Only One of its kind: Dickens doubled

Only One of Its Kind...

The New York Times has published a digital copy of Charles Dickens Manuscript for A Christmas Carol. The original is in the collection of The Morgan Library in New York City.

via http://wardsix.blogspot.com/


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Double Exposure - Ten Per Cent

Double Exposure - Ten Per Cent
Originally uploaded by ElectriqueKingdom

Uncommon Press

Uncommon Press account on Spike
http://meanjin.com.au/spike-the-meanjin-blog/post/uncommon-press/


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cryptomnesia and plagarism

You Didn’t Plagiarize, Your Unconscious Did
Is cryptomnesia—copying the work of others without being aware of it—to blame for journalism's ultimate sin? Um, maybe not.

By Russ Juskalian | Newsweek Web Exclusive

Jul 7, 2009

Henry Roediger, a memory expert at Washington University in St. Louis, said that cryptomnesia is partially caused by the lopsidedness of our memories: it's easier to remember information than it is to remember its source. Under the right conditions, this quirk can even evoke false memories. In one study, the more times Roediger instructed participants to imagine performing a basic action (like, "sharpen the pencil") the more likely the participants were to recall—incorrectly—having actually performed the action when asked about it later.

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Nunberg on Google Book's Meta-data Disaster

Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars
By Geoffrey Nunberg
The Chronicle of Higher Education-August 31, 2009

Seen in that light, the quality of Google's book search will be measured by how well it supports the familiar activity that we have come to think of as "googling," in tribute to the company's specialty: entering in a string of keywords in an effort to locate specific information, like the dates of the Franco-Prussian War. For those purposes, we don't really care about metadata—the whos, whats, wheres, and whens provided by a library catalog. It's enough just to find a chunk of a book that answers our needs and barrel into it sideways.

But we're sometimes interested in finding a book for reasons that have nothing to do with the information it contains, and for those purposes googling is not a very efficient way to search. If you're looking for a particular edition of Leaves of Grass and simply punch in, "I contain multitudes," that's what you'll get. For those purposes, you want to be able to come in via the book's metadata, the same way you do if you're trying to assemble all the French editions of Rousseau's Social Contract published before 1800 or books of Victorian sermons that talk about profanity.

It's clear that Google designed the system without giving much thought to the need for reliable metadata. In fact, Google's great achievement as a Web search engine was to demonstrate how easy it could be to locate useful information without attending to metadata or resorting to Yahoo-like schemes of classification. But books aren't simply vehicles for communicating information, and managing a vast library collection requires different skills, approaches, and data than those that enabled Google to dominate Web searching.

Nunberg,Geoffrey, "Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars", The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 31, 2009.

Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist, is an adjunct full professor at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley.

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McCartney on Imitation and Originality

McCartney’s own musical beginnings weren’t too different from picking up Rock Band and pretending to be a star, he pointed out. “I emulated Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis. We all did.” The group might have kept going that way, he said, except that they’d find themselves backstage, “and we’d hear our complete set being played by the band before us.” That’s the reason, he said, he and Lennon started writing their own songs. “It’s grown to something so big, but it really just started as a way to avoid the other bands being able to play our set.”

From
Magazine
While My Guitar Gently Beeps
By DANIEL RADOSH
Published: August 16, 2009
A Beatles video game arrives at a time when participation and simulation are changing the way we listen to music.



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Distributing the risk (pre-pirate bay)

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25739026-2703,00.html

The project began 44 years ago with Michael Samuels, then Professor of English Language at the University of Glasgow. Several of the project's founders have since died.
His team began transcribing information from the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary (OED) on to slips of paper.

They plugged away for more than a decade, and disaster almost struck in 1978 when the building housing the only copy of their work caught fire.

The entire building was gutted, but the slips remained intact because they were stored in metal filing cabinets.

After that the slips were written in triplicate and stored in three different locations.

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Distributing the out-of-the way town

David Farley on the perils of travel writing

“Is that a good article?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t have come here if I hadn’t seen this in my local paper,” the woman from Houston said. It turned out, the article went out on the Times’ wire service and was picked up by a dozen or so other newspapers. There was even an article about my article in La Stampa, the daily newspaper of Turin. In the coming weeks, I’d see versions of my article in numerous newspapers, including the Seattle Times, the Boston Globe, and the Toronto Star. Interestingly, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Dallas Morning News cut the two paragraphs about the town’s famous relic, the Holy Foreskin; the newspapers in Poland and Mexico, however, did not.

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Holden Caufield meet Dorian Grey

"A lawyer for Mr. Salinger, Marcia B. Paul, told Judge Batts that the author had a right to keep Holden Caulfield “frozen in time” for the life of his copyright." (via Clyde Haberman's "‘Rye’ Dispute Is Gateway to City’s Past"

Judge Rules for J.D. Salinger in ‘Catcher’ Copyright Suit
By SEWELL CHAN
Published: July 2, 2009
A federal judge banned publication in the United States of a book containing a 76-year-old version of Holden Caulfield.

Cheap Trick release new album on 8-track

Cheap Trick adventures with 8-track in 2009!

Globe & Mail's Report

Fair Syndication and copied content

It's unfortunate that the authors equated 'copied' with 'stolen' but Attributor's idea seems fair at first glance if it allows for the following:

1. It facilitates social distribution, that is, the reposting of entire articles without having to seek permission
2. It allows blogger to profit from their aggregating or curating activities while creating a simple solution for any ad revenues generated to be shared. This is fine if the publication owns the copyright. What happens to the freelance writer who granted a paper one-time rights?
3. It allows for non-commercial use. That is blogs like this one that don't collect ad revenue.
I run this blog entirely for my own convenience and benefit--it's just so I can find articles again--which is why I mostly point and copy rather than point and comment. But if I help a reader finds content from another site, I hope this would be seen as a benefit to the publication (eg helping to generate buzz) rather than 'stealing'.

Should Ad Networks Pay Publishers For Stolen Content? The Fair Syndication Consortium Thinks So.
18 Comments
by Erick Schonfeld on April 21, 2009

As newspapers and other publishers watch their revenues diminish, one common refrain among them is that maybe they should somehow go after Google or Yahoo for aiding and abetting the destruction of their businesses and sometimes the wholesale theft of their content. We’ve seen how the Associated Press wants to handle this: by aggressively going after anyone who even borrows a headline. Today, a consortium of other publishers including Reuters, the Magazine Publishers of America, and Politico are taking a more measured approach, but one which will no doubt still be controversial. They are forming the Fair Syndication Consortium, which is the brainchild of Attributor, the startup which tracks the reuse of text and images across the Web for many of these same publishers.

The Fair Syndication Consortium is initially trying to address a legitimate problem on the Web: the proliferation of splogs (spam blogs) and other sites which do nothing more than republish the entire feed of news sites and blogs, often without attribution or links. There are tens of thousands of these sites, perhaps more. Rather than go after these sites one at a time, the Fair Syndication Consortium wants to negotiate directly with the ad networks which serve ads on these sites: DoubleClick, Google’s AdSense, and Yahoo primarily. For any post or page which takes a full copy of a publisher’s work, the Fair Syndication Consortium thinks the ad networks should pay a portion of the ad revenues being generated by those sites.

'Archival Auteurs' at the UNSW Creative Media Conference

Research Showcases

Creative Media Showcase & Energy Showcase


The Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research), Professor Les Field, has announced the winners of the Presentation and Poster Prizes for the Creative Media Research Showcase and the Energy Research Showcase.

The quality of the all presentations was exceptionally high and he thanked all those who had contributed to the success of the showcases. Both days had been entertaining, educative and exciting and had raised awareness across disciplines of the research being undertaken in the field.

The prizes of $1000.00 each are to be used to foster collaborative research, particularly by more junior researchers.

Creative Media Showcase Winners

creative media showcase
Photo: Getty
Presentations
Session 1: Professor Rob Brooks, Science, BEES
Session 2: Professor Jeffrey Shaw, COFA, FASS, Engineering, iCinema
Session 3: Mr Ian McArthur, COFA, Design Studies
Session 4: Ms Margaret Borschke, FASS, Journalism and Media Research Centre

Poster
Dr Daniel Woo, Engineering, CSE