David Patrick McKenzie

This week’s readings (Week 13) focused on the interrelated, sometimes opposed, issues of copyright and open access in scholarly (and other) communication.

I greatly enjoyed all of the readings, but the one that resonated with me most was Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture. This well-written book–so well-written that in spite of having plenty of other readings, I didn’t do the graduate student skim (much to my chagrin on Sunday night!)–discusses the formation of the United States’s scheme of copyright, its recent abuses, and presents a moderate, well-reasoned solution to recent issues. In keeping with the Constitution’s original intent (yes, that loaded term) of promoting creativity by both granting and limiting copyrights, Lessig suggests allowing one fifty-year copyright term, renewable. That way, non-commercially-viable works will lapse into the public domain–allowing them to be used and built upon–while forcing registration of still-commercially-viable works. In the meanwhile–particularly after his unfortunate loss in Eldred v. Ashcroft (discussed in-depth and well in this book)–Lessig has promoted the Creative Commons licenses that have recently taken off.

This book resonated with me because of my experiences as a public historian, particularly as a content developer sourcing images for several museum exhibitions while working for The Design Minds, Inc. Because of the current 95-year copyright term, many of these exhibitions took on added expenses–expenses that could be crippling for many of the small museums for which we worked. In a couple of instances, we (or the client, depending on the nature of the contract) coughed up four figures for images. Because we had used largely public-domain images, or images from the clients’ collections, otherwise, in these cases the clients were able and willing to pay those costs. But other times we found ourselves having to substitute inferior images.

This is to say nothing of cases where copyright is uncertain–an issue rearing its head lately in regards to Google Books and the Hathi Trust, or old recordings.

I got lucky the one time I tried to do track down copyright for an old recording. When I was working on the Gold Mining Camp Museum at Monroe Park, I emailed Dick Spottswood of WAMU’s Bluegrass Country (whose delightful show I’m listening to right now) to ask what sort of music might have been heard at a mining camp in Fauquier County, Virginia, in the 1930s–the time and place we were interpreting. He was nice enough to reply and suggest John Ashby, a musician performing around Fauquier at that time. Thankfully, I was able to track down the copyright holder for Ashby’s music after only going through a few people, and gain permission–the person was even happy to provide me a digital file. This worked well for him–it exposed new audiences to Ashby’s music–and worked well for the county’s park authority (owner of the museum), allowing the featuring of a local artist.

But what if I had not been able to track that rights holder down? Would the client and I have decided to take the risk of playing that recording? Or would we have lost that local connection, choosing to play, say, jazz from that period (which Spottswood said would have been heard in Fauquier from Washington radio stations)? I’m guessing the latter, since we would have feared the repercussions of someone coming after us for breach of copyright–that is, if we could have even found Ashby’s recordings.

As Lessig brings up, digital technology is making copyright a bigger issue than before, as the technology allows for easier duplication and derivative works. As we have discussed through the semester, it also opens up new doors for scholarly communication. We can more easily find sources–presuming they are not locked down. Recently I followed a Twitter discussion suggesting that more historians will choose to study the 19th century, because so much 20th century material is locked down due to copyright, thus much harder to digitize and distribute–and not for technical reasons.

We also can disseminate our work in different ways, the subject of the Scholarly Communications Institute’s eighth session. The report–a nice summation of issues we have discussed during class–talked about different ways scholars can communicate using digital technology, going beyond the monograph-article model, and what the implications of those new means are. What of peer review? What of writing for a broader audience? Two lines about that subject particularly resonated with me:

To date, scholarly communication has privileged authors over audience, and many scholars carry this presumption of precedence into the digital realm (10). [...] Which audience will take precedence–fellow specialists or the general public? Or if that dichotomy is itself a false distinction in the digital environment–as seems likely–what does it mean for scholarly communication? (11)

Indeed. Is it a false distinction in the digital environment? If it is–and I think it can be–that explains what attracted this public historian with academic leanings toward digital history–the ability to bridge that dichotomy, to fulfill my goal of having one foot in the academic history door, one in the public history door.

This and the other readings also raised the important issue of open access. Since we can, should we make our work readily available? I’m leaning toward yes. While some might worry about plagiarism, the technology makes plagiarism easier to detect. I’d like to hear what others think about this, though.

So digital technology has put us at a crossroads. Will our sources and the products we produce from those sources be locked down and controlled, or will they be open? What are the implications from each of those paths? Thoughts?

This week’s readings for Clio I got into basic nuts and bolts of disseminating history on the Web, particularly planning and design of websites. For me, they were quite useful as I think about putting my own projects on the Web.

Some of the design principles discussed in the readings were familiar to me from taking an exhibition design class and working at an exhibition design firm–rules about contrast, length and width of text, etc., hold consistently true for both Web sites and exhibitions, since both are means of conveying content beyond the medium of black text on paper.

Others are quite different, owing to the different nature of the media. The information architecture of a museum exhibition differs from that of a Web site, and that of course influences how one goes about designing. In the museum world, one must plan for conveying content in a three-dimensional way, leading to a different user experience and different impact (as my classmate Claire points out in her insightful post).

Before going into the museum exhibition world, I had not thought much about design principles. Indeed, I probably would not have thought as much about design without that experience and without diving into digital history, as I am now. While reading this week’s selections from A List Apart and Cohen and Rosenzweig’s Digital History, it struck me how thinking of information architecture and design is, in some ways, a revolution for many historians.

Since the advent of Gutenberg’s printing press (and one could argue before that time, taking into account scribes), historians have relied upon others to design our means of knowledge dissemination. As Cohen and Rosenzweig correctly note, citing Mike O’Malley, the typically black written word, whether in article or book form, has been the traditional way of disseminating historical knowledge for centuries.

We submit the our text–using a general information architecture that has been relatively unchanged–and someone from the publisher lays it out on the page. If we’re lucky, we get to include images. From my time at the Alamo I remember the day the curator’s galleys for his latest book came back. The only revelatory part of that experience was the cover. The medium simply did not permit much variation in the text, and the information conveyed remained the same as when the curator had handed printed Word documents to reviewers and others.

Even in museum exhibitions, the design is often outsourced to specialty firms. While those working on the content side are taught to think about design (although others discourage such thinking, saying it’s not the content person’s job), the designers actually execute it. They think about color, font, the space, and even the the information architecture. The content person works with the designer–perhaps more closely than the author of a book–and perhaps suggests tweaks, but is in the end not the person responsible for the design.

In other words, traditionally historians have been responsible for the information architecture of their dissemination of knowledge, if even that. In this digital age, we also need to think about the design of that means of dissemination. Not only that, we are presented with more means of information architecture.

On top of that, we’re dealing with Metadata, traditionally the realm of museum collections managers, librarians, and archivists, more first-hand now. This is probably why, for me, this week’s readings on metadata were a greater challenge than those on design. Whenever we place primary sources on our sites–whether they be museum objects, archival documents, references to books–we are creating the metadata appropriate for our websites, or at least figuring out how to convey the standard metadata. Thus, knowledge about that realm is important as well.

I see all of this as both empowering and scary (update: I see I’m not the only one). Empowering because it gives historians full control–in some ways, more than a profession that has typically worked solo is used to.

It can also be scary. The responsibility for conveying the content in an attractive, logical way (barring a budget for outsourcing design) is now on the historian’s shoulders. The metadata is no longer the realm of the museum collections manager, archivist, or librarian. It is now our realm, at least for our own work.

Overall, I find this change positive. Knowing about design, information architecture, and metadata can only enhance our work, whether for the Web or not. So all in all, the turn toward the digital, and the attendant new skills historians must learn (and that I am grateful to learn), will facilitate our interactions with the professionals who are part of our work otherwise, whether librarians, archivists, museum collections managers, publishers, or designers of all stripes.