The Register has a bit of commentary about Creative Commons and its possible Americanist tendencies (not really surprising, given that it's in response to American copyright law). It also nods to a Doonesbury cartoon that spoofs Creative Commons zealots. Zealotry is always a ripe target for satire, but as I've always said, Doonesbury sucks. SUCH BITING POLITICAL COMMENTARY! SO sophisticated! yawn.
Jason Kottke muses on the predominance of male narrators in historical documentaries. He explains that apparently "Authority is part of the issue, but in the narrative context, men are perceived as gender neutral, while women are perceived as female. Since the narrator is supposed to be anonymous and not perceived by the audience as a person, the more general neutral the better." Does this "gender neutrality" have other implications for new media in general? I'm thinking here of the "Where are all the female bloggers" question (which we'll discuss later in the semester) , but I'm also thinking about podcasting and journalism. Undoubtedly, Kottke's observation is applicable to news anchors and the like (hence the male dominance of that field). But does and can this phenomenon spill over into other areas of new media?
American Library Association president Michael Gorman posted this short piece about blogs:
library journal
The quick reaction is that this is a blog decrying blogs. However, I don't think that Gorman is condemning blogs, but rather the facile belief that technology inherently leads to certain social or cultural changes: in this case, that digitization must necessarily lead to a utopian world of free information interchange.
I have put the colloquia notice below. It will be a round table discussion on the issues below. It is being held on Friday, Feb. 25th at 2:30-3:45pm in BRNG1254:
Title: Research Collaboration and Co-Authoring: Possibilities and Potential Pitfalls (Feb. 25, 2005)
Faculty Participants: J. Boyd, M. Dutta-Bergman, E. MacGeorge, S. Matei
Graduate Student Participants: A. Basu, M. Gill, A. Graves, K. Lucas
Questions about Collaboration
1. What are collaborative research projects, and what forms can they take?
2. Why might it be important/worthwhile for a graduate student to be involved in collaborative research projects (both those seeking academic and non-academic careers)?
3. What does a professor have in mind in terms of benefits (for self as well as for student), expectations, perils, etc. when approaching a student about collaborating on a project?
4. What are the expectations that faculty and students bring to the table and how are these expectations negotiated? What type of faculty expectations would be outside the bounds of what is appropriate? What about student expectations?
5. How might varying cultural norms affect research/authorship relations between a professor and a student?
6. How can students established cross-disciplinary collaborative research relationships with scholars outside of our own department (in other disciplines at Purdue or elsewhere)?
Questions about Co-Authorship
1. How should authorship be negotiated at the beginning of a project? What should occur if expectations/contributions change as the project unfolds?
2. Should my thesis/dissertation advisor automatically be my co-author on every publication that uses data from that project? And, if so, how much can I reasonably expect him/her to contribute or assist me with the post-defense analyzing/writing/editing activities?
3. Should my professor be my co-author if s/he gave me help and feedback on a paper I wrote in a course?
4. If my advisor/professor helps me navigate my way through the conference/publication processes (e.g., selecting an appropriate conference/division or journals, responding to editors’ and reviewers’ comments, etc) should s/he be my co-author?
5. What amount and/or kinds of work constitute co-authorship vs. acknowledgement/thanks in the publication “byline” vs. feedback/instruction that is considered part of a class rather than a collaboration?
6. What should happen if two co-authors (e.g., professor and graduate student) find themselves in strong disagreement about how data from the project should be interpreted, what conclusions are warranted, what findings should be reported, etc.?
7. To what extent should graduate students be encouraged to get single-authored publications out of collaborative projects? Is this ethical/fair in the first place?
8. Are there norms/codes regarding collaborative research and authorship/publication in U.S. academia? How could these be made available to get international students (or domestic students or faculty) up to speed on U.S. academic culture?
Resources
American Psychological Association. (2001). Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (5th edition). Washington, DC: APA. See Sections 1.03 “Authorship” (pp. 6-7), 8.05 “Ethics of Scientific Publication” (especially pp. 350-351) and Appendix C, 6.23 (pp. 396-396).
Nagy, T.E. (2000). Ethics in plain English: An illustrative casebook for psychologists. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Lessig and his podcasting experiment, along with other relevant blog posts from his archives.
Vimeo is a site for tagging, organizing, and sharing video clips. "Vimeo also makes it easy to watch your friends' video clips, or to view clips that have common subject matter." It's only is beta now, so you can't login and upload your clips yet, but you can view a bunch that are already up. The automatic movies function is quite interesting. Enjoy!
One of Lessig's more important points seems to be his insistence that media literacy is more than passive consumerism. Rather than just watch tv shows, movies, digital video, and the like, kids (and adults) need to know how to actually create with those types of media. Lessig writes:
For though anyone who has written understands how difficult writing is--how difficult it is to sequence a story, to keep a reader's attention, to craft language to be understandable--few of us have any real sense of how difficult media is. Or more fundamentally, few of us have a sense of how media works, how it holds an audience or leads it through a story, how it triggers emotion or builds suspense. (36)
With my primary area in 19th Century English Literature, I find myself in the midst of the “old” media and this new concept of “new media.” After spending the weekend reading Vanity Fair, an 800+ page novel by Tackeray, I find myself desiring a “new media” version of the story. Why? Because that seems like it would be more fun somehow. Then I ask myself what would a new media version of a novel be like? Is it possible? (I am trying to develop a new media project on Great Expections; we'll see how that turns out). Some may suggest that I rent the movie. But would the movie version offer the same narration, description, and overall effect as the novel? I doubt it, but the movie could be valued for its artistic qualities. For 19th C. Britons, reading Vanity Fair was entertaining, possibly something similar to soap operas we have today. However, reading the novel now, in our highly digitalized and visual world, is just plain work (not that I didn’t enjoy it).
Also, I had two very different reading experiences over the last couple days. While reading Vanity Fair, I curled up with a blanket and made myself comfortable. Usually I print out anything that we have to read off the computer for comfort sake. However, this time I read Free Culture while at the computer with a word document opened for notes. I always enjoyed the more comfortable way of reading, but I found that my second reading experience seemed more productive. I always underline / annotate while reading a hard copy, but I found myself cutting and pasting passages out of Free Culture and then commenting on some of those passages. However, the notes are rather fragmented (an idea I can't seem to get away from), and I sometimes wondered just why I chose certain quotes over others. Again, just reflecting on my experiences reading old texts with newer (and new forms of) texts.
Lots packed in here; maybe I should have separated it into 2 blogs.
I find myself drawn to the statement made by Lessig that "Our democracy has atrophied" (41). It reminded me of a conference I attended last fall where a colleague of mine noted a loss of "public spaces" or "town commons" areas for political discussion and protest. He reflected on a trip in his "The War Bus" to a mall parking lot with a group of his students to initiated discussion on the Iraq War. As can be seen on the website, the bus has imagery and arguments from two perspectives (Anti-war & Pro-War) plastered all over it. Before he and his students could step foot onto the blacktop, mall security agents indicated that they would have to leave. When Deluca asked why, an officer responded that the mall was private property and not an appropriate place for this political discussion. Deluca and his students began to inquire about the bumper stickers on the other cars in the parking lot and asked how the "War Bus" was different. No answer was given before the bus was forced to leave the premises.
I find it interesting that I can be bombarded by advertisements everywhere (on vacation, at home, in the bathroom, at home in my bathroom if you consider a recent text message from Cingular to my cell phone, etc.), yet our political discussion has been cut short in the physical realm...Or has it adapted to online arenas...?
I guess that I see "democracy" as described by Lessig on the move to spaces such as Kyoto and Beyond. Those with access have the potential to "deliberate" (42) on blogs/discussion boards, and those that don't have access, well, similar to those without an address on census day, they are not counted. I wonder if we have the same ole' democracy we always had . . .Or is this democracy "as good as it gets" . . . What do you all think?
(Oh, and I also find it amusing that when I completed my spell check that the program flagged "Lessig" but made sure that I capitalized "Cingular")
If you were interested in what Lessig had to say, you may also want to check out this:
Freedom of Expression® (I use the "®" because the author registered the phrase "freedom of expression" in order to make a now obvious point)
This is a book about copyright's recent manifestations in culture. It is freely available under a creative commons license, and it is also published in print. And--surprise, surprise--DJ Spooky provides a review on the website.
The author, Kembrew McLeod, is a professor at the University of Iowa. He is also known for his arthouse pranks. In fact, I encourage you to look at his website:
Kembrew.com
It is an intentionally horrifying parody of over-glossed, over-commodified webpresence.
Here's also a quotation from his site strangely applicable to us folks who've somehow found themselves in Indiana:
After five years in Iowa City chasing the children of the corn through the field of dreams, I still solemnly swear to put the "ass" back in assistant professor (and if I get tenure, I will continue putting the "ass" back in associate professor).
...although I perfer to think of our students as the children of the soy, but it's a personal preference.
I know we're long past the discussion on blogs, but a story on BBC this morning caught my eye for a particular phrase ... after being censored for writing hard-copy text, one of the Iranian people speaking in the story turned to blogging (the story reports more than 46,000 blogs coming from Iran) "because I felt free and uncensored... ." Bloggers are being collected as criminals in Iran right now, and certainly efforts to control freedoms of expression are not new, but the sense that the blogging environment was somehow outside the purview of censorship is an interesting aspect of the event. Nations may come to a new kind of struggle for controlling their "properties" in much the same way as producers of media now struggle for ownership. In this way the questions revolving around identity and the location of identity - Burnett's hybid person - may raise issues of global concern not easily anticipated.
OH SNAP. I found this short documentary piece that really connects the readings of the past few weeks. Indeed, both DJ Spooky and Lawrence Lessig are in the documentary:
Copyright Criminals
The content of the piece is sampling. I encourage you to watch.
Here's a blog that collects podcasts:
podcrawl
There are many such blogs, but you have to start somewhere.
Speaking of which, I would be curious if people would comment here about how many of us actually use portable music players (iPod or other). As the name implies, podcasts in part own their ameliorating popularity to the proliferation of iPods and other digital music players. This is partially because these devices provide a way to listen to podcasts in controlled bytes and while engaged in other activities: while driving, taking the bus, jogging, etc.
iPods, like TiVo DVRs, are fetishes of pseudo-religious potency. Most of those who use these devices have conversion experiences such that it is difficult to revert to a pre-use state (think of email in your own life). I imagine that we miss something of the "magic" of technologies like podcasts if we are not already instantiated in a particular world that presumes a certain level of active use. For example, people wouldn't care about how cool my email filters are--they route mail to different folders depending on if the content is academic CFP, student work, personal mail, etc.--if they do not traffic heavily in email (or if, if this is still possible, do not use email at all).
So how many of us are use portable music players? How many of us have the kind of literacy or expertise or dependence that allows us to see the potential of podcasts?
