#access2009pei – Richard Akerman – Will We Command Our Data?
1 Oct 09
The David Binkley Lecture.
(Akerman writes Science Library Pad.)
Issues around data use and management are not unlike those facing copyright.
How big is data? Although storage capacity is significantly improved, it takes about ten 2m tall racks to contain a petabyte. There is a physical aspect to data, and costs associated with it. At the petabyte scale, data must by close to computation because of bandwidth constraints.
Four sources of data: research data, government data, library data, personal data. Government data is being released a bit more freely, so there’s more of it and we might be in a position to leverage even more into the public realm.
Convergence of factors since 2000: value of sharing, ease of sharing, and level of sharing at the machine level. We see this as good, and it’s increasingly easy to do. Are increasingly able to expose raw data to machines and take advantage of the rote activities in processing that machines do really well.
“OECD Principles and Guidelines for Access to Research Data from Public Funding” (April 2007). Fairly non-controversial principal that if the public funds research, the data should be release publicly. Publishers do not have a vested interest in becoming data publishers.
“The Toronto Statement on prepublication data sharing” (September 2009). Encouraging sharing of data before the long publication process.
OECD: “Open access to research data … easy, timely, user-friendly and preferable Internet based”
Gov’t data: US Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, US Memorandum on the FOIA; commitment to public release of gov’t information and the power of transparency. UK Power of Information Task Force: “public information held by for example the police, health bodies and local authorities is often not available. This is bad for democratic expression, the economy, and citizen customers.” US – data.gov; can librarians help governments learn to share this data more effectively? UK PM Brown meets with Tim Berners-Lee, announces UK wants to release gov’t data as linked data.
Library data: ILS Customer bill-of-rights (2005); Berkeley accord (2008).
Personal data: privacy risks, but potential power from the data in our lives. Wired cover feature “Living by numbers” (July 2009). Twitter will soon allow you to opt-in to automatically recording you geographic position.
Why libraries? Advocates, exemplars, experts. Open up data in a sensible, productive, usable way. Unlike print, data is not self-describing. E.g. of DataCite: “DOIs for data”; NRC-CISTI Gateway to (Canadian) Scientific Data Sets.
Canada hasn’t had the strong push from the PM/Pres level that other nations have, but there are significant projects. It’s actually really difficult to release government data under crown copyright. Can look at geogratis, DLI, and ODESI for examples of how it can be done.
Municipal efforts too: Vancouver, Toronto has plans, Ottawa working on a policy.
Back to Library data: how do we connect library data to patrons in a similar way? Some examples: a million free covers from LibraryThing, the Open Library has pulled data from all over, TALIS Connected Commons specifically about linked data, MESUR (resolver data) – we have data in our resolver logs that we could use to build interesting tools, LCSH (see Dan Chudnov, later).
APIs vs raw data….
Personal data: Daytum, people can record almost anything about themselves.
Back to the peta-scale: Total Recall; only valuable if you could find stuff in that huge store of information. Libraries as preserving culture and its outputs, must think about how we record and preserve people’s lifestreams.
Posted by pzed on October 1, 2009 at 8.15am
#access2009pei – Cory Doctorow – Copyright vs Universal Access
1 Oct 09
tale of two networks: the one we thought we would get, delivering 500 channels of high-res tv! The network that would make us more socially normally (instead of infinitely weirder). David Eisenberg calls this the “smart” network.
Instead, we got a dumb network, in which the people in the middle don’t know what they tech is for or what people would do with it. Great advantage to this is that people at the edge can be very smart.
Surprisingly, dumb network delivered progressively low resolution. Example of telephone, from high quality centrally controlled network, through introduction of crappy phones, to mobile, to skype. We trade quality for price, access, and customizability. Content isn’t king, conversation is.
Every exec thinks they’re industry is the most important thing ever, and are regularly proven wrong by the cycle of creative destruction that is the market economy. Except when the have a regulatory monopoly.
Countries have formerly managed copyright in local, idiosyncratic ways. However, the current regime is governed by a harmonized approach developed through WTO etc. and these rules are written primarily by industry insiders, preferring rights of producers over rights of users.
The network is fundamentally a copying machine, with increasing capacity for storage. It just gets easier to copy. But copying is reified not as an act of an individual, but as an act of a company making copies on an industrial scale. The problem is it doesn’t take a giant, industrial machine to make a copy any more, but we trigger the same set of regulations that govern industry to govern the activities of private individuals. On the internet, we make copies simply by accessing material. We communicate, make plans; read for education, political engagement; work, fall in love… all governed by copyright.
UK study: Extending the term of copyright has a net negative effect economically. DRM doesn’t work. Policies are set without any recourse to evidence. Industrial revolution was not based on buying and selling machines, but using and access to them. Info revolution must also be based on access and use.
The punishment for infringement in many places is disconnection from the internet. Effectively, this is equivalent to the death penalty for citizenship. Future treaties may build surveillance and control into regulations, requiring hardware to be checked at borders, ISPs to inspect packets. These negotiations are entirely in secret, the Obama admin says its position papers are state secrets. Why? Because experience has shown (Hello, Sam Bulte) that when the public becomes aware of them, we rebel.
Copyright law should go on doing what it’s always done: regulate the way corporate entities interact with one another, not how we as individuals act. The point of copyright law can’t be to ensure that one group of people get to make a living for ever. Rather, its role should be to ensure that the greatest number of people can participate in culture. Libraries have an important role, as an unimpeachable moral authority.
Posted by pzed on October 1, 2009 at 7.16am
My email to the PM and M of Foreign Affairs, please consider sending your own #iranelection
20 Jun 09
To: CannoL@parl.gc.ca, HarpeS@parl.gc.ca
Dear Prime Minister Harper, and Minister Cannon:
I am a Canadian citizen doing my best to follow what is happening in Iran. I am shocked to hear reports that the Canadian Embassy is refusing to accept injured democracy supporters. I sincerely hope that these reports are untrue. If they are true, however, please on behalf of Canadians, open our doors to them. The world is watching.
Peter Zimmerman
Windsor, Ontario
Posted by pzed on June 20, 2009 at 3.36pm
What’s wrong with Canada’s internet?
9 Jun 09
Michael Geist presents to the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications. Short answer: just about everything.
via Boing Boing
Posted by pzed on June 9, 2009 at 10.08am
nit picking, blip edition
23 Mar 09
What’s wrong with this excerpt from blip.fm’s FAQ page?
A blip is a combination of 1) a song and 2) a short message that accompanies it. The way you create a blip is to first search for a song that you want to hear (or a song that you want your listeners to hear), then add a short message (under 150 characters), finally you submit it. Submitting a blip is also referred to as “blipping”, so from here on out, when you read “he blipped my favorite track” it means “he submitted a blip that had my favorite song attached”.
In the first sentence, a blip is defined as a song plus a comment. Hence the example in the last sentence should read something like “he submitted a blip that included my favorite song”. The song is not attached to the blip, it’s one of two constituent parts. The example as written says “he submitted a [song plus a comment] that had my favorite song attached”.
One could, of course, leave the comment field blank, but there would still be a song plus a comment of zero length making up the blip.
Posted by pzed on March 23, 2009 at 1.59pm
“In tough times, creative pursuits stage a revival”
23 Feb 09
When all else fails, make art.
Housing prices, industries and morale are all sinking. But for some, the recession brings a rare moment of opportunity – the chance to bravely pursue a dream when there is nothing else to lose.
It’s too Monday morning to think about how this connects to the stuff I’ve been thinking about the last few days, except to say I think creativity in art must be both personal and social, and somewhere in there lies the connection to citizenship and cities and making things better.
Posted by pzed on February 23, 2009 at 10.00am
a more nuanced discussion of creative class
22 Feb 09
Yesterday’s post about joining the creative class was kind of meant as a joke, but kind of not. The amazingly successful pecha kucha night held at Artcite last Thursday (and organized by my hunny, Jodi Green) inspired me to start getting better connected to what’s going on in Windsor.
All the talks went really well, and the energy and excitement both in the gallery and at the after party were remarkable. Phog’s Tom Lucier taped and uploaded all six Pecha Kucha Windsor talks. Tom, also one of the presenters, subtitled his talk “Growing Windsor’s Creative Class”, and this expression, creative class, was picked up by others over the evening.
During the discussion afterwards, I was tempted to challenge everyone to think beyond the term “creative class”. It makes me uncomfortable, but at the time I couldn’t think how to articulate exactly why, and I’m still not entirely sure. It reminds me entirely too much of knowledge worker, but being a member of the creative class sounds so much less like being a line worker in the manufacture of “knowledge”.
Years ago, I read Paul Fussell’s Class: A Guide through the American Status System (Leddy Library: HN90.S6 F87 1983), in which he lays out a persuasive statement of what is obvious to any non-America: that America has a well-defined and fairly rigid class structure. But he also posits the existence of an “X” class of people, usually either impoverished artists or wealthy drop-outs, who (sort of) live outside the class system. These are the Bohemians in Florida’s formulation of the creative class, but note that they make up a small minority. The majority of this creative class are defined by the nature of their contribution to the economy, mostly in the private sector. Which isn’t to say that creative economic activity isn’t what Windsor needs, lord knows we need all the economic activity we can get.
Thursday night a very diverse group of people were brought together by their love of this city (this polis). To me, the unifying theme of Pecha Kucha Windsor’s six talks turned out to be citizenship. What does it mean to be a part of a city, to love that city, to be hurt by that city; how can we make that city better, how can we get more people thinking about, talking about, and making the change we need; how do we encourage residents to interact with their city as active participants, as citizens, rather than as passive consumers of utilities and services? And how can we live up to that ideal ourselves?
Posted by pzed on February 22, 2009 at 1.22pm
