Epistemographer

I’m in Cleveland for the weekend at the previously-mentioned workshop. In reading over the papers, I’ve really been wrestling with the slippery distinction between invention and authorship as separate categories. On one level, the two words seem to point to the same kind of creative act, but it seems that the various scholars participating are using them as distinct categories which don’t entirely map onto each other across the disciplines. Some of this is an artifact of disciplinary particularities; in law, for example, copyright has a genaeology which, while structurally similar, is distinct from that of patents (in other words, though they’re both intellectual property, the way we treat texts is different from the way we treat machines because the history of texts is different from the history of technologies).

This fits into my own thoughts on creative amateurs (hackers/tinkerers, etc.) in an intriguing way – I’ve been wondering lately whether it’s useful for me to simply dissolve the distinction between authors (who write texts) and inventors (who write technologies) and treat them all as creators/producers. The benefit here is that I can talk the same way about hardware hackers (who take pre-built artifacts and repurpose them) and media remixers (who do essentially the same thing with pre-written texts), but my concern is whether I’m missing some deeper difference between the two kinds of practice that would complicate things down the road.

More on this as the weekend progresses…

This weekend, I’ll be Cleveland at the Con/Texts of Invention workshop:

This conference interrogates the social and cultural construction of invention – the diverse ways in which invention has been conceptualized in the arts and sciences in the broadest sense, including literature, the fine arts, entertainment, the physical and life sciences, law, economics, medicine, engineering, agriculture, education, communications, computation, finance, and business. Emphasis will be on the institutional cultures, rhetorics, and histories of invention across these fields. In this way the Society seeks to extend and deepen the inquiry of its long-standing project on “Intellectual Property and the Construction of Authorship”

I’m not giving a paper, but was invited to participate by AU Law Professor Peter Jaszi, and I’ve been getting increasingly excited about the weekend as I’ve read through the precirculated papers. If I weren’t in Cleveland, however, I’d be up in New Haven, at the Access to Knowledge conference organized by the Yale Law School Information Society Project:

In the digital era, most multinational corporations and policymakers are of the view that the current trend characterised by increasing intellectual property rights and corporate control over knowledge best serve society’s interests. At the same time, however, a growing number of commentators believe that widespread access to knowledge (A2K) and the preservation of a healthy knowledge commons are the real basis for sustainable human development. Nonetheless, intellectual property-based approaches continue to singlehandedly dictate global legal norms and shape national legal infrastructures.

The first goal of the Yale A2K Initiative is to come up with a new analytic framework for analysing the possibly distortive effects of public policies relying exclusively on intellectual property rights. Beyond this aim, the A2K initiative seeks to support the adoption and development of alternative ways to foster greater access to knowledge in the digitally connected environment.

Two really fascinating conferences, each representative of a particular trend I’ve been noticing in the scholarly world – these days, much of the really fascinating inquiry into information studies has been taking place in the unexpected intersection of STS, Communication/Information Science, and Law.

Panelists:

• Daniel Clancy Google
• Bob Stein
• Danielle Tiedt GM, Microsoft

• Elizabeth Lawley Professor, RIT

LL: Concerns ->

• chilling effect of requiring login for viewing of resources, etc.

• rankings are opaque systems

DC:

• Asked group of students how many had been to the library in last year; less than 1/2 had.
• two programs – publisher program and library program
  • publisher program works with currently available materials

• library program works with out-of-copyright materials, etc.

DT:

• Sees Microsoft’s digitization efforts as intended to help them “answer questions better”
• Wishes government would take a larger role in digitization – from Microsoft’s perspective, she’d rather everything was already scanned so that all she had to do was crawl it, index it and create a user interface that makes users want to use it via Microsoft.

• Ultimately, corporations are going to be concerned about the bottom line

DC:

• Asks Bob Stein:
1. Would you rather we cancel the project?

1. Would you really want the U.S. government in charge?

LL: What about decentralization? Can individuals scan individual books?

Kevin Smokler (question): Is there really such a demand for digitization of 19th century lit that justifies a rush forward without concern for the cultural and ethical questions posed?

DC: Yes (particularly for still-in-copyright works)

BS: There’s a certian disingenuousness to the argument that this is all about making the materials available; the purpose of Google’s project is not so much about making the world’s information available as it is about serving ads and gathering information about us.

Once more into the breach! I never really hit my writing stride after getting back from my honeymoon (honestly, one decently thoughtful post in almost two months does not a blog justify), but if there’s one motivation that outweighs all others, it’s the threat of public shaming – since I’m heading off to spend 5 days with all the cool kids at SXSWi, I’m blowing the dust off this here blog and hitting the ground running.

First, a brief catch-up on general life stuff:

• Bought a condo in DC, spent a month or so getting my hands all dusty with some home improvement (June 2005)
• Got married (Oct 8, 2005)
• Spent a month in New Zealand (December 2005 – January 2006)

• Had a small homeowner’s disaster

In more professional news:

• Teaching a class at American University this semester
• Got positive reviews back on my book manuscript from MIT Press, currently writing a response to criticisms
• Working on some cool software projects

• Hatching a few other plans, more about which soon

Non-RSS readers will also notice a snazzy new design, cribbed almost whole-cloth from the talented Jeremy Boggs, with whom I’m lucky to work. My strengths are many, but design ain’t one of ‘em; my interests lie far more in tweaking information design than in graphic design, so standing on Jeremy’s shoulders was exactly the boost that I needed. I’ve also decided to kill the blog.epistemographer.com subdomain, so everything now redirects to www.epistemographer.com – change your bookmarks and RSS feeds accordingly!

Come work with me:

This is a one- to two-year position (depending on funding) at the rank of Research Assistant Professor at the Center for History and New Media (CHNM), which is closely affiliated with the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. A PhD or advanced ABD in History or a closely related field is required. We are especially interested in people with some or all of the following credentials, but they are not required for the position: 1. experience in digital history or digital libraries; 2. strong technical background in new technology and new media; 3. administrative and organizational experience; 4. background in the history of science, technology, and industry, broadly defined. Please send letter of application, CV or resume, and three letters of recommendation (or dossier) to chnm@gmu.edu or Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive MS 1E7, Fairfax, VA 22030. Electronic submissions encouraged. Please use subject line “Digital Historian/” We will begin considering applications 1 April, 2006.

All the online world’s abuzz over the seeming resurgence of enthusiasm around web development; Jeffrey Zeldman’s Web 3.0 post notwithstanding, it can seem as though the past six years didn’t happen and all is sunshine, roses and optimism for the online world. While the move toward dynamic scripting and web applications is clearly changing the ways in which we interact with the world within our browser pane (in most cases clearly for the better), there’s a small but nasty thundercloud on the horizon that hardly anyone’s talking about, but which has the potential to seriously rain on the parade.

For the first time in a good two years, the beginning of the semester is bringing with it that rush of excitement tinged with uncertainty that only comes when you’re teaching a class for the first time. In this case, a colleague referred me to the folks over at American University’s Department of History, and tomorrow I start teaching a seminar for them titled “History in the Digital Age.”

Syllabus is online, if you’re curious – it’s a kludge of Bob Griffith’s earlier incarnation of the course, Roy Rosenzweig’s “Clio Wired“ and the Digital History workshops that I’ve been designing and running for the past year. I’ve got the first few weeks pretty fleshed out, but I’ve held off on pinning down too many details after that until I better know the capabilities of my students; one of the awkward things about teaching digital history is that you never know the range of skills and expertise that’ll show up in the room.

As an aside, one fringe benefit of teaching this class is that it’ll spur me to a lot more blogging – if I’m expecting it of my students, I suppose that I’d better be willing to step up as well.

Just upgraded to Wordpress 2.0. All sorts of new bells and whistles behind the scenes.

Total time to upgrade = 15 mins (mainly thanks to the slow airport wi-fi connection I used to upload the new files).

While I was gone, CHNM went and set up a listing of all staff blogs, and several of my colleagues seem to have started blogging without me realizing it. The particularly great thing about this (aside from the general satisfaction of others drinking the same kool-aid) is that I get to see a very different side of their personalities and research.

While I love the Center, one of the few downsides of working there is that we all tend to focus on talking about the projects at hand and technology in general, with our own academic interests figuring into fewer conversations. Reading my colleagues’ blogs lets me see other facets of their interests, and hopefully might bleed back into our day-to-day work.

Shearing Layers (from Stewart Brand’s “How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built”)

• Buildings have layers, each of which change at different rates (fast change on inside, slow change on outside)
• Applies to NDIIPP – nested shearing layers from fastest to slowest
  • Media shelf lives are short – fast change
  • Format
  • OS
  • Architecture
• Essence of content (we want this to stay as still as possible, given the rapid change of internal layers)
• Preservation involved managing shearing layers (What if the Constitution was written in 1980’s?)

• Book, for example, has few shearing layers (short of physical preservation and literacy)

Potential problem with this model: separates archival “thing” from its context of use. Assumes that the thing in itself is useful (or, perhaps more accurately, “usable”) in and of itself…in the context of the book, this is literacy, but problems of use and access are bound up with both the artifactual and the epistemic

Theses

• Longer the time frame, more shearing layers
• More layers, more kinds of expertise are involved
• Longer the time frame, the more social the problem

• Digital Preservation Network must syndicate expertise

Example: Syndicated storage

• Separate out storage function from other aspects of preservation
• Share distributed storage, not content or access
• Heterogeneous storage schemes safer (one fails, others might now)

• Data checking

Example: Shared Tools

• Deals with “Understanding, Interpreting, Caring For” level

• File Validators, File Walkers, Risk Assessment

Questions for partners

• Where are your areas of expertise?
• Where aren’t your areas of expertise?
  • Access, Operations, Storage?
  • Ingest, Export?
  • IP? Security?
• Workflow? Contracts?
• Bilateral? Multilateral?

• High Trust? Low Trust?

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