Robert McCrum, an associate editor of the Observer, has this remarkably sane blog post regarding the nature of digitisation and Google Books. Perhaps it is only my interpreation but it does seem to be a slight volte face on his part, as I’ve always interpreted his stance as slightly anti-digitised books. Having read Adrian Johns’ […]
I’ve just come across this Varsity article on the Open Shakespeare project which the Open Knowledge Foundation run (and I did a bit of porting of for Open Milton). I got involved in other things like the Dickens project and sidetracked that way but the original project has received a second wind.
Jonathan Gray of the Open Knowledge Foundation has a thought provoking post on the need for an Open Bibliographic Service which he calls Bibliographica. As he writes: lists of publications are an absolutely critical part of scholarship. They articulate the contours of a body of knowledge, and define the scope and focus of scholarly enquiry […]
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 […]
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 […]
