Digging Digitally

In the Ancient World Bloggers Group blog (AWBL), an interesting discussion was brought to my attention on the impact (or lack thereof) of anthropological blogs on the discipline. The Savage Minds blog features prominently as it was quoted in the title of a recent American Anthropologist article by David H. Price. Savage Minds has a blog post on the AA article, with comments. AWBL contributor Michael E. Smith notes:

“I haven’t seen anything remotely similar in archaeology. AWBG occasionally gets some interesting discussion going, and I’ve seen a few interesting discussions on other blogs here and there. I often post things on Publishing Archaeology that are deliberately provocative, hoping to generate discussion. But almost all of the interesting responses I’ve gotten have come in the form of emails to me, NOT comments on the blog. People want to respond, but evidently don’t feel comfortable doing that in a public venue. I don’t have any grand conclusions, just a sense of disappointment that archaeology doesn’t yet seem to have a vibrant and exciting intellectual venue on the internet. But anthropology sure does – check out Savage Minds, its great.”

There are more worrying developments for open source software. It is becoming a(n unintended?) target of zealots in the copyright-to-the-absurd, shortsighted entertainment industry. Behind the curve as such attempts may be, this industry has enormous cloud in the US Congress and parliaments and governments around the world. The esteemed BBC that has now introduced commercials before showing video content also blocks certain open source video software from accessing their videos: “… BBC … has enabled SWF Verification for its catch-up Internet-video service. … users of Open Source software (such as Xbox Media Center – or XBMC) can no longer access videos from BBC’s iPlayer.” (AfterDawn.com). According to ZDNet, “Andres Guadamuz, a lecturer in law at the University of Edinburgh in the UK, has carried out an investigation and discovered that a very influential lobby group is asking the US government to look at open source as being worse than piracy. The lobby group in question is the  International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), a group of organizations that includes the MPAA and RIAA.” They quote from IIPA documents: “The Indonesian government’s policy… simply weakens the software industry and undermines its long-term competitiveness by creating an artificial preference for companies offering open source software and related services, even as it denies many legitimate companies access to the government market. Rather than fostering a system that will allow users to benefit from the best solution available in the market, irrespective of the development model, it encourages a mindset that does not give due consideration to the value to intellectual creations. As such, it fails to build respect for intellectual property rights and also limits the ability of government or public-sector customers (e.g., State-owned enterprise) to choose the best solutions.”

A new report came out: The Future of the Internet IV, by J. Anderson and L. Rainie. It’s the 4th volume in this quasi-annual series (previous volumes also available online). This is an important study.

A survey of nearly 900 Internet stakeholders reveals fascinating new perspectives on the way the Internet is affecting human intelligence and the ways that information is being shared and rendered.

The web-based survey gathered opinions from prominent scientists, business leaders, consultants, writers and technology developers. It is the fourth in a series of Internet expert studies conducted by the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University and the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. In this report, we cover experts’ thoughts on the following issues:

• Will Google make us stupid?
• Will the internet enhance or detract from reading, writing, and rendering of knowledge?
• Is the next wave of innovation in technology, gadgets, and applications pretty clear now, or will the most interesting developments between now and 2020 come “out of the blue”?
• Will the end-to-end principle of the internet still prevail in 10 years, or will there be more control of access to information?
• Will it be possible to be anonymous online or not by the end of the decade?

“Three out of four experts said our use of the Internet enhances and augments human intelligence, and two-thirds said use of the Internet has improved reading, writing and rendering of knowledge,” said Janna Anderson, study co-author and director of the Imagining the Internet Center. “There are still many people, however, who are critics of the impact of Google, Wikipedia and other online tools.” Read more…

I’m a bit confused. The National Treasures website, set up by the Israel Antiquities Authority, provides a gallery and info: “This on-line site offers a selection of published artifacts from the collections of the National Treasures and is available for researchers, curators, students and the general public in Israel and abroad. This site is updated continuously, and new artifacts are added on a regular basis.” So far so good. However, when you dig down to an actual artifact page, this is what jumps out:

There are two links for “Purchase”? Fortunately, when I clicked these, nothing happened, the page stayed the same. Still, is the IAA in the antique dealing business now?

Correction: As Mark and Catherine were kind enough to point out, the entry page of National treasures actually does state: “The artifact’s information card presents detailed archaeological data about the selected artifact, including provenance, type, dimensions, material, site where discovered, dating and bibliography. In addition, hi-resolution images of on-line artifacts may be purchased on-line from the photographic archives of the Israel Antiquities Authority.” I am sorry for any confusion I may have caused. Just goes to show that it isn’t always a good idea to write blog posts (very) late at night…

This week, I came across a website, unprofound.com, with free, no-strings-attached photos that you can “use in just about any way [you]‘d like. You may NOT, however, redistribute these photos individually or en masse, as photos, to any other websites or offline buyers. The photos themselves are still the intellectual property of their respective owners and you are merely receiving permission to use them in your designs, your art, your personal and professional projects, as your desktop backgrounds.” One way to browse the photos is by dominant color… It is nice that the contributing photographers come from around the world and therefore provide more than just typical stock photos of life in the US or so. Here’s a photo I liked:

And now for something a bit different: “… volunteers are gathering in cities around the world to help bolster relief groups and government first responders in a new way: by building free open-source technology tools that can help aid relief and recovery in Haiti. ‘We’ve figured out a way to bring the average citizen, literally around the world, to come and help in a crisis,’ says Noel Dickover, co-founder of Crisis Commons (crisiscommons.org), which is organizing the effort.” (source: NYT article)

Update 2-17-10: Wired magazine has set up its own Haiti webpage: Haiti Rewired.

Microsoft has made a deal with the NSF to offer free cloud computing services to scientists, says The New York Times. “The goal of the three-year project is to give scientists the computing power to cope with exploding amounts of research data. It uses Microsoft’s Windows Azure computing system, …” “[Those systems] allow organizations and individuals to run computing tasks and Internet services remotely in relatively low-cost data centers.” “Microsoft’s commitment to scientific computing comes two years after a similar service was introduced by Google and I.B.M. … hoping to differentiate the new service by offering scientists a set of custom applications that simplified access to Azure and use of existing software applications like Microsoft Excel easily.” “… the explosion of data being collected by scientists had transformed the needs of the typical scientific research program on campus from a half-time graduate student one day a week to a full-time employee dedicated to managing the data. He said this kind of exponential growth in cost was increasingly hampering scientific research.”

J. Hadro has an interesting article in Library Journal about the American Library Association’s 2010 Midwinter Meeting: “Open access (OA) publishing models, pricing concerns, and the cannibalization of print sales were the headline topics at the SPARC-ACRL forum session on Saturday at the ALA 2010 Midwinter Meeting in Boston, titled ‘The Ebook Transition: Collaboration and Innovations Behind Open Access Monographs.’ The conclusion? Open access monographs are an unprecedented boon to the scholarly mission of dissemination, yet challenge the financial sustainability of an academic press.” (thanks to Chuck Jones)

The Brooklyn Museum continues to push the envelope:

“When it comes to progressive, public-friendly copyright policies, few art museums can match The Brooklyn Museum. In 2004, it was the first art museum to adopt a Creative Commons license, allowing any non-commercial copying of any image in which the museum holds the copyright. In 2008, it was the third institution to join the Flickr Commons, making available high-resolution images of Public Domain artworks from its collection. Last week, the musuem published the detailed copyright status of every image in its online collection–that’s over 12,000 artworks–and made this information available through its API so that anyone can easily cross-reference the data with their own copyright research. It also switched to a less restrictive Creative Commons license, allowing non-commercial remixing as well.” (Jonathan Melber in The Huffington Post).

The museum possesses many archaeological artifacts from the Middle East, Latin America, etc. Here’s an example:

Bahía. Seated Figure, 500 B.C.E.- 500 C.E. Clay, post-fire pigment, 17 3/4 x 13 1/4 x 8 1/4 in. (45.1 x 33.7 x 21.0 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Tessim Zorach, 88.57.7. Creative Commons-BY-NC

A recent report—thanks to Clifford Lynch via Melinda Burns—by Kathy English, The Longtail of News: To Unpublish or Not to Unpublish, draws attention to an old issue that is gaining new prominence: published content can be challenged but open-access and Google-indexed content brings even passages of material that was “obscure in practice” out into the open. Newspapers and news websites are of course foremost confronted with this (I remember lawyers contacting me a couple of times when I was editing IW&A). People don’t like something published about them (or a pet cause), erroneously or not, and ask for it to be removed from an online archive, sometimes years after the fact. Before, one would easily move on and forget but, now that one can google oneself, old wounds are easily ripped open again, listed prominently in Google search results. In archaeology, we haven’t been subject to this kind of problem much yet—correct me if I’m wrong—but it may very well be only a matter of time. We all know how politically sensitive certain research can be, e.g., Native American repatriation, Biblical archaeology, national heritage vs. colonialism, etc. Personal issues (accusations, challenges, …) do interfere often in the study of the ancients too. A long-forgotten diatribe against an esteemed colleague, “buried” in a Festschrift or some other obscure volume, may suddenly pop up on the Google radar. Excavation notes could list certain artifacts as having been excavated by Ms. X while her arch rival, Mr. Y, remembers differently.

Paradoxically or as a matter of purpose, the endeavored better user experience leads to easier access to information: open-access and Google-indexing means open to legal and other potentially unpleasant challenges. Our academic gentlemen’s agreement on such issues may become antiquated. The general cultural context under which we operate influences our research and the way we communicate our research. The open-access movement is making great strides but there are counterforces. We are not insulated from them. Only time will tell how the balance will evolve, I suppose. One more thing: this also draws attention to archiving and retention policies of online collections. In the future, will outdated, controversial or neglected publications  be included in the migration of a collection to the umpteenth new data standard? Who will decide and on what grounds?

(Crossposted with minor alterations from Heritage Bytes)