Fair use talk on Inside Higher Ed

My talk on fair use for Educause Live! last month was picked up by Rodney Murray for his monthly podcast at Inside Higher Ed, “The Pulse.” Murray nicely excerpted and highlighted parts of the talk pertaining to obstacles and solutions for educators using copyrighted media (even though he left out the more self-serving parts of the presentation that focused on Critical Commons as an alternative to proprietary learning management systems!). So if you only have 20 minutes to spend thinking about fair use instead of 60, you can get the audio from Inside Higher Ed while exploring the contents of Critical Commons.

JFK reenactments from Technologies of History

I just got back from SCMS 2011 in New Orleans, where I presented a talk on reenactments of the JFK assassination drawn from Technologies of History as part of a panel titled Cultural Logics of Replay. Although these slides don’t include the video clips used in the presentation, the JFK montage is included in the media survey I cut together for the book. The panel generated some very engaged responses and was followed by a book signing hosted by Mark Williams and Dartmouth College Press. Thanks to everyone who joined us for the panel and the signing!

Critical Commons on Educause Live!

The webcast recording of my presentation to Educause Live! on February 25, 2011 just went online. Although the title of the talk, “The Future of Fair Use” may have been a bit oversold, it was an amazing opportunity to speak on behalf of fair use to hundreds of higher ed professionals nationwide. For those who don’t have an hour to spare, the basic message is that non-specialists (educators, librarians, media makers) can and should contribute directly to the shaping of an assertive, ethical future for fair use. Citing the groundbreaking work done by the Center for Social Media’s best practices guides, the presentation also highlights Critical Commons as a case study of a fair use-enabled platform for promoting digital scholarship, teaching and research. The presentation sparked a lively discussion among the Educause community and a huge spike in traffic to Critical Commons. Thanks to Steve Worona of Educause for giving us this opportunity!

The Pleasure of the Index II

Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s thoughtful post How To Index Your Own Book and Why I’ll Never Do It Again on ProfHacker sparked a very interesting debate over the merits of self-indexing vs. professional indexing of academic books. Coincidentally, her post appeared less than 24 hours after I had completed my own index and enthusiastically blogged about the pleasures I found in indexing. I responded to Kathleen’s post with a brief comment and link on ProfHacker, which prompted several responses by professional indexers that ranged from bemused condescension to reassertions of the value of proper indexing.

I realize now that I should have done a bit more to inoculate my characterization of indexing as a creative reinterpretation of a text against being perceived as naive or irresponsible. For me, indexing is clearly an extension of the fundamental information architecture of a book, similar to chapter breaks, sub-heads, tables of contents, image captioning and the ordering of a book’s contents, none of which is routinely turned over to professionals or software programs to be completed objectively. I would make a similar argument for the importance of typography and page design in a printed text, but that’s another discussion, and indeed we do routinely (and with mixed results) turn this part of the publishing process over to professionals. The index, however, is arguably the heart of a book’s information architecture and we know that the categories and presuppositions of knowledge systems are at least coextensive with, if not co-constitutive of, any scholarly endeavor. If an author is inclined to do so, thinking seriously about the index as a creative interface offers an important way of directly addressing the fantasy that readers (particularly in a digital age) follow a linear trajectory through a text from start to finish. I am not against professional indexing, which doubtless results in a more faithful rendering of a work’s contents and is probably appropriate for most books, it’s just that for me, this would constitute a lost opportunity to reinforce certain paths and associations in the text that I hope will be productive for readers.

I should say that much of my work for the past decade has been devoted to thinking about the potentials of scholarly interface, information design and what good can come of encouraging humanities scholars to explore the creative (not just practical) potentials of electronic publication. The Vectors Journal that I co-edit with Tara McPherson has been doing this with some success through collaboration between scholars and designers for the past few years and we have now moved on to developing a platform called Scalar that encourages an even deeper reconsideration of scholarly publication and electronic argumentation. Both of these projects invite scholars to rethink their work in terms of database structures and the combinatoric possibilities they enable. The relational and/or semantic structures of databases open extremely productive avenues of possibility for some scholars and some works of scholarship, though clearly not all. Given my immersion in database-driven scholarship, interface design and cultures of remix, it was impossible for me to approach indexing as anything other than a welcome bridge between traditional text publication and the electronic publishing platforms that now I largely prefer.

On alternative licensing and academic publication

I almost didn’t ask my editor if it would be possible to have Technologies of History published under a Creative Commons license. With many academic presses struggling economically and so much disinformation equating open publishing with communism or piracy (or both), such a request seemed ridiculously unlikely to be granted. To my surprise, the response of my editor at UPNE was curious and welcoming; he had heard of Creative Commons and knew that, although this book is about media and history, I am also deeply invested in issues of copyright and fair use. I wrote up an informal proposal, explaining that Creative Commons licensing did not mean giving the book away for free to everyone with an internet connection and why I believed it would ultimately help us to craft a more effective online marketing strategy. With the help of a former student who now works at Creative Commons, I also compiled a list of other academic presses and publications that have used CC licenses recently. He promised to run it by the suits and the law-talking guys at the press and, to my surprise, with just a few additional clarifications and reassurances (e.g., that the press could still collect royalties for parts of the book that might be republished in course readers, etc.), everyone was on board. Interestingly, initiating this conversation with my editor also sparked a discussion of ways to use CC licensing to reactivate older titles in their list that have stopped selling and, perhaps most importantly, it has made me feel even more invested as a partner in the marketing of the book, since I don’t need to feel like a total sellout for allowing a standard copyright notice to go in the front.

Technologies of History cover preview

Although the book is not due out on shelves until the spring, I recently received a proof of the cover image for my forthcoming book Technologies of History that is too good not to share. Although academic presses have been known to be less than inventive with the design of book covers, the University Press of New England totally came through on this one. The real thanks go to Peter Brinson and Kurosh ValaNejad, the creators of The Cat and the Coup, from which the cover image is drawn. The striking visual style of the game comes from the Persian miniatures that Kurosh painstakingly created as a backdrop for the game, in which you play as the cat of Mohammad Mossadegh, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran who was overthrown by a CIA sponsored coup. As it happened, I was just completing the final draft of the book as Peter and Kurosh were finishing the game last spring. I was amazed by how perfectly The Cat and the Coup resonated with the book’s focus on eccentric historiography and wound up using it as one of the centerpiece projects in my chapter on digital histories.

The Pleasure of the Index Part I

I have just completed the page proofs and indexing of my book Technologies of History, the final stages in a long and not entirely unpleasant process. Against the advice of my publisher, I created the index myself rather than hire a professional who is experienced and competent in such matters. Although this decision was initially driven by simple aversion to paying money for the service, I quickly recognized the process of indexing as coextensive with the creative and scholarly work in the digital realm that I have been focused on for most of the past decade. Specifically (obviously, now that I think about it), the process of indexing combines two of my core pleasures: interface design and remix. The index itself is, of course, an alternative interface, offering multiple points of entry and the possibility of non-linear navigation of the book’s contents. At the same time, it is a creative reinterpretation and visualization of the themes, people and works under discussion. Whereas pouring the book’s complete contents into the Wordle visualization engine brings mostly painful revelations (Am I really that obsessed with the JFK assassination? Should I try to find another word for “although”?), the distillation of the text according to concepts, sub-heads and page ranges suggests insights into my own writing patterns: seemingly fewer sustained discussions of complex ideas and primary texts than I would like; less precise parsing of terms such as “memory” than intended, etc.

On the other hand, I feel encouraged that the project has somehow never seemed boring or tedious, even as its arguments have grown overly familiar. Ironically, now that the book has finally been committed to its ultimate, linear form, I want nothing more than to subject it to the kind of dissection and recombination that is only possible via a fully digital, interactive database-driven platform (the kind of transformation to which Vectors has been devoted for the past six years). Is it any accident that the index, which is arguably the most “writerly” and hence most threatening aspect of text-based scholarship, should be politely relegated by academic convention to both the final stages of composition and the most extreme margins of the published book? For my next book, I will generate the index first and compel the written words and everything else to fall in line behind it.

UCLA Reimagining the Archive conference

Mark Williams organized this panel titled “Realizing Scalar Capacities To Transform Media Archives” with Erik Loyer, Craig Dietrich and myself, which was to be our first public debut of our work on Scalar for the Reimagining the Archive conference at UCLA on November 13, 2010. Unfortunately, Mark was unable to attend but was ably replaced by Jackson Stakeman, who stole the show with an improvised VJ set using sampled video sequences from his project about Walter White, incubated during the NEH funded Broadening the Digital Humanities seminar at USC last summer. You can download my presentation from the conference site as a PDF here; Erik’s slides are here.

Alternative Projections at USC

Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles (1945–1980) is an extraordinarily ambitious three-day (Fri. Nov. 11-Sun. Nov. 13) symposium that focuses on the community of filmmakers, artists, curators and programmers who contributed to the creation and presentation of experimental cinema in Southern California. Co-organized and curated by Critical Studies professor David James, the event draws inspiration from his book The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles, and includes screenings of numerous rarely-seen films, videos, installations and performances right here at USC.

Of particular interest for the IMD community is the Single Wing Turquoise Bird Light Show on Saturday night (8-10PM) in Norris Theater and the Sunday afternoon (3-6PM) panel and screenings by members of the Oasis film collective that includes Morgan Fisher, Roberta Friedman, Amy Halpern, Tom Leeser, Beverly O’Neill, Pat O’Neill, Grahame Weinbren, and David Wilson; as well as the installation in the SCA Gallery of Side Phase Drift, a 1965 abstract three-screen performance projection piece by John Whitney Jr., in which each frame was composed of sets of images that were manipulated in form, color, superimposition and time.
Complete schedule is here.

Steve’s Lightning talk at Open Video 2009

My five-minute presentation sketching the origins, goals and context of Critical Commons for attendees at the 2009 Open Video conference.

On sharing ideas and community

I’ve been surprised recently by the frequency with which I hear people (even those who should know better!) express concerns about sharing ideas in public or online before they are fully articulated or “protected.” This strikes me as symptomatic of a cultural moment marked by both desperation and the subtle triumph of today’s intellectual property regime.

I think it is worth thinking clearly about the consequences within a community of sharing vs. not sharing ideas. In the commercial realm, it is probably reasonable to expect the worst. This is why we have ham-fisted systems such as copyright, digital rights management and the DMCA. On a listserv devoted to Games for Change (G4C), a newcomer recently expressed her #1 concern with participating on the list as “How do I protect my idea?”

A number of the responses to her message suggested ways to import the copyright-centric conventions of commercial culture into the G4C community. I suppose that this would indeed prevent someone from stealing an idea, commercializing it and cutting the originator out of the profits. At the very least, it would provide lawyers with ammunition to use in court when a lawsuit for copyright infringement goes to trial.

Assuming that this is not really the primary issue for a community focused on social issue game design, I would instead propose a thought exercise to explore possible “worst-case scenarios” if we were to treat the G4C community as a shared, collective space for exploring and developing ideas at all stages.

Worst case #1
You mention an idea on the G4C list; someone takes it and makes exactly the game you were intending and they do so before your game can get off the ground. Perhaps the game will have the very impact you wanted to achieve, which is not all bad; or it will fail without taking up any of your time or resources. Everyone in the community will know what happened and the “stealer” will be regarded with suspicion thereafter.

Worst case #2
Someone takes your idea and tries to make a game out of it but botches the job; in this case, you can go on to make the game you originally envisioned, with the benefit of learning from their mistakes. The stealer will thereafter be regarded as both untrustworthy and incompetent.

Worst case #3
Your idea is not exactly “stolen” but it sparks a creative impulse in someone else, who makes a related project with significant variations, perhaps applying it to a different social issue or context. Again, your idea has brought something good to the world; you are free to go ahead and make your game, having learned from, or perhaps even collaborating with, those who made the other project. In this case, it is worth asking whether your current idea is really 100% original. Surely the best ideas sometimes build on the creativity of others; perhaps the initial idea was made possible precisely because someone else decided to share their own thinking with you or the world.

Worst case #4
Your idea circulates through the G4C community, you receive suggestions for improvement, references to related projects and ideas for collaborators; the original idea evolves and becomes stronger and more achievable; you make connections with others of like mind and G4C becomes an even more dynamic, creative space. In this case, you no longer feel total ownership and control of your original idea; it is no longer “intellectual property,” but it has become one among many parts of a community that shares certain goals and values.

In any case, participating in such a community improves the chances that any given idea will not be the last one (good or bad) that you ever have and certainly it increases the likelihood that both your idea and the community will get better. For me, the question comes down to what kind of creative communities I want to be a part of. I come to communities such as G4C to find creative, socially conscious people who care about issues and the potentials of games to make a difference in the world. Such a community is enriched when ideas are shared freely and openly and it is greatly impoverished, even poisoned, when ideas are held back or treated as property to be either protected or stolen.

Ideas are cheap and they should be plentiful; doing good work that makes a difference takes a whole community.

On the recent wave of anti-China campaign ads

The ugliness of political advertising is nowhere more apparent than in the wave of anti-China ads airing in the weeks prior to the 2010 mid-term elections. These ads show that racism and xenophobia are strategies used actively by both Democratic and Republican parties when attempting to deflect responsibility for the domestic economic crisis.

These ads are also remarkable for their shameless use of iconic imagery (maps, flags, stars, dragons, Chinese characters) and sounds (gongs, Chinese music and language) to signify the evilness of China and to accuse incumbent politicians of colluding in China’s economic rise, ostensibly at the expense of American businesses and jobs.

On October 9, the New York Times reported that “at least 29 candidates have unveiled advertisements suggesting that their opponents have been too sympathetic to China and, as a result, Americans have suffered.”

The clips linked here represent only a fraction of the more egregious instances of scapegoating China for America’s economic woes. For more examples, search for keyword “China” on Critical Commons.