered designers out of work (its a tough enough gig out there at the moment). However, this still means that there will be so much really fab cultural and heritage material locked up in institutions that people cant afford to use. Harrumph.<br />
<br />
I also consider that there <i>must</i> be a model that generates all the costs: its not like computers spit out all this stuff themselves without any human input. I do know a little about that, in my line of work. So I'll ask again about getting hold of the underlying model that generates costs. <br />
<br />
And what am I going to do, myself? Well, I'll wait til I get a response about lowering the number of licenses available, and if they do, I'll buy a commercial license for 20 units, and get my make on. But if they wont, all I can do is apply for the non-commercial license, and make source files available for others to use in a not for profit manner. There's very little in that for me (for the price of £20.10, including processing fee) but I feel I should see this process right through to the end, even if it isnt the magic, transformative process we had all hoped for, for the cultural and heritage world. <br />
<br />
<h3 id="korn">
Diary Entry 5: Monday 5th January 2015</h3>
It's worth pausing for a moment here, to think about what the alternative to chasing such a license are. Of course, there were a lot of changes to the law in October last year regarding copyright and orphan works, not just the orphan works scheme, but <i>exceptions</i> to the scheme. Just before Xmas I had the delight of taking one of <a href="http://www.naomikorn.com/training.htm">Naomi Korn</a>'s one day courses on Digital Copyright. She was keen to point that for many institutions these exceptions may be more than adequate for their needs, and compares the exceptions to the licenses in a table below, which I've been given permission to reuse from a forthcoming piece by Korn called "The Orphan Works Dilemma".<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB5YAZiw3ymtdBWSOCOuH7kXhjeZ-C44bHU8cKaokDYMiDmLRvpjx1WXpZjVv19DVrf4uJorkL8AcDgDiewuc-9V77ng1AJqvQbPkraJD7Wp7qbRX7SWClCHGw8kQF9buAG7fiivs_K_g/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-01-05+at+20.33.45.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="524" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB5YAZiw3ymtdBWSOCOuH7kXhjeZ-C44bHU8cKaokDYMiDmLRvpjx1WXpZjVv19DVrf4uJorkL8AcDgDiewuc-9V77ng1AJqvQbPkraJD7Wp7qbRX7SWClCHGw8kQF9buAG7fiivs_K_g/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-01-05+at+20.33.45.png" width="640" /></a></div>
In many cases, provided due diligence is undertaken (and there's a guide from the UK government on <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/orphan-works-diligent-search-guidance-for-applicants">how to do that</a>) then reusing items under the Orphan Works Exception is preferable, easier, and more cost effective than pursuing a license via the orphan works scheme. Its therefore worth exploring this option first, before thinking that a license is necessary for every reuse case of an orphan work.<br />
<br />
For my use case - small run commercial printing, by an individual - the exception doesn't count, so its not a route that is open to me <i>for this particular case</i>. But for many libraries, archives and museums, wishing to display orphan works, or use them in a non-commercial way, the orphan works exceptions are more practical than trying to obtain licenses.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<h3 id="IPO">
Diary Entry 6: Tuesday 6th January 2015</h3>
I have a response in from the IPO, and I think this is as much as we are going to get pursuing this. I'm copying it here, as it is self explanatory:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
1. Minimal commercial licences<br />
You asked for a licence for 20 items or less, rather than the 5000 items which is the minimum for using a still image. This is something we will consider going forward, which is why we have a contact form in the application process to allow people to say that their use is not listed. I obviously cannot guarantee that we will offer it, as it depends on us getting sufficient evidence of its need. Do you have any evidence of licensing which allows such small numbers? We would be able to take that into account in making a decision.<br />
<br />
2. Fee calculations and sources<br />
You asked about the underlying mathematical model for the fee calculations. I am afraid we are not in a position to share this with you. As I have mentioned before, we have used publicly available licence information which we researched and averaged (commercial and non-commercial). We then took into account relevant factors like the fact that we only offer up to 7 years for the licence whereas non-orphan licences might be available in perpetuity or for other lengths, non-exclusivity versus exclusivity and territoriality. As I said before, this means we do not have precisely the same prices as Gettys, for example, although they were one of the sources of information because they have publicly available information. <br />
<br />
3. Unclaimed licence fees<br />
After the 8 years, as you know the unclaimed fees are first use to defray the setting up and running costs of the scheme. Then any excess will be used at the discretion of the Secretary of State for social, cultural and educational activities. This could be a wide variety of activities, which might include cultural heritage research, digitisation projects or benevolent projects for right holders. It is some time in the future, so it is difficult to say what might qualify under any given Secretary of State’s opinion, but I hope that gives you a better sense of what might be included.</blockquote>
Interesting. I think (1) is rather the wrong way to think about it: they have compared commercial licensing costs for stock photography with the licensing of orphan works that are mostly of historical importance, within institutional contexts... It is rather like applying rules for apples to those for oranges. There is an opportunity here to do something different that will help the use of content in the library and archive sector, not just to ape what is happening in industry (with a licensing structure that is set up to maximize profits and minimize time wasting experimentation). The model really doesnt apply here. But that said, the lowest licensing number that the IPO offers is for 5000 items, but a quick look at the main stock photography licensing sites shows that iStockPhoto licenses a <a href="http://www.istockphoto.com/extended_license_provisions.php">maximum of 2000</a> items of apparel created with an image. If I understand it correctly, <a href="http://www.bigstockphoto.com/licensing-tos.html">BigStock's license</a> allows you to print on apparel with no limit, with the cost of each image being significantly less than the quote given here.<br />
<br />
You could spend weeks working out the licensing structures for stock photography, which are often not comparable across websites, and I dont think that the costing structure here has really been worked out in such a way to take the needs of the library and archive sector into account. I understand the need to balance the needs of commercial artists, photographers, and illustrators, but I think concern for them has outweighed the needs of the cultural and heritage sector. Given the costs, and the restrictions, if I were in an institutional context such as a library or archive, I wouldnt advocate going down this licensing route at all, but I would try and do what you could do within the exceptions, as detailed above. The orphan works licensing scheme is good in theory, but in practice it seems overly concerned with the models for commercial stock photography, and not at all concerned with the needs of the gallery, library, archive and museum sector. <br />
<br />
Regarding (2): should I pay an RA to sit for a day or two and work out all the licensing fees? We can then retrospectively calculate the model they use. Sounds like fun? Is anyone interested in that bar me? Let me know and we'll crack on. It may be, though, that the sector has already accepted that these costs simply arent bearable (and you try and license 300 different items, individually, even for non commercial reuse - it would take weeks, and cost ££££.)<br />
<br />
I think (3) sound fair - 8 years is at least two governments away, so planning ahead for the state of culture and libraries and museums is like chucking darts blindfolded, anyway. But remind me in 8 years to file a FOI request asking about income and revenue from this scheme - if FOI requests still exist then ho ho ho! (hollow laughter). <br />
<br />
So that brings me to the end of my quest, I think. I'll continue to engage with the IPO about the licensing number question, and fill you in if there are any changes, but its clear that at the moment, as it stands, the scheme excludes people like me: sole traders, wanting to use orphan works in small print runs. And the scheme is too unwieldy, time consuming, and costly, to allow any more than the odd item to be licensed: those wanting a non-commercial license are better trying to look at the exceptions, first. <br />
<br />
What shall I do re Lolly Time? I want to share decent images of it, and its free standing artwork, so its not covered by the exceptions. So I'll file the paperwork for getting a non-commercial license to use this, so I can share the big files of the image online legally, just to wrap this up, and to see that process through. Should anyone take the image once its put online and do anything with it, well, I cant stop them. But you shouldnt go near Etsy with this one to sell... <br />
<br />
<h3>
Diary Entry: 14th March 2015</h3>
So where is the license? I've tried to get a non commercial license, I really have. I spend 15 minutes carefully filling in all the details to the online system, then I fail at the last hurdle, as it wont let me upload the due diligence form. I've tried different browsers, but no. I cant save that 15 minutes of data entry, and need to start again every time. It seems like not only the process is broken, but the online tool. I have emailed the IPO about it, but I think I'm done. I tried, I really did.<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQOHLRwOOGv7Y4Wpuot6l1WXXVXWhFbbMxcjy_msrk1tB1prlEmvqiML9VvCWBfNCTq01KEwyYhCv7lUsDqxld2-5UKFuMLObmqEaeP7L6hsE4YHxdGgDyK0RgP5VSV1i7Y1TGLpMxDX8/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-03-14+at+15.26.48.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQOHLRwOOGv7Y4Wpuot6l1WXXVXWhFbbMxcjy_msrk1tB1prlEmvqiML9VvCWBfNCTq01KEwyYhCv7lUsDqxld2-5UKFuMLObmqEaeP7L6hsE4YHxdGgDyK0RgP5VSV1i7Y1TGLpMxDX8/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-03-14+at+15.26.48.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I keep getting an error message asking me to upload a pdf file - when I have tried to upload a pdf file.</blockquote>
<br />
What has the take up been across the sector, given the licensing scheme has been running for the past 4 months? In total there have been <a href="https://www.orphanworkslicensing.service.gov.uk/view-register">228 licenses</a> issued altogether to date, with 200 of those from <a href="https://www.orphanworkslicensing.service.gov.uk/view-register/search?searchQuery=Museum%20of%20the%20Order%20of%20St%20John&filter=LicenseeName">one museum alone (Museum of the Order of St John</a>) and a further thirteen to the Rawk Agency ("<a href="http://therawkagency.com/">one of the UK's leading providers of boutique and marketing events</a>").<br />
<br />
According to the "In from the Cold" Jisc report on Orphan Works, "<span class="item">across UK museums and galleries, the number of Orphan
Works can conservatively be estimated at 25 million, although this
figure is likely to be much higher" [<a href="http://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20140614192019/http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2009/infromthecold.aspx">link]</a>. The Orphan Works licensing scheme is not being used to make these available in any numbers worth considering.</span><br />
<span class="item"><br /></span>
<span class="item"><i>This blog post was nominated for, and won, the "Best Exploration of DH Failure" category in the <a href="http://dhawards.org/dhawards2014/results/">Digital Humanities Awards 2014</a> following public voting. Thanks! </i></span><br />
<br />
<b><span class="item">Addendum, 31/03/15. </span></b><br />
<span class="item"><i><br /></i></span>
<span class="item">I couldnt let this one lie, could I? It took a chat to the IPO, 3 different browsers, and me tinkering up the back of class while invigilating an exam over a 3 hour period, and look what I just did! I'll update here with further information, once a license is granted. Victory of sorts, but I still maintain <i>it shouldnt be this hard.</i>.. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuMKaSJ1QNTNj3qzGCg4XfWH32lQu_5j8LshZWrY7gTqAySneNI6ffWMhCDbHoRge6qWBRbgs2Rf0U7IeLiQnTOn60MR3taswisrB2Mck7RI5cfy7IsU0YnBsqEODix5CRRk-qApLu3wc/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-03-31+at+16.12.41.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="130" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuMKaSJ1QNTNj3qzGCg4XfWH32lQu_5j8LshZWrY7gTqAySneNI6ffWMhCDbHoRge6qWBRbgs2Rf0U7IeLiQnTOn60MR3taswisrB2Mck7RI5cfy7IsU0YnBsqEODix5CRRk-qApLu3wc/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-03-31+at+16.12.41.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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And finally, in April 2015, I got the license. THE END. Now what?<br />
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<br />Melissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-69608362224043961872014-10-22T21:49:00.001+01:002014-10-22T21:49:59.245+01:00Reuse of Digitised Content (3): Special Festive Halloween Image Give-away EditionIn my first blog post about<a href="http://melissaterras.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/reuse-of-digitised-content-1-so-you.html"> reuse of digitised content, particularly images</a>, I suggested that institutions could think about batching up some good images, for people to take and reuse, so they could find them easily. They could also be prepared for people to reuse. But what would this mean, in reality? I decided to have a try, myself. Halloween is approaching - lets look for 5 really cute, public domain images about Halloween, and see if we can make them "more" reusable, whatever that may mean. Like this one:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG55PrUF7PbnQ92DiCOC9rPsnxUNlLy5Qlb5lkBwoD2uFf1WUEYqUGedpxl2CaBtdefJbLxNGDRsGO7eMH7MGqD2N9kt5IfznChplW0-JcC_TOjdKmqIyXmDlRQU313SpYz6NJgGmSD8E/s1600/witch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG55PrUF7PbnQ92DiCOC9rPsnxUNlLy5Qlb5lkBwoD2uFf1WUEYqUGedpxl2CaBtdefJbLxNGDRsGO7eMH7MGqD2N9kt5IfznChplW0-JcC_TOjdKmqIyXmDlRQU313SpYz6NJgGmSD8E/s1600/witch.jpg" height="640" width="465" /></a></div>
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Isn't she handsome? An illustration tagged with witch, over at the <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/11296113503">British Library book images photoset</a>, Flickr. Originally taken from "<span class=" meta-field photo-title " id="yui_3_16_0_1_1414006295230_3285">Life & Finding of Dr. Livingstone", 1897.</span><br />
<span class=" meta-field photo-title " id="yui_3_16_0_1_1414006295230_3285"><br /></span>
<span class=" meta-field photo-title " id="yui_3_16_0_1_1414006295230_3285">But bother about all that writing, which makes it unusable on my Halloween party invitations. It would be better if there wasnt all that writing, just the image, right?</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtsdkLEc0JOEcqgRKXMzZ2aNdLKY39bLM-pd4Ngf7NcOGnolh78x8JXglqzv-XIk091fQhbPkZAg0KItiK9t33VRIgU2QAuxGEzdCSGPmHCYAgBhlhK19W8cfPg6CD260r0AD7APTjIpE/s1600/witch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtsdkLEc0JOEcqgRKXMzZ2aNdLKY39bLM-pd4Ngf7NcOGnolh78x8JXglqzv-XIk091fQhbPkZAg0KItiK9t33VRIgU2QAuxGEzdCSGPmHCYAgBhlhK19W8cfPg6CD260r0AD7APTjIpE/s1600/witch.jpg" height="640" width="441" /></a></div>
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<span class=" meta-field photo-title " id="yui_3_16_0_1_1414006295230_3285"><br /></span>
<span class=" meta-field photo-title " id="yui_3_16_0_1_1414006295230_3285">Or even, make the background transparent. Ta da! take it and do with it as you like, please do.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWBmT0Lk7iQ33B9ZstCjnFDAYTc2ulQhWxhxXu8u7gHMFZdaSK7OaQEwKwvTme0EeqbHazBVq6PVYhy5L2tLeVba7T4xDcCXmWCYlsy2Q3IeiYbncPO9VqyJZCE4c3sNrjU7KwkIg_0bg/s1600/witch.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWBmT0Lk7iQ33B9ZstCjnFDAYTc2ulQhWxhxXu8u7gHMFZdaSK7OaQEwKwvTme0EeqbHazBVq6PVYhy5L2tLeVba7T4xDcCXmWCYlsy2Q3IeiYbncPO9VqyJZCE4c3sNrjU7KwkIg_0bg/s1600/witch.png" height="640" width="443" /></a></div>
<span class=" meta-field photo-title " id="yui_3_16_0_1_1414006295230_3285">Nice, huh? and all this took me was time. An hour or so of grubbing about on flickr, an hour or so of messing around in Photoshop (I'm rusty). And as we all know, time is precious, and institutions dont have that level of time to devote to this kind of thing. Hmmm. </span><br />
<span class=" meta-field photo-title " id="yui_3_16_0_1_1414006295230_3285"><br /></span>
<span class=" meta-field photo-title " id="yui_3_16_0_1_1414006295230_3285">I also wonder what I'm really doing here. Turning images into clip art? erm, yay? Is that what we mean by reuse? But why else are we making images available, if its not for people to take them and do something with them? Does this make them more "useable"? Its certainly more easy to take the image and dump it into a poster, or webpage, etc. We need to ask ourselves what we mean by use and reuse, if we cant conceptualise what that really means in the first place. </span><br />
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<span class=" meta-field photo-title " id="yui_3_16_0_1_1414006295230_3285">But I said 5 images, right? I'm time pressed at the moment (shortly off on a big work trip), so - being honest here - I signed up for the first time to <a href="https://www.fiverr.com/">Fiverr,</a> where you can get a myriad of small tasks done for $5, and bought some photo retouching for photos, and within an hour, I had four other Halloween images, this time from the <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/">Internet Archive Flickr Pool</a>, converted into black and white, with transparency too. A set of Halloween images! But Fiverr made me feel icky - even though this fixing up would be a relatively simple task for someone with better PhotoShop chops than I to do, and even though I chose someone who said they were a student in a first world country, it just seems such a small amount to pay someone. (I did try to engage them in conversation about that, and offered going hourly rate I would pay a student: they didn't reply). I am happy with the images provided, but I wouldn't advocate institutional use of this type of service if it can be avoided, something about it feels exploitative to me. It was interesting to try. (Perhaps its part of my penance that I share these images here for everyone but... shudder. Is that how we value skills now? Sorry, world. I know is the market economy, but, doesn't mean I have to pay people less than I believe a job is worth). </span><br />
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<span class=" meta-field photo-title " id="yui_3_16_0_1_1414006295230_3285">So now what. </span><br />
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<span class=" meta-field photo-title " id="yui_3_16_0_1_1414006295230_3285"></span><span class=" meta-field photo-title " id="yui_3_16_0_1_1414006295230_3285">I parked this, and a selection of others I found that I'll put at the bottom of this post, on a <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/ucldh/sets/72157648923256755">group over at Flickr</a>. There's been obvious interest in them, with a total of 50 views or so in 24 hours, even though I didn't tell anyone where they were, yet. So I'll leave them up there, and take them if you like! <i>I</i> think they are cute. Do something, they are in the public domain! they are free! Use them at will! It only cost me time and some perhaps student's time and $5 and the electric that drives the internet and the heavy metals that are in our computers etc etc! and if you fancy telling me how you used them, on here or on twitter, that would be great, but you dont have to because its public domain! woohoo! (I may do some reverse image lookup in a while and see where they got to). </span><br />
<span class=" meta-field photo-title " id="yui_3_16_0_1_1414006295230_3285"><br /></span>
<span class=" meta-field photo-title " id="yui_3_16_0_1_1414006295230_3285">This is a minor experiment - especially compared to my l<a href="http://melissaterras.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/reuse-of-digitised-content-2-heres-one.html">ast blog post</a>, which was much more of an investment in both time and money - but it goes back to what I was saying previously about the time and skill needed to use the image content available successfully. Its not all just "there" yet, you need time to sort, and time to manipulate, and resources to do so. It also makes me think of what you read about in pre-print times, when artists' workshops had teams of people working for them who just painted silk, or hair, or skin or whatever, and the whole thing was a production line, where you farmed jobs out to other painters - sure, its a makers revolution, but its one that involves getting a student to do a quick job on PhotoShop for you, or a print shop to do some formatting and printing. You can take the content and do something with it, if you have the resources to both pay for and manage the process. The stuff is in the public domain, and is free. But doing something with it isnt, not really. </span><br />
<span class=" meta-field photo-title " id="yui_3_16_0_1_1414006295230_3285"><br /></span>
<span class=" meta-field photo-title " id="yui_3_16_0_1_1414006295230_3285">Except, of course, I'm not <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael#Workshop">Raphael</a>, I'm just messing about with images taken offline and turned into slightly cleaned up versions of themselves for clip art. I'd like to see a "real" collection do a longitudinal study on the benefits of this, releasing some of their content in different graphic formats, and tracking interest... hmmm, a potential MA student dissertation for this year, perhaps? Its a worthy topic, and one that should be pursued in more than a couple of hours, and a hurried blog post. </span><br />
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<span class=" meta-field photo-title " id="yui_3_16_0_1_1414006295230_3285">Still, Happy Halloween, and feel free to reuse these in any way you like, should you want to. The full size I have is up here, made smaller to fit in blog format, you know what to do to grab the larger file. Black and white jpgs first, then transparent png. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr8bwxCDnGtEv2XUDthSO5xwhrNc0C_erC1SfhK8RALHT-bBLPyVCx2mGvJknX1RI1fre9YvFn-wUCLVFeo_ceSSt_pP4lFbR-bjxkPm7jO94riMd1plRKsVjtPYIAnwrbL9Tv_nq02_M/s1600/party.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr8bwxCDnGtEv2XUDthSO5xwhrNc0C_erC1SfhK8RALHT-bBLPyVCx2mGvJknX1RI1fre9YvFn-wUCLVFeo_ceSSt_pP4lFbR-bjxkPm7jO94riMd1plRKsVjtPYIAnwrbL9Tv_nq02_M/s1600/party.jpg" height="184" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span class=" meta-field photo-title " id="yui_3_16_0_1_1414006295230_3285"></span><span class=" meta-field photo-title " id="yui_3_16_0_1_1414006295230_3285">Originally taken from the <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14578356658/">Internet Archive Book Images Flickr Pool</a>. This originally had only a couple of previous views, and isn't it delightful? ripe for putting at the top of any manner of Halloween related paraphenalia... </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNhUUvYqRp0Ean66HJdY5_sz9PqRJwSK5ICOyan3P6-71zFdFbf0zXTTm7Um2epL1r3VwiS47aBUX_K_WVyVilKgDuVZQ79L-B0z5Xwxb-GD8_-BMRLXEQ-PuV0IvhEeATGSAzSSjgLyE/s1600/cat.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNhUUvYqRp0Ean66HJdY5_sz9PqRJwSK5ICOyan3P6-71zFdFbf0zXTTm7Um2epL1r3VwiS47aBUX_K_WVyVilKgDuVZQ79L-B0z5Xwxb-GD8_-BMRLXEQ-PuV0IvhEeATGSAzSSjgLyE/s1600/cat.jpg" height="245" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhds-wi4lVv5D_vQTHlfd6bXubjohjx7Iot87bONPN14IqRn0-0JhnZyJIArViEGNCgY1YNfX7ntRGKfMoN8nGAxuWYfXVu89Nz_LWcLOqr5krF6xTcyKEhXoSmYApwIKQLwqsjCZDsdpE/s1600/cat.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhds-wi4lVv5D_vQTHlfd6bXubjohjx7Iot87bONPN14IqRn0-0JhnZyJIArViEGNCgY1YNfX7ntRGKfMoN8nGAxuWYfXVu89Nz_LWcLOqr5krF6xTcyKEhXoSmYApwIKQLwqsjCZDsdpE/s1600/cat.png" height="245" width="400" /></a></div>
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Originally taken from the <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/">Internet Archive Book Images Flickr Pool</a>. It started off pink, mind! </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdlgyf8U9pe6g72yNe-JGn73UXiB6oIQKVyeo6_lTmUhxuCIMcN_Qh4Ys5-8wDQIMZv96dp0R7SvA-i6IxKBafNF-APqkVAVWKvJqe-4T1UpFwR7o6cj3_MWc7MfiQ128ZZWTv6cY2gOI/s1600/pumpkin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdlgyf8U9pe6g72yNe-JGn73UXiB6oIQKVyeo6_lTmUhxuCIMcN_Qh4Ys5-8wDQIMZv96dp0R7SvA-i6IxKBafNF-APqkVAVWKvJqe-4T1UpFwR7o6cj3_MWc7MfiQ128ZZWTv6cY2gOI/s1600/pumpkin.jpg" height="346" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8qde15JwI8KxOx-NKrlPECcpg4PSKHV4qSf2qWDW_1ZHOf4ugNrkGmdwP5a_UQvm7XzLoUAKNkijVck7r6A_m856kAWBOqR4Cx96Pf-BFI9jHMKkA68C8tYiGI1Q4CXzW2zrRNQppwKE/s1600/pumpkin.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8qde15JwI8KxOx-NKrlPECcpg4PSKHV4qSf2qWDW_1ZHOf4ugNrkGmdwP5a_UQvm7XzLoUAKNkijVck7r6A_m856kAWBOqR4Cx96Pf-BFI9jHMKkA68C8tYiGI1Q4CXzW2zrRNQppwKE/s1600/pumpkin.png" height="346" width="400" /></a></div>
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Originally taken from the <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14596505189/">Internet Archive Book Images Flickr Pool</a>.</div>
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And last but not least, my favourite:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoi-on9gLt52ikNPcl81nKT0xjY_2f43qbUoWA3kCADeHp-VRn9S_4TdR8JqBukDMKx3_scx1AGW-OtooBenaB797QEA17N99Uxj8QPFD9wJGcyHTMw8_OBhWRCFUCNYXThEQe8q1GD5I/s1600/scene.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoi-on9gLt52ikNPcl81nKT0xjY_2f43qbUoWA3kCADeHp-VRn9S_4TdR8JqBukDMKx3_scx1AGW-OtooBenaB797QEA17N99Uxj8QPFD9wJGcyHTMw8_OBhWRCFUCNYXThEQe8q1GD5I/s1600/scene.jpg" height="433" width="640" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbN2CgEBsmG0tTn_ddCGosJSM012X8ulCFbtOqNlUQ6ZSjL_GxP8ZzCvt_sigkQQdwTYZloMMzsVz_2oLLF46ymVGCUCcQsOZA93NeV_tBmZzVDtFIJhKk5du6pvLRUh3T_tBJ-NYRjQs/s1600/scene.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbN2CgEBsmG0tTn_ddCGosJSM012X8ulCFbtOqNlUQ6ZSjL_GxP8ZzCvt_sigkQQdwTYZloMMzsVz_2oLLF46ymVGCUCcQsOZA93NeV_tBmZzVDtFIJhKk5du6pvLRUh3T_tBJ-NYRjQs/s1600/scene.png" height="433" width="640" /></a></div>
<span class=" meta-field photo-title " id="yui_3_16_0_1_1414006295230_3285"><br /></span>
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<span class=" meta-field photo-title " id="yui_3_16_0_1_1414006295230_3285">Originally taken from the <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14598078408/">Internet Archive Book Images Pool. </a></span><span class=" meta-field photo-title " id="yui_3_16_0_1_1414006295230_3285">Brilliant.</span></div>
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<span class=" meta-field photo-title " id="yui_3_16_0_1_1414006295230_3285"> </span></div>
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<span class=" meta-field photo-title " id="yui_3_16_0_1_1414006295230_3285">All of them over at<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/ucldh/sets/72157648923256755"> Flickr,</a> too, if you'd prefer. Have fun! And don't have nightmares. </span></div>
Melissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-33295051841243974382014-10-14T11:00:00.000+01:002014-10-14T11:00:15.762+01:00Reuse of Digitised Content (2): Here's One I Made Earlier, or, It's Lolly Time<h4 class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Following on from my previous post in which <a href="http://melissaterras.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/reuse-of-digitised-content-1-so-you.html">I bemoan how hard it is to reuse digitised content as a source for creating something</a>, I reuse a digitised image of an item in the National Library of Scotland, discovering how tricky it is to reuse images of "orphan works", but producing something that, well, I like!</h4>
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After a few months of exploring digitised collections looking for A Thing to Make and Do, something caught my eye. Ironically, I found it whilst flicking through a print catalogue of an exhibition I hadn't had the chance to attend: <a href="http://www.nls.uk/exhibitions/cinema">Going to the pictures: Scotland at the cinema</a>, which had run at the <a href="http://www.nls.uk/">National Library of Scotland</a>* in the summer of 2012. A quick google showed it had been digitised at least in low resolution, appearing on the website: </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEik0pV7s8jh4BwWbMfbVIXNM88C0kPOiD1DJaqVrO6CWbYCW2ZxXPV4AgPRn6lthcx1KrgCQLnyH-_0_iL7dTKbnTRr4nBdEJ7ySEvfqdHv96mLuJnjmjyTE9KuhasDinuYckXeJXXjiAk/s1600/lantern-slide-lolly-time_NLS.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEik0pV7s8jh4BwWbMfbVIXNM88C0kPOiD1DJaqVrO6CWbYCW2ZxXPV4AgPRn6lthcx1KrgCQLnyH-_0_iL7dTKbnTRr4nBdEJ7ySEvfqdHv96mLuJnjmjyTE9KuhasDinuYckXeJXXjiAk/s1600/lantern-slide-lolly-time_NLS.jpg" /></a></div>
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A 1960s "lantern" interval slide tempting patrons </div>
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to buy an ice lolly, used
at the Odeon Cinema, </div>
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Eglinton Toll, Glasgow. Image used here </div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
with permission from the <a href="http://ssa.nls.uk/">Scottish Screen Archive</a>,</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
National Library of Scotland. [<a href="http://www.nls.uk/exhibitions/cinema/lantern-slides">source page</a>]</div>
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<br /></div>
Look at that! How cheerful is it? And right up my street. I kept going back to it and going... ahhhhh! But was it digitised in high enough resolution, and could I get permission to do anything with it, given it is quite clearly still in copyright?<br />
<br />
The folks at the Scottish Screen Archive, and the Intellectual Property Officer at the National Library of Scotland, couldn't have been more helpful. Yes, they had previously digitised it at high resolution (all 69MB of it), and I could get permission to use it for my own use (and to feature the image(s) here on my blog) for the princely sum of ten of your British Pounds for the license. I also contacted the Odeon: their records dont go that far back for design so they cannot prove they own copyright, but they gave me permission to use it if they do, with the caveat that a copyright owner, whom they cannot speak for, may come forward at some future date (and hey, stranger things have happened once you put things into the blogosphere, if anyone knows anything about the illustrator, please get in touch). This lantern slide is officially an "orphan work", then. This means it isn't in the public domain, and I cant reuse the high resolution image provided from the SSA willy-nilly (such as making a pattern for anyone to use with it, or giving away the source files, or putting it up on third party website such as spoonflower), under the terms of the license agreed. But it means I can use it for personal use. I'll come back to that later, but lets crack on.<br />
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<h3>
Getting My Make On</h3>
The process of turning this into something was straightforward. Once I had the high res file, I spent a few hours tidying up the image, removing some scratches and marks from the slide: this is a fragile, opaque, archival item, and it's no wonder that, close up, there were some marks that may detract from print quality. Its a line to walk, though: you dont want to make it <i>too</i> cleaned up. It still wants to look original. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvH-WfvMQWwpQS6D9Ax4Y1f0KJG7VblSJY7b3hi1sDoAmsYVTRm0_rprnsK0YwRC3F4g7nN_UmGQh61Fb4pK-0uNCdxAOZ59_6K2pCHoyreD_3ZKu0MhmwC_W6gh1Pz6smh7j48m_42po/s1600/LollyTime_before_aft.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvH-WfvMQWwpQS6D9Ax4Y1f0KJG7VblSJY7b3hi1sDoAmsYVTRm0_rprnsK0YwRC3F4g7nN_UmGQh61Fb4pK-0uNCdxAOZ59_6K2pCHoyreD_3ZKu0MhmwC_W6gh1Pz6smh7j48m_42po/s1600/LollyTime_before_aft.jpg" height="147" width="400" /></a></div>
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Before and after, with a bit of cleaning up in PhotoShop. </div>
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This resulted in a cleaned up version of the lantern slide, ready to go:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzs8ZY-2Os3gyeIbt-De_xjCZvDoY7U1MrDGER1W99tnVe0Fp3OuDuIZjKx_680zRL0XcoJCh0kKOi6zInzpnT5IEK1Fdmcvaq15-_StSl8HAlKwEhUT96T7_C3224enoZi7CE9WyqjAc/s1600/LollyTime_tidied_forblog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzs8ZY-2Os3gyeIbt-De_xjCZvDoY7U1MrDGER1W99tnVe0Fp3OuDuIZjKx_680zRL0XcoJCh0kKOi6zInzpnT5IEK1Fdmcvaq15-_StSl8HAlKwEhUT96T7_C3224enoZi7CE9WyqjAc/s1600/LollyTime_tidied_forblog.jpg" height="400" width="400" /></a></div>
It's not a huge difference from the original (and I havent put the full resolution file up here that I have, I'm not allowed to), but it just makes the whole thing a bit fresher for printing. <br />
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Then it was just a case of more PhotoShop jiggery pokery, measuring up, tiling, choosing my printer (I went with <a href="http://www.bagsoflove.co.uk/">BagsofLove</a>, a UK company which seems to offer quite a range of printing: people online say that if you order from Spoonflower, a company based in the USA, import duty can really make the costs mount up for shipping to the UK).<br />
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<h3>
The Big Reveal</h3>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-BTpCTrlwZ1OxGfR1VPfOEkV7pt6BHhM02mPp6F8j7Kk_ysY1vaO2UEaXRVISh-0I8Ue8FkwyfCM151KKLrZhlaEOkGogFIcNJ-zHK9DWpjxZU9PVfzQ_xlZxye7ZjMVH4aznHmk9xtI/s1600/scarf_small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-BTpCTrlwZ1OxGfR1VPfOEkV7pt6BHhM02mPp6F8j7Kk_ysY1vaO2UEaXRVISh-0I8Ue8FkwyfCM151KKLrZhlaEOkGogFIcNJ-zHK9DWpjxZU9PVfzQ_xlZxye7ZjMVH4aznHmk9xtI/s1600/scarf_small.jpg" height="400" width="265" /></a></div>
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Ta da! A pure silk scarf, with repeating motif. Cute, huh? Bagsoflove offer <a href="http://www.bagsoflove.co.uk/real-silk-printing.aspx">silk printing plus hemming</a>, given a lot of people want silk scarves to test patterns. I got quite a large one made, and the whole thing cost £100 all in, ready to wear). <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRwOhgU5w6i7A5SichLnR3Y3Hgjq2h2To3P2SSo4b5yGl-ckHZQGeMgVX7a6NzGKAOK4LFsKZ0ORrxI40-mSAp6VYV35wvUq_8dwa6phzibkaqWlSDBxWD05TC0TZoPDG7fNSMe1fgA6s/s1600/2014_me_scarf_small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRwOhgU5w6i7A5SichLnR3Y3Hgjq2h2To3P2SSo4b5yGl-ckHZQGeMgVX7a6NzGKAOK4LFsKZ0ORrxI40-mSAp6VYV35wvUq_8dwa6phzibkaqWlSDBxWD05TC0TZoPDG7fNSMe1fgA6s/s1600/2014_me_scarf_small.jpg" height="400" width="280" /></a></div>
And here I am wearing it! While we are talking about copyright, etc, this photo was taken by my 6 year old who has given me permission to post it here (which also might explain why all the scarf is cropped out on the left! but you get the drift).<br />
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<h3>
Thoughts On the Process</h3>
<br />
Do I like the resulting item? Well, I chuckled when it came in the post, so yeah. I do feel as if I've made it - a few hours navigating licensing issues, about 5 hours total in PhotoShop, a few hours choosing where to get it made and what to get it made into, so it feels like I've had to invest time (and some brain effort, in working out tiling sizes, etc, and what I actually wanted size wise: this was a significant investment in time and cash, so its good to get it right). It's already made me think about the next digital printing project, which means the whole thing must've been fun. Working, as I do, with so much digital data, its nice to actually have a product at the end of the day. Going with silk was expensive, and there are cheaper options available, but I've got a high quality item (that would probably cost around the same on the high street - I'm not going to make a fortune if I choose to sell these on etsy, unless I go for a cheaper supplier!).<br />
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The one frustration I have is that I cant share the files with anyone, and I cant say, if you like it, here it is, get it printed up yourself, and I cant, at the moment, stick it up on etsy for sale even if I wanted to, due to the orphan works copyright restrictions. I talked at length with the NLS's Intellectual Property Officer, and we walked through why its just not legal, at the moment, for them to allow someone else to "publish" something that is in their collection and still in copyright without getting the holder's permission, and I understand this - although it doesnt mean I'm not frustrated by that. (You could get a license from the NLS yourself, if you wanted to use it for personal use). <br />
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But of course, the law on the licensing of orphan works in the UK is changing very soon. The upcoming orphan works licensing scheme (coming into force on the 29th October 2014) will allow that a person can obtain a license for commercial or non-commercial use of an orphan work on payment of a nominal fee and demonstration of a ‘diligent search’. (There's a PDF <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/315078/Orphan_Works_Government_Response.pdf">summary</a> of this new scheme over at the Intellectual Property Office's website, with more on <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/orphan-works-diligent-search-guidance-for-applicants">diligent search here</a>). At time of writing, there is very little up there about how the process will work, or what the "nominal" fee would be (one person's nominal is another person's how-bleedin'-much?) but that's one to watch. Come the end of October, I'll start a blog post chasing this image through the Orphan Works Licensing Scheme: who knows, within a few months, you may be able to make some It's Lolly Time! merchandise yourself, should you care to. <br />
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It's been a fun journey, chasing something from idea to conception to manipulation to production. I've learned a lot about how we are delivering digital content to end users in the gallery, library, archive and museum sector, and also how frustrating it can be at times. But look, I've eventually ended up with a bespoke thing that I love, just for me. And once I've published this blog post, I'm going to start wearing the scarf that <i>I made</i>, just in time for winter-a-comin' in. <br />
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*One final thing to say: eagle-eyed regular readers may know that I'm currently serving on the board of the National Library of Scotland, but I applied to use this image from my civilian, non-work, unidentifiable email account, so as not to get any special treatment in the process of licensing. It has to be said though, that being on the board was the reason I was flicking through past catalogues of their exhibitions in the first place! And I'm personally glad I found something in the NLS collections that so tickled me: a little bit of Scotland to remind me of where I'm from, and an emotional attachment to a piece of digitised cultural heritage. Melissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-4559661355028330442014-10-06T11:54:00.001+01:002014-10-06T11:54:09.401+01:00Reuse of Digitised Content (1): So you want to reuse digital heritage content in a creative context? Good luck with that. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Although there is a lot of digitised cultural heritage content online, it is still incredibly difficult to source good material to reuse in creative projects. What can institutions do to help people who want to invest their time in making and creating using digitised historical items as source material?</h4>
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<img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwiL1q7eo78JCAvEmDA4px8ocnQ187TTBxk9us7N5XygM3o0406eQa5BeQ6LZ0KNMyz75jGY6hdeN1OaxTJDX84nNownUCdvYPieghrmRYWR-Ul5crAn94opcSim76cpej2DclPXwq9ck/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-10-05+at+14.54.05.png" height="125" width="400" /></div>
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The Garden of Earthly Delights, <a href="https://www.etsy.com/uk/search/handmade?q=garden%20of%20earthly%20delights&order=most_relevant&ref=auto2&explicit_scope=1">repurposed</a> over at Etsy</div>
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Over the last few months I have become increasingly <strike>interested</strike> obsessed with creative reuse of digitised cultural heritage content. We live at a time when most galleries, libraries, archives and museums are digitising collections and putting them up online to increase access, with some (such as the <a href="https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/explore-the-collection">Rijksmuseum</a>, <a href="http://collections.lacma.org/">LACMA</a>, <a href="http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2013/12/a-million-first-steps.html">The British Library</a>, and the <a href="http://blog.archive.org/2014/08/29/millions-of-historic-images-posted-to-flickr/">Internet Archive</a>) releasing content with open licensing actively encouraging reuse. We also live at a time where it has become increasingly easy to take digital content, repurpose it, mash it up, produce new material, and make physical items (with many <a href="http://www.photobox.co.uk/">commercial</a> <a href="http://www.snapfish.co.uk/">photographic</a> services offering <a href="http://www.bagsoflove.co.uk/">no end of digital printing possibilities</a>, and cheaper <a href="http://www.alibaba.com/showroom/digital-printing-silk-scarves.html">global manufacturing opportunities</a> at scale being assisted with internet technologies). What relationship does digitisation of cultural and heritage content have to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maker_movement">maker movement</a>? Where are all the people looking at online image collections like <a href="http://www.europeana.eu/">Europeana </a>or the <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/">book images from the Internet Archive</a> and going... fantastic! Cousin Henry would love a teatowel of that: I'll make some xmas presents based on that lot! <br />
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I'm not the only person interested in this: The British Library is currently <a href="http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2014/03/tracking-public-domain-re-use-in-the-wild.html">tracking their Public Domain Reuse in the Wild</a>, looking to see where the <a href="http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2013/12/a-million-first-steps.html">1 million images</a> they released into the public domain, and on Flickr, end up being used. At the moment, they manually maintain a list of <a href="http://blpublicdomain.wikispaces.com/Creative+Projects">creative projects</a> of what people have got up to with their content. And people are using digitised stuff: pop over to a commercial fabric printing service like <a href="http://www.spoonflower.com/welcome">Spoonflower</a> and you can see people <a href="http://www.spoonflower.com/fabric/3226754">grabbing creative commons images off Wikipedia </a>and providing the means to print them on a whole range of materials for creative reuse. At Spoonflower, people are <a href="http://www.spoonflower.com/fabric/2059533">remixing images</a>, providing <a href="http://www.spoonflower.com/fabric/1152417">opportunities</a> for <a href="http://www.spoonflower.com/fabric/3027271">creative</a> projects, <a href="http://www.spoonflower.com/fabric/1151298">designing</a> and playing with available heritage content, using it as a design source and inspiration, although many <a href="http://www.spoonflower.com/fabric/3157505">dont quote</a> the <a href="http://www.spoonflower.com/fabric/795835">source</a> of their hopefully out of copyright images used a basis for <a href="http://www.spoonflower.com/fabric/823556">fabric design</a>. Pop over to <a href="https://www.etsy.com/">Etsy,</a> and you can see (as the illustration above shows) high res images of historical art and culture turned into <a href="https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/179360562/ancient-world-map-marble-coaster-set-of?ref=sr_gallery_34&ga_search_query=ancient&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery">coasters</a>, <a href="https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/193741084/degas-ballet-corset-historical-corset?ref=sc_3&plkey=429bea11ab634402c9d54b497f4b5f3d56e48d39%3A193741084&ga_search_query=degas&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery">corsets</a>, <a href="https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/113340978/large-size-brass-cuff-with-graphic-lady?ref=sc_2&plkey=8e747e0d3c931662715b646e80e992cafc37a300%3A113340978&ga_search_query=shallot&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery">bangles</a>, <a href="https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/205248495/sandro-botticelli-birth-of-venus-pillow?ref=related-4">pillows</a>, <a href="https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/116380116/on-sale-samsung-galaxy-s3-case-gustav?ref=sr_gallery_5&ga_search_query=klimt&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery">phone cases</a>, <a href="https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/198184482/charm-bracelet-degas-ballerina-theme?ref=sr_gallery_9&ga_search_query=degas&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery">jewellery</a>, etc - and <a href="https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/173341529/van-goghs-starry-night-landscape-with?ref=sr_gallery_12&ga_search_query=gogh&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery">mashed up</a> and <a href="https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/170996642/botticelli-pop-remix-2-on-stretched?ref=sr_gallery_19&ga_search_query=remix+art&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery">remixed</a> into further creations, all of which are for sale (although, again, where they got the source images from isnt usually made clear, and there are obvious copyright infringements happening in some cases). But overall, I'm left wondering why more use isn't made of online digital collections - and why we havent seen the "maker's revolution" where everyone is walking around going "this old thing? I cobbled it together from public domain images on wikimedia and had a tailor on Etsy run it up for me!" - or even see more commercial companies start to use this content as the basis for their home and fashion collections on the high street. There are now funding programs and efforts to help try and help the exchange between the "<a href="http://the multiple sub-sectors of the creative industries and the public infrastructure of museums, galleries, libraries, orchestras, theatres and the like">multiple sub-sectors of the creative industries and the public infrastructure of museums, galleries, libraries, orchestras, theatres and the like</a>" and funds for "<a href="http://www.react-hub.org.uk/about/">collaboration between arts and humanities researchers and creative companies</a>" etc etc - in this this new "impact" world, allowing reuse of your content will probably score huge brownie points - but what can institutions be doing off their own back to make sure the digitised content they spent so much time creating is used, and reused, further? <br />
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I was really impressed, at DH2014, to see <a href="http://www.quinndombrowski.com/blog/2014/07/11/annotating-geeky-fashion-or-what-i-wore-dh-2014">Quinn Dombrowski have an entire wardrobe</a> made with <a href="http://www.spoonflower.com/profiles/quinnanya">fabric designed</a> using heritage content images in the public domain, and this inspired me to think: I should have a go at this. I should find something which is digitised and online, that <i>I like</i>, that <i>I can access</i>, that <i>I can repurpose</i>, and make something that <i>I want and will use</i> from it. What larks! But the rest of this blog post is an expression of sheer frustration at the current state of play of delivering digitised content online, for people who want to take digitised content, and reuse, and repurpose it.<br />
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Before I get started: let me make clear that I'm entirely supportive of folks like the <a href="https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/explore-the-collection">Rijksmuseum</a>, <a href="http://collections.lacma.org/">LACMA</a>, <a href="http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2013/12/a-million-first-steps.html">The British Library</a>, and the <a href="http://blog.archive.org/2014/08/29/millions-of-historic-images-posted-to-flickr/">Internet Archive</a> making their out of copyright images freely available for folks to use. Its absolutely the right thing to do, and I'm not going to start railing against them (there are, of course, many institutions who haven't made their digitised content available and they deserve railing against.) But with that caveat in place, let's broach some frustrations of someone looking through digitised heritage content, wanting to get a decent image of something they want, to reuse in a way that they would like (whether or not that involves paying for the privilege - this isnt just about getting stuff for free, its about getting it <i>at all</i>). It isnt pretty.<br />
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<h3>
1. So much stuff, such poor interfaces. </h3>
Yay! so much stuff online! <a href="http://www.europeana.eu/">Europeana</a> now has over 30 million items online from 2000 institutions! <a href="https://www.flickr.com/commons">Flickr Commons</a> has a tonne of stuff online! Flickr is now being used, independently of the commons, to host tens of millions of digital cultural heritage objects, by thousands of institutions! But for a user, browsing through this stuff, it is nigh on impossible to navigate or search Flickr in any meaningful way, and sift through this, simply because Flickr's interface is so poor (and often the content isnt tagged very well, so isn't very findable). What if institutions dont use Flickr? Dont get me started on content management systems, and their "user friendly" interfaces, such as <a href="http://www.proquest.com/products-services/AquaBrowser.html">Aquabrowser,</a> or <a href="http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/DigiToolOverview">Digitool</a>: shudder. Unless you know exactly what you are looking for, it's incredibly difficult for a user to browse and view content - and there is a <i>lot</i> of dross out there to sift through. Finding decent images that are interesting from a design perspective is a time consuming, utterly frustrating task. I speak from a few months of chuck-my-computer-across-the-room
frustration in trying to navigate ( mostly unsuccessfully) what the cultural heritage sector has spent millions of pounds putting online. <br />
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<b>Suggestion</b>: Institutions should use a little resources to get folk with any sort of graphic or design background help sort through the thousands or millions of images and present to their users a curated collection of a few hundred really good things which are ripe for using. Heck, put together some downloadable packs of images of art, logos, boats, trains, etc. Here are 10 great images of witches you may like to play with! At the moment <i>you are making users work too hard to sort through the digital haystack to find the interesting, usable needle</i>. No wonder much of the content isn't used - people simply cant find it, or they walk away from your rubbish interface before finding that digitisation diamond. <br />
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<h3>
2. The shackles of Copyright, part 1: aesthetic.</h3>
The copyright free images which are put online free to use are out of copyright (duh) which means they are from a particular time period: generally pre-1920s (depending on the country's copyright laws). There's a lot of stuff up there, but an incredible amount of it is Victoriana, which has a particular aesthetic. This is great if you are into <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk">Steampunk</a> (check out the first few pages of the <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/">Internet Archive book images Flickr stream</a> and you'll see what I mean) but... having scrolled thought oodles of this stuff, it just doesnt float my boat. I'm into mid-20th-century design, so that puts me into an entirely different category of user: one who is going to have to sort out permission for reuse for items still in copyright, if the institution hasnt sorted out copyright before publishing online. B*gger. This isn't going to be as easy as it first appeared for me, then.<br />
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<b>Suggestion:</b> Institutions should cherry pick a few in-copyright items that are really very reusable, and preemptively clear copyright under various licenses. Here are 10 fabulous 1950s illustrations which we have arranged for you to use under a creative commons license! (There is some of this stuff up on Flickr Commons, but it is in the minority). I understand the resources which are required for this, but really, institutions could be leading the way in making images of selected in-copyright items available and usable for people, to encourage uptake and creativity. Or - at least - make processes for chasing copyright clearance a bit clearer to users. Information on that is <i>very </i>sketchy, to say the least, and its often impossible to even find out who in the institutions to email about rights clearances. <br />
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<h3>
3. The shackles of Copyright, part 2: cowardice.</h3>
Let's put aside the wonderful work of those who are bravely making their collections available for reuse, and arranging licensing for folks to do so, and address the majority of institutions who dont do this. Say you think... I'd like to make some of my own stationery! I know, I'll pop over to Europeana, and grab some cool images of old envelopes, and print up some notecards with those on (not to sell! just for my own use!). There's <a href="http://www.europeana.eu/portal/search.html?query=envelope&rows=24">6563 images labelled "envelope" currently in Europeana</a>. The licensing for these - what you can and cant reuse - is <i>incredibly</i> confusing. <a href="http://www.europeana.eu/portal/search.html?query=envelope&rows=24&qf=RIGHTS%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fcreativecommons.org%2Fpublicdomain%2Fmark%2F1.0%2F*">Only 60 of these items have been put into the public domain</a>. I have no issue with institutions wanting attribution when their images are reused - of course not - and you can do that with 592 images (although... how are you going to provide attribution on fabric or a cushion or a corset or a bracelet, etc). My beef is with <a href="http://www.europeana.eu/portal/search.html?query=envelope&rows=24&qf=RIGHTS%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.europeana.eu%2Frights%2Frr-f%2F*">the quarter of these digitised items which allow access but no further reuse </a>of the images. Seriously, why not? What are you scared of? That someone is going to pop over to <a href="http://www.photobox.co.uk/">Photobox</a> (other commercial photo printers are available) and make up some notelets? That someone will make a corset out of those image and sell them on Etsy? Quite frankly, if your stuff is out of copyright, and if you dont have the nous or cant afford to employ a graphic designer to turn your images of envelopes into going commercial concerns, good luck to anyone who can. I dont get why you would put images of old stuff online and say to the users "You can't use it. At all". What are you afraid of? (I also presume here that people wont use digital images when they dont have persmission to do so. Which is nonsense. <a href="http://mw2013.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/where-do-images-of-art-go-once-they-go-online-a-reverse-image-lookup-study-to-assess-the-dissemination-of-digitized-cultural-heritage/">People will take it and use it anyway</a>). <br />
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Oh yeah, you are saying, but copyright is complex, envelopes are manuscripts, manuscripts never go out of copyright, blah blah, till the cows come home. But just let people reuse digital content, and good luck to them. Seriously, what is the worst that could happen? That something archival takes off and becomes another "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_Calm_and_Carry_On">keep calm and carry on</a>" meme? But really - wouldnt your institution love to be the source of one of those, for perpetuity? <br />
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Yes, I did find a really good image of an envelope I wanted to use on some notecards, but couldnt get permission to do so (hence choosing it as an example). I'll address licensing and paying for image licenses in another blog post (I'm not averse to that either. At the end of the day, just <i>let me reuse that cool image</i>, even if I have to pay license costs to do so). <br />
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All over the world, institutions are digitising cultural heritage content and putting it online with restrictive licensing which means that users cannot do <i>anything</i> at all with it (at least not without jumping through lots of begging hoops, or using it illegally). Not use it on a blog post. Not print it on a home made birthday card. Not make their granny a key ring with it on. Not make a scholar who is an expert in this field a mug with it printed on for their retirement present. This seems absolutely bonkers to me - and a complete waste of limited resources in the sector. What "access" do you think you are actually providing, if its only of the "look but dont touch" variety? <br />
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<b>Suggestion</b>: if you arent going to monetise it yourself, just make it available for others to reuse, with a generous license. Go on! <br />
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<h3>
4. Image quality</h3>
All I want is a clear, 300dpi (or higher) image of the digitised item. Its no use saying "this is in the public domain!" if you only provide 72dpi: you cant do anything with that, except stick it up on another webpage. Just give me a reasonably high resolution image, and let me go and play with it. Cheers! So, so much of the "public domain" material is quite low resolution, which stops people from using the images for creative purposes. Maybe that was your plan all along (ha ha! we'll put this online but only at low resolution! that'll thwart those corset makers!) but seriously, 300dpi. Let folk have at it. <br />
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One other point: if you are using algorithms to crop lots of stuff before sticking it up on Flickr, please make sure that it works, and isnt cropping things too tightly. I understand that its all about efficiency and storage capacity - you dont want to be storing tens of millions of blank pixels and paying for hostage for empty content - but if you crop things too closely, its just unusable. Another reason I stopped looking for images in the Internet Archive Book Images Flickr pool was all the ones I want were shaved off. I know! I'll make a montage of ye olde fruit and veg! except this <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14729074316/in/photolist-orymDb-odoznM-ouepJ9-ovWuxf-oxzHkk-ovxEA6-oem1JZ-ovN7mY-ovQ1FP-owea65-owpFqX-owpN34-ounRfd-ownSZu-ounQsS-oeV6LD-oeV4EJ-ounVG9-owpFi2-oyauj2-oeV8P5-oeVQFV-ownUcE-oeVP5D-ovPYgD-ovBUVU-ovPWcP-oejZPC-otN4V1-oxzJD2-otMYoj-oekmb7-oek35j-owo1GJ-oeLcPZ-oue4mA-ounNAA-owo5Dm-oeV4bD-oeVPZz-owpPux-oeV9ud-ow8Ea8-oeVLyr-ownXKw-oeV7Gr-oeUKdq-oeVdaj-oeVKSB-owcJW7">apple is cut off at the bottom</a>, these carrots are <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14778424252/in/photolist-ovVhE9-oeArsu-oeFbBZ-oemMQG-otnFWs-oeSy2m-ow2GMN-oduuSH-oxgLRK-ow7nsW-otkPJx-oeeAW3-ovJFSg-ow2dz2-ovK8mj-oc8pfE-osWqv9-ovWXSh-ouE1So-ovMqru-otWXfj-ow6c2V-oeuTZE-otaYuJ-ovbcbj-ovnSaR-otsKqd-ovbyzz-ot5Rtu-ouDBaW-of1JnW-oxV356-owe4sw-ow2cZs-oyaesD-ownzWz-oc65kR-ot9Dky-ouubhs-odq6tg-owq9EV-odau6o-otsqNo-odbV21-ovHr6V-odXB8M-ovPh5x-otmukf-ouHP8r-oxKvYc">missing part of their top</a>, this <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14782271275/in/photolist-oeLDoU-oeLY8Z-ox8Fzi-ovYKtg--oy8bJg-ow6rPk-ocq8uY-owafxN-ouUJFz-ouYJb1-ouqppu-oeWtDU-oerQUZ-oeYdKm-odkMZM-ouku6U-ovsb5c-ovQpaW-oxZFPX-ovXGd7-odZNxg-owg1f8-otJ4WS-owef3i-oe2hY2-odGYuf-ow4Wdw-oeq6gi-osG8UG-ouUoyk-ouQ3iQ-oeXVGq-odnZTn-osPVzA-oeSZXC-oybzNr-owWgKg-oeutbR-owp9X9-osrmJQ-oeD75z-odmJNz-osWSW5-osMwyE-oeLYka-ocDDeo-ouCjN9-oeSQ3P-oeSB2Q">apple sliced right through</a>, as <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14596012177/in/photolist-oeNnUn-oeLVRA-oeMqp6-oy3cee-owfnLd-ovZXzK-oeNtoZ-oufn23-oeMFQA-oeMCvv-owfyJf-ovZLhp-oeM9Vv-owh2Sp-oeMVMn-oy2B4k-oeNjDK-owez1S-oeMGeb-oeMi4z-owfxm5-owaxnM-owpRmf-oeMgVT-ovZMuK-owrDjZ-oeLUVs-owrDUr-oeMva9-oeMMmA-owf5TA-oeMSTY-oeM8Jy-oufuPC-oy2BN6-ow59M9-oy2BeR-oeM7F1-owh1fr-ow4Z8E-owhcNg-oy363r-oeMaye-ow5cWq-oy2RBP-oeMead-oeMtEp-owffmU-oufyN9-owgVrt">are these peaches</a>. Thanks for offering to give me all this stuff free, but its unusable for creative purposes unless you give me a whole illustration, not one that has been chopped off around the edges.<br />
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<b>Suggestion:</b> 300dpi, <i>at least</i>. Cheers, love. <br />
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<h3>
5. Checking the maker privilege</h3>
Its worth just remembering that you may be making some content freely available, but its still actually quite costly for people to do anything creative with it where digital printing is concerned, especially in small print runs, making individual items, etc. It takes significant investment of time and resources to take an archival tiff and turn it into, say, a cushion (or a corset). I'm not really sure what I'm trying to say here in making that point (isnt that what ranty blog posts are for?)... perhaps it offsets the feeling that institutions are giving this stuff away for nothing: people reusing digital images are putting in significant time and often money to turn them into something else. It becomes co-creation, rather than mere duplication. Or something. It's certainly not an activity that is available to those without the skills to do image manipulation (despite many publication features being available on these commercial digital image printing websites: if you want to do anything that deviates from very simple printing, it still takes time and effort to set up). It still takes skill and resources and sometimes training and probably talent to make something <i>nice</i> and that people will want from something someone else has digitised, and it often takes a huge amount of time. It certainly surprised me how long the selection and preparation of items takes before you get to the stage of sending something to the print shop. So let's all proceed in a realm of mutual respect and adoration, yeah? Love the provision of high quality digital heritage imaging online: love the people who have the sewing chops to make the corsets. (There are also ethical considerations if people start sending high resolution images of items to be made into products in <a href="http://www.alibaba.com/showroom/t-shirt-screen-printing.html">"cheaper" international production</a> contexts, but I'm not sure realistically how that can be broached by image licensing). <br />
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<b>Suggestion:</b> Wonderful things can happen when individuals work with institutional digitised content! sometimes. <br />
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<h3>
Conclusion</h3>
Overall, here is what institutions can do if they want people to <i>really </i>use digitised content:<br />
<ul>
<li>Put out of copyright material in the public domain to encourage reuse. Go on! what are you scared of? </li>
<li>Provide 300dpi images as a minimum. </li>
<li>Curate small collections of really good stuff for people to reuse. Present them in downloadable "get all the images at once" bundles, with related documentation about usage rights, how to cite, etc. </li>
<li>Think carefully about the user interface you have invested in. Have you actually tried to use it? Does it work? Can people browse and find stuff? Really?</li>
<li>Make sure the image quality is good before putting it online. Dont chop bits off illustrations. </li>
<li>Make rights clearer. Give guidance for rights clearance for in-copyright material, and perhaps provide small collections with pre-cleared rights, to allow some 20th Century Materials to be reusable. </li>
</ul>
What do we want! Curated bundles of 300dpi images of cultural heritage content, freely and easily available with clear licensing and attribution guidelines! When do we want that? Yesteryear!<br />
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So what about me, and my task? Did I find something that <i>I like</i>, that <i>I can access</i>, that <i>I can repurpose</i>, and make something that <i>I want and will use</i> from it? After a few months trawling digitised collections online, I eventually stumbled across something which I <b>adore</b>, which got sent off to the print shop last week. I'll be waiting by the postbox over the next few days, in the hope that my investment in time and resources has paid off: I cant wait to see it IRL. But that, my friends, is for another blog post. And in the meantime, I leave you with this conclusion: institutions can be doing so, so much more to help those wanting to use digitised content creatively. <br />
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nce onlin</div>
<div id="stcpDiv" style="left: -1988px; position: absolute; top: -1999px;">
release
of 1 million images and counting into the public domain and on to
Flickr Commons - See more at:
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2014/03/tracking-public-domain-re-use-in-the-wild.html#sthash.pPTYhUN3.dpuf</div>
<div id="stcpDiv" style="left: -1988px; position: absolute; top: -1999px;">
the
release of 1 million images and counting into the public domain and on
to Flickr Commons - See more at:
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2014/03/tracking-public-domain-re-use-in-the-wild.html#sthash.pPTYhUN3.dpuf</div>
<div id="stcpDiv" style="left: -1988px; position: absolute; top: -1999px;">
the
release of 1 million images and counting into the public domain and on
to Flickr Commons - See more at:
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2014/03/tracking-public-domain-re-use-in-the-wild.html#sthash.pPTYhUN3.dpuf</div>
<div id="stcpDiv" style="left: -1988px; position: absolute; top: -1999px;">
the
release of 1 million images and counting into the public domain and on
to Flickr Commons - See more at:
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2014/03/tracking-public-domain-re-use-in-the-wild.html#sthash.pPTYhUN3.dpuf</div>
Melissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-35619008249521516802014-10-01T10:26:00.002+01:002014-10-01T10:26:33.789+01:00Want to be taken seriously as scholar in the humanities? Publish a monograph(This is the unedited version of a piece published yesterday over at <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2014/sep/30/publishing-humanities-monograph-open-access">Guardian Higher Ed</a>.)<br />
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A decade ago, in my first year as lecturer in a Humanities department, an eminent Professor helped me secure a book contract with a top university press for my recently completed doctoral thesis. Another senior colleague stopped me in the corridor: “This is very rare,” she said. “And this is what gets you ahead in this game.” The book itself is a lovely object, of which I’m still very proud (it took me four years of doctoral research, plus another two years of preparation). It only sold a few hundred copies: enough to make the press happy, and to give me annual royalties of a fiver. There is an ebook, comparable in price to the physical version, but no Open Access version. Despite little proof that it is well read, it has been cited just enough to give me another elusive point on the dreaded H-index. We don't write Humanities monographs for riches, we may do for an attempt at academic fame, but the career kickback for me was rapid promotion. In the Humanities, the monograph’s the thing.<br /><br />Today, the Humanities publishing landscape is, of course, changing alongside every other. We must work through the potentials and issues that digital technologies bring. With digital publishing comes the uncoupling of content from print: why should those six years of work (or more) result in only a physical book that sits on a few shelves? Why can’t the content be made available freely online via Open Access? Isn’t this the great ethical stance: making knowledge available to all? Won’t opening up access to the detailed, considered arguments held within Humanities monographs do wonders for the reputation and impact of subject areas whose contribution to society is often under-rated?<br /><br />Research councils are prescribing Open Access requirements for outputs which will be submittable in the next REF, and there are now nods towards monographs being included in those requirements at some elusive point in the future. The Humanities’ dependency on the monograph for the shaping and sharing of scholarship means that<br />scholars, and publishers, should be paying attention. How will small-print runs of expensive books fare in this new “content should be available for free” marketplace? How will production costs be recouped? Predatory models are already emerging, with established presses offering Open Access monographs alongside the print version for an all inclusive £10,000 charge to offset a presumed (but not proven) fall in revenue: out of the reach for most individual academics, or many institutions. I certainly couldn't have afforded those costs, a junior academic fresh out of the doctoral pod, with student debt hanging around my neck. <br /><br />The<a href="http://oapen-uk.jiscebooks.org/research-findings/researcher-survey-2014/"> latest JISC survey</a> on the attitudes of academics in the Humanities and Social Sciences to Open Access monograph publishing makes an interesting contribution to this debate, showing how central single author monographs still are to the Humanities, and how important the physical – rather than digital – copies are. People still like to read, and in many cases buy, them. The survey suggests monographs are fairly easy to access even in physical form (inter-library loan, anyone?). Open Access is welcomed, and is seen to increase readership, but the physical object is still central to the consideration of the monograph: something which should allay fears of publishers wondering how any change in the REF requirement will affect their bottom line. The most difficult problem seems to be securing a book contract in the first place, whether that has an Open Access option or not: the survey clearly shows that ECRs need help and guidance to do so. <br /><br />Will I publish another monograph without an associated Open Access version? No, but getting published in the first place is the important thing. What advice do I have for early career researchers looking to publish their doctoral thesis, especially if they had the chance to do so with a strong, established academic publisher? The monograph is still the thing: anyone who wants to be taken seriously as a scholar in the Humanities should work towards having one. Open Access requirements are on the horizon, so broach them with the publisher. Don't accept £10,000 costs. Brandish this survey, say People Still Buy Books. Ask for help from those further along the academic path to help you navigate the pre-contract stage. Even with the changing publishing environment, some things stay the same: the importance of the physical single author monograph, and the importance of academic patronage. Melissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-27435810427450401742014-05-27T19:10:00.000+01:002014-06-09T12:54:58.529+01:00Inaugural Lecture: A Decade in Digital Humanities<i>This is the crux of what I planned to say - or hoped to say! at my professorial inaugural lecture at UCL on the 27th May 2014. I'm not one for reading off a script though, so may have deviated, hesitated, or expanded on the night. A <a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/stream/media/swatch?v=e0ae57b11658">video of my talk</a> on the night is now available. No I haven't watched it myself!</i><br />
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I decided to call my inaugural lecture "A Decade in Digital Humanities" for three reasons.<br />
1. The term Digital Humanities has been commonly used to describe the application of computational methods in the arts and humanities for 10 years, since the publication, in 2004, of the <a href="http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/">Companion to Digital Humanities</a>. "Digital Humanities" was quickly picked up by the academic community as a catch-all, big tent name for a range of activities in computing, the arts, and culture. A decade on from the publication of this text, I thought it would be useful to reflect on the growth, spread, and changes that had occurred in our discipline, and my place within them.<br />
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2. This year sees me in my 10th year of being in an academic post. I joined UCL in August 2003, my first academic post after obtaining my doctorate, and since then have worked my way up the ranks from probationary lecturer, to senior lecturer, to reader, and now full professor. The professorial lecture gives me a rare chance to pause and look behind me to see what the body of work built up over this time represents, and what it means to be undertaking research in this area.<br />
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3. You'll have to wait for later in the lecture to see the third reason...<br />
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Who here would be comfortable <a href="http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409469636">defining</a> what is meant by the term Digital Humanities? In this, the week of <a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/festival-of-the-arts">UCL Festival of the Arts</a>, celebrating all things to do with the Arts and Humanities, let's go back to first principles. In <a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/dh/">UCLDH </a>and <a href="http://4humanities.org/">4Humanities</a>' award winning infographic "<a href="http://4humanities.org/2013/07/the-humanities-matter-infographic/">The Humanities Matter</a>" we defined the humanities as "academic disciplines that seek to understand and interpret the human experience, from individuals to entire cultures, engaging in the discovery, preservation, and communication of the past and present record to enable a deeper understanding of contemporary society." It stands to reason, then, that the <i>Digital</i> Humanities are computational methods that are trying to understand what it means to be human, in both our past and present society. But it may be easier if I give some brief examples to demonstrate the kind of work we Digital Humanists get up to.<br />
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One of the easiest things we can do with computers is count things. For data to be computationally manipulated, it has to be in numeric form. If we can get text into a computational form, we can easily count and manipulate the language, showing trends across time. For example, if we take a million words of conference abstracts from my discipline from the ALLC/ACH conference across various years, we can easily see how mentions of <a href="https://twitter.com/melissaterras/status/298813822347649024">one technology (XML) becomes more popular, while another (SGML)</a> is in decline. Much of the work in DH is in manipulating and processing and analysing text - our iOS app <a href="http://www.textal.org/">Textal</a> is just part of that trajectory. Much of <i>my</i> work, though, has been in digital images, starting with developing systems to try and read <a href="http://global.oup.com/academic/product/image-to-interpretation-9780199204557?cc=gb&lang=en&">damaged documents from Hadrian's wall</a>, and more recently working on multispectral and <a href="http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/3-1/great-parchment-book-project/">3D manipulation of damaged texts</a>. We've also worked with museums on <a href="http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/about_us/history/shipping.aspx">large scale 3D capture of cultural and heritage objects</a>. The important thing about all of this is that as well as implementation, we're also interested in use and usage of these technologies, and what impact that they have on those working in culture and heritage, and the ability to study the past and present human record. We often innovate new systems, or adopt concepts and apply them to humanities projects, such as the crowdsourcing of <a href="http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/">Jeremy Bentham's handwriting by volunteers</a>, or working with visitors to the <a href="http://www.qrator.org/">Grant Museum of Zoology at UCL</a> to encourage debate about zoological collections. We build, we test, we reflect back on what using these technologies means for the humanities, giving recommendations which can be useful across the sector. From these projects, its difficult to pin down what Digital Humanities actually is, but that sums up the difficulty of our discpline's title: it encourages thinking about computational methods in the arts and humanities, and then into culture and heritage, in as broad a sense as possible.<br />
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What made Digital Humanities spring, fully formed like Athena from the Head of Zeus, as an academic field in 2004? Was it because that was the first time quantifiable methods had been used in the Arts and Humanities? (remember - all computational methods require quantification). Well, of course that is nonsense. When you look back across the history of Humanities scholarship, quantifiable methods were used in the Arts and Humanities since the birth of Universities. If we think of the book as technology, from its inception scholars took it to pieces to see under the hood: concordances and indexes of works were manually created, such as this "<a href="http://ucl-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo_library/libweb/action/display.do?tabs=detailsTab&ct=display&fn=search&doc=UCL_LMS_DS001731757&indx=4&recIds=UCL_LMS_DS001731757&recIdxs=3&elementId=3&renderMode=poppedOut&displayMode=full&frbrVersion=2&dscnt=0&onCampus=false&query=any%2Ccontains%2Cconcordance+or+table&scp.scps=scope%3A%28UCL%29%2Cprimo_central_multiple_fe&tab=local&dstmp=1400597633572&dym=true&highlight=true&vl%282235343UI0%29=any&search_scope=CSCOP_UCL&displayField=title&bulkSize=10&vl%28freeText0%29=concordance%20or%20table&vid=UCL_VU1&institution=UCL">Concordance or table made after the order of the alphabet</a>" from 1579 which lists how many times concepts such as "abomination" appear in the New Testament. Or the work of <a href="http://ucl-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo_library/libweb/action/display.do?tabs=detailsTab&ct=display&fn=search&doc=UCL_LMS_DS001725540&indx=1&recIds=UCL_LMS_DS001725540&recIdxs=0&elementId=0&renderMode=poppedOut&displayMode=full&frbrVersion=&dscnt=1&scp.scps=scope%3A%28UCL%29%2Cprimo_central_multiple_fe&frbg=&tab=local&dstmp=1400597733089&srt=rank&mode=Basic&dum=true&tb=t&vl%28freeText0%29=ioseph%20scaliger&vid=UCL_VU1">Joseph Scaliger</a> who in the early 1600s plotted the different periods in time in which different civilizations must have existed, through quantifiable methods. Or the work of <a href="http://ucl-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo_library/libweb/action/display.do?tabs=detailsTab&ct=display&fn=search&doc=UCL_LMS_DS000311961&indx=1&recIds=UCL_LMS_DS000311961&recIdxs=0&elementId=0&renderMode=poppedOut&displayMode=full&frbrVersion=&dscnt=1&scp.scps=scope%3A%28UCL%29%2Cprimo_central_multiple_fe&frbg=&tab=local&dstmp=1400597935737&srt=lso01&mode=Basic&dum=true&tb=t&vl%28freeText0%29=august%20schleicher&vid=UCL_VU1">August Schleicher</a> in the 1850s who showed, by quantifiable methods, that the languages of Europe must have had a common historical root. All of these texts are available from UCL Library, none of which I have to leave my sofa to see because YAY! Digitisation! Changing humanities scholarship! - but the point is that quantifiable methods are part of established methods in the humanities, and have been for as long as the Humanities have existed. So when I undertook my first project at UCL, looking at whether we could use the <a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dh/reach">high performance computing facilities at UCL to analyse historical census data</a> - this is part of an quantifiable humanities academic tradition which harks back 500 years, just at a grander scale.<br />
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So what made Digital Humanities spring, fully formed like Athena from the Head of Zeus, as an academic field in 2004? Perhaps in 2004, this was the first time people had used computational techniques in the arts and humanities? But of course, that is nonsense too. When you look back at the history of computing - and not even digital computing, but the very first computer - the very first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace, hints at the possibilities for art, music, and understanding human knowledge and culture in her <a href="http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html">earliest writings</a>. She understood that there was something more to the mathematical calculations afforded by this machine than science, and they called her a madwoman for it. Well, <i>this </i>madwoman has a (yet unproven) theory that if you look at the history of the first 100 electronic programmable computers in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computing_1950%E2%80%9379">1950s, 1960s and 1970s</a> across the world, you will see humanists eyeing them up and asking "how can I use, or develop this tool for use, in my research"? Its certainly true of <a href="http://www.eadh.org/people/roberto-busa">Father Busa,</a> working with IBM in the 1950s on the concordance of the works of Thomas Aquinas (counting, indexing, and manipulating words, as part of the historical trajectory of humanities methods stretching back 500 years, just a change in scale...) but also of <a href="http://www.eadh.org/people/roy-wisbey">Roy Wisbey,</a> in Cambridge, who set up the Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre there in the 1960s. When the first computers arrived at UCL, the artists from the Slade School of Fine Art were over there like a shot to establish the <a href="http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/a/computer-art-history/">Experimental and Computing Department</a>. We should also mention <a href="http://www.eadh.org/people/susan-hockey">Susan Hockey</a>, who led various initiatives in text encoding, text analysis, and digital libraries. Susan, incidentally, gave me my first academic job here at UCL in 2003: UCL had included a <a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/dis/people/juliannenyhan/INSTG008">Digital Resources in the Humanities </a>module course as part of its MA offering for librarians and archivists in the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies (now the <a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dis">Department of Information Studies</a>) from 2000, under Susan's auspices. But the point is, considering how best to use computing in the arts and humanities is not something which started in the 21st Century, nor 2004, and Humanists have been looking at available tools, and how best to use them, since computation began. So when we undertook one of the latest projects at UCLDH, which came from looking at an iPhone, thinking "how can I use, or develop this tool for use, in my research in the Humanities" and developed an <a href="http://www.textal.org/">iOS app for text analysis</a>, this is part of a longer trajectory of considering available computational tools, and how they may be appropriated, adopted, and adapted for our means in the humanities, just at a grander scale, as processing technologies increase in speed.<br />
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So why Digital Humanities, in 2004? Firstly, the coalescing of interested scholars into an identifiable field is an understandable academic response to societal changes. The speed of computing rises, the price of computing plummets, the information available on the internet (and the possibility to create new information) increases, use and usage of internet technologies has become commonplace. Remember, its up to Humanities scholars to look at the past and present record to enable a deeper understanding of contemporary society: quite frankly, it would be more alarming if an academic movement <i>hadn't </i>emerged looking at what using computational methods could do for our understanding of human society, both past and present, and how best we can grab the technical opportunities which fly by and appropriate them for our means, to inform both ourselves and others about the prospects of using computing in this area. The discipline of Digital Humanities is inevitable, and would have appeared whatever the title it was given.<br />
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Secondly, Digital Humanities is a handy, all inclusive, modern title which rebrands all the various work which has gone before it, such as Humanities Computing, Computing and the Humanities, Cultural Heritage Informatics, Humanities Advanced Technology... DH has a ring to is, and boy, what a rebranding it was. We tend to call it "Big Tent Digital Humanities" meaning: roll up! roll up! everyone using any computational method in any aspects of the arts and humanities is welcome! but really, Big Wave Digital Humanities may be more appropriate, as we countenance the sudden swell, dissipation, and speed of the activities of the discipline. Taking a peek at the mention of Digital Humanities on <a href="https://books.google.com/ngrams">Google Ngrams</a> we can see its sudden growth, and the fact that it is now used as a proper noun, with Capital Letters (although remember that this, counting words, is part of a long tradition of humanities scholarship, Google simply have more books to include in their count). We can see how <a href="http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=digital%20humanities">DH has trended over time</a>, appearing in headlines in the media. Many, many textbooks in DH appear, some of which <a href="http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/dh-in-practice/">I am</a> r<a href="http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409469636">esponsible for</a> myself. Journals appear, such as <a href="http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/">Digital Humanities Quarterly</a> (of which I'm one of the general editors), and the ALLC/ACH conference renames itself <a href="http://adho.org/conference">Digital Humanities </a>(this year, for my sins, I'm the Program Chair for DH2014 which will be held in Lausanne, Switzerland. We have seen over 700 proposals from more than 2000 vying for a space to present). There are many <a href="https://twitter.com/scott_bot/status/465264351494955008/photo/1">more DH conference presentations and workshop slots, worldwide, year on year.</a> In 2010, I gathered together all the available evidence I could on DH in an infographic called <a href="http://melissaterras.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/infographic-quanitifying-digital.html">Quantifying Digital Humanities</a>, showing that there were 114 DH Centres in 24 countries. Today, not even four full years later, there are <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/centernet/">195 DH Centers in 27 Countries</a>. Those knowing how long it takes to set up a research centre know that this is phenomenal growth in the university and GLAM sector, and that institutional support must be strong, behind each and everyone of these.<br />
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<a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dh/">UCL Centre for Digital Humanities</a> is part of those who have joined the recently founded centres. We officially launched four years ago to the week of this lecture, in the same lecture hall where this lecture is being presented. We dont talk about the launch much - its not often I'm part of something at work which ends up featured in the political pages of the newspapers - but you'll have to google that to find out more (YAY! digital media! the internet never forgets!) but in those four years since launch we've undertaken a <a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dh/">phenomenal amount of projects</a>, covering many aspects of Humanities and Arts research, and considered Digital Humanities in its broadest sense. This isnt all me - there is an <a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dh/people">amazing team</a> who are part of the Centre, and we've won <a href="http://succeed-project.eu/succeed-awards/awards-2014">various</a> <a href="http://dhawards.org/dhawards2013/results/">awards</a> for our <a href="http://www.museumsandheritage.com/awards/2012-shortlist">academic</a> <a href="http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/2012/11/22/transcribe-bentham-receives-award-in-knetworks-competition/">projects</a> and <a href="http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/2011/05/26/transcribe-bentham-receives-prestigious-international-award/">collaborations</a>, published many books, papers, and book chapters, and been part of successful funding bids from research councils worth tens of millions of pounds. One wonders what makes a Digital Humanities Centre attractive to universities that dont have one. Nope, I cant see what makes that level of activity attractive, at all.<br />
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So what proportion of Humanities scholars are now digital humanists? Back in 2005, participants in the <a href="http://www.iath.virginia.edu/dtsummit/">Summit on Digital Tools in the Humanities</a> at the University of Virginia estimated that "only about six percent of humanist scholars go beyond general purpose information technology and use digital resources and more complex digital tools in their scholarship" (p.4 of this <a href="http://www.iath.virginia.edu/dtsummit/SummitText.pdf">PDF</a>). By 2012, N. Katherine Hayles, in her chapter "How we think: transforming power and digital technologies" in David M. Berry's edited text "Understanding Digital Humanities", estimates that 10 per cent of Humanists are now digital humanists (p.59). Now, in 2014, a forthcoming study from <a href="http://www.sr.ithaka.org/">Ithaka S+R</a> (with the working title of <a href="http://www.sr.ithaka.org/research-publications/sustaining-digital-humanities">Sustaining the Digital Humanities: Institutional Strategies beyond the Start-up Phase</a>) includes surveys of faculty at four American universities. In the departments surveyed at each institution, nearly 50% of faculty members indicated they have "created or managed" digital resources. Granted, the departments were chosen by campus staff (often at the library) who felt there was some significant activity taking place there. The percentage of these "creators" was consistent across all universities (Brown, Columbia, University of Wisconsin, Indiana University), and most of the creators also felt that their creation was intended for public use (not just their own research aims), and would require ongoing development in the future.<br />
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50% of humanists are involved in digital activity, are digital humanists. How can this possibly be? And how can we conceptualise what it means to be a digital humanist, amongst this spread of activity and range of available technology: is creating or managing digital resources the same as being a digital humanist? At a time where (nearly) every library catalogue is digitised and available online, and (nearly) every book manuscript written on a work processor, and many historical documents digitised and available for consulting from your own sofa, does that make everybody working in the humanities a digital humanist? How can I begin to conceptualise my contribution, and my place, and where my work sits within Big Wave Digital Humanities?<br />
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I find it useful, here to turn to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations">Roger's Innovation Adoption Curve</a>, a sociological model that looks at how technology spreads through society. This is a bell curve, and right at the start of adoption of technology, are a few innovators, experimenting (and developing) new technology. These innovators sometimes persuade a larger number of early adopters to take up the new technology on offer, and only once a sufficient mass of users are achieved, does the technology "cross the chasm" and become used by the majority of individuals in a society (who are split into an early majority, or late majority). Finally, we have adoption by the "laggards", who are slow in taking up technologies, but do so if they have permeated throughout society. (Hard not to think, here, of my elderly grandmother who recently got her first mobile phone). Now, this model is useful as we can plot along it some of the technologies which are available to a humanist. Things like word processing, and searching for references online, and even looking up the digitised texts which I showed at the start of this lecture: even the technologically laggard humanists can do it now, and although these technologies <i>are </i>changing scholarship, its a question of scale (better! faster! more!) rather than of approach or technique, for the main. Technically facilitated tasks like updating websites, using and updating wikis, using social media: even the late majority of humanists can do it now. Online tools are available, such as <a href="http://voyant-tools.org/">Voyant</a>, which allow you to do text analysis, and manipulate texts to see the underlying patterns: so the early majority of humanists can use these tools should they want to. But the most difficult, intellectual work of applying technology in the humanities still occurs before the chasm has been crossed, in the phase of innovation, and early adoption, where we are looking at the technologies that cross our path and saying "how can I use, or develop this tool for use, in my research?", much like those in the 1950s or 1960s who were coming across university mainframes and asking how best to apply that in the literary and linguistic arena. It's important to note, of course, that this wave of technology keeps on coming at us, and the place of where technology sits along the curve changes: 20 years ago, had you been making a website for your humanities project, you would have been an innovator, rather than a late majority, and the same holds for word processing 40 years ago. The technology keeps coming: we have to respond to this, innovate, adopt, and see what is useful or useable for, or used by, the majority of people in our discpline.<br />
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Now (and this is the most contentious thing I'm going to say in my whole lecture, for those attending who are dyed-in-the-wool Digital Humanists) one of the problems that we have as a movement is that we tend to get caught up and fixated upon a certain technological solution. For example, every DH program I've come across teaches XML, that technology which took over from SGML in the conference abstracts - as the best practice way to encode text. And there's no doubt that XML provides the framework with which we can both explore theoretically what is means to describe texts computationally, in such a way they retain the information in their printed or manuscript form, whilst also the means to build and test prototypes. But XML as a technological standard has been around for 16 years, and technology moves on, but DH doesnt seem to be doing so. In many ways, DH's relationship to XML is similar to the AI community's relationship with LISP: the means of computational expression in the language or format suit the questions which need to be asked by the field, so there is no need to use other technologies which come on stream, which may be more efficient from a computational point of view, as we explore what is <i>means</i> to work with our question in this computational way. And that's ok, but we shouldnt be blind to the fact that, hey! technology is advancing all the time and, also, XML is not a technology that crossed the chasm: it may be in use for technical systems, but its not one that you see a lot of the general populace using. This, in turn, means that DH has permanently hitched its wagon to an aging technology, which is hard to explain to others, including other non-XML humanists, whilst other things are happening in the technological world around us. Just something we have to watch out for, when building teaching programs, or looking at the scope of outputs in our field. We dont want to be left behind as the digital in digital humanities rolls on without us.<br />
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I find it useful to plot my research on the Innovation Curve, to see where what I am doing sits. So, the work on counting terms across a corpus - very much sits in the early majority, given the availability of tools to do so. But the work on building an iPhone app to do so - very much innovation: it took a lot of pure programming in a relatively new space to achieve it. The work in image processing I do is either innovation (we are publishing here in pure computer/engineering science venues, as well as in humanities venues, which I'm very proud of), or we adopt technologies our academic colleagues in the engineering sciences have generated and roll them out to a humanities or heritage application. Our work on user studies is something completely different though: here we are generally looking at how the majority of people are using an extant text, or (in the case of something like <a href="http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/">Transcribe Bentham</a>, or <a href="http://www.qrator.org/">QRator</a>) we are conducting reception studies, where we innovate and build a technology, launch it, and study its uptake across the whole cycle. We can see, then a range of DH activity across the innovation cycle, but the majority of the work I do is certainly at the start of the innovation curve. Is this where DH sits? I like to think so, but more to the point, I'm confident its where I sit best, when doing DH. <br />
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I need here to show you another curve, though. This time, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle">Gartner Hype Cycle</a>, which looks at how technologies are launched, mature, and are applied (so people know when to invest). The premise of this is that when technologies are first triggered, everyone thinks they are going to be the Next Big Thing, and so they reach "the peak of inflated expectations", before crashing down into a "trough of disillusionment" when those adopting them realise they aren't that great at all. Its hard work to get technologies up the "slope of enlightenment" where useful, useable applications are found, and few technologies make it to the "plateau of productivity" where they become profitable. Its a useful curve - this year's predictions show Big Data right at the top of the peak, which chimes in with media coverage of how it will solve everything, for example. So where would I put DH, if I had to as a movement, on this curve?<br />
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I'd put it at the top. At the top of the Peak of Inflated Expectations. We've got a lot of pressure on us to prove our johnny-come-lately benefit to the world of academia, to demonstrate our worth, to show that the investment made in us over the past few years is worth it (whilst also bringing in further investments in research funding, to meet institutional expectations). After a peak, comes a crash, and we have to be prepared for the tide to turn and the backlash to begin, after the years of media hype and raised expectations. So how do we get to the plateau of productivity of Digital Humanities?<br />
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First, I would argue that we have to understand our lineage: that the current manifestation of DH is a logical progression of qualitative methods used in the humanities for the past 500 years. That the current manifestation of DH is a logical progression of humans wondering what the potential is for applying computational methods to humanities problems, which has been going on in the digital space for the past 60 years. These combined trajectories aren't going away, and despite what funding cuts and media backlash may come at us, it is the role of the digital humanist to understand and investigate how computers can be used to question what it means to be human, and the human record, in both our past and present society. Secure in our mission, we can carry on whatever the storm throws at us. <br />
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Second, I would argue we have to ignore naysayers who are unsure about this new Digital Humanities lark (and believe me, there are plenty, even in my own department) and just <i>do good work</i>. The way to demonstrate our worth is to demonstrate our worth through <i>doing good work</i>. We have to keep asking questions about computational methods, computational processes, and the potentials that they offer humanities scholars, as well as the pitfalls, to explore this changing information environment from the humanities viewpoint. Its not just about building websites, or putting information online, its about innovating and adopting, and questioning while we build about the ramifications of doing this, the impact on the humanities, the issues using technology raises, and the answers it provides that you couldn't otherwise generate, to <i>do good work</i> in Digital Humanities. I realise this is very Calvinist of me - you can take the lass out of Scotland - but I do see that we have to be engaging with theories and questions of what is means to be doing this work in this way, as well as updating a website or creating a digital file. A continuation of what it means to be a humanities scholar, in the digital space.<br />
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I'm not one for looking back, and despite the title, I deliberately didn't want this inaugural to be a survey of all the projects I have undertaken over the past ten years - then I did this, then I talked to that person, then I visited there - but when I look back over the variety and range of projects, publications, and outputs that I've worked on, either on my own, or as part of a team (there's a lot of teamwork that has gone on here) I'm firstly surprised at how much of it there is and the range of topics we've covered, and the opportunities we've pounced on. I see a body of work which explores various aspects of what it means to be applying digital technologies in the humanities space, and facilitates both those in engineering science and those in the humanities to explore issues which are important to them. I've learn't things along the way about the nature of interdisciplinary work, the nature of teams, the nature of the academic publishing and peer review process, the nature of the grant funding process, but I've written about that elsewhere. There are things, also, that I am proud of that are physical rather than purely digital: over the last few years I'm most proud of building the <a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dh/facilities/digitisation-suite">UCL Multi-Modal digitisation suite</a>, which is a shared space between the UCL Library Services, UCL Faculty of Arts and Humanities, and UCL Faculty of Engineering Science, contributing to the infrastructure of UCL in a collaborative endeavor. But what I see here, as a common thread, is that the work I do tends to sit right at the beginning of the technology adoption cycle, aiding and abetting the application of technology within the arts, humanities, and heritage, and I'm comfortable with that. There's a strength in knowing your place, and your remit, and what you do best. <br />
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So the third reason for calling my talk "A Decade in Digital Humanities" is that I didn't say which decade we were talking about, and it is time also to look towards the future, and what the next ten years holds for both DH, as the field turns into a teenager, and for me, as I go into my next decade here at UCL. I'm not one for crystal balls, so I'll keep my scrying brief. I see an inevitable fragmentation of the DH community and DH focus - it was never conceived of as a homogenous entity anyway, and it is the nature of waves and swells that they will dissipate. We'll see (we are already seeing) more focussed groups of scholarly work around, say, Geographical Information Systems and literature, as people specialise and work on specific technologies and specific methods. The technology will keep coming, and its up to individual humanities scholars to respond to what is appropriate to their research question: the effects of DH scholarship will continue to ripple out across the humanities as technologies go along the adoption cycle, and certain aspects of digital research will just become normal for humanities scholars, as time goes on. But I do see that there will always be a place, right at the start of the technology innovation uptake curve, for specialists in Digital Humanities to sit, watching out for these changing and emerging technologies, setting up pilot projects to experiment with different aspects of these technologies, feeding back recommendations and the potential ramifications for other humanities and engineering scholars and those within the wider cultural and heritage sector, and exploring what is means to be doing humanities research in that area. I'm happy to remain there, and I see that this will remain my place working with other humanists, and engineers and computer scientists, over the next decade. I'm delighted to be a co-investigator on the doctoral training centre for <a href="http://www.seaha-cdt.ac.uk/">Science and Engineering in the Arts Heritage and Archaeology</a>, which is the EPSRC's largest every investment in Heritage Science, and for the next 8 years we'll be training up a range of doctoral students in this cross section of the arts, heritage, humanities, and engineering and conservation science. (Perhaps what I really do is Heritage Science, but that's another talk entirely, and DH has work to do with the Heritage Science community in future). That said, we do have work to do, in keeping an eye to making sure people know about the successes, outputs, and impacts of DH work. Given the expectations foisted upon us, we have to learn to be more vocal about our objectives, our remit, and our results. It's our job to be thinking what it means to use digital technologies in humanities research, and just research, full stop. As a result, our insights can benefit a range of other fields, if we communicate them effectively.<br />
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Digital technologies are not going away any time soon: and although DH
has had a rapid swell, it will remain essential that we investigate,
use, and experiment with technologies over the coming decade. There is a new Companion to Digital Humanities coming out in late 2014, showing how the technologies used in humanities research have developed since the first edition (I'm delighted to have written a chapter on our public engagement work for it), and our see our field, as well as knowing where we have come from, has to understand that the technological wave on which we sail is continually on the move. I hope I've shown here that our uptake of technologies in the humanities is, and will continue to be, a moving target, and that as part of a longer trajectory of investigation into humanities methods, DH is a modern but necessary, and even inevitable, part of the Humanities, and even computational, landscape. I look forward to what adventures the next Decade in Digital Humanities holds. There is so much to do!<br />
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Now, that is where I'd normally pause and say thank you for your attention, but hey, its my inaugural, so I'll cry if I want to. I have a few brief thanks to make - its quite a lick to go from probationary lecturer to full prof in ten years, and so I have to thank those who have supported me. Thanks go to my family up in Scotland for all their support, and my family of my own: many of you know that in the past few year's I've had three children, so biggest thanks of all go to my husband Os, aka Expert Sleepers, for his forbearance and baby juggling skillz. I've been blessed with an amazing support network of friends, who have supported my enormously over this period. My first academic supervisor was <a href="http://www.ischool.utoronto.ca/seamus-ross">Professor Seamus Ross</a>, who kick started my interest in this area, and his support and interest at the start of my career really set me up for the work I do today. Likewise, my PhD supervisor <a href="http://www.bnc.ox.ac.uk/about-brasenose/academic-staff/376-professor-alan-k-bowman-principal">Professor Alan Bowman</a> remains a fantastic mentor: thank you, Alan. My other PhD supervisor, <a href="http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~jmb/home.html">Professor Sir Mike Brady,</a> made me promise (when I got my doctorate in engineering) not to go near any nuclear power stations or bridges, a promise I have kept - thanks Mike. I've already mentioned that <a href="http://www.eadh.org/people/susan-hockey">Professor Susan Hockey</a> gave me my first academic job: but her work remains an inspiration on what is possible in computing in the arts and humanities. I work with an <a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dh/people">amazing team of people at UCLDH</a> and I thank them for their input both for the centre and on our various projects. Special thanks go to <a href="http://tawawa.org/">Rudolf Ammann</a>, our designer at large, who helped prepare the graphics for this lecture. <br />
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But in this week of <a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/festival-of-the-arts">UCL's Festival of the Arts</a> and Humanities, its good to pause and see how embedded Digital Humanities research is now throughout college, and how much we work, in the Humanities, with those around us. The projects I've shown, albeit briefly, today, are carried out in league with various other faculties (UCLDH reports to both the Arts and Humanities and Engineering Faculties here). Colleagues come from a range of different departments including not only those across the Arts Faculty, but the Bartlett <a href="http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/casa">Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis</a> (in the UCL Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment), and across the <a href="http://www.engineering.ucl.ac.uk/">UCL Faculty of Engineering</a> (I have joint projects with Medical Physics, Computer Science, and Civil, Environmental, and Geomatic Engineering). We are dependent on input from both our colleagues in <a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/">UCL Library Services</a>, and <a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums">UCL Museums and Collections</a>, and work very closely with items in all the collections across college. The success of DH at UCL is then dependent on the institutional context we have here. Digital Humanities is now embedded into college life at UCL, and in this week of the Festival of the Arts, my final thanks go to UCL as an community for its institutional support in encouraging us to ride the DH wave: for without being at UCL, my decade in digital humanities would have been completely different. <br />
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<br />Melissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-13476608437959386882014-05-24T15:39:00.002+01:002014-05-24T15:42:24.085+01:00Roy Wisbey, and Literary and Linguistic Computing, 1965 style<br />
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I recently got in touch with <a href="http://www.eadh.org/people/roy-wisbey">Professor Roy Wisbey,</a> who set up the University of Cambridge's Linguistic Computing Centre in 1960, to invite him to my inaugural lecture. He is not able to attend (but passes on his regards to those who know him!) and he also briefly loaned me this newspaper article, from 24th September 1965, from the Cambridge News. A very early piece of Humanities Computing history! It's in very fragile condition - I've spliced it together here to give the whole piece in one image (and the blog stylesheet is not my friend here - will sort out later - but...) - enjoy!<br />
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The use of computers will save the scholar years of mindless drudgery! indeed!<br />
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<br />Melissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-36771913030060722332014-05-16T14:40:00.000+01:002014-05-16T17:02:05.621+01:00Siberian Digital Humanities Adventure<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>The Siberian Federal University</b></blockquote>
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Greetings from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasnoyarsk">Krasnoyark</a>, Siberia, where for the past week I've been hanging out at the <a href="http://www.sfu-kras.ru/en">Siberian Federal University</a>, the largest university in the Siberian region, which is in the top rankings in Russia. I've been giving some guest lectures on digital humanities, meeting various staff and students, and plotting with them on how to support their work and how to make connections to the wider digital humanities community.<br />
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How did I end up here? Its all down to the wonderful <a href="http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2008/bios/au_440015721.html">Inna Kizhner </a>who approached me nearly two years ago, in my guise then as secretary of what is now the European Association for Digital Humanities. After helping source some teaching materials, in English and Russian, for their taught courses, Inna remarked to me "no-one ever comes to Siberia..." and I immediately said "ask me!". And finally, after much preparation, here I am.<br />
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Siberian Federal University are establishing a solid Digital Humanities presence. In the Institute of Humanities they currently offer digital humanities modules at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, and also an undergraduate module in the subject area of digital history (which next year will be taught by Inna). They have a digital lab (door sign, above!) and digitisation lab. They have a range of projects they have been working on with both researchers and students, many of them led by Maxim Rumyantsev who is now the university's deputy head, so there is positive institutional support here. These projects are mostly in the area of multimedia and digitisation. For example, working with the Museum of Geology of Central Siberia to create the simply stunning companion to their <a href="http://mgcs.sfu-kras.ru/en">minerals collection</a> (it is no easy task to capture minerals in this detail, at this quality); capturing, virtually exploring, and explaining regional heritage architecture (which is fast disappearing under new developments in this region) from the nearby town of <a href="http://www.yeniseisk-heritage.ru/">Yeniseisk</a>, documenting <a href="http://av-2010.ru/">regional art shows</a> and <a href="http://young-siberia.ru/">youth art shows</a>; capturing high resolution images of the art contained within the <a href="http://www.surikov-museum.ru/">Surikov Museum</a> (life size copies of which adorn the university's walls at every turn); working with Gigapan capture methods and the State Russian Museum to create zoomable images of large art works (can you spot <a href="http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/87249">Pushkin</a>?); and creating an <a href="http://www.vt.sfu-kras.ru/">interactive model of the Siberian Federal University campus </a>itself. They are keen, now, to be making connections with others across the world, and I'm delighted to be helping them, and introducing them to various figures, and associations, in Digital Humanities. There is much work to be done, we have plans set out, and they are keen to make new relationships and new collaborations. <br />
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Its not all been work! I've been welcomed into colleagues' homes for meals (often meeting their families), treated at friendly restaurants (the food is wonderful), and toured round museums and supermarkets (Inna patiently put up with me pointing and exclaiming at various products we dont have in the UK, such as dried fish, and tinned horse). Today we went to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasnoyarsk_Dam">Krasnoyarsk Dam</a>, 30km upstream from the city, on a glorious spring day which showed off this remarkable feat of engineering (which is so exceptional it features on banknotes across Russia). There is a heavy security presence, and no photos allowed, but I did manage this sneaky selfie...<br />
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It's been a fantastic, trip, and I've been very welcome here. Thanks to Inna, Maxim and Marina for their hospitality, and I look forward to further opportunities, visits and introducing anyone who wants to be introduced (if I can be of help, drop me an email and I will forward it on). I have to admit I was nervous about my trip here - but instead of stress I've found
friendly connections, and much opportunity to help further establish DH
in this region, and throughout Russia. Now to pack, and begin the long trip home, where my three small boys are missing their mummy on the other side of the world (and I them). до свидания!
Melissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-38831261656057920612014-05-15T14:12:00.001+01:002014-05-23T09:07:16.559+01:00Digitisation's Most Wanted<h4>
What are the most commonly accessed digitised items from heritage organisations? Even asking the question leads to further understanding about the current digitisation landscape.</h4>
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Have you seen this Dog? Last spotted on the <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/llgc/3467832779/">Flickr account of the National Library of Wales</a>. <i>Dog with a Pipe in Its Mouth</i>, Taken by <span class=" meta-field photo-desc " id="yui_3_16_0_rc_1_1_1400117823499_1087"> P. B. Abery, 1940s. </span></blockquote>
Last month, at a meeting at the <a href="http://www.nls.uk/">National Library of Scotland</a>, an interesting fact flew by me. The NLS has hundreds of thousands of <a href="http://digital.nls.uk/gallery.cfm">digitised items</a> online, so what do you think is the most popular, and most regularly accessed and/or downloaded? (it is difficult to make the distinction regarding accessed or downloaded on most sites.) Is it the original <a href="http://digital.nls.uk/robert-burns/">Robert Burns</a> material? The last letter of <a href="http://digital.nls.uk/mqs/">Mary Queen of Scots</a>? or any of the 86,000 <a href="http://maps.nls.uk/">maps</a> held in this, one of the best map collections worldwide? No. It is "<a href="https://archive.org/details/grammardictionar02craw">A grammar and dictionary of the Malay language : with a preliminary dissertation</a>" by John Crawfurd, published in 1852. This is accessed by hundreds of people every month - mostly from Malaysia, partly because it is featured on many product pages providing <a href="http://hoodiagordonii.herbalyzer.com/men-with-anting-angin-in-the-philippines.html">definitions of malaysian words</a> - demonstrating the surprising reach and potential in digitising items and then making them freely available online, reaching out to a worldwide audience far beyond the geographical local of the library itself. Wonderful.<br />
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This left me pondering... what are the other most downloaded items at major institutions in the UK? So I sent out some feelers, and here are the results, demonstrating both the hidden complexity of the question, and the relationship of digitised heritage content to the current online audience landscape. <br />
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At <a href="http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/">Cambridge University Library</a>, the most accessed collection overall is the <a href="http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/newton">Newton Papers</a>, which was the first major digitised collection launched by the Library in 2010, and promoted widely. Within that, there is <a href="http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-03996/1">one particular notebook</a> (which Newton acquired while he was an undergraduate at Trinity College and used from about 1661 to 1665 for his lecture notes) which is the most popular, featuring heavily in the initial promotion of the collection, and also in an <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b018xy22">In Our Time</a> special series hosted my Melvyn Bragg on Radio 4. But within that notebook there is <a href="http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-03996/9">one page</a> that is accessed more than the others, with most of the traffic coming from Greece. Why? This page was picked up in the Greek press and pointed to on many <a href="http://apollonios.pblogs.gr/2014/02/ekplhktiko-ntokoymento-se-poia-glwssa-egrafe-o-neftwnas-deite-ed.html">websites</a>, <a href="http://greekvoices.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/blog-post_7952.html">blogs</a>, newspaper reports, and in social media as evidence that Newton knew Greek. The links that remain still direct thousands of users to view Newton's jottings from his Greek lessons at the front of the book, showing the fascinating relationship between publicity, social media, linkage, and an item which reflects national pride, to a worldwide audience.<br />
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The most downloaded items at Cambridge also reflect the rapidly changing mentions of items on social media: in April 2014, an item downloaded/accessed more than 6000 times was the <a href="http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-DD-00005-00005/21">Breviary of Marie de Saint Pol</a>, which went live this month. Why the sudden notice? On the 3rd of April, one of the Cambridge colleges with thousands of followers posted a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=726293320762270&id=105516922839916&stream_ref=10">link to it on Facebook</a> followed by the Cambridge Digital Library <a href="https://www.facebook.com/camdiglib/posts/1490821081137390?stream_ref=10">Facebook</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/CamDigLib/status/451643008153579520">Twitter </a>feed on the 4th of April. Retweeted a few times, these few postings led to the thousands of views of the document, demonstrating the growing importance of using social media to tell people about newly mounted digitised content.<br />
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Over at <a href="http://www.tcd.ie/Library/">Trinity College Library</a>, the most accessed item from their <a href="http://digitalcollections.tcd.ie/home/">digital collection</a> in general is the <a href="http://digitalcollections.tcd.ie/home/index.php?DRIS_ID=MS408_001#searchresults">Book of Kells</a>, which again was their first major digitised item, heavily promoted in the press, and attracting a level of viewing that is unique due to general tourism and cultural heritage interest. The second most accessed digitised item is the surprise: a <a href="http://digitalcollections.tcd.ie/home/index.php?DRIS_ID=MS408_001">book of Lute music by William Ballet</a>, from the 17th Century. There is much discussion of this item, and links to it online, posted by <a href="https://www.mail-archive.com/lute@cs.dartmouth.edu/msg43861.html">online communities of lute players</a>, and those who <a href="http://kakitoshilute.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/trinity-college-dublin.html">blog about lutes worldwide</a>. Interest and demand in at item can therefore be encouraged if interested online communities hear about it, and share with their membership. <br />
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A similar tale about the importance of publicity and social media emerges from the <a href="http://www.britishmuseum.org/">British Museum</a>. There are popular items about the Viking exhibition which are linked from their home page at the moment given the current exhibition, but since the 1st January 2014 til now, the most popular item accessed in the digital collection (no, wait, go on, guess.... Rosetta stone? Vindolanda Tablets? ...) is the <a href="http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectid=3402039&partid=1">Landscape Alphabet by Joseph Hulmandell</a> (no? me neither). These were discovered and shared on social media by <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=landscape%20alphabet%20&src=typd">type enthusiasts on twitter </a>in mid February, and promoted by the cool-hunter t<a href="https://twitter.com/LaughingSquid/status/433736721503891456">he Laughing Squid</a> who has almost half a million followers on twitter, which caused a sudden spike (I cant see the British Museum actually tweeting them out themselves on their timeline). However, the initial swell of tens of thousands of hits has since dwindled to nothing, showing the fickleness of attention that comes with the social media stream. In 2013, the most single viewed item at the British Museum was... (go on, guess!)... a <a href="http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectid=399876&partid=1">lead sling bullet</a>, viewed 42,156 times in total. Why? It was picked up on <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1m44px/til_that_some_ancient_sling_bullets_excavated/">reddit</a>, due to the sarcastic inscription "some
ancient sling bullets excavated from the city of Athens, Greece were
inscribed with the word "ΔΕΞΑΙ" (dexai), which translates to "catch!"" which generated a lot of online LOLs ("Halt gentlemen. Do not yet partake of the feast before us, for I must
capture the image of it with instagram whereupon I shalt bequeath it to
my herald upon Facebook for all to see." <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1m44px/til_that_some_ancient_sling_bullets_excavated/cc5qskx">here</a>) and this encouraged - and still encourages - visitors to the British Museum website: some forms of posting on social media generate the long tail of usage more than others. <br />
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Things start to get more complicated when various digital asset management systems (DAMS) come into place - often institutions have more than one database of digitised content, from different suppliers, with different licensing restrictions and requirements, and so ascertaining the most viewed single item is not a simple question. Organisations also post and share content in various different places. The <a href="http://www.llgc.org.uk/">National Library of Wales</a> are looking through their DAMS to see which items are the most accessed, but immediately know that the most popular item they hold that has been posted to Flickr (with no known copyright restrictions, contributed to Flickr Commons) is the photograph at the top of this post, <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/llgc/3467832779/"><i>Dog with a Pipe in its Mouth</i></a>, from the P. B. Abery Collection. Again, this is an image which has been mentioned regularly on <a href="http://cuteoverload.com/2009/05/24/ceci-nest-pas-un-pup-qui-fume-une-pipe/">blogs</a>, <a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/21Tgsc/www.flickr.com/photos/llgc/3467832779/">social media</a>, and <a href="http://infobot.rikers.org/%23wowuidev/20091031.html.gz">internet chats</a>, as well as being a <a href="https://blog.flickr.net/en/2013/01/16/happy-commons-anniversary/">featured image on the 2013 anniversary of Flickr Commons</a>: the fact that it has no copyright restrictions encourages its reuse - and therefore traffic towards its host institution's site, if those users point back to it - online. <br />
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The <a href="http://www.ox.ac.uk/research/libraries">libraries at Oxford University</a>, including the Bodleian, have been digitising items for over twenty years, and so it is difficult to say what the most accessed or popular items are, due to the way the systems have been designed, implemented and integrated over the past two decades. Their most downloaded or accessed digitised book, scanned in collaboration with <a href="http://books.google.ru/books/about/History_of_the_Scott_Monument_Edinburgh.html?id=14gqQwAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">Google</a>, is probably the "History of the Scott Monument, to which is prefixed a biographical sketch of Sir Walter Scott" by James Colston (published 1881) - a freely downloadable version is available from <a href="http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/dlDisplay.do?vid=OXVU1&docId=oxfaleph014456203">its library record</a> (ignore the resellers offering printed versions generated from this for much cost on amazon and eBay!). As far as images are concerned, the most popular at Oxford are among those listed on <a href="http://image.ox.ac.uk/">Early Manuscripts at Oxford University</a>, partly because many of them have been up continuously for twenty years (legacy data for the history of downloads of specific images are not available, indicating how difficult it is to access long term data about this. Server logs get very big very quickly and so are generally periodically discarded, and it is only recently that reporting facilities such as Google Analytics have allowed a quick and easy overview of the usage of websites). Currently popular digitisation projects at the University of Oxford Libraries are the <a href="http://bav.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/">Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project</a>, and the recently launched digitized <a href="http://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/">First Folio of Shakespeare's works</a>, but there isn't sufficient data available from all the digital collections to be able to say one way or the other which is the one most popular project, never mind item. It was also pointed out, though, that you would probably struggle just as much (if not more so) to identify which has been the most requested book in the Bodleian's collections!<br />
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This trend of databases complicating the question continues at the <a href="http://www.bl.uk/">British Library</a>, where their digitisation outputs and projects are made available via multiple platforms and viewers, some managed by the British Library, and others by commercial partners, with some content available for free, other content via subscription, or paying a fee per image. These are only some of the most popular different sites: <a href="https://imagesonline.bl.uk/">https://imagesonline.bl.uk</a>, <a href="http://www.bl.uk/treasures/treasuresinfull.html">http://www.bl.uk/treasures/treasuresinfull.html</a>, <a href="http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/">http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/</a>, <a href="http://www.sounds.bl.uk/">www.sounds.bl.uk</a>, <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/">https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/</a>, <a href="http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/">http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/</a>, <a href="http://find.galegroup.com/bncn/">http://find.galegroup.com/bncn/</a>, <a href="http://gdc.gale.com/products/17th-and-18th-century-burney-collection-newspapers/">http://gdc.gale.com/products/17th-and-18th-century-burney-collection-newspapers/</a> and the BL module on <a href="http://www.biblioboard.com/libraries.html">http://www.biblioboard.com/libraries.html</a>. In addition, there are BL digitisation partnerships with other content providers, for example <a href="http://idp.bl.uk/">http://idp.bl.uk/</a> and <a href="http://eap.bl.uk/">http://eap.bl.uk/</a>. Finding out the most accessed digitised item from within this is tricky (but not impossible - they tell me they are looking into it). The fact that they cannot say immediately demonstrates the complexity of running many large databases of digitised content. <br />
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These results, from very different institutions, invite discussions on shallow versus deep engagement with digital collections. Some examples of commonly accessed material are what we would think of as part of the Canon of Digitised Content: Shakespeare, Newton, Medieval Manuscripts. Some examples of commonly accessed material here can be taken as little more than clickbait - LOL! History! - or free reference material - its a free Malaysian Dictionary! Bonus! - but is getting people through the virtual door to digitised collections in this way, and through these items, such a bad thing? Come for the Dog with the pipe in its mouth! stay for the genealogy, then the discussions on palaeographic method! One can also argue that some of the discussion surrounding these objects are exactly what we are trying to encourage - many of the hundreds of <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1m44px/til_that_some_ancient_sling_bullets_excavated/">comments</a> posted on the Reddit item about the British Museum sling shot bullet, although hilarious, show consideration of what it would mean to be human in the time of Ancient Greece, and relate their societal response to ours. Isn't that the starting place (and in some cases, the ending place) of engagement with primary historical evidence? <br />
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Asking to see Digitisation's most wanted opens up wider questions of public engagement, the impact of social networks on internet traffic to digitised collections (from highlights posted by the institution, to those identified and shared by others outside it, often quite unexpectedly), and the role of making images of primary historical sources open for others to discover, use and share. We also become aware of the complex and intertwined database systems which are in place in many large organisations undertaking digitisation and delivering digitised items to users, and the difficulties in reporting on individual items (be they physical or digital!) as a result. Digitisation's most wanted is also a rapidly moving target, dependent on publicity, and changing interest and focus over time: social media can encourage large swings and changes in popular items very quickly. The act of posing this question has led to an interesting discussion on how we think about use of digitised content, and how we can build up evidence about usage. (I'd also like to thank the organisations listed above for responding to my query so promptly!)<br />
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Have you, or any organisation you work with, been affected by the discussion in this blog post? Do you have any evidence you can contribute to the investigation? Your help is needed to catch digitisation's most wanted. Please do post your comments about your experiences below (comments are moderated so may take a few hours to appear), or email m dot terras at ucl.ac.uk for them to be integrated here. The internet is a place of busy traffic. Someone must have seen them...<br />
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Update 15/05/14: The British Library's Endangered Archives' most popular item is the <a href="http://eap.bl.uk/database/overview_item.a4d?catId=49428;r=9961">St Helena Banns of Marriage</a>, an item commonly pointed to on genealogy websites such as <a href="http://www.fibis.org/archives/1141">this </a>and <a href="http://www.4yourfamilystory.com/blog/7-genealogy-things-you-need-to-know-this-morning-thursday-27-feb-2014#.U3TVjMfR3Cg">this</a>.<br />
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Update 16/05/14:<br />
-The National Library of Australia have a discussion of their 25 most viewed digitised newspapers, and why, <a href="http://www.nla.gov.au/blogs/trove/2014/02/20/the-top-25-most-viewed-newspaper-articles-of-2013">here</a>.<br />
- The <a href="http://idp.bl.uk/">International Dunhuang Project </a>at the British Library <a href="https://twitter.com/idp_uk/status/467020651434618881">tell me </a>that a redevelopment of their database and website is underway to improve reporting for them, their partners and users.<br />
- <a href="http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/">Glasgow University Library Special Collections</a> tell me that their most popular item is the <a href="http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/month/aug2009.html">Curious Case of Mary Toft</a>, from 1726, who supposedly gave birth to a litter of rabbits. This was featured as a book of the month in 2009, but picked up by the social media site <a href="http://mentalfloss.com/article/54643/woman-who-gave-birth-rabbits">Mental Floss</a> in January 2014, with that page being shared on facebook more than 4000 times, and garnering 30,000 hits in one day alone, and has since been posted on various other social media platforms, including Reddit. Glasgow also say that there is a difficulty in measuring access counts as the content is held on various different servers, and it can be difficult to interpret Google Analytics in this case. They also point out that, from their perspective, there is a lack of benchmarks to compare usage of their items to that of other special collections. <br />
- The <a href="http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/">National Archives</a> tell me they <a href="http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/SearchUI/">point to the popular items as part of their navigation</a> and as a result, these "most popular items" remain the most popular, in a virtuous circle. A very popular item at the moment is the <a href="http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/SearchUI/details/C14997-the-security-service-personal-%28pf-series%29-files-details">The Security Service: Personal (PF Series) Files KV2</a> which hosts the records of spies such as Mata Hari. These were embargoed until Thursday 10 April 2014, then launched with an accompanying press release, which <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/apr/09/mi5-files-released-world-war-centenary">garnered</a> <a href="http://www.express.co.uk/news/world-war-1/469562/Secrets-of-Mata-Hari-to-be-revealed-as-MI5-files-on-wartime-spies-go-online">significant</a> <a href="http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/secret-files-of-first-world-war-go-online.23924752">press</a> <a href="http://www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/news/national-archives-reveals-top-secret-ww1-files">coverage</a> <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/uk/Britains-MI5-files-reveal-Mata-Haris-secrets/articleshow/33583809.cms">worldwide,</a> driving traffic to the site. The only frequently accessed item which is not in these lists is the muster roll of HMS Victory for the Battle of Trafalgar, which is commonly referred to in military and naval history websites (although interestingly few people link through directly to the page where it can be downloaded from, so those who read about it must come to TNA's website and search themselves). <br />
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Update 19/05/14 <br />
- The Estonian Folklore Archives at the <a href="http://kivike.kirmus.ee/index.php?dok_id=1&module=2&op=">Estonian Literary Museum</a> tell me that their most popular item is a leaflet from 1937 on <a href="http://kivike.kirmus.ee/index.php?pid=AR-11303-50048-59591&module=400&op=3">how to preserve sealskins</a>, although I can see no other webpages pointing to this item (perhaps because my Estonian search skills are weak!).<br />
- UCLA Digital Library tell me their most viewed item is a <a href="http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz002h27qf">Lyrical Map of the Concept of Los Angeles</a>, a 23-foot long hand-drawn and hand-lettered map of Los Angeles, using the words and images of dozens of L.A. authors, which was on display in a <a href="http://www.laassubject.org/index.php/articles/detail/article_city_in_mind_a_lyrical_map_of_the_concept_of_los_angeles_exhibit">museum in 2011</a>, and was featured <a href="http://www.jmichaelwalker.com/#!city-in-mind/c1ft0">widely</a> <a href="http://www.laassubject.org/index.php/articles/detail/article_city_in_mind_a_lyrical_map_of_the_concept_of_los_angeles_exhibit">on</a> <a href="http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/columns/maps/new-map-of-los-angeles-makes-words-a-cultural-way-finders.html">blogs </a>both at the time of the exhibit and since, which points people to the digital version now the display is no longer live in the museum space. Another popular item is the complete set of the 1582 <a href="http://digital.library.ucla.edu/canonlaw/"><i>Corpus Juris Canonici</i></a>, the "Body of Canon Law," particularly the table of contents, which is commonly linked to from those interested in Canon Law, such as <a href="http://canonlaw.wikispot.org/bookmarks">this</a>, thus driving subject specialists to the site.<br />
- The <a href="http://hcle.wikispaces.com/home">History of Computing in Learning and Education Virtual Museum</a> tells me the most viewed items are the <a href="http://hcle.wikispaces.com/HCLE+Writing+Competition+-+January+2014">writing competition</a> and Historic Newsletters from the <a href="http://hcle.wikispaces.com/Peoples_Computer_Company_working">People's Computer Company</a>.<br />
- A Hack day carried out at the Zurich Hackathon 2014 looked at image analytics from the US National Archives and Record Administrations contributions to flickr commons, looking at 200 million hits in a 3 month period and identifying the most common images: a description of that hack is <a href="http://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:GLAMwiki_Toolset_Project/NARA_analytics_pilot">here</a>, which also gives examples of the most commonly looked at images. "There is a spike on March 24. Further analysis shows that the biggest referral on that day is <a class="extiw" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Height" title="en:Dorothy Height">Dorothy Height</a>. Turns out this lady was featured on a <a class="extiw" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_Doodles_in_2014#March_24" title="en:List of Google Doodles in 2014">Google Doodle</a> on that day." Popular subjects (and referrer pages, generally from Wikipedia) were John F. Kennedy, World War II, Japanese American Internment, Vietnam War. A full list is available on the project page. This shows the importance of institutions linking their content from Wikipedia, and what can happen if you are featured by Google.<br />
- There is also a useful tool in <a href="http://tools.wmflabs.org/glamtools/baglama.php">BaGLAMA</a> which shows view counts for pages using Commons images in GLAM-related category trees.<br />
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Update 20/05/14<br />
- The Bodleian also make the very good point that "With most browsers now defaulting to 'do not track' combined with the EU cookies legislation it is difficult to find any sort of data that one can 'stand behind' these days."<br />
- The <a href="http://www.jmberlin.de/">Jüdischen Museums Berlin</a>'s most accessed items are the <a href="http://objekte.jmberlin.de/object/jmb-obj-6131">Sammeldatensatz: Orden, Ehrenzeichen und Embleme von Julius Fliess (1876-1955)</a>, but they say that most accesses come from searches for "jewish emblems", and so there is a need to add emblem as synonym for symbol to thesaurus, to help users find what they are looking for. In this way, looking at search terms can help develop user paths through the system so they can find what they actually want. <br />
- The <a href="http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/">University of Iowa Digital Libraries</a> say that based on google analytics for the last year, the <a href="http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/ref/collection/dada/id/28837">most popular item is a dada book</a>, and the most popular collection is <a href="http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/maps/">Iowa Maps</a>, but the access numbers for different objects in the database themselves are hard to count, and they'll get back to me on that. Based on recent web searches reported from the web master, a surprisingly high number of people find them via searches for Peter Rabbit: the <a href="http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/peterrabbit/pageflip.html">digital book</a> of which is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Peter_Rabbit">linked through to their site from the Wikipedia page</a> and various other websites featuring Peter Rabbit. <br />
- The National Library of Wales tell me the most popular article on http://welshnewspapers.llgc.org.uk is a <a href="http://welshnewspapers.llgc.org.uk/en/page/view/4100839/ART175">1916 Cambria Daily Leader advert for 'blouses' and 'hosiery'</a>. To find out more about why may take some digging, though!<br />
- <a href="http://www.hamlethistoricdepot.org/">Hamlet Depot and Museums</a> tell me that their most popular items are genealogical records, including railroad employees lists, and seniority records, and also historic pictures.<br />
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Update 22/05/14<br />
- The <a href="http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/">New Zealand Electronic Text Collection</a> tell me that reference works are their most used, including<a href="http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-PraDict.html"> A Grammar and Dictionary of the Samoan Language, with English and Samoan vocabulary</a> (which is linked to from thousands of different sources about New Zealand culture, and <a href="http://www.rqna.net/qna/qmuhpu-is-there-a-verb-meaning-ldquo-to-come-back-from-fishing-without-any-fish-rdquo.html">discussions on translation</a>), <a href="http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-corpus-WH1.html">New Zealand in the First World War</a> (which is linked to from various history and <a href="http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=645201.10">genealogy sites</a>) and <a href="http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-corpus-WH2.html">The Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War</a> (which is also popularly linked to online, including in <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/25m0dq/iama_92_year_old_new_zealand_wwii_veteran_and/">reminiscing personal postings from soldiers who served, talking about the war on social media</a>).<br />
- The <a href="http://www.otago.ac.nz/library">University of Otago Library</a> provided me with a very detailed overview of the issues they face (thanks!). They are in the process of developing a repository to manage all of their digital collections that they want to curate, and the pilot will be live by November, but for the moment, they have a variety of different sites on which you can see digitised material, showing again the complex relationship of databases and content which many institutions have. For example, they have <a href="http://otago.ourheritage.ac.nz/">OUR Heritage</a> which is a window across some collections. Some records are pulled from OUR Heritage and displayed via <a href="http://www.otago.ac.nz/library/specialcollections/exhibitions.html#past">Special Collections Online Exhibitions</a>. There also is <a href="http://hockensnapshop.ac.nz/">Hocken Collections</a> who had their reader access collection digitised and made available online. They track this via Google Analytics, and also watching their own server stats: and these do not in any way match up. Google does not capture when someone goes directly to a file, so Analytics reports just a fraction of the over a million hits in the past year that they can track on their server. They digitise on request, and respond to community demand, and are trying to prioritise the digitisation process. From Google Analytics, the most heavily used collections are the <a href="http://otago.ourheritage.ac.nz/collections/show/21">History of the University</a> and <a href="http://otago.ourheritage.ac.nz/collections/show/24">Botanical charts</a> (which belong to the Department of Botany at Otago and some are still used in the Labs. They digitised these, provided a copy for their use and deposited the originals in Hocken Collections.) The most popular items are “<a href="http://otago.ourheritage.ac.nz/items/show/5786">Key plan to Mr G.B. Shaw’s picture of Dunedin in 1851</a>” which is mentioned on various <a href="http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nzbound/ow.htm">genealogical sites</a> online: a Painting “<a href="http://otago.ourheritage.ac.nz/items/show/5435">Sangro, a rosary of olive trees, landscape of windswept manuka</a>.” which appears linked from some other <a href="http://digitalnz.org/records/30046783">major federated collections online</a> and a printed map of Rome “<a href="http://otago.ourheritage.ac.nz/items/show/5977">Mappa della campagna Romana del 1547</a>” which is a commonly consulted map (there are various copies of it in libraries worldwide) so those searching online to see it must find the freely available copy here. Melissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-51588607108064600542014-04-24T11:25:00.003+01:002014-04-24T11:25:55.181+01:00Inaugural PreparationsSo, my inaugural lecture is coming up in a few weeks, and I'm starting to write it now, nervously... The <a href="https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/inaugural-lecture-professor-melissa-terras-ucl-information-studies-dis-tickets-9177699747">event has already sold out</a>, but will be streamed online live, and there is also another lecture theatre at UCL that it will be shown live in (The Terras Terrace?). <a href="http://tawawa.org/ark">Dr Rudolf Ammann</a>, UCLDH's designer at large, has kindly provided some visuals for me... here's the promotional flyer.<br />
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I plan to write the lecture out long hand once it is done, and of course, you will be the first to know about it (after I've given it...)<br />
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<br />Melissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-20922867255917240772014-02-27T11:58:00.000+00:002014-02-27T12:06:14.458+00:00Making it Free, Making it Open - Transcribe Bentham, publications, and unexpected benefitsA few years ago I made a commitment to Open Access - in an attempt <a href="http://melissaterras.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/is-blogging-and-tweeting-about-research.html">to reach a wider audience for my academic work</a>, and to tell people about research as it was happening (not three of four years later once it was locked behind a paywalled journal). I'm really pleased to have something new to talk about once again, and this time I can share it with you <i>before it even comes out in print</i>. Allied to this are a few spin offs from the project in question - <a href="http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/">Transcribe Bentham</a>, which aims to make the work of the <a href="http://www.transcribe-bentham.da.ulcc.ac.uk/td/JB/107/020/001">the philosopher and reformer, Jeremy Bentham</a> (1748 – 1832) available via a<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
double award-winning collaborative transcription initiative, which is
digitising and making available digital images of Bentham’s unpublished
manuscripts through a platform known as the ‘<a href="http://www.transcribe-bentham.da.ulcc.ac.uk/td/Transcribe_Bentham">Transcription Desk</a>‘. There, you can access the material and—just as importantly—transcribe the material, to help the work of <a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/">UCL’s Bentham Project</a>,
and further improve access to, and searchability of, this enormously
important collection of historical and philosophical material. [<a href="http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/">Link</a>]</blockquote>
First, the article: a pre-publication version which will be published in April in a special issue of the <i>International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing</i>, from Edinburgh University Press. In it, Tim Causer and myself talk about crowdsourcing transcriptions of Bentham's writings, the impact of Transcribe Bentham on the work of the Bentham Project, and the use of volunteers to help us with tasks traditionally associated with lone academic researchers. We give particular examples of new Bentham material transcribed by volunteers dealing with the subjects of
political economy, animal welfare, and convict transportation and the
history of early New South Wales, which has further clarified and widened our understanding of certain aspects of Bentham’s thought. You can go and get it here:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span id="short_list_1354678"><span class="person_name">Causer, T</span>. and Terras, M. M.</span> (2014) "Crowdsourcing Bentham: beyond the traditional boundaries of academic history". <i>International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing</i>, 8 (1) (In press). <a href="http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1354678/1/Causer_Terras_IJHAC.pdf">Link to PDF version in UCL Repository</a>. </blockquote>
I'm pleased it is up there quickly, and openly, and free for all to see. Its one of the aims of the Transcribe Bentham project, of which I am only a <a href="http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/people/">small cog</a>, to make Bentham's writings more well known, accessible, and searchable, over the long term. Allied to that is the ethos in involving a wider group of society in contributing to the project - this is about "co-creation" (as it gets called in Gallery, Library, Archive, and Museum (GLAM) circles) rather than academic broadcast. It would make no sense for us to take the product of something developed in online crowdsourcing, and lock it back in the academic ivory tower, given we asked for help to understand and find the material in the first place. We're finding our way with how to credit transcribers along the way (some of them are named in the article above, and we did ask their permission to do so) and to carry out crowdsourcing in as ethical a way as possible (something which is also of concern to <a href="http://www.trevorowens.org/2012/05/the-crowd-and-the-library/">others figuring out crowdsourcing</a> in GLAM as we go). All in all, open access here is part of the Transcribe Bentham product: make it free, make it open. <br />
<br />
And future doors line up ahead of us to walk through. This week we hit over 7000 manuscripts transcribed via the Transcription Desk, and a few months ago we passed the 3 million words of transcribed material mark. So we now have a body of digital material with which to work, and make available, and to a certain extent play with. We're pursuing various research aims here - from both a Digital Humanities side, and a Bentham studies side, and a Library side, and Publishing side. We're working on making canonical versions of all images and transcribed texts available online. Students in UCL Centre for Publishing are (quite literally) <a href="https://twitter.com/Benthamcookbook">cooking up plans</a> from what has been found in the previously untranscribed Bentham material, unearthed via Transcribe Bentham. What else can we do with this material? <br />
<br />
And other doors open. I've talked before about <a href="http://melissaterras.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/on-making-use-and-reuse-in-digital.html">reuse of the code</a> behind Transcribe Bentham - in use by the Public Record Office of Victoria, and parts of it (the Transcription Desk bar, since you ask) has since been used in the <a href="http://dh.tcd.ie/letters1916/">Letters of 1916 </a>transcription
project, too. We're also in talks with other collections who are
thinking of doing crowdsourcing, and who may use the Transcription Desk:
watch this space. Again, this is part of the same trajectory: make it
free, make it available. <br />
<br />
And other doors open. The development of systems to read handwritten material (more advanced than Optical Character Recognition, which to date really only has success on printed, clean material) depends on having datasets of images of handwritten texts, plus checked validated transcripts of their content in a useful format, to train and test systems and algorithms. Transcribe Bentham is pleased to be part of the <a href="http://transcriptorium.eu/">Transcriptorium</a> project (as am I!), looking into Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technologies, and a set of 433 pages of Bentham's manuscripts plus the crowdsourced transcriptions are this year making up the "<a href="http://www.transcriptorium.eu/~htrcontest/">ICFHR 2014 Handwritten Text Recognition on the tranScriptorium Dataset</a>" - to evaluate and test the current algorithms on Handwritten Text Recognition. How great is that. Did any of <a href="http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/about/">us sitting round the table</a> first discussing crowdsourcing and Bentham back in 2009 ever expect we (and our transcribers) would be creating a benchmarked dataset in which to train handwriting recognition technologies? No. It is wonderful. <br />
<br />
Create. Involve. Research. Make it available. Some of this by planning, some of this by happy accident. I now see the Open Access ethos underpinning all of this, and driving forward the direction of my research into the use of computing in culture, heritage, and the humanites. So, enjoy the article. We have access to and did and found out some cool stuff, you know - and we made it freely available. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Melissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-70299694782859396922014-02-05T11:49:00.000+00:002014-02-05T11:49:11.468+00:00Male, Mad and Muddleheaded: Academics in Children's Picture Books<h3>
Academics in children's picture books tend to be elderly, old men, who work in science, called Professor SomethingDumb. Why does this matter? </h3>
<br />
Like many academics, I love books. Like many book-loving parents, I'm keen to share that love with my young children. Two years ago, I chanced upon two <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/32750817951/dr-seuss-did-i-ever-tell-you-how-lucky-you-are">different</a> <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/32751036309/professor-wormbogs-research-methodology">professors</a> in children's books, in quick succession. Wouldn't it be a fun project, I thought, to see how academics, and universities, appear in children's illustrated books? This would function both as an excuse to buy more books (we do live in a golden age of second hand books, cheaply delivered to your front door) and to explain to my kids - now five and a half, and twins of three - what Mummy Actually Does.<br />
<br />
It turns out it's hard to search just for children's books, and picture
books, in library catalogues, but I combed through various electronic
library resources, as well as Amazon, eBay, LibraryThing, and Abe, to
dig up source material. I began to obsessively search the bookshelves of
kids books in friend's houses, and doctors and dentist and hospital
waiting rooms, whilst also keeping on the look out on our regular visits
to our local library: often academics appear in books without being named in the title, so dont turn up easily via electronic searches.
Parking my finds on a devoted <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/">Tumblr</a>
which was shared on social media, friends, family members, and total
strangers tweeted, facebooked, and emailed me to suggest additions.
People sidled up to me after invited guest lectures to whisper "I have a
good professor for you..." Two years on, I've no doubt still not found
all of the possible candidates, but new finds in my source material are
becoming less frequent. 101 books (or individual books from a series*)
and 108 academics, and a few specific mentions of university
architecture and systems later, its time to look at what results from a
survey of the representation of academics and academia in children's
picture books. <br />
<br />
<h3>
What are academics in children's books like? </h3>
The 108 academics found consist of 76 Professors, 21 Academic Doctors, 2 Students, 2 Lecturers, 1 Assistant Professor, 1 Child, 1 Astronomer, 1 Geographer, 1 Medical Doctor who undertakes research, 1 researcher, and 1 lab assistant. In general, the Academic Doctors tend to be crazy mad evil egotists ("It's <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/43298069674/if-youre-going-to-do-something-you-should-do-it">Dr Frankensteiner</a> - the maddest mad scientist on mercury!"), whilst the Professors tend to be kindly, but baffled, obsessive egg-<a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/33553618090/rocket-science-is-all-in-the-head-in-the">heads</a> who dont quite function <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/33511667196/normal-adults-dont-understand-academics-in">normally</a>. <br />
<br />
The academics are mostly (old, white) males. Out of the 108 found, only 9 are female: 90% of the identified academics are male, 8% are female, and 2% have no identifiable gender (there are therefore much fewer women in this cohort than in reality, where it is estimated that <a href="http://horizon-magazine.eu/article/qualified-women-still-opting-out-career-science-says-study_en.html">one third of senior research posts are occupied by women</a>). They are also nearly all caucasian: only two of those identified are people of colour: one <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/35229134497/finally-a-non-caucasian-academic-professor">Professor,</a> and one child who is so smart he is called <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/36584284529/prof-as-nickname-sounds-a-cool-thing-to-be-yeah">The Prof</a>: both are male: this is scarily close to the recent statistic that only <a href="http://events.ucl.ac.uk/event/event:xe-hobmesz1-pt3gqx/why-isnt-my-professor-black">0.4% of the UK professoriat are black</a>. 43% of those found in this corpus are are elderly men, 33% are middle aged (comprising of 27% male and 6% female, there are no elderly female professors, as they are all middle age or younger). The women are so lacking that the denoument of one whodunnit/ solve the mystery/ choose your own adventure book for slightly older children is that the <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/34845462873/this-is-an-interesting-one-for-older-children">professor they have been talking about was actually a woman</a>, and you didn't see that coming, did you? Ha!<br />
<br />
The earliest published academic in a children's book found was in <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/35229134497/finally-a-non-caucasian-academic-professor">1922</a> (although its probable that the real craze for featuring baffled old men came after the success of <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/34845801106/old-check-eccentric-check-white-check-male">Professor Branestawm</a>, which was a major international bestseller, first published in 1933, and not out of print since). The first woman Professor found is the amazing <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/32877620689/finally-a-female-academic-from-professor">Professor Puffendorf</a> - billed as "the world's greatest scientist" -, published in 1992, 70 years after the first male professor appears in a children's book. 70 years (although it is frustrating that the book really isn't about her, but what her jealous, male lab assistant gets up to in her lab when she goes off to a conference. More Puffendorf next time, please). There is also a more recent phenomenon of using a Professor as a framing device to suggest some gravitas to a book's subject, but the professor themselves <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/42092334250/the-mystery-professor-never-appears-but-leaves">does not appear</a> in any way within the text, so its impossible to say if they are male or female. Male Professors in children's books have appeared much more frequently over the past ten years: women not so much.<br />
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What areas do these fictional academics work in? (There is an entirely different genre of children's books covering the lives of <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/33490705161/einstein-has-no-luck-on-the-academic-job-market">real academics</a> - but that's for another obsessive compulsive mini research project). Here we identify the subject areas of the 108 academics: <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBgrhPcvrrVIUG3QY8Z8n2s3nCi7px8jcroS8LiPjV1SSZeog8RvAyhuU69oqOPNUjoAiVKEiPffTsuQsB2n60v4R6VZkP2y_379LHqwd0pLYxlgVyr9Kc_EnvRmq4qpvxDHFEJCx4rXg/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-02-01+at+14.02.14.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBgrhPcvrrVIUG3QY8Z8n2s3nCi7px8jcroS8LiPjV1SSZeog8RvAyhuU69oqOPNUjoAiVKEiPffTsuQsB2n60v4R6VZkP2y_379LHqwd0pLYxlgVyr9Kc_EnvRmq4qpvxDHFEJCx4rXg/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-02-01+at+14.02.14.png" /></a></div>
<br />
Most of the identified academics work in science, engineering and technology subjects. 31% work in some area of generic "science", 10% work in biology, a few in maths, paleontology, geography, and zoology, and lone academics in rocket science, veterinary science, astronomy, computing, medical research and oceanography. There is one prof who is a homeopath, and I wasnt sure whether to put them in STEM or Fiction, so I plumped for STEM as they seemed to be trying to see if <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/50184826620/professor-dash-hund-in-a-dose-of-dr-dog-by">homeopathy</a> worked (I like to presume all the academics here have proper qualifications, but who knows if fictional characters can buy professorships online these days). Subjects classed as Fictional were <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/43255939470/in-a-word-badass-alack-the-url-is-no-longer">serpentology</a>, <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/35786495320/dr-ernest-drake-dragonologist-and-chair-of-the">dragonology</a>, and <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/33501657932/merlin-is-alive-and-well-and-your-rather-scary">magic</a>. Arts, Humanities and Social Science subjects identified are archaeology (6% of the total), and linguistics, psychology, arts and theatre. 27% of those with an academic title make <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/34920082577/remember-the-days-when-your-profs-were-god-like">no reference</a> to what type of area they supposed to work in: they are generally just trying to <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/42379492020/professor-zoom-takes-academic-competition-to-its">take over the world</a>. Just out of interest, the female academics identify their subject areas as <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/43255939470/in-a-word-badass-alack-the-url-is-no-longer">serpentology</a>, <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/36584627012/you-go-girl-this-book-is-set-around-harvard">maths</a>, <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/35350825485/is-a-museum-scientist-an-academic-she-features">paleontology</a>, <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/35482283902/love-this-polymath-as-eco-warrior-throughout-the">ecology</a>, and <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/34845462873/this-is-an-interesting-one-for-older-children">three</a> <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/32877620689/finally-a-female-academic-from-professor">generic </a><a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/74482607174/shes-mad-bad-and-dangerous-to-know-well-is">scientists</a> (with two further <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/43298237467/love-this-role-model-number-1-professor">unknown</a> <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/43329202859/because-nothing-says-senior-academic-quite-like">subjects</a>), so its not as is the women are doing the "soft" subjects in children's books, when they actually appear. <br />
<br />
Not all of these academics featured are humans: 74% are human, 19% are animals, 4% are aliens, 2% are unknown, and 1% are <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/42777069395/so-there-we-have-it-train-your-brain-to-excel-in">vegetable</a>. There are no discernible trends regarding animals that are chosen to represent wisdom - its not like they are all owls - with three mice, three dogs, two toads, a kingfisher, a gorilla, a woodpecker, a pig, a crow, an owl, a dumbo octopus, a mole, a bumble bee, a shark, a cockroach, and a wooden bird. If you spot any defining similarities there, let me know.<br />
<br />
There are some other fun trends to note. 46% of those humans featured are bald (higher than the average percentage?) - no women are bald. 35% had very big, messy hair, and it seems to be that if you are in academia, you should be a bit disheveled, in general. 45% have white hair - but none of the women have white hair. 13% had ginger hair (higher than the average percentage?). 37% had moustaches, and 16% had beards (higher than the average percentage?) - but no women had facial hair. What they wore is also interesting:<br />
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Labcoats, suits (but not if you are female!) or safari suits (but not if you are female!) are the academic uniform <i>du jour</i>.<br />
<br />
The names given to the academics are telling, with the majority being less than complimentary: <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/45142466152/nothing-like-academic-all-nighters-and-pizza">Professor Dinglebat</a>, Professor <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/45142890036/the-rules-of-research-never-stop-never">P. Brain</a>, Professor <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/43298237467/love-this-role-model-number-1-professor">Blabbermouth</a>, Professor <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/42688560450/professor-bumblebrain-had-evidently-ignored-any">Bumblebrain</a>, Professor <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/42687739551/professor-muddlehead-depends-on-chemically">Muddlehead</a>, Professor <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/34843948965/professor-hogwash-might-be-professor-sniffs">Hogwash</a>, Professor <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/32948558137/professor-bumble-ignores-legislation-on-the">Bumble</a>, Professor <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/51585568947/professor-dumkopf-sets-out-his-methodology-in">Dumkopf</a>, Professor <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/45140989347/professor-nutter-is-obsessed-by-the-impact">Nutter</a>, and two different <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/43329883106/professor-potts-never-looks-at-the-reader-so">Professor</a> <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/74483176379/grounded-theory-in-action-professor-potts-in">Potts</a>. There is the odd professor with a name that alludes to intelligence: <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/34920777227/whatever-you-do-do-not-deviate-from-the">Professor I.Q</a>, <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/32749942777/in-the-octonauts-and-the-frown-fish-meomi">Professor Inkling</a>, <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/35350825485/is-a-museum-scientist-an-academic-she-features">Professor Wiseman</a>, but those are in the minority. <br />
<br />
What types of book are they featured in? 82% of the 101 books are fiction stories, and the theme of the stories tends to be "academic is out of touch with how the world works, with hilarious consequences" in the case of professors, or "is evil and wants to take over the world, but is thwarted by our plucky hero (never heroine)" in the case of doctors. 7% of the books are factual, using a fictional academic to explain how science or experiments work, and 1% are cookbooks. The remainder, 10%, are a curious genre I have called "tall tales" - where the fictional academic character is brought in to bring gravitas and explain something, but the <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/33553333927/professor-mole-leaves-no-stone-unturned-in">explanations are either fictional</a> or <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/34843948965/professor-hogwash-might-be-professor-sniffs">bordering on fiction</a>. Its a curious blend of science and fiction: they are not traditional stories, but work in a way which subverts the traditional children's science books, injecting fiction into the process (not very succesfully, in most cases). <br />
<br />
What can we draw from this? If you are going to be a fictional human academic in a children's book, you are most likely to be an elderly, old man, with big white hair, who wears a lab coat, has facial hair, works in science, and is called Professor SomethingDumb or Dr CrazyPants, featuring in a story about how you bumble around causing some type of chaos. Close your eyes and think of a Professor. Is <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/34920777227/whatever-you-do-do-not-deviate-from-the">this</a> what you see? Or <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/42124354118/its-the-look-we-all-aspire-to-this-season-in">this</a>? (One wonders how much well-circulated images of Einstein have perculated into the subconscious of writers and publishers to emerge as the obvious representation of an academic in children's illustrated books). <br />
<br />
<br />
<h3>
Universities in Children's Picture Books</h3>
What about the universities themselves? They dont feature as often as the academics associated with them - the focus of children's books is seldom about such an institution that will have an effect so far in the future of the reader, although some characters <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/50848438977/got-to-have-the-conversation-when-they-are">plan well ahead in advance</a>. Lectures, when depicted, are obviously <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/42688560450/professor-bumblebrain-had-evidently-ignored-any">very boring</a> and <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/75267418112/that-training-course-in-how-to-lecture-modestly">impenetrable</a>. University buildings are like <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/33554629127/uni-is-like-school-for-adults-in-castles-and">castle schools for grown ups</a> or <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/43745919819/a-rare-comment-on-university-estates-it-wouldnt">the site of secret underground lairs</a> or the <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/36374659305/because-the-most-important-building-on-campus-is">best holiday park ever</a>. There are a couple of sweet kids books from the USA that attempt to describe the university campus and rituals of specific actual colleges - <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/36584438615/an-a-z-of-college-life-in-b-is-for-baylor-by">Baylor University </a>and <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/42123859414/following-in-his-daddys-footsteps-this-is">Boston College</a>. But in general, the children's books revolve around the characters, rather than the fact they are in a university, per se.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Why is this relevant? </h3>
Obviously, this has been a bit of a fun project. Given the lengths gone to to gather this corpus of children's books, it is unlikely that any individual child would happen across all of the books noted. It's actually interesting to think how few children's picture or illustrated books feature academics or academia (at time of writing, Amazon lists 1.3 million books in its children's section, and 101* different books (or books series) were identified in this project). While no doubt there are other books out there not on the list, this has been a darn good crack at finding as many as possible, not only in the English Language. Professors and academic Doctors in children's books are a useful device on occasion, but really are not terribly frequent in the scheme of things.<br />
<br />
That said, the difference in gender, and how women and men are represented, and the underepresentation of those who are anything but white in children's books about academia, is shocking, especially given that <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/occams-corner/2014/jan/09/1?CMP=twt_gu">almost all scientific fields are still dominated by men, and women are frequently discriminated against</a> and although <a href="http://horizon-magazine.eu/article/qualified-women-still-opting-out-career-science-says-study_en.html">46% of all PhD graduates in the EU are female, only 1/3 of senior research posts are occupied by women</a>. At a time when researchers are asking <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25857895">if available toys can influence later career choice</a>, can the same be said about books? At a time when it is becoming <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alicia-chang/bridging-the-gender-gap-encouraging-girls-in-stem_b_4508787.html?utm_content=buffer1512c&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer">the parents' job to encourage girls into science and technology</a> - and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/occams-corner/2013/oct/18/people-in-science-engineering">to educate all children about science and engineering careers</a> - does the lack of anything but white, old men as academics in children's books reinforce the impossibility of anyone other than those making a contribution? At a time when the leaky pipe of academia shows that <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2012/may/24/why-women-leave-academia?CMP=twt_gu">women are leaving in droves at every level of the academic ladder</a>, should we be worried that there are no female academics in children's books above middle age? <a href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/maria-do-mar-pereira/dangerous-laughter-mocking-of-gender-studies-in-academia">Laugh at this</a> analysis if you will, but sociological analysis of other children's books has shown that<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
there is a hidden language or code inscribed in children’s books, which
teaches kids to view inequalities within the division of labor as a
“natural” fact of life – that is, as a reflection of the inherent
characteristics of the workers themselves. Young readers learn (without
realizing it, of course) that some... are simply better
equipped to hold manual or service jobs, while other[s]... ought to
be professionals. Once this code is acquired by pre-school children... it becomes exceedingly difficult to unlearn. As adults, then,
we are already predisposed to accept the hierarchical, caste-based
system of labor that characterizes the... workplace. [<a href="http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2013/12/28/inequality-and-segregation-in-the-workplace-lessons-from-richard-scarrys-what-do-people-do-all-day/">link</a>]</blockquote>
Another<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/may/06/gender-imbalance-children-s-literature"> analysis</a> of 6000 children's books published between 1900 and 2000 suggests the gender disparity, and the lack of women characters, sends children a message that "women and girls occupy a less important role in society than men or boys": <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The messages conveyed through representation of males and females in
books contribute to children's ideas of what it means to be a boy, girl,
man, or woman. The disparities we find point to the symbolic
annihilation of women and girls, and particularly female animals, in
20th-century children's literature, suggesting to children that these
characters are less important than their male counterparts... The disproportionate numbers of males in central roles may
encourage children to accept the invisibility of women and girls and to
believe they are less important than men and boys, thereby reinforcing
the gender system. [<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/may/06/gender-imbalance-children-s-literature">link</a>]</blockquote>
As for the diversity issue - in general, children's books have been shown to be <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/06/25/193174358/as-demographics-shift-kids-books-stay-stubbornly-white?sc=tw&cc=share">stubbornly white</a>, even though "children of all ethnicities and races need role models of all
ethnicities and races. That breeds normalcy and acceptance, and it's
good for everybody. [<a href="http://jezebel.com/childrens-books-are-still-really-really-white-582852237">link</a>]" What we are seeing here in this corpus, then, is a microcosm of what is happening in children's literature in general, although played out alongside an ongoing debate about the involvement of women and minorities in the academy. That doesn't make it ok, mind. <br />
<br />
There are wider nuances, though, that dont just involve headcounts of men and women, black and white. <a href="http://ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/project.html">Children's perceptions of scientists</a>
have been shown to be based on various stereotypes, and the stereotypes
of academics presented and promulgated in these books is the product of
writers and publishers who, taken together, quite clearly <i>don't think academics are much cop</i>,
which will perculate back to those who read the books, or have the
books read to them. Academics are routinely shown as individuals
obsessed with one topic who are either baffled and harmless and
ineffectual, or malicious, vindictive and psychotic, and although these
can be affectionate sketches ("bless! look at the clueless/psychopathic
genius!") academics routinely come across as out of touch wierdos - and
what is that teaching kids about universities? In this age of proving
academic "impact", it might be not so bad for us to be able to show we
were relevant to society? That there is more to academia than science? Or for the kids books I show my kids to have
more positive and integrated representations of professors and
academics? Perhaps this is not the role of kids books though, and I
should just be telling my kids my own tales of academic derring-do. <br />
<br />
I
mean, who would spend two years gathering a corpus of kids lit for fun,
and then count how many beards the people in the books had. Wierdo.
Wierdos, the lot of them.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Top Children's Picture Books Featuring Academia </h3>
Out of all of the books found in this project, there are some which have been read and read again by my boys, and some which got tossed aside as soon as they arrived. There is also one I adore, but the boys are not so interested in. If you wanted to read some children's books which feature academics and universities, you could do worse than start with the following:<br />
<br />
1. Dr. Dog, by Babette Cole, Red Fox, London, 1994. Dr Dog is a medical Doctor, but who also does research. It has one fantastic page where <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/36372292781/dr-dog-looks-like-he-knows-how-to-work-the-room">Dr Dog goes to conference in Brazil to give a talk about bone marrow</a>, and that one page has explained where Mummy goes when she goes in the airplane, on many occasions. Very useful. For age 2+<br />
<br />
2. Professor Puffendorf’s Secret Potions. Robin Tzannes, Korky Paul, Oxford University Press, 1992. The most read story in our house about a Professor. <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/32877620689/finally-a-female-academic-from-professor">Prof P</a> goes off to a conference and her lazy lab assistant wants to steal her secret potions for himself... (I would have preferred to see more about her, though). 2+<br />
<br />
3. Mahalia Mouse Goes to College, by John Lithgow, illustrated by Igor Oleynikov, Simon and Schuster, 2007, New York. <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/36584627012/you-go-girl-this-book-is-set-around-harvard">Mahalia</a> is a brave little mouse who wants to go to Harvard and study maths, and succeeds. Uplifting. 3+<br />
<br />
4. The Rooftop Rocket Party, by Roland Chambers, Anderson Press, 2002. <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/33553618090/rocket-science-is-all-in-the-head-in-the">Doctor Gass</a> is a rocket scientist, who doesnt believe a little boy that the water coolers on top of the New York skyline are capable of going to the moon... Delightful.3+<br />
<br />
5. Professor Astro Cat’s Frontiers of Space, by Dominic Walliman and Ben Newman. Flying Eye Books, 2013. This is a lovely, well illustrated, detailed and well written kids introduction to astronomy, which is explained by Professor <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/71336718471/professor-astro-cat-in-professor-astro-cats">Astro Cat</a>. Nice paper too, bibliophiles. For age 5+. <br />
<br />
6. Professor Wormbog in Search for the Zipperump-a-Zoo (Mercer Mayer Classic Collectible: Little Monsters), by Mercer Mayer, Golden Pr. 1976. Professor <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/32751036309/professor-wormbogs-research-methodology">Wormbog</a> is searching for the only thing he hasnt got in his zoology collection... perhaps they are right under his nose all along? 2+<br />
<br />
7. Mungo and the Spiders from Space. By Timothy Knapman, illustrated by Adam Stower. 2007, Puffin, London. A rollicking space adventure about a little boy who gets an old book about an <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/43298069674/if-youre-going-to-do-something-you-should-do-it">evil doctor</a>... and steps into the book... 4+<br />
<br />
8. Any of the Octonaut books, by Meomi. Now a popular tv programme, the Octonauts started off as a book series. <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/32749942777/in-the-octonauts-and-the-frown-fish-meomi">Professor Inkling</a>
shows how he can work with others to, ya know, deliver impact in the
field etc etc. The Meomi books (Harper Collins) are delightful, with
lots of detail that demand rereading - start of with the Octonauts
Explore the Great Big Ocean (but steer clear of the tv spin off books
published by Simon and Schuster - they arent a patch on the illustrated
books by Meomi). Much, much loved in our house. 2+<br />
<br />
9. The <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/33581431144/pre-tenure-dr-xargle-eschews-socratic-method-for">Dr Xargle</a> and <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/33581893306/post-tenure-professor-xargle-has-clearly-not">Professor Xargle</a> books (he gets promoted at some point, evidently). By Jeanne Willis and Tony Ross, different publishers. Xargle explains various things about human society, or science, to his university class of aliens, with hilarious consequences. 3+<br />
<br />
10. Professor Twill’s Travels, written and illustrated by Bob Gumpertz. Ward Lock Limited, London, 1968. A sweet tale of <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/51311942533/professor-twill-ponders-the-state-of-the#notes">Professor Twill</a>, travelling the world to collect animals. The illustrations in this book are very much of the era - it's just beautiful. A forgotten classic. 1+<br />
<br />
And one just for the adults: Jack Dawe and The Professors, Bedtime Stories for Technically Inclined Little Ones, 1964, illustrated by Brian Green. (By "Uncle B", no press listed). An Oxford Professor wrote down and vanity published the tales of academia he told his nieces and nephews. They are <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/33511667196/normal-adults-dont-understand-academics-in">absolutely</a> <a href="http://academiainchildrenspicturebooks.tumblr.com/post/33510422224/well-its-one-way-to-get-tenure-in-jack-dawe">hilarious</a>. <br />
<br />
Happy reading. And if you find any more academics or universities that I dont know about in children's picture books... do let me know!<br />
<br />
<br />
*There were a few characters that appear in series of
books, for example Professor Branestawm, Dr Xargle, and Professor
Inkling in Octonauts. Only one book from each series was counted: if all
the books from series were included, there would be over 140 books in
total. Please note, none of the spin offs from the children's film <a href="http://monstersuniversity.com/edu/">Monsters University</a> were included in this analysis, as we're dealing here with things that started as books, rather than spin offs, and it would take over the corpus, and, hmmm, that deserves an analysis of its very own... uh-oh...Melissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-76839830289188128492013-11-27T20:59:00.000+00:002013-11-28T12:09:56.660+00:00I'm not going to edit your £10,000 pay-to-open-access-publish monograph series for youOver the last three or four months, I’ve been talking with an academic publisher – one of the big names that most people have heard of – who approached me to talk about launching a series in Digital Humanities. Now, Digital Humanities is quite fashionable at the moment, with many presses launching books and series about digital arts, culture, humanities and heritage, but goodness knows there is a need for a series that would publish only academic monographs in the area, rather than text books like <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Digital-Humanities-Practice-Claire-Warwick/dp/1856047660/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1385585257&sr=1-1&keywords=digital+humanities+in+practice">this</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Defining-Digital-Humanities-A-Reader/dp/1409469638/ref=tmm_pap_title_0">this</a>. I’ve been enjoying talking through the issues of publication with the press in question, and I asked <a href="https://twitter.com/nowviskie">Bethany Nowviskie</a> to join me as co-editor, hoping to work together and thinking about how we could do something that suits our academic neck of the woods: offering good digital as well as print content, and tackling the open access monograph issue in as brave a way as possible, committing to delivering a high quality print publication that would also be available in open access too.<br />
<br />
Last week they emailed me with their new company policy on open access. They are fully committed to offering high quality open access versions of their high quality academic books. But to produce open access versions, authors would be required to pay £10,000 (with applicable taxes added on top) to cover the “number of costs” that are involved to “produce” these titles. <br />
<br />
I believe – at a time where rumours are flying that the next Research Excellent Framework will require <a href="http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/year/2013/201316/">all submissions to be available in open access</a>, including monographs (although, please see later update at the end of the post about this) – that placing a £10,000 cost-to-publish fee onto monographs is iniquitous and will exclude many, if not most, early career scholars in the humanities from publishing their books in open access, as well as excluding any academic who is not at a very rich institution who has the resources to meet this publisher’s <strike>ransom</strike> demand. (There's an excellent <a href="http://hybridpublishing.org/2013/11/open-access-funding-bunz-silent-revolution-algorithms/">blog post by Mercedes Bunz</a> which demonstrates this very point). This will have deleterious effects on humanities academic career progression, as the monograph is still seen to be the proof of academic excellence (even if “just print” will no longer “count”.) I believe that this stance by publishers to place the costs of publishing open access monographs onto humanities academics (in particular) is perfidious, and the only way we can counteract it is to stop engaging with presses who behave in this manner, refusing to submit manuscripts to them, but also, refusing to peer review manuscripts for them, and refusing to edit manuscripts – or a series of manuscripts - for them.<br />
<br />
So I'm not going to edit their £10,000 pay-to-open-access-publish monograph series. And here is my reply to them. I’m not sure about the legalities of talking about this, so I have stripped out any identifying information regarding the individual publisher to safeguard myself. I would very much welcome your comments. <br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Dear (doesn’t matter which particular publisher, this could be directed to the whole shower of those who are asking for £10,000 for pay to open access publish a humanities monograph). <br />
<br />
I understand that you are operating in a world where traditional publishing mechanisms and relationships have been turned on their heads. I understand that you have revenues to make to cover your costs, and profits to report to shareholders. I understand that, given a lot of authors from now on will have to provide open access versions of their research, you see this as an opportunity to further extend your profits. But I cannot understand the maths involved in calculating that it will cost £10,000 to turn a ready-for-print PDF proof into an ebook (seriously, I've been round the block a few times in book production, and that's some hourly rate those folks are charging you). You have looked at the £2,000 per academic journal paper model for open access in the sciences, and simply multiplied it and stuck it onto what you think is an humanities equivalent: a monograph equals about five journal papers, right? It would be more honest for you to say: we are charging £10,000 to offset the open access copy against loss of potential revenue for book sales. I understand that this is a concern for you, of course I do, and it would be better to say this up front. <br />
<br />
But even with this concern, I do not see that humanities authors are the people you should be targeting to make a profit.<br />
<br />
The £10,000 cost for open access is not a commitment to open access at all. It is is a shield behind which you can keep open access away from those who might harm your profit margin. But think of the poor humanities academic who *has* to publish their work in open access. What are they going to do? Turn to their institution? Only the best ranked institutions in the world will be able to cover their costs: are you seriously saying that only those in the top universities worldwide are welcome to publish open access with you? Even within those institutions, only the top ranked individuals with prior grant income would have such a request entertained: here's a secret which you probably haven't figured out: most humanities faculties aren't rolling in money. So should aspiring book writers get the £10k from grant income? But you are applying a model from the sciences that doesnt apply to the humanities: in the UK the average Russell Group humanities academic brings around your cost for open access in grant income a year, and funding councils who have had their own incomes slashed cannot expect to prop up the publishing industry. Some have suggested that the £10,000 is seen as an "investment in self" where individuals would seriously pony up the £10,000 from their own meagre funds (read: credit cards), in the hope that they would recoup this through promotion, tenure, etc. Its a huge gamble to take, at a time when many - including most early career scholars - are exhausted from carrying the student debt albatross round their necks. As a result, the numbers publishing open access with you will be few and far between. With your "commitment" to open access, you will still be able to publish print editions for those who do not care about securing an open access copy. There's your open access commitment right there - you are more likely to never, ever have to publish an open access volume, even though you have a "policy", as it is just not achievable for all but the independently wealthy. And academic success for all just moves that step further away again. Hurrah for building the pristine ring-fenced arena that no-one can ever use, unless they bring their own polo horse! *snort*. It's just odious. <br />
<br />
I know that my list of suggestions for pursuing an open access monograph series in Digital Humanities were not usual (just to recap, I asked for: the print book for sale, with full contents available for free in an open access digital version, with a creative commons license to be agreed with each individual author (some of them might allow commercial reuse, such as CC-BY, some of them might be more conservative going for ND). This would be Diamond Open Access -so full peer review process, item available free in digital form, but no "author pays" model, and the resulting book should be published in various ebook formats, with no digital rights management (DRM). The author should retain copyright. Ideas for offsetting costs and potential lost revenue include lowering the level of royalty payments, or increasing the point at which the publication will start to recoup costs, depending on a realistic cost model, which we could help work out.) I'll also point out that I have never once asked for payment in any of this (and just for math's sake: what proportion of that £10,000 per open access book will go to the series editors? Oh that's right, none). So you expect to use my contacts, and to use my time, and for me to help feed into a exclusionary model that keeps your wheels turning, that takes money from institutions, or grants, or individuals, and to do that for you without even listening to anything I have been saying about the need for open access in the humanities, particularly within our community, or what we can do to fix – or at least experiment with - the existing model to be in everyone's favour?<br />
<br />
The open access agenda is a huge issue in Digital Humanities. It is at the heart of the discipline: doing things in the open, experimenting, being the voice for the humanities in the digital age, showing people how it is done. Digital Humanities is big business at the moment, as can be witnessed by the explosion of Digital Humanities titles published in the past year alone (which is why you are talking to me, after all). Goodness knows we need more research monographs to come out that give people the space to seriously consider and present their research ideas amongst all these textbooks. But this can only be done by operating within the research modes of the community. We could have committed to doing a trial of, say, 5 or 10 books that would be printed with diamond open access too, and being absolutely open and honest about the costs and the revenues and the potential losses and gains, and really led the way in a discussion about where open access monograph publishing goes, and what works, and what doesnt, and what the realistic costs of producing open access research to a high standard is. We would have been famous, we would have sold books, we would have attracted the best and brightest minds with the most brilliant texts, no matter what their bank balance was. As it is, your £10,000 (plus taxes) seems entirely one-size-only-fits-you, jumping on the bandwagon of a scared publishing industry whose fear is contagious, copying an approach which doesnt work for anyone, but allows you to have a policy that will never actually have to be exercised. I'm sad, as I see this as a missed opportunity for us to work together. <br />
<br />
I am at a stage in my career where I do not have to take on anything that I do not want to do, or do not agree with. I am at a stage in my career where I should be sticking up for what I think is right, and also looking out for early careers scholars coming up behind me. I am uncomfortable in putting my name to a Digital Humanities series that touts a £10,000 pay to publish open access policy as fair or egalitarian. I'm not going to edit your £10,000 pay-to-open-access-publish monograph series. I doubt that any leading figure in our field would, but I wish you well in finding the person to take this book series forward.<br />
<br />
I hope your book series in Digital Humanities is a success, I really do. Its been a pleasure scoping out what a book series could have looked like, especially with the challenges that face us in the digital environment. But I am left frustrated that we could have done so much together. Please do get in touch in the future, when this £10,000 open access model doesn't work for you, when you may like to - or have to - be braver.</blockquote>
<br />
<b>Update 28/11/2013: </b>Since posting last night, this has gone a little... viral. With the result that, ring-ring! that's HEFCE calling (via a tweet from <a href="https://twitter.com/ersatzben">Ben Johnson</a>, thanks Ben) to point out the current state of affairs on the requirements for open access in the next REF. This is sketched out in <a href="http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/hefce/content/pubs/2013/201316/Consultation%20on%20open%20access%20in%20the%20post-2014%20Research%20Excellence%20Framework.pdf">paragraphs 46-50 of this policy document</a>. So there wont be a requirement in the next ref for open access, but their view is "that open access publication for monographs and books is likely <br />
to be achievable in the long term".<br />
<br />
Obviously, if I had been able to find this (rather than the rumours) this would have tempered a couple of sentences in my blog post above, but only a couple, so I'm not going to retool it. The fact remains that open access monographs are on the horizon, and that publishers are attempting to profiteer from this without any adequate costing model as to how to achieve them. I'm not happy about being any part of that, and will not give up my time, advice, and hard work to support a model which excludes many from taking part in making their work available via open access. Melissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-58235831034477440482013-10-15T07:53:00.000+01:002013-10-23T15:19:54.070+01:00For Ada Lovelace Day – Father Busa’s Female Punch Card Operatives15th October 2013 is <a href="http://findingada.com/about/">Ada Lovelace Day</a> – the annual celebration of women in science, technology, engineering and maths, named after <a href="http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/onlinestuff/stories/ada_lovelace.aspx">Ada Lovelace</a>, the first computer programmer. Working with Charles Babbage in 1840, Lovelace understood the significance of his Analytical Engine (a machine that can conduct a number of different functions, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) and its implications for computational method. She saw that via the punched card input device the Analytical Engine opened up a whole new opportunity for designing machines that could manipulate symbols rather than just numbers. Lovelace attempted to draw together romanticism and rationality to create a ‘poetical science’ that allowed mathematics and computing to explore the world around us, recognizing the potential for a move away from pure calculation to computation, and possessing a vision that foretold how computing could be used in creative areas such as music and literature.<br />
<br />
It seems apposite on Ada Lovelace day to look at some female punchcard operators from the very first days of available electronic computation, working on one of the first "poetical science" projects in "Humanities Computing". From 1949, an Italian Jesuit priest called <a href="http://www.osservatoreromano.va/portal/dt?JSPTabContainer.setSelected=JSPTabContainer%2FDetail&last=false%3D&path=%2Fnews%2Fcultura%2F2011%2F184q11-Lettore-fermati----morto-padre-Busa.html&title=Lettore+fermati!+%C3%83%C2%88+morto+padre+Busa&locale=en">Father Roberto Busa</a> (November 13, 1913 – August 9, 2011) pioneered the use of computing for linguistic and literary analysis, teaming up with IBM to produce an <a href="http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/it/index.age">index of the works of St Thomas Aquinas</a>. Thomas Aquinas wrote some 9 million words of medieval Latin, and so Busa’s project to index his works via computational methods took over 30 years, being one of the earliest and most ambitious projects in the field which is now called <a href="http://adho.org/">Digital Humanities</a>. <br />
<br />
To produce an index, the works of St Thomas Aquinas had to be encoded onto punchcards, and Marco Passarotti, from the <a href="http://centridiricerca.unicatt.it/dicdr-centridiricerca/circse_index.html?rdeLocaleAttr=en">CIRCSE Research Centre</a>, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy (where the <a href="http://itreebank.marginalia.it/"><i>Index Thomisticus</i> Treebank</a> project is hosted), explains how this happened: <br />
<blockquote>
Once, I was told by father Busa that he was used to choose young women for punching cards on purpose, because they were more careful than men. Further, he chose women who did not know Latin, because the quality of their work was higher than that of those who knew it (the latter felt more secure while typing the texts of Thomas Aquinas and, so, less careful). These women were working on the Index Thomisticus, punching the texts on cards provided by IBM. Busa had created a kind of "school for punching cards" in Gallarate. That work experience gave these women a professionally transferable and documented skill attested to by Father Busa himself.</blockquote>
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Update! (23/1013): We now know the name of the woman top left: Livia Canestraro. She also appears in many of the pictures below. <br />
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Livia Canestraro<br />
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Livia Canestraro, above and below.<br />
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Update! (23/1013): We now know the name of the woman back left: Rosetta Rossi Bertolli. Livia Canestraro is bottom right, and below. <br />
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Update! (23/1013): We now know the name of the woman second from the left: Gisa Crosta.<br />
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<span id="goog_1086202955"></span><span id="goog_1086202956"></span><br />
These previously unpublished images come from the archive of Father Busa and date from the late 1950s and early 1960s. Taken in Gallarate, Italy, they show the ranks of women involved in encoding and checking the punchcard content of Thomas Aquinas’ works. The women can also be seen demonstrating the technologies to visiting dignitaries, and overseeing the loading of the punchcards into the mainframe. <br />
<br />
We don’t know the names of these women: further research and enquiries are ongoing to try to establish their identities, and their role in the project. However, it shouldn’t be that surprising to us that women were so important in Father Busa’s pioneering computing project: in the early 1960s <a href="http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/2013/10/computer-programming-used-to-be-womens-work/">computer programmers were commonly women</a>. It’s pleasing to show on Ada Lovelace Day how important women were to one of the first projects in my academic field - look at the scale of the operation! - although further research is needed to uncover the role and responsibilities of women in this project: the majority of them seen here are doing data entry, albeit in a skilled and new format. The project certainly could not have happened without their input. <br />
<br />
The images shown here are kindly made available under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/">Creative Commons CC-BY-NC</a> license by permission of CIRCSE Research Centre, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy. For further information, or to request permission for reuse, please contact Marco Passarotti, on marco.passarotti AT unicatt.it, or by post: Largo Gemelli 1, 20123 Milan, Italy. This year is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Father Busa, which will be celebrated with a workshop in Sofia on the <a href="http://www.bultreebank.org/ACRH-3/">Annotation of Corpora for Research in the Humanities</a>. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Melissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-76369567471586525732013-07-23T18:06:00.000+01:002013-07-23T18:18:44.596+01:00Digital Humanities in works of literature?This post finds me jetlagged and happily worn out after my trip over the pond to the <a href="https://ocs.usask.ca/conf/index.php/sdse/sdse13">Social, Digital, Scholarly Editing</a> conference in Saskatoon, followed in quick succession by <a href="http://dh2013.unl.edu/">Digital Humanities 2013</a> in Lincoln, Nebraska. 10 days, 6 flights, 2 countries, 2 conferences, 2 papers, 1 panel session, 2 chaired meetings and 3 posters later, I made my way home yesterday and decided not to work on the plane home (shock! horror!) but to treat myself to a nice novel. I picked up "Her Fearful Symmetry" by Audrey Niffenegger, and happily battered through it whilst airbourne - laughing to myself when the following paragraphs emerged...<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Martin shook his head... "I used to work at the British Museum, translating ancient and classical languages. But now I work from home".<br />
<br />
Julia smiled. "So they bring the Rosetta Stone and all that here to you?"...<br />
<br />
"No, no. I don't often need the actual objects. They take photographs and make drawings - I use those. It's all become so much easier now everything is digital. I suppose someday they'll just wave the objects over the computer and it will sing the translation in Gregorian chant. But in the meantime they still need somebody like me to work it out." Martin paused, then said, rather shyly, "Do you like crossword puzzles?" (Niffenegger, A. (2009). Her Fearful Symmetry, p. 129. Scribner, New York.)</blockquote>
<br />
Later on in the book - set in and around Highgate Cemetry in London - the following is also said:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Perhaps we ought to make another sign to post at the gate," said James. "All uncertain grave owners please present yourselves during office hours when the staff can attend to your very time-consuming requests".<br />
<br />
"We <i>want </i>to help them," said Jessica. "But they <i>must</i> call ahead. These people who pitch up on the cemetery's doorstep wanting us to do a grave search while they wait - it's beyond anything."<br />
<br />
"They think the records are digitised," Robert said.<br />
<br />
Jessica laughed. "Ten years from now, perhaps. Evelyn and Paul are typing in the burial records as fast as their fingers can fly, but with one hundred and sixty-nine thousand entries -"<br />
<br />
"I know."</blockquote>
Its not the first time I've seen digital humanities/ digitisation creep into fiction - I remember some ludicrous database in Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code* - but it did make me think, people are starting to notice the kind of things we've been working on for (in my case) over a decade. It's great to see something that so relates to my doctoral work and published texts pop up in a work of fiction. Heck, the people at US immigration who ask you what you do when you say you are going to a conference might even understand what "Digital Humanities" means next! Maybe not. <br />
<br />
Anyone else stumble across mentions of computing, culture, humanities and heritage in fiction? If so, I might feel another Tumblr coming on. Uh-oh... <br />
<br />
* I dont have a copy of the Da Vinci Code, but the internet has provided an illegal online version, I copy the scene here. First one to send me a cease and desist and ask me to take it down wins. <br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
She
glanced at her guests. "What is this? Some kind of Harvard scavenger
hunt?" Langdon's laugh sounded forced. "Yeah, something like that."
Gettum paused, feeling she was not getting the whole story. Nonetheless,
she felt intrigued and found herself pondering the verse carefully.
"According to this rhyme, a knight did something that incurred
displeasure with God, and yet a Pope was kind enough to bury him in
London."<br />
<br />
Langdon nodded. "Does it ring any bells?"<br />
<br />
Gettum moved toward one of the workstations. "Not offhand, but let's see what we can pull up in the database."<br />
<br />
Over the past two decades, King's College Research Institute in
Systematic Theology had used optical character recognition software in
unison with linguistic translation devices to digitize and catalog an
enormous collection of texts – encyclopedias of religion, religious
biographies, sacred scriptures in dozens of languages, histories,
Vatican letters, diaries of clerics, anything at all that qualified as
writings on human spirituality. Because the massive collection was now
in the form of bits and bytes rather than physical pages, the data was
infinitely more accessible.<br />
<br />
Settling into one of the workstations, Gettum eyed the slip of paper and
began typing. "To begin, we'll run a straight Boolean with a few
obvious keywords and see what happens."<br />
<br />
"Thank you."<br />
<br />
Gettum typed in a few words:<br />
<br />
LONDON, KNIGHT, POPE<br />
<br />
As she clicked the SEARCH button, she could feel the hum of the massive
mainframe downstairs scanning data at a rate of 500 MB/sec. "I'm asking
the system to show us any documents whose complete text contains all
three of these keywords. We'll get more hits than we want, but it's a
good place to start."<br />
<br />
The screen was already showing the first of the hits now.<br />
<br />
Painting the Pope. The Collected Portraits of Sir Joshua Reynolds. London University Press.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Gettum shook her head. "Obviously not what you're looking for." She scrolled to the next hit.<br />
<br />
The London Writings of Alexander Pope by G. Wilson Knight.<br />
<br />
Again she shook her head.<br />
<br />
As the system churned on, the hits came up more quickly than usual.
Dozens of texts appeared, many of them referencing the
eighteenth-century British writer Alexander Pope, whose counter
religious, mock-epic poetry apparently contained plenty of references to
knights and London.<br />
<br />
Gettum shot a quick glance to the numeric field at the bottom of the
screen. This computer, by calculating the current number of hits and
multiplying by the percentage of the database left to search, provided a
rough guess of how much information would be found. This particular
search looked like it was going to return an obscenely large amount of
data.<br />
<br />
Estimated number of total hits: 2, 692<br />
<br />
"We need to refine the parameters further," Gettum said, stopping the
search. "Is this all the information you have regarding the tomb?
There's nothing else to go on?"<br />
<br />
Langdon glanced at Sophie Neveu, looking uncertain.<br />
<br />
This is no scavenger hunt, Gettum sensed. She had heard the whisperings
of Robert Langdon's experience in Rome last year. This American had been
granted access to the most secure library on earth – the Vatican Secret
Archives. She wondered what kinds of secrets Langdon might have learned
inside and if his current desperate hunt for a mysterious London tomb
might relate to information he had gained within the Vatican. Gettum had
been a librarian long enough to know the most common reason people came
to London to look for knights. The Grail.<br />
<br />
Gettum smiled and adjusted her glasses. "You are friends with Leigh
Teabing, you are in England, and you are looking for a knight." She
folded her hands. "I can only assume you are on a Grail quest."<br />
<br />
Langdon and Sophie exchanged startled looks.<br />
<br />
Gettum laughed. "My friends, this library is a base camp for Grail
seekers. Leigh Teabing among them. I wish I had a shilling for every
time I'd run searches for the Rose, Mary Magdalene, Sangreal,
Merovingian, Priory of Sion, et cetera, et cetera. Everyone loves a
conspiracy." She took off her glasses and eyed them. "I need more
information."<br />
<br />
In the silence, Gettum sensed her guests' desire for discretion was
quickly being outweighed by their eagerness for a fast result.<br />
<br />
"Here," Sophie Neveu blurted. "This is everything we know." Borrowing a
pen from Langdon, she wrote two more lines on the slip of paper and
handed it to Gettum.<br />
<br />
You seek the orb that ought be on his tomb. It speaks of Rosy flesh and seeded womb.<br />
<br />
Gettum gave an inward smile. The Grail indeed, she thought, noting the
references to the Rose and her seeded womb. "I can help you," she said,
looking up from the slip of paper. "Might I ask where this verse came
from? And why you are seeking an orb?"<br />
<br />
"You might ask," Langdon said, with a friendly smile," but it's a long story and we have very little time."<br />
<br />
"Sounds like a polite way of saying “mind your own business.”"<br />
<br />
"We would be forever in your debt, Pamela," Langdon said, "if you could find out who this knight is and where he is buried."<br />
<br />
"Very well," Gettum said, typing again. "I'll play along. If this is a
Grail-related issue, we should cross-reference against Grail keywords.
I'll add a proximity parameter and remove the title weighting. That will
limit our hits only to those instances of textual keywords that occur
near aGrail-related word."<br />
<br />
Search for: KNIGHT, LONDON, POPE, TOMB<br />
<br />
Within 100 word proximity of: GRAIL, ROSE, SANGREAL, CHALICE<br />
<br />
"How long will this take?" Sophie asked.<br />
<br />
"A few hundred terabytes with multiple cross-referencing fields?"
Gettum's eyes glimmered as she clicked the SEARCH key. "A mere fifteen
minutes."<br />
<br />
Langdon and Sophie said nothing, but Gettum sensed this sounded like an eternity to them.<br />
<br />
"Tea?" Gettum asked, standing and walking toward the pot she had made earlier. "Leigh always loves my tea."
</blockquote>
<br />Melissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-48032118740282109892013-05-27T14:51:00.001+01:002013-05-28T13:05:42.967+01:00On Changing the Rules of Digital Humanities from the InsideThere has been a lot
of talk recently about how my field – Digital Humanities – has to change. We
are too insular. We’re excluding those who want to partake in it. The structures
that have been built within the discipline preclude the type and means of
research which we claim to do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Issues of
gender, race, ethnicity, and class raise their heads. There are a few online
resources that exist which sum up these feelings: see “<a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uPtB0xr793V27vHBmBZr87LY6Pe1BLxN-_DuJzqG-wU/edit?authkey=CPDaqs0J#heading=h.z1yea0vuq550">Toward an Open DigitalHumanities</a>” google discussion document and, more recently, the Open Thread on “<a href="http://dhpoco.org/blog/2013/05/10/open-thread-the-digital-humanities-as-a-historical-refuge-from-raceclassgendersexualitydisability/">The Digital Humanities as a Historical“Refuge” from Race/Class/Gender/Sexuality/Disability</a>?” over at Postcolonial
Digital Humanities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">I’m not denying that
there are issues in Digital Humanities. One need only look at the <a href="http://dh2013.unl.edu/schedule-and-events/program/">recently published program for DH2013</a> and cast your eye over the
authorship of the accepted papers to see that this year’s Digital Humanities
presenting cohort is around 65% male, 35% female. But what I would say,
speaking on a personal level and not representing any authority here, is an
obvious point which I don’t hear often voiced. Most people “within” Digital
Humanities – that is those within the ADHO committee structures, those helping to
run the conferences, those helping to allocate student bursaries and prizes,
those helping to review papers and manuscripts, and heck, even the cool kids on
twitter, are people who want Digital Humanities to be as open and as great as possible. This
whole field has been built on the hard work of many academics who have given up
their free time to try and entrench the use of computing in humanistic study
into an academic field of enquiry, and it wouldn't exist without them, even if the form it exists in is currently imperfect. I would say, from where I sit on various
committees, that people want to keep DH growing, and growing healthily. So if
there are things wrong with DH, then do give concrete examples, or propose
concrete solutions, so they can be taken forward. They're listening - we're listening. </span><br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br />
There are things
that have really frustrated me within DH, and it is only recently that I’ve
started to actively question and pursue them, to get them to be changed. For
example, in 2006 I first noticed that the TEI guidelines encouraged the use of <a href="http://www.iso.org/iso/home/store/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=36266">ISO5218:2004 </a>to assign sexuality of persons in a document (with attributes being
given as 1 for male, 2 for female, 9 for non-applicable, and 0 for unknown). I
find this an outmoded and problematic representation of sexuality, which in
particular formally assigns women to be secondary to men, and so, in one of the
core guidelines in Digital Humanities, we allow and indeed encourage sexist
structures to be encoded. I was shocked to hear this – and have often brought
it up when discussing entrenched issues in DH about gender balance. In a recent
conversation on twitter about this topic, <a href="https://twitter.com/sramsay">Stephen Ramsay</a> summed up the issue: </span><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZDILU0GpIeQP4nAkyV5lXqAn2IIxgWBkxiaeZVNI6JjWM4eJCqu234E8sQ_8nAGxxxSiFSv3ud9YYSul3vrzjsrg6sKt8Ojh6WQlyo9PZPEfXjasWBk30FhE_7eKl6xP4Vg950m81pfQ/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-05-27+at+14.22.30.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="56" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZDILU0GpIeQP4nAkyV5lXqAn2IIxgWBkxiaeZVNI6JjWM4eJCqu234E8sQ_8nAGxxxSiFSv3ud9YYSul3vrzjsrg6sKt8Ojh6WQlyo9PZPEfXjasWBk30FhE_7eKl6xP4Vg950m81pfQ/s320/Screen+Shot+2013-05-27+at+14.22.30.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<a href="https://twitter.com/jamescummings">James Cummings</a>
responded to our tweets, asking why, if it bothered me (and others) so much,
hadn’t anyone submitted a feature request to TEI about it? And you know, it had
never occurred to me that there would be an easy route to question this sort of
stuff. He pointed me to where to submit a request, which I did <a href="http://sourceforge.net/p/tei/feature-requests/425/?page=1">here</a>.
The discussion which follows is really very interesting – look out for the “you
cant possibly be offended!” argument, or the “but we’ve always done it this
way!” response. Also look out for very vocal support from <a href="https://twitter.com/palaeofuturist">Gabriel Bodard</a>, in
particular, who helped steer the discussion forward to ensure that at<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“the TEI
Council meeting in Brown, 2013-04, we agreed to change the datatype of
person/@sex, personGrp/@sex and sex/@value from ISO 5218 to data.word, so as to
allow the use of locally defined values or alternative published standards to
be used in these attributes.” </blockquote>
Women are secondary in the TEI rules no more!
Hurrah! – and all it needed for that to happen was for someone to raise the
issue in the correct forum, and explain the issue to those who did not understand it, until they finally did.<br />
<br />
I’m Program Chair
for DH2014 and issues of diversity and equality are currently on my mind as we
discuss and choose plenary speakers for the Lausanne conference. It was recently pointed out to me, though,
that the <a href="http://adho.org/administration/conference-coordinating/adho-conference-protocol">ADHO conference protocols</a> don’t allow issues of diversity to be taken
into consideration when choosing plenary speakers, originally saying<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Keynote
speakers are decided by the International Program Committee in consultation
with the Local Organiser, and should ideally represent a range of disciplines,
interests, and geography.” </blockquote>
This isn’t good
enough, as it means that you cant say “We’ve got a man to be one of the
speakers, how about having a woman for the other one?” without being at risk of being accused of
breaching protocol. I’ve recently chased an amendment round the <a href="http://adho.org/administration">ADHO committee structures</a>, which means the ADHO conference protocols, since last week, state:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Keynote speakers are decided by the International Program Committee in
consultation with the Local Organiser, and should ideally represent a range of
complementary disciplines, interests, and geography, with consideration given
to issues of gender equality, and economic, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic
diversity." </blockquote>
Perhaps a small
deal, focussing on the choice of a couple of speakers a year at our
international conference, but pointing to the fact that the ADHO constitution
needs to be looked over, to see where we can enshrine issues of gender equality,
and other issues of diversity, within our communities. We need to make the
rules that people have to abide by. We can make the rules, and we can change the rules. What rules would
there help to be?<br />
<br />
Of course, changing
rules and guidelines wont make everything change overnight, and I wouldnt like to naively claim they will solve everything, but they are a
start. I guess what I’m saying here is that, in general, folks “within” Digital
Humanities are doing their best, and open to discussion and improvement, and
are not willfully obstructive to those of a different gender, race, or economic class, etc. Criticism is helpful, and if there are things that need changing, or unconscious biases that need rectifying, then point
them out, tell us. Tell us where concrete things are that we can act upon. We
all want Digital Humanities to be the best it possibly can be, and I, for one,
don’t mind changing the rules from the inside, in the time that I remain there. <br />
<br />
<b>28/05/13 Addendum to the original post: </b> for an ADHO led initiative on diversity see <a href="http://www.globaloutlookdh.org/">GO::DH</a>. I'd also like to encourage anyone who is interested in discussing change to consider standing for election to one of the ADHO organisations - we always need volunteers who want to roll up their sleeves!<br />
<br />
<br />Melissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-38901548658402777032013-05-26T13:24:00.001+01:002013-05-27T14:54:37.461+01:00On Throwing Your Klout Around
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">I am <a href="https://twitter.com/melissaterras">@melissaterras</a>. I have just shy of
4500 followers on twitter, a blog which garnered 100,000 readers last year, and
a <a href="http://klout.com/melissaterras">current Klout score</a> of 64. I tend to take this kind of thing with a grain of
salt: I hang out on social media because I enjoy it and it has also proved
useful and beneficial to my career. I’m aware I’m not Justin Bieber and that my
stats – while above average - are not particularly big shakes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But over the past few weeks a few things have
happened which have made me think about digital identity, responsibility, and
where academic use of social media crosses into the “real life” arena. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Case 1. I travel a lot with work, usually
using Opodo to book tickets. A few weeks ago I found myself locked out of “My
Opodo” and couldn’t access it to check itineraries, tickets, or print boarding
passes, etc.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I tried getting in touch
with customer services, spending hours on the phone, emailing, tweeting and
asking for help. Nothing. With an upcoming trip, and growing frustration
(spending an hour on hold to Opodo is never in the plan of my day) I posted a
few disgruntled tweets about their shocking customer service, which, retweeted by
some followers, had the potential to reach over 10,000 users within a matter of
minutes. My mobile rang. Opodo – a firm reknowned for not answering customer
complaints in a timely fashion- <i>had phoned me</i> to help resolve the problem.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">I’ve seen it reported that <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/06/12/a-high-klout-score-can-lead-to-better-customer-service/">Klout scores andtwitter follower counts are now being paid attention by customer services</a>,
but while I can provide various concrete examples of why having a digital
profile has helped my academic career, this is the first time I can point to
something which has actually helped resolve an issue I have had with a
commercial entity. I’m simultaneously aghast that it would take an above
average twitter following to help you get on a departing flight, and relieved
that it helped me to get an increasing pressing travel issue sorted out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What about those not-so-valued customers that
didn’t manage to get the issue resolved in time? </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Case 2 is where I now am aware that writing
something online could cost a local business tens of thousands of pounds in
business. I’m not happy with the project management company who looked after a
build at our home, as the ceiling is now leaking, and they are ignoring any enquiries
we are making to help have this sorted. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It would be easy for me to name them here,
linking to their website, and</span><span lang="EN-US"> within a couple of days if you googled for
them my blog post would appear above their own website in the rankings, due to
the fact that my blog is tapped into more existing networks than theirs. </span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">It would seem that, at the moment, the
easiest tool at my disposal to use is my digital identity. Indeed, it is
probably the only leverage I have to stop the growing discolouration of our new
dining room ceiling. But that makes me uneasy, as I know how difficult it would
be for them to claw back in a negative customer comment once it has
been broadcast online, and we are happy in general with our build and are sure this is a minor issue to resolve. Should I be
throwing my klout around, if it will negatively affect others in the long term? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">I’m left thinking of the increasingly
intertwined nature of customer service, digital presence, and moral responsibility. Whilst I was
playing at this, this stuff got real. </span></div>
Melissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-21094880010434823452013-05-09T12:57:00.000+01:002013-05-09T12:57:20.329+01:00What People Study When They Study TwitterSo, keeping good to my Open Access promises - my latest co-authored paper to go up in preprint, which will be out in print sometime this year in the Journal of Documentation - hot off the presses! Just as it goes up in preprint behind a paywall on the journal pages! is a jointly authored paper with <a href="https://twitter.com/ShirleyEarley">Shirley Williams</a>, from the University of Reading, and <a href="https://twitter.com/clhw1">Claire Warwick</a>, from UCLDIS. And here it is:<br />
<br />
<span class="person_name">Williams, S</span> and <span class="person_name">Terras, M</span> and <span class="person_name">Warwick, C</span> (2013) "What people study when they study Twitter: Classifying Twitter related academic papers". <strong>Journal of Documentation</strong> , 69 (3). <a href="http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1391572/2/WhatPeopleStudyWhenTheyStudyTwitter.pdf">Free PDF Download</a> From UCL repository.<br />
<br />
In this paper, we identify the 1161 academic papers that were published about Twitter between 2007 (when the first papers on Twitter appeared) and the close of 2011. We then analyse method, subject, and approach, to show what people are doing (or have been publishing!) on the use of Twitter in academic studies, providing a framework within which researchers studying the development and use of twitter as a source of data will be able to position their work. Oh, we also provide the list of the papers we found, so you can have a look-see yourself. <br />
<br />
<br />
And the story behind this one? Shirley was introduced to Claire and myself by the late (and much missed) Prof. Mark Baker at Reading, when we undertook the Linksphere project. Now, I've written about Linksphere <a href="http://melissaterras.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/twitters-and-research-paths.html">elsewhere</a> - it was an ambitious project which really didnt take off due to a variety of factors - but the good things to come out of it were our RA, <a href="https://twitter.com/clairey_ross">Claire Ross,</a> and meeting Shirley. We published <a href="http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/155116/1/Terras_EnabledBackchannel.pdf">a paper </a>on the use of twitter by academics at conferences when the Linksphere project was going. A year or so after the project finished, Shirley was granted a research sabbatical, and asked Claire and I if we would be interested in carrying on that work with her. Kicking around a few ideas, we wondered whether it would be possible to round up all the published work on Twitter - what are people using it for? And then to analyse it, to see if we can classify how people are using it, what the datasets are, what the methods are, and what the domains are. Wouldnt it be nice to have a bibliography on the use of twitter in research papers? And so away Shirley went, working with Claire and I, and building up this nice framework in which we can look at twitter based research. <br />
<br />
The paper was accepted into the Journal of Documentation last summer, and this month went up <a href="http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?issn=0022-0418&volume=69&issue=3">in preprint at the Journal of Documentation website</a>, and is now <a href="http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1391572/2/WhatPeopleStudyWhenTheyStudyTwitter.pdf">out in Open Access from UCL's research repository</a>, before it even hits the Library shelves. Which is how it should be, non? Melissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-5636071019999058082013-04-15T14:52:00.002+01:002013-04-15T14:52:26.827+01:00Changes at UCLDHWe’re going into our fourth year at <a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dh/">UCL Centre for Digital Humanities</a>, and there have been quite a
few changes along the way. Since the centre was founded under the
direction of <a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dis/people/clairewarwick">Professor Claire Warwick</a>, Claire has also taken on Head of Department in <a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dis">UCL Department of Information Studies</a>, as well as Vice Dean of Research for the Arts and Humanities faculty. Over the past year, Claire and I
have been co-directing the centre. I’m pleased, proud, and a little bit
nervous to say that from now on I’ll be taking on full operational
duties as Director of UCLDH, still working closely with Claire, who
remains committed to Digital Humanities as a subject, and UCLDH in
particular. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Claire for her
continued input into UCLDH – and I look forward to working with her in
this slightly different capacity over the next few years, as well as the
rest of the team at UCLDH, and putting my efforts into building up
UCLDH even further after its great start.<br />
<br />
Onwards! <br />
Melissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-21608545732208762032013-04-08T21:01:00.000+01:002013-04-08T21:01:27.203+01:00How Many Digital Humanists does it take to change a lightbulb?
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Q. How many Digital Humanists does it take
to change a lightbulb?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">A. Two: The first to change the lightbulb
using the available, existing technology. The second to say “You’re not DH
unless you make the lightbulb yourself!”.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Q. How many Digital Humanists does it take
to change a lightbulb?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">A. Yay! Lets Crowdsource!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Q. How many Digital Humanists does it take
to change a lightbulb?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">A. One. But they have to have a PhD in
Byzantine Sigillography AND at least 4 years experience of XSLT before you are
going to let them near that bad boy.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Q. How many Digital Humanists does it take
to change a lightbulb?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">A. As many as you like, but no REAL
humanities academic is going to trust that lightsource.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Q. How many Digital Humanists does it take
to change a lightbulb?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">A. It depends. Does the lightbulb count as
a “scholarly primitive”?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Q. How many Digital Humanists does it take
to change a lightbulb?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">A. One. But only if they are allowed to
include “multimedia experience” in their tenure portfolio.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"> </span><span lang="EN-US">Q. How many Digital Humanists does it take
to change a lightbulb?</span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">A. These are such IN JOKES only the COOL
KIDS on twitter will get them. Pout.</span></div>
<br /><div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"> (I originally came up with these jokes on the <a href="http://ra.tapor.ualberta.ca/~dayofdh2011/melissaterras/">DayofDH2011</a> - reposting them here on the <a href="http://dayofdh2013.matrix.msu.edu/melissaterras/">DayofDH2013</a> to have a copy on my own blog.) </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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Melissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-21747801561829804712013-04-08T20:52:00.001+01:002013-04-08T20:55:22.660+01:00This is not a blog post<div class="entry-content">
(This is the blog post <a href="http://dayofdh2013.matrix.msu.edu/melissaterras/2013/04/08/this-is-not-a-blog-post/">I've put up</a> on the <a href="http://dayofdh2013.matrix.msu.edu/about-day-of-dh/">Day of DH</a> site - where Digital Humanists all over the world are telling people what they are up to on a specific day. Me, I'm working hard in a different way, on holiday). <br />
<br />
This Day of DH sees me not doing much DH at all… but yet. I’m on
holiday, on the second week of the school easter break, with my three
young boys, in Scotland, staying with family. I wasn’t going to blog
anything at all – but then, hey, this is part of my life as a DHer too,
right? Its not just about the work, its about what you do elsewhere? But
can you actually switch off from DH, from work, when you are away?– at
least, it seems not that way if you are an academic.<br />
<br />
So what did we get up to today? Not a bad night, up only three times
(two night terrors and one sea shanty) and then woken early to a boy
shouting “Mummy! Robot! Monkey!” repeatedly. A slow walk to the shop for
papers and sweeties, some playing with watering cans, a trip to a
garden centre to meet an old friend and her kid for coffee, a visit from
my Aunt. The endless cleaning and tidying and management of stuff which
comes with having three small people, roll calls to ensure people have
their shoes and their stuffed animals from one stop to the next.
Highlights included driving alongside a wind farm for a mile or so and
the boys shouting “BIG. WINDMILLS! BIG. WINDMILLS!” – lowlights include
turning my back for two minutes and seeing Twin Two up 8 feet in the air
on something he shouldn’t be climbing on in the garden centre – tuts
from other parents in the vicinity very forthcoming.<br />
<br />
Its not like I haven’t thought about work. I find it very difficult
to switch off when on holiday – it takes me about a week to stop sending
myself emails reminding me to do X, Y, and Z when I get back. I’m on
the twitters – I find hanging out on twitter gets me through the day
when looking after the three weans all day and all night, especially if
they are up through the night – and today of all days, it was
fascinating to see twitter erupt and turn and shift around a news item.
The asynchronous nature suits having a quick shufty at quiet moments –
seconds – in the parenting day. But I haven’t been on work email for a
week or so, and wont be for another week or so. Usually I’m glued to it,
answering emails at all times of the day, but its important for me to
step back from it a few times a year. I popped on there a couple of days
ago to action something time-limited and laughed at all the emails that
had come in setting me deadlines I hadn’t agreed to that I will miss in
my absence. Meh – I’m usually quick on the mark but this week? I’m
teaching my twins how to do forward rolls instead.<br />
<br />
As I do more and more managerial work in my role at <a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dh/">UCL Centre for Digital Humanities</a>
I wonder really how much of my interaction with computing is through
email. (Most of it now). I’m a professional email answerer, really.
Been a while since I implemented something myself. I wonder, amidst all
the arguments about should DHers code, etc, how the whole “can code,
but manages coders” fits in. But this week, I’m not even answering
email. Oh no. I’m on holiday. I’m away. And goodness, it is good to
step away from email, that harsh, thankless taskmistress. But if I’m not
on email…. I am a DHer any more?<br />
<br />
But its not like I haven’t thought about work. It’s the
blessing/curse of academia: obsessive compulsive behavior is rewarded,
and its hard to switch off the obsession. So in the past week or so I’ve
been ruminating on next steps, projects I’m undertaking, research I
should do next, blog posts that are brewing, in between having cups of
tea at my grandparents or visiting my cousins or dandling poorly boys at
3am. Everything you can do when you are not on email. The nice stuff
online and offline, without the work email.<br />
<br />
It’s not that I haven’t thought about work. Heck, I even blogged for
the Day of DH. An example of the blended life style us DHers live: how
hard it is to get away, even when you are away, how connected we all
are, how it’s all a balancing act.<br />
<br />
So I’m not sure that this is a blog post. I’m not sure that this is a holiday. I don’t know what it is… must be DH, then.</div>
Melissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-53402146403996247352013-03-28T09:43:00.000+00:002013-03-28T09:43:19.195+00:00What Price a Hashtag? The cost of #digitalhumanities
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<span lang="EN-US">The academic community I’m most heavily
involved in – Digital Humanities – are fairly invested in twitter. At all times
of the day there are major figures, students, and newbies in the field on there, just hanging out,
debating topics, forwarding links to events, job postings, interesting research
and cool things they have stumbled upon. People have studied this – <a href="http://ynada.com/posters/gor11.pdf">graphing and charting</a> the discussions, especially around the DH <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8s5Qh9WDqU">conference</a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>,
and heck, even I have co-authored a <a href="http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/155116/1/Terras_EnabledBackchannel.pdf">paper </a>on the subject.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">I’m currently working on a book/project
called <a href="https://twitter.com/DefiningDH">Defining Digital Humanities </a> and I
thought, wouldn’t it be fun to get all – and I mean all – the tweets that
contain the hashtag #Digitalhumanities – what fun could be had charting the
growth of the discipline, the geolocation of tweets, the networks that exist,
the sentiments surrounding it – etc etc. Now, hindsight is a grand thing<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>- I should have thought to start scraping
these back in 2006 – but surely it must be possible to get access to this for
research? So I asked.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The first approach was to <a href="http://gnip.com/">Gnip</a> – who have “full historical access to the twitter firehose available
exclusively”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were really very
helpful, and we got into a conversation about my needs, their licensing, and –
of course – costs. The upshot is that if you want a hashtag, you can get it for
a price, with the text delivered in JSON format. I was quoted between $15,000
and $25,000 for the full historical set (depending on the exact volume of the
data, they are now looking into it to give me the final figure - I and they dont yet know how many tweets there are containing this hashtag). </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The second place I asked was <a href="http://datasift.com/">Datasift</a>– “</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">the leading platform for building
applications with insights derived from the most popular social networks and
news sources”</span><span lang="EN-US">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They do have access to the historical twitter firehose, but they don’t
do one off searches, and licensing will start at $3000 per month to get access
to it (on a yearly contract). They will be launching a pay as you go service at some point, they tell
me. By the way, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>you can get $10 worth of
free credit for processing if you sign up and play around with some current
searches: I set a set for #digitalhumanities and I had run out of credit within
a few hours. (I find the user interface very obfuscating<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>– I’m still wrangling with it to see what
that data actually is!). </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Now, these costs are very little compared
to the <a href="http://readwrite.com/2010/11/17/twitter_to_sell_50_of_all_tweets_for_360kyear_thro">costs to access the full firehose</a> and lets face it – a free service like twitter has to make its money somewhere.
These were not vexatious enquiries: I’d really like to do this study. But now I
have to find $25k down the back of the sofa to get access to this data (and
incidentally, if I do, I wont be allowed to quote it, only to show the stats
that emerge from the analysis).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>$25k is
a fair whack of money in academia-land. It will also take around 6 months (at
least) to write it into a grant proposal to raise the money – and how to persuade
academic funders that buying this dataset is good use of their money? Frankly,
I’m not sure that will fly in the arts and humanities, where complete grant
costings can come under £100k for a one year project. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Thinking caps are now on to see how we can
get funding put together to get access to the data of the community I –
goddamit – helped (in some small way) to create. I love twitter with a passion
and it continues to inform and aid my teaching and research. But when we invest
so much in a free service, we are selling ourselves. It’s interesting to see
how much #digitalhumanities is “worth” to others. Anyone got a free $25k?</span></div>
Melissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-76403748794868044612012-10-30T21:29:00.002+00:002013-05-06T17:14:13.239+01:00What's in a name? Academic Identity in the metadata age, or, I didnt see #tarotgate coming <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
At the end of last week I was pulling together some internal appraisal documentation - the kind of thing where you say "oh look how many people cited my work over the past year". Wandering over to my <a href="http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=nKl6E7EAAAAJ&hl=en">Google scholar profile</a> to check some citation counts I noted something weird. Alongside my usual digital humanities-ey, digitisation-ey, digital classicist-ey journal papers and book chapters were some strange papers that I definitely had not written. Things like <a href="http://www.springerlink.com/index/NQ01L3X6L7670436.pdf" style="text-decoration: none;">Human Experience and Tarot Symbolism</a>, (link still working to my Google scholar profile at time of writing) or Tarot and Projective Hypothesis.<br />
<br />
Now, I'm a committed atheist, which means I also don't care for the occult either. And while I try to respect other's research choices (its a bit like feminism - I may not like what you are doing with your life, but I respect your right to choose what you do with it) this is not something that, professionally, I would choose to be associated with. And it's extremely strange to see your name academically associated with something you don't want to be associated with - especially when academic identity is everything in this game. <br />
<br />
Perhaps there is another Melissa M. Terras? I first thought. I'm very lucky that there aren't too many Terrases about - I've never really had to deal with name disambiguation (I know academics who have other colleagues <i>with the same name as them in the same department</i>) so I'm a bit spoiled on that front in real life. Melissa is a really rare name in Scotland (although not other parts of the world) and so I had never met another one until I was 15. I sometimes get confused for Melody Terras, who is in Psychology, and automated algorithms especially like to assign me her works (such as Google scholar, or the algorithm in our open access repository). But no, the works clearly showed that the Melissa M. Terras was in the Department of Information Studies at UCL. There's only one of us there, and that's me.<br />
<br />
A bit of googling told me that the author of the book in which all of these chapters were published was Inna Semetsky. A few seconds more of googling took me to her personal website, which had a big fat CALL ME NOW skype button on it (I'm not linking to it here, as I dont want to encourage anyone to call her. If you want to seek her out, you will have to do so yourself). So I CALLED HER NOW, not really expecting anyone to pick up. She picked up on video chat after a few rings, although it was clearly in the middle of the night wherever she was (which I wasnt to know). She knew immediately who I was: it was clear that the book had been up with the wrong authorship attributed for some time, which I find strange: if you had written a book, and the "Internet" decided it was written by someone else, would you not fight to get it righted? A heated exchange followed. I dont want to say too much about Inna Semetsky - she is entitled to her own privacy and her own research space. Let's just say we didnt exactly hit it off, and that heated exchange continued over email. (Everyone knows that the <a href="http://www.joblo.com/movie-posters/images/full/2009-in_the_loop-4.jpg">one way to anger someone from Scotland is to call them English</a>, right?) <br />
<br />
By now it had become clear that there was no real malice in this: but I suspected metadata fail. I had previously published a chapter in a book which was published by Sense Publishers - who published Semetsky's book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Re-Symbolization-Self-Human-Development-Hermeneutic/dp/9460914195">Re-Symbolization of the Self, Human Development and Tarot Hermeneutic</a>. It seemed to me that somewhere in the ingestion process into the Springer system, that my name had gotten into the author field - field slippage in a database? that's fairly common? S next to T in the alphabet, so perhaps field slippage in Sense Publisher's author database? - which meant I had been erroneously associated with this work. So now to get it right.<br />
<br />
I contacted both Springer and the Press. Sense Publishers were very helpful, but ducked for cover when I hit them with the cease and desist. Springer said they would take it down. But they didnt. I complained again, and lined up the UCL lawyers to begin legal proceedings. Springer said they would take down the content ("We induced the deletion of the content from our platform, which will be done as soon as possible" - but hey, their English is better than my German, so I cant really mock them too badly when they later said they would delete the "hole" book). It took 6 days of constant emailing to complain and escalating legal threats before they eventually assigned<a href="http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-94-6091-421-8/page/1"> the correct authorship information</a> to the publication, which really must've been a 5 minute job. I hate to think how they would handle a request from someone not nearly as... pushy as me. <br />
<br />
I repeatedly asked for an explanation from the press and Springer - explaining a professional interest (and thinking of my dear, neglected blog, and the folks who were all pitching in on twitter by this time, following #tarotgate and the toings and froings from Springer and book author and me). I have received no explanation. You take my name, you pin it to something else, and you expect me not to want to find out <i>why</i>? When I work in an information studies department? No explanation has been given, and really - without malice! - I would like to know the assignation structure of author to material, given it seems so very fragile. <br />
<br />
And so I am no longer associated with Tarot in publications databases. Except at time of writing, I still am. Various places crawl and syndicate authorship content online - Google Scholar is still showing me as author of various pieces of Tarot scholarship, and now its going to be up to me to chase down mentions of my name associated with something I never chose to be associated with, simply because of an automated error, replicated across time and space and electronic repository, in a professional space becoming obsessed with citation counts and authorship and If You Liked This You May Like That, all churned out by thousands of servers and databases and... who cares if a database field slips in all this and an academic name is assigned to the wrong thing? It's the future! It's how scholarship works these days!<br />
<br />
I have up til now pretty much ignored the discussions and systems about how to look after your scholarly identity - things like <a href="http://about.orcid.org/">ORCID</a> - why do I need to register! I have an unusual name! Everyone knows that it's me who publishes on the digitisation-ey, digital humanities-ey stuff! Except the machines, the machines they dont care. We're looking at a future where we dont just have to look after the stuff we have published, we now have to weed out the things that we havent. We have to be vigilant that the joiney-uppey automated systems dont replicate authorship errors uncontrollably. How rare of commonplace is this? I have no way to tell. But when the electronic record can be so easily compromised, how can we trust digital-only publications, without a canonical physical artefact to check? <br />
<br />
It takes a long time to build up a scholarly identity. One slipped database field may have permanently associated me with an area I, quite frankly, dont respect. This blog post will go some way to explaining how that happened, so serves a dual purpose - explanation of how, and reference for why it's not me. When was the last time you checked what the Internet said you wrote? Will you ever be able to rectify it, should a mistake be made? Will I? I didnt see that one coming. Maybe I should take up Tarot. <br />
<br />
<b>Update: 31/10/12, Response from the Publisher!!!!!!</b> I will paste the email below.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
My colleague Georg Kaimann alerted me about the serious mistake in the author information of several chapters in Dr. Semetsky’s book. Please do accept our apologies, also on behalf of our data conversion partner, and be assured that the problem is taken seriously.<br />
<br />
High quality metadata, especially the correctness of titles, author names, and affiliations are of utmost importance for us. We have therefore taken the matter up with the production manager at our supplier. It turned out that errors in two places led to the incorrect author information which was published online: Firstly, the operator who created the xml metadata mistakenly used an already filled-out sample template for updating the chapter metadata; and secondly, quality control did not check the metadata in all chapters because they assumed that they were created in the approved way.<br />
<br />
Although this is a very rare error (I don’t remember having seen such a case before), we of course want to rule out that it can happen again. At the vendors end, the technical team will work on improving the tool for capturing metadata information to avoid errors related to manual intervention. At Springer’s end, we will investigate if further data checks can be introduced so that errors are caught early in the production process.<br />
<br />
Once again, we apologize for this mistake. Be assured that this problem is taken seriously as it affects the relationship between authors and publisher which is of high importance to us.<br />
<br />
<br />
Best regards<br />
<br />
Ilse Wittig<br />
Springer<br />
Production<br />
<br />
Manager Quality Assurance</blockquote>
<b>Update: 06/05/12. Further contact from the publishers (Sense Publishers, this time, not Springer). See our conversation below. I would note at this stage that they have indeed kept their promises, the catalogue now reflects the true authorship of the pieces, and even google scholar finally no longer lists me as author of them. It doesn't mean that this didn't happen, though... hence the emails below. Oh, and its lovely weather here as I type this, hence my final comment. </b><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Dear Melissa:<br />
<br />
Now this matter had been solved quite a while ago, could you please delete it from your blog?<br />
<br />
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/11/26/terras-identity-metadata-age/<br />
<br />
Many thanks,<br />
Peter de Liefde<br />
SENSE PUBLISHERS<br />
<br />
-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----<br />
Van: Inna Semetsky <br />
Verzonden: zondag 28 april 2013 21:46<br />
Aan: Peter de Liefde<br />
Onderwerp: Problem again<br />
<br />
Dear Peter<br />
I sincerely hope that you will contact Melissa to request her to remove this insulting post from the Internet. As you recall she promised to to so after she apologized for her insinuations . Still the post exists. This is degrading to me as the author and to Sense as publishers. Please take it in your hands as it was a case between Sense and Springer -- yet my name is involved. I hope that upon your request Melissa will delete the post which goes viral here http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/11/26/terras-identity-metadata-age/<br />
I consider this matter a subject if legal action -- my academic status is tarnished because of Springer -- and Springer got all data from Sense.<br />
<br />
Please contact Melissa! <br />
Thank you<br />
Inna <br />
<br />
<br />
Sent from my iPhone</blockquote>
<b>To which I replied:</b><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<br />
Thanks for your email!<br />
<br />
- it may have been resolved, but it still happened. My blog post will be staying up, both here and on my own personal blog. There is nothing factually incorrect, and I haven't been nasty or untruthful. <br />
<br />
best wishes,<br />
<br />
Melissa </blockquote>
<b>To which the publisher replied:</b><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Good for you. <br />
<br />
Thank God most of the people I deal with are a lot nicer.<br />
<br />
All best wishes,<br />
Peter de Liefde<br />
SENSE PUBLISHERS</blockquote>
<b><br /></b>
<b>To which I replied:</b><br />
<span class="st"></span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Hmmm. I'm too nice to get into a flame war with you over this.<br />
<br />
Have a good day, and enjoy the sun.<br />
<br />
Melissa</blockquote>
<span class="st"><i></i></span>Melissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-962447465856397284.post-43317329146715114472012-09-22T14:15:00.002+01:002012-09-22T14:15:45.954+01:00Showing the Arts and Humanities Matter<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Greetings from Dublin airport. Its been a busy week - on Tuesday I hosted the first <a href="http://humanistica.ualberta.ca/">4Humanities </a>conference, at UCL, then jetted off to Galway, Ireland where on Thursday I keynoted at the <a href="http://dahphd.ie/">Digital Arts and Humanities PhD</a> Programme annual conference.<br />
<br />
The conference at UCL, entitled <a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ah/4humanities/18thSeptember">Showing the Arts and Humanities Matter</a> gathered together various initiatives who are actively promoting the arts and humanities, to allow discussion regarding what is the best way forward to ensure that the benefits and contribution that the Arts and Humanities make to society is recognised. It was a fantastic day, and I learnt a lot - I'm fairly new to this area. Ernesto Priego live blogged and tweeted the event, and there is a <a href="http://storify.com/ernestopriego/4humanities-ucl-showing-the-arts-and-humanities-ma-2?utm_source=embed_header">storify</a> of the tweets for those who want to catch up on the discussion. <br />
<br />
One thing we decided to do was have a practice based artist, <a href="http://www.lucylyons.org/">Dr Lucy Lyons</a>, as a conference artist in residence, sketching and note taking, using a different sort of technology (pen, pencil, paper) than the ones we usually use, in what she calls "a frenetic, haptic method of note taking and engaging with the speakers". Lucy created <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/lucylyons/sets/72157631588021055/with/8008839023/">a wonderful set of notes and drawings</a> of the day that capture the flavour of the event.<br />
<br />
It is interesting to reflect that our discussions seldom wandered into talking about the practice led arts - and the fact that the immediate reaction of many speakers who saw Lucy's drawings was "great! a new avatar for me on twitter!" (how we are all addicted) rather than a discussion of what integrating this process into the conference setting would show or tell us. I'm still processing that, myself - but I loved having a conference artist in residence, and hope to feature this again at future events.<br />
<br />
Time for me to check in, I'll tell you about <a href="http://www.textal.org/clouds/b99545ca7b8f9118235044">#dahphdie</a> at another time! Melissahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00759369628908140089noreply@blogger.com2