Therefore, one invents--in the literal use of the Latin word inventio, employed by rhetoricians to stress finding again or reassembling from past performances, as opposed to the romantic use of invention as something you create from scratch--goals abductively, that is, hypothesizes a better situation from the known historical and social facts.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
“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.
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'.
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.
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
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.
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.)
Seminar – Journalism and Media Research Centre Title: JMRC 2008 Seminar Series Dr Jean Burgess Post-doctoral Fellow Queensland University of Technology
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.
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.
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."
"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
Margie Borschke is a writer and Senior Lecturer in Journalism and Media at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. This blog began as part of her research into the cultural poetics and politics of copies in networked culture. Her doctoral dissertation, Rethinking the Rhetoric of Remix: Copies and Material Culture in Digital Networks, was awarded a PhD by the University of New South Wales in 2012.
