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

Hulu, huh?

AP Reporter Jake Coyle named Hulu.com, a video streaming site backed by NBC and News Corp, best web site of the year.

I can't comment on the reporter's pick as I've never seen the site--it is only available for streaming in the USA.

Given this failure to work with the *world wide* nature of the web, holding Hulu up as a model of "how professional content can thrive on the Web" is problematic. I'm beginning to wonder if the entertainment industry's licensing habit will turn out like the financial market's addiction to deriviatives.

So for those of us on the outside, I'd have to say it's still Pirate Bay that takes the cake.

And the Hippos were Boiled in their Tanks

Michiko Kakutani, writin in The New York Times on Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs' early collaboration:

The best thing about this collaboration between Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs is its gruesomely comic title: “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks,” a phrase the two writers said they once heard on a radio broadcast about a circus fire.

Kerouac, writing in the persona of Mike Ryko, tends to sound like ersatz Henry Miller without the sex or fake Hemingway without a war (“There was a long orange slant in the street and Central Park was all fragrant and cool and green-dark”); his chapters possess none of the electric spontaneity of “On the Road,” none of the stream-of-consciousness immediacy of his later work.

Burroughs, writing as Will Dennison, serves up passages that feel more like imitation Cain or Spillane: semi-hardboiled prose with flashes of Burroughs’s famous nihilism but none of the experimental discontinuities and jump-cuts of “Naked Lunch.” In fact, both writers lean toward a plodding, highly linear, blow-by-blow style here that reads like elaborate stage directions: they describe every tiny little thing their characters do, from pouring a drink to walking out of a room to climbing some stairs, from ordering eggs in a restaurant to sending them back for being underdone to eating the new ones delivered by the waitress.

I'm curious to look at the book to consider the role that imitation plays in the development of personal style. The beats use of found material has always been notable. It will be enlightening to see their clumsier attempts (even if it would make the writers themselves wince.)

Google to e-publish out-of-print books

Google Signs Deal to e-Publish out-of-print books
Book Publishers Take Leaps Into Digital
By ERIC PFANNER
Published:
New York Times
November 10, 2008

Two Bits

Two Bits

Flickr vs youtube: competing models oF Participatory culture

Seminar – Journalism and Media Research Centre
Title: JMRC 2008 Seminar Series
Dr Jean Burgess
Post-doctoral Fellow
Queensland University of Technology

Date: 18/9/2008
Time: 4-6pm
Location: Room 127, Goodsell Building, UNSW
Notes

Whether celebratory or critical, too much scholarly discussion of 'Web 2.0' and participatory culture fails to fully engage with the specificity of the branded online communities where it happens. in this presentation Jean Burgess compares two such spaces -- flickr and youTube. Both of them are highly popular commercial platforms for user-created content, but they have very different business models, user communities, and aesthetic and social norms. Through this comparison Burgess demonstrates the importance and methodological challenges of treating particular branded spaces as research objects. She argues that an understanding of their specificity and complexity is essential to understanding the competing futures of participatory culture.

Journalism and Media Research Centre

Photography & the Transformation of Culture @ UTS

Last night, I attended Prof Christopher Pinney's talk, Photography & the Transformation of Cultures. The lecture was a part Transforming Cultures.

He spoke at great length about photography as an event but I kept having a nagging question about both the specificity and multiplicity of the print. I look forward to reading the longer version of the paper.

UNSW's Journalism and Media Research Centre launched

The press release and footage from the new Journalism and Media Research Centre where I am working on my PhD:


News Ltd chief opens UNSW Centre
5th September 2008

The Chairman and CEO of News Limited has told a gathering of media insiders and researchers that there is a growing need for relevant, high quality research into the media, during a period of great change in the industry.

Speaking at the launch of UNSW's prestigious Journalism and Media Research Centre, John Hartigan has welcomed its commitment to industry-focused research through better collaboration with those in the industry.

"You are embarking on your quest to become the leading research centre in its field at an ideal time," he told the gathering. "The internet is the biggest thing to happen to the media since the telephone. And there is still a lot we don't know and don't understand about the social, political or industry implications.

"There is a place I believe for a new body of high quality research - a big gap in the market if you like - that you are well positioned to occupy."

Mr Hartigan who has been a journalist for more than 40 years has been at the forefront of a recent campaign by the Australian media to get governments and the judiciary to reform more than 500 pieces of legislation that restrict the public's right to know how it is governed and how courts dispense justice.

Led by Professor Catharine Lumby and including some of the country's leading media and journalism experts, the Centre conducts public and private sector research into three key areas: new media audiences and business models; the social, cultural and health impacts of media consumption; and the regulation, ethics and practice of journalism.

"We want our research to be independent, expert and excellent," said Professor Lumby.

"Our focus is on research that assists our journalism and media industries to be competitive and flexible and that also sets an evidence-based agenda in public policy.

"Academic research in our field has to be applied, relevant and engaged with real issues confronting the private and public sectors," she said. "What sets us apart is that all of the key researchers in the Centre have been involved in journalism and in the private sector."

The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Fred Hilmer, said the Centre sits well with UNSW's professional and scientific focus.

"It's a good fit with where the University is heading and shows the sort of leadership that the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences can provide," he said.

The Centre, which is part of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, is offering a Masters in Journalism and Communciations next year that will be taught by industry professionals.

Media Contact: Susi Hamilton | 0422 934 024 | susi.hamilton@unsw.edu.au

John Berger's Twelve Theses on the Economy of the Dead

Twelve Theses on the Economy of the Dead
by John Berger
from Left Curve, 31

1. The dead surround the living. The living are the core of the dead.
In this core are the dimensions of time and space.
What surrounds the core is timelessness.

2. Between the core and its surrundings there are exchanges, which are not
usually clear. All religions have been concerned with making them clearer.
The credibility of religion depends upon the clarity of certain unusual exchanges.
The mystifications of religion are the result of trying to systematically produce such exchanges.

3. The rarity of clear exchange is due to the rarity of what can cross intact the frontier between timelessness and time.

4. To see the dead as the individuals they once were tends to obscure their nature.
Try to consider the living as we might assume the dead to do:
collectively.
The collective would accrue not only across space but also throughout time.
It would include all those who had ever lived. And so we would also be thnking of the dead.
The living reduce the dead to those who have lived, yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective.

5. The dead inhabit a timeless moment of construction continually rebegun.
The construction is the state of the universe at any instant.

6. According to their memory of life, the dead know the moment of construction as, also, a moment of collapse.
Having lived, the dead can never be inert.

7. If the dead live in a timeless moment, how can they have a memory?
They remember no more than being thrown into time, as does everything which existed or exists.

8. The difference between the dead and the unborn is that the dead have this memory.
As the number of dead increases, the memory enlarges.

9. The memory of the dead existing in timelessness may be thought of as a form of imagination concerning the possible.
This imagination is close to (resides in) God, but I do not know how.

10. In the world of the living there is an equivalent but contrary phenomenon.
The living sometimes experience timelessness, as revealed in sleep, ecstasy,
instants of extreme danger, orgasm, and perhaps in the experience of dying itself.
During these instants the living imagination covers the entire field of experience
and overruns the contours of the individual life or death. It touches the waiting imagination of the dead.

11. What is the relation of the dead to what has not yet happened, to the future?
All the future is the construction in which their “imagination” is engaged.

12. How do the living lie with the dead? Until the dehumanisation of society by capitalism,
all the living awaited the experience of the dead. It was their ultimate future. By themselves the living were incomplete.
Thus living and dead were inter-dependent. Always. Only a uniquely modern form of egotism has broken this inter-dependence.
With disastrous results for the living, who now think of the dead as eliminated.

The Dead Media Project

The Dead Media Project

Uppity Audiences and the Crisis of Author(ity)

"You'll Shut up. You're the Audience. I am the author. I outrank you!"
World's Worst Playright Franz Liebkind in The Producers

And this is fresh...

Excerpts from
The DJs They Couldn’t Hang
by Stuart Cosgrove
Originally published in the NME, August 9, 1986
(See whole story in the archives at DJhistory.com)

House music is dedicated. There are one or two releases which have the familiarity that hit records depend on, but most of them are for the dedicated. It is meta-music, a sound that constantly refers outwards to other sounds

House music is far from original, it’s a celebration of ten years of club music, strung out and remixed. If the last ten years of club music say nothing about your life then House music will be a massive disappointment, but if you feel club music communicates then smile for the hangman.

Frankie Knuckles, Farley Jackmaster Funk, radio mixers The Hot Mix 5 and young mixers like DJ Pope and Jackmaster House have transformed the DJ’s actions into an art: the aesthetics of house. Record decks, found sounds, simple drum machines, snatched backing tracks, sound effects and samplers are brought together to create live music from records, These in the words of current controversy are the ultimate musicians: the DJs they couldn’t hang. The House Mix style is creative, brash, extreme, dub crazy and soulful in the most modern and technological sense, The DJ becomes a creator and the hangman just an artisan performing two-bit rope tricks.

It’s the sound Chicago invented by borrowing from everywhere else.

Also See Cosgrove On the Wheels of Steal (1987)

House has broken the mould forever. The first theft as exploitation, one-way cultural traffic in which the authentic voice of black America was taken and toned down. But that was then and this is now. In 1987, theft is emancipatory, the traffic flows in both directions, every tune is a victim and every musician has the ability to mug a passer-by.