ReadWriteWeb has an intriguing guest post by Alisa Leonard-Hansen on the the idea of the Pragmatic Web. She takes a sanguine look at the Semantic Web and the fact that it is going to take time to build the machines and networking to fully mine the contextual information that will appear. She explores the way […]
Just started on a new version of the Dickens letters which I’m trying to improve before adding in further volumes of text and other authors. I’ve refactored some of the code to remove some of the cruft and obsolescence. I’ve also been working on the rdf so that I can build up the RDFa links […]
Just caught this story on the Guardian culture page about the heirs of Jack Kirby seeking to extend the copyright on the Marvel characters that he co-created with Stan Lee. From what I understand, comic copyrights appear to be fairly complicated (certainly more so than book publishing) and perhaps it is an issue that needs […]
I’ve finally posted the first draft of the Dickens website here: https://austgate.co.uk/dickens/index.php?author=Dickens. The idea is that it will allow users to derive networks across the a variety of Victorian authors as and when I can develop the datasets. I’ve also been developing a small text ontology to add to the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) […]
As an aside I’ve started a small project to begin visualising ways of searching the letters of Charles Dickens and exploring the Simile library which MIT have produced. Its originally an extension to the D-Space repository tool but Rufus Pollock used in the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Weaving History project – to which I contributed the […]
The slowness or lack of real time on RSS feeds has reared its head again in terms of getting news out quickly and in “real-time”. Erick Schonfeld on Techcrunch wants to speed them up and John Biggs has decided that RSS needs to RIP. I’ve been working on Twittering RSS feeds for the JISCMail service […]
Is a text really stable? Is it entity? In a lecture during my final year at the University of Leicester, one of the English lecturers posed a a question: What is a text? After soliciting various answers from the masses, he argued that a text is anything – email, note, manuscript and so on. So […]
Cory Doctorow has come up with a quick guide to self-serve licensing via Creative Commons which outlines the uses and advantages of the licence. The crux, apart from citation of sources, is what it allows users to do to use your data/craft/book/doohickey in innovative ways. From that both parties can learn from each other and […]
The New York Times had a piece on digital piracy of books and the contrasting views which was picked up by Slashdot. Starting out from the anti-piracy view, it does note that bestsellers are often the most pirated books which backs up Cory Doctorow‘s assertion: “I really feel like my problem isn’t piracy,…It’s obscurity.” His […]
