Briefly noted for November 29, 2022

Check out these amazing WPA-style posters created by the Department of Energy to mark the infrastructure achievements made possible under the 2009 stimulus bill. I hope this time around, the government doesn’t wait 10 years to start selling the infrastructure and climate bills that passed earlier this year.

Two takes on this year’s tech industry crash: The first, from Derek Thompson, is cultural (the crash is big tech’s “midlife crisis”). The second, from Matt Yglesias, is financial (higher interest rates are making speculation in technology relatively less attractive).

Steven Johnson on the importance of the cassette tape and the way it changed both the sound and the business of music—in many of the same ways that another low-fidelity technology, the mp3, did.

Finally, if you have been wondering what Post.news is, how it’s different from other social networks, and especially how it plans to make money, here’s a primer from Neiman Journalism Lab.

When UConn broke up with Adobe: A parable of artists and copyright

One of the things I try very hard to do in my DMD 2010 “History of Digital Culture” class is to teach students that their technology choices are not inevitable nor even determined primarily by what’s “best,” but rather that their technology choices are values choices, reflections of their ethical commitments and those of the communities that create and use those technologies.

When the University of Connecticut’s  UITS (University Information Technology Services) made a choice not to renew it’s Adobe Creative Cloud site license, my students correctly judged that this was a values choice about the relative importance the higher administration places on artistic work at the university. The decision not to support software for artists, while at the same time maintaining support for software for, say, engineers, is a statement about how the university values different kinds of work on campus. I was pleased that the students immediately saw that this wasn’t just a choice about the quality of the software or even its cost, but about the intellectual commitments and identity of the university. What the students didn’t so easily grasp, however, was that the controversy over the Adobe suite also reflects on the values choices of the students, on the values choices that digital artists have made over many years to put the Adobe suite and other expensive, proprietary, closed-source software packages at the center of their creative practice, which in turn stems from set of larger choices artists have made vis à vis our prevailing copyright regime.

Artists have largely chosen think about copyright a something that exists to protect them and their work, and they have generally supported our ever-stricter copyright regime. Moving from a humanities and social sciences faculty to a fine arts faculty when I came to UConn from George Mason in 2013, I was struck by how poorly my storm-the-barricades, anti-copyright, open access agenda went over with my colleagues. Not that anyone really cared, but it was apparent from the beginning that I was coming at conversations that touched upon intellectual property (for example, a conversation about making faculty syllabi freely available on the web) from one side of the fence and they were coming at them from the other.  Indeed, UConn’s School of Fine Arts offers a course on copyright for artists called Protecting the Creative Spirit: The Law and the Arts, which is taught by two lawyers. You can tell from the title of the course where its sympathies lie.

My DMD 2010 students (most of whom are freshman and sophomores studying in the department of Digital Media & Design which resides within the School of Fine Arts) are no exception. When I teach the unit on copyright, the first question I ask the class is, “What is the purpose of copyright.” Inevitably, students answer with some version of “to keep people from ripping you off.” My next move is to put the copyright clause of the Constitution up on the overhead and explain to them that, in fact, the purpose of copyright is to “Promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” and that protecting an author’s exclusive rights for a limited term is simply a means to an end.

What is more, I tell them that the ever-stricter copyright regime we live with today wasn’t really designed to protect artists artists at all, although some may have used and benefited its protections. Instead, it was designed by and for big corporations, and it does a much better job of protecting those corporations than it does of protecting individual artists. It is true that many of these corporations employ artists (several former DMD 2010 students are now working for Disney), but those artists’ works are works for hire. The works may be protected by copyright law, but they are protected to the benefit of the employer, not the employee.

It is telling that the feelings of outrage and abandonment regarding the UITS Adobe announcement weren’t evenly distributed among my students. Digital Media & Design students at UConn choose from six different “concentrations,” electing to focus on either 2D animation/motion graphics; 3D animation; game design and development; web design and development; digital media business strategies; or digital culture, learning, and advocacy. (Students from all concentrations are required to take DMD 2010.) Especially hard hit by the news were the 2D/motion graphics students, for whom Adobe After Effects sits at the heart of their practice and for which there really isn’t a substitute, commercial or open source. Letting the Adobe license lapse was basically going to kill their creative practice, or, at the very least, put them out several hundred dollars.

My web design and development students, on the other hand, felt sympathy for their colleagues, but were pretty blasé about the whole thing. For them, letting the Adobe license lapse wouldn’t really change anything. The Adobe corporation has very little leverage over a web developer. To drive the point home, I challenged these web development students to think of a single piece of software that, if taken away from them, would affect their practice in any significant way. A few came up with TCP/IP, but quickly corrected themselves: TCP/IP is a protocol not a piece of software and is an open standard in any case. Apache was another, but, again, it’s open source, and there are serviceable alternatives. Certainly, they couldn’t name a corporation that exists that could raise its prices and bring their web development work to a halt in the way that Adobe was threatening to stop the work of our motion graphics artists. The difference, of course, is that our web developers rely on an open source technology stack and our motion graphics artists rely on proprietary software protected by a copyright law that was written in part by the very companies that produce it. Our web developers are not captive to copyright. Our motion graphics artists are.

Far from protecting artists, this is the best example I have of how our overly restrictive copyright regime harms artists. Rather than teaching our students how to situate their creative practice within a framework of intellectual property protection and thereby reinforce a copyright regime that wasn’t put in place for them in the first place, we should be encouraging our students to resist this regime. We should be teaching them to advocate for open access and open source software. In the longer term, we should be helping them to develop open source and open access alternatives themselves. This is an especially important message for my digital media and design students who, with their considerable skills, will be in a position to effect the longer term project of building the open source tools that will be necessary to free artists’ creative practice from propriety software. In the long term, maybe the very long term, this is the only way we can keep digital artists from being held hostage to corporations as Adobe held my students hostage this semester.

Fortunately, we’ve sorted out the Adobe license issue for now by cutting a licensing deal (shall we call it a hostage negotiation?) apart from UITS for students enrolled in the School of Fine Arts. For now, our students are safe. But only for now. You can bet I’ll be screaming this example over the fence at my colleagues in the School of Fine Arts the next time we talk about copyright.

Game Change: Digital Technology and Performative Humanities

“Game changing” is a term we hear a lot in digital humanities. I have used it myself. But try, as I was asked to do for a recent talk at Brown University’s Ancient Religion, Modern Technology workshop, to name a list of truly game-changing developments wrought by digital humanities. I come up short.

Struggling with this problem, I found it useful in preparing my talk to examine the origins or at least the evolution of the term. I’m sure it’s not the earliest use, but the first reference I could find to “game changing” (as an adjective) in Google Books was from a 1953 Newsweek article, not surprisingly about baseball, specifically in reference to how Babe Ruth and his mastery of the home run changed the game of baseball. This is a telling, if serendipitous, example, because baseball fans will know that Babe Ruth really did change baseball, in that the game was played one way before he joined the Red Sox in 1914 and another way really ever since. Babe Ruth’s veritable invention of the home run changed baseball forever, from the “small ball” game of infield singles, sacrifice bunts, and strategic base running of the late-19th and early-20th centuries to the modern game dominated by power and strength. As Baseball Magazine put it none-too-flatteringly in 1921: “Babe has not only smashed all records, he has smashed the long-accepted system of things in the batting world and on the ruins of the system has erected another system or rather lack of system whose dominant quality is brute force.” From what I could gather from my quick survey of Google Books, for the better part of the next thirty years, the term is mainly used in just this way, in the context of sports, literally to talk about how games have been changed.

In the 1980s, however, the term seems to take on a new meaning, a new frequency and a new currency. Interestingly, the term’s new relevance seems to be tied to a boom in business and self-help books. This probably comes as no surprise: I think most of us will associate the term today with the kind of management-speak taught in business schools and professional development workshops. In this context, it’s used metaphorically to recommend new strategies for success in sales, finance, or one’s own career. It’s still used in the context of sports, but most of what I found throughout the 80s and 90s relates to business and career. Going back to our graph, however, we see that it’s not until the turn of this century that term gets its big boost. Here we see another shift in its usage, from referring to business in general to the technology business in particular. This also comes as no surprise, considering the digital communications revolution that tooks shape during the five years on either side of the new millenium. Here we see a new word appended to the phrase: game-changing technology. And even more specifically, the phrase seems to become bound up with a fourth word: innovation. Today use of the term has been extended even further to be used in all manner of cultural discourse from politics to university-press-published humanities texts.

But when we use the term in these other arenas—i.e. in ways other than in the literal sense of changing the way a sport or game is played—in order for it to be meaningful, in order for it to be more than jargon and hyperbole, in order for the “game-changing” developments we’re describing to live up to the description, it seems to me that they have to effect a transformation akin to the one Babe Ruth effected in baseball. After Ruth, baseball games were won and lost by new means, and the skills required to be successful at baseball were completely different. A skilled baserunner was useless if most runs were driven in off homeruns. The change Ruth made wasn’t engendered by him being able to bunt or steal more effectively than, say, Ty Cobb (widely acknowledged as the best player of the “small ball” era) it was engendered by making bunting and stealing irrelevant, by doing something completely new.

In the same way, I don’t think technologies that simply help us do what we’ve always done, but better and more efficiently, should be counted as game-changing. Innovation isn’t enough. Something that helps us write a traditional journal article more expertly or answer an existing question more satisfactorily isn’t to me a game-changing development. When you use Zotero to organize your research, or even when you use sophisticated text mining techniques to answer a question that you could have answered (though possibly less compellingly) using other methods, or even when you use those techniques to answer questions that you couldn’t have answered but would like to have answered, that’s not to me game-changing. And when you write that research up and publish it in a print journal, or even online as an open access .pdf, or even as a rich multimedia visualization or Omeka exhibit, that to me looks like playing the existing game more expertly, not fundamentally changing the game itself.

These things may make excellent use of new technologies. But they do so to more or less the same ends: to critique or interpret a certain text or artifact or set of text or artifacts. Indeed, it is this act of criticism and interpretation that is central to our current vision of humanistic pursuit. It is what we mean when we talk about humanities. A journal article by other means isn’t a game changer. It is the very essence of the game we play.

If those things, so much of what we consider to be the work of digital humanities, don’t count as game changers, then what does count? In his new book, Reading Machines, Steve Ramsay argues that the promise of digital technologies for humanities scholarship is not so much to help us establish a new interpretation of a given text but to make and remake that text to produce meaning after meaning. Here Steve looks to the Oulipo or “workshop of potential literature” movement, which sought to use artificial constraints of time or meter or mathematics—such as replacing all the nouns in an existing text with other nouns according to a predefined constraint—to create “story-making machines,” as a model. He draws on Jerry McGann and Lisa Samuels’ notion of cultural criticism as “deformance,” a word that for Steve “usefully combines a number of terms, including ‘form,’ ‘deform,’ and ‘performance.'” For Ramsay digital humanists “neither worry that criticism is being naively mechanized, nor that algorithms are being pressed beyond their inability” but rather imagine “the artifacts of human culture as being radically transformed, reordered, disassembled, and reassembled” to produce new artifacts.

This rings true to me. Increasingly, our digital work is crossing the boundary that separates secondary source from primary source, that separates second-hand criticism from original creation. In this our work looks increasingly like art.

The notion of digital humanities as deformance or performance extends beyond what Steve calls “algorithmic criticism,” beyond the work of bringing computational processes to bear on humanities texts. Increasingly digital humanities work is being conceived as much as event as product or project. With the rise of social media and with its ethic of transparency, digital humanities is increasingly being done in public and experienced by its audiences in real time. Two recent CHNM projects, One Week | One Tool and Hacking the Academy, point in this direction.

An NEH-funded summer institute, One Week | One Tool set out to build a digital tool for humanities scholarship, from inception to launch, in one week. For one week in July 2010, CHNM brought together a group of twelve digital humanists of diverse disciplinary backgrounds and practical experience (Steve Ramsay among them) to build a new software application or service. The tool the group created, Anthologize, a WordPress plugin which allows bloggers to remix, rework, and publish their blog posts as an e-book, is currently in use by thousands of WordPress users.

At the outset, One Week | One Tool set out to prove three claims: 1) that learning by doing is an important and effective part of digital humanities training; 2) that the NEH summer institute can be adapted to accommodate practical digital humanities pedagogy; and 3) that digital humanities tools can be built more quickly and affordably than conventional wisdom would suggest. I think we succeeded in proving these claims. But as a project, I think One Week | One Tool showed something else, something unexpected.

One of the teams working on Anthologize during One Week | One Tool was an outreach team. We have found that outreach—or more crudely, marketing—is absolutely crucial to making open source tools successful. The One Week | One Tool outreach team made heavy use of Twitter, blogs, and other social media during the week Anthologize was built, and one of the strategies we employed was the Apple-style “unveil”—letting a user community know something is coming but not letting on as to what it will be. All twelve members of the One Week | One Tool crew—not only the outreach team, but the developers, designers, and project managers as well—joined in on this, live-Tweeting and live-blogging their work, but not letting on as to what they were building. This created a tremendous buzz around the work of the team in the digital humanities community and even among a broader audience (articles about One Week | One Tool turned up in The Atlantic, ReadWriteWeb, and the Chronicle of Higher Education). More interestingly, these broader communities joined in the discussion, inspired the team at CHNM to work harder to produce a tool (actually put the fear of God in them), and ultimately influenced the design and distribution of the tool. It was, as Tim Carmody, now of Wired Magazine put it, representative of a new kind of “generative web event.”

Quoting his colleague, Robin Sloan, Tim lists the essential features of the generative web event:

Live. It’s an event that hap­pens at a spe­cific time and place in the real world. It’s some­thing you can buy a ticket for—or fol­low on Twitter.

Gen­er­a­tive. Some­thing new gets cre­ated. The event doesn’t have to pro­duce a series of lumi­nous photo essays; the point is sim­ply that con­trib­u­tors aren’t oper­at­ing in play­back mode. They’re think­ing on their feet, col­lab­o­rat­ing on their feet, creat­ing on their feet. There’s risk involved! And that’s one of the most com­pelling rea­sons to fol­low along.

Pub­lish­able. The result of all that gen­er­a­tion ought, ide­ally, to be some­thing you can pub­lish on the web, some­thing that peo­ple can hap­pily dis­cover two weeks or two years after the event is over.

Per­for­ma­tive. The event has an audience—either live or online, and ide­ally both. The event’s struc­ture and prod­ucts are carefully con­sid­ered and well-crafted. I love the Bar­Camp model; this is not a BarCamp.

Ser­ial. It doesn’t just hap­pen once, and it doesn’t just hap­pen once a year. Ide­ally it hap­penn… what? Once a month? It’s a pat­tern: you focus sharply on the event, but then the media that you pro­duce flares out onto the web to grow your audi­ence and pull them in—to focus on the next event. Focus, flare.

To this list I would add a sixth item, which follows from all of the above, and is perhaps obvious, but which I think we should make explicit. Generative web events are collaborative.

CHNM’s Hacking the Academy project is another example from digital humanities of this kind of generative web event. On May 21, 2010, Dan Cohen and I put out a call for “papers” for a collectively produced volume that would explore how the academy might be reformed using digital media and technology. We gave potential contributors only seven days to respond, and during this time we received more than 300 submissions from nearly 200 authors.

Turning this into the “book” that eventually became Hacking the Academy would take considerably longer than a week. The huge response presented us with a problem, one that required us to rethink our assumptions about the nature of authorship and editing and the relationship between the two. Reading through the submissions, some as long as 10,000 words, others as short as 140 characters, we struggled with how to accommodate such a diversity of forms and voices. Our key breakthrough came when we realized we had to let the writing dictate the form of the book rather than the opposite. We established three formal buckets (“feature essays,” “coversations,” and “voices”) and three topical buckets (“scholarship,” “teaching,” and “institutions”) into which we would fit the very best submissions. Some of the good longer pieces could stand on their own, relatively unedited, as features. But in most cases, we had to give ourselves permission to be almost ruthless in the editing (at least when compared to long accepted notions of authorial versus editorial prerogative in academic writing) so that submissions would fit into the formal and intellectual spaces we created. Long or short, formal or informal, we let the best writing rise to the top, selecting contributions (either entire pieces or very often just a particularly compelling paragraph) that could be juxtaposed or contraposed or placed in conversation with one another to best effect.

In the end, the “book” exists in several forms. There is the “raw” index of every submission. There is our 150-odd-page remix of this material, containing more approximately 40 articles from more than 60 authors, which is being published online and in print by the University of Michigan’s MPublishing division and Digital Culture Books imprint. Then, and I think most interestingly, there are third-party remixes, including one by Mark Sample re-titled Hacking the Accident.

Appropriately, Hacking the Accident is itself a performance of sorts. Using the classic Oulipo technique of N+7, in which the author replaces every noun in a text with the noun seven dictionary entries ahead of it, Mark has created a new work, not of humanities scholarship, but of literature, or poetry, or theater, or something else altogether.

These are just two examples, two with which I am particularly familar, of what we might call “performative humanities.” There are others: most significantly, the lively performative exchanges that play out in the digital humanities Twittersphere every day. I wouldn’t go so far to say performance is the future of humanities in general or even digital humanities in particular. But I do think the generative web event is one example of a game-changing development. Performance is a different ball game than publication. The things required to make a successful performance are very different from the things required to make a successful text. It requires different skills, different labor arrangements, way more collaboration, and different economies than traditional humanities research.

We can look to new tools and new research findings, but I think we will only know for sure that digital humanities has changed the game when what it takes to succeed in the humanities has changed. We will know the game has change when bunting and base-running aren’t working any more, and a new kind of player with a new set of skills comes to dominate the field of play.

[Image credit: Wikipedia]

[This post is based on a talk I gave on February 13, 2012 at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Many thanks to Michael Satlow for the kind invitation, generous hospitality, and an excellent two-day workshop.]

Briefly Noted: Creative Commons Choices; Radical Transparency; Presidential Sex

Creative Commons logo Creative Commons has released a statistical analysis of the licensing choices of Flickr users. My summary: most people are happy to provide open access, but they don’t want you messing with their stuff. Some commentators lament the fact that so few Flickr users allow derivative works or commercial use of their materials. But for me the important thing about Creative Commons and its use on sites like Flickr is not the particular licenses people choose, but that they choose open licenses—under terms that are clearly explained and easily understood—at all. It is the clarity that Creative Commons licensing brings and the spur to open access this allows that’s important to education, scholarship, and cultural heritage.

This has made the rounds, but for those of you who haven’t seen it, Indianapolis Museum of Art Director Maxwell Anderson’s recent lecture, Through the Looking Glass: Museums and Internet-Based Transparency is an important statement of the value of openness. Not simply a good talk, IMA is walking the walk.

Our good friend Rob MacDougall points to painter Justine Lai’s series picturing herself having sex with past U.S. presidents. Check your modesty before clicking the link.

Years Ago

I have a confession to make. I actually subscribe to very few of the amateur history blogs I mention here on Found History. 10 Years Ago looks like an exception. According to it’s German author, “Every day a historic event will be posted which happened on the same day but years ago. The illustrations will all be done in a Moleskine 2008 Daily Planner.” Yesterday’s entry commemorates the 1964 opening of Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip with this image:

Whisky a Go Go

Today the blog remembers the 1966 debut of the television show Batman:

Batman

Very cool.

(Thanks Jerm.)

Briefly Noted for December 21, 2007

NEH announces funding for Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities.

A Visit to Yesterland – The Discontinued Disneyland. “Did you ever wonder what happened to Disneyland’s Mine Train, Flying Saucers, or Indian Village? These and other attractions, restaurants, and shops are now collected in Yesterland, a theme park on the Web.”

The Museum of Bad Album Covers. “Currently displaying 156 awful album covers!”

1990 Mac ad deemed fake. (Via Crunchgear.)

original_mac_chick.jpg

Change Over Time

This is kind of creepy—it reminds me of Michael Jackson’s 1991 Black or White video, which is creepy on many levels—but it’s also kind of cool. Eggman913‘s 500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art provides a compelling and potentially telling history of the evolution of Western female portraiture in the space of three minutes.

It would be great if we had artists, titles, and dates to go along with the music and images, but even without them the video provides an incredibly rich visualization of how both painting and perceptions of women have changed since the Renaissance. Professional digital historians could take a lesson from this slick amateur effort.

Google, Miro, and Commemoration

I’m sure many of you noticed the recent controversy over Google’s use of Spanish surrealist Joan Miro’s work in a logo commemorating the 113th anniversary of the artist’s birth. Intended by Google as a “tribute” to Miro’s “extraordinary contribution,” the artist’s family and their representatives at the The Artists Rights Society nevertheless cried foul and demanded Google remove the logo. Without admitting any copyright violation, Google complied with the family’s request.

A lot has been made of the implications of this brouhaha for artistic freedom. But I’m worried about the implications for popular history-making. Commemoration is one of the most common and important ways the non-professional public produces and understands history. This is especially true among the business community, which should not be undervalued as a producer and disseminator of historical information. The “anniversary edition” and the “birthday sale” are among the most widespread and most visible forms of historical expression in contemporary culture.

Miro was not the first person Google chose to commemorate with a special logo. These commemorative logos bring a little bit of history to literally millions and millions of people in a single day, many more than professional historians can ever hope to reach. Next time it wants to honor someone from the past, will Google remember the Miro incident and pass? That would be a grievous instance of found history lost.