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 […]
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 […]
As part of the Open Milton project, I’ve been thinking about the place of XML in it. Over Christmas, I wrote a small XSL transform using the Bosak XML Shakespeare files. Rufus took Anthony and Cleopatra and, using Latex (I gather), created the Open Shakespeare Anthony and Cleopatra pdf. At one level, this is yet […]
I’m a happy bunny this morning with regards to calendaring. I’ve finally managed to solve why MS Outlook was ignoring the events sent with a timezone stamp. If I scheduled an event without specifying the time, then no time zone id is attached to the event so Outlook parses it quite happily. If I did […]
I’ve recently been working on a plugin for WordPress to set up each post as RDF enabled using OAI_ORE and SWORD which I presented to the Oxon SWIG on Tuesday. The Berlin Declaration of Open Access states the work should be free and also that it should be deposited in a repository. This seems to […]
I’m going to talk to you today about opening science and some of the ways that are being used to create platforms and tools and underlying responsibilities and actions that the commons needs to take if it is to develop a truly open way of working. Technology really is a means to an end; not […]
