Category: open source

books and search

dig1 Comment

There is a lot of talk about the Library Project of Google in collaboration with University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, The New York Public Library, and Oxford University. The Project will have Google digitize the holdings of the participating libraries and have the content searchable via print.google.com. Currently, books in the public domain can be browsed entirely. Other books are limited to a few pages and one is limited to how many books are avaliable and users are monitored. An authors’ guild have sued Google claiming copyright violation and would like for Google to ask every single copyright holder to give their consent. Some points to Fair Use should be sufficient to allow Google to proceed. Many logically concludes many more will be sold because links provided by Goggle’s Ad-Sense.
On the Media have piece(mp3) about this and Siva Vaidhyanathan argued that he would prefer the Library of Congress spearhead such a project on behalf of us all and not a behemoth of a company using proprietary methods. I totally agree. As much as I accept Google doesn’t intend to be evil but the biggest kid in the class is always feared. The French government feared the anglo-centric nature of the project so they will have their own program, featuring books written in french. And today, Yahoo and some others(including the Internet Archive, the University of California, and the University of Toronto, as well as the National Archive in England) announced the Open Content Alliance which will similarly digitize library contents and make them searchable and downloadable, but the alliance will initially(my emphasis) provided contents from book in public domain.

I would like to see our local libraries invest in similar open projects for contents that are at least Florida specific.

Saturday edition

dig

We listen to a lot of radio around here. We don’t watch tv at home, we primarily do Netflix and the library. Television is too expensive really and besides, I want to get tv à la carte.
< dream > I want about 5 or 6 channels and want to pay about $10 a month. I want to be able to switch those 5-6 channels from the pool of avaliable channels and I want this as part of an open DVR package. For no more than $10 a month. < /dream >

Until that happens, radio will continue to be dominant aroung here. I am not sure how dominant radio is really. We mainly listen to WLRN, our local NPR affiliate. I also listen to some of University of Miami‘s, WVUM; but the current wvum-DJs are just too young. Some of them sounds like that they have just discovered Squarepusher and Aphex Twin. And they just talk about crap like being too tired from partying. And times, they play the same music day after day. They also missed their own shows, and so, a tape show is played. Sometimes, the same tape show is played several times a day for sereral months. Yeah, wvum can be a bit annoying.

Saturday is good day for radio, though. The highlight of the saturday line-up is Weekend Edition with Scott Simon, WaitWait…Don’t Tell Me, Marketplace: Money, Weekend America, On the Media, A Prarie Home Companion and Weekend Jazz. It’s a lot of listening, but listening is developable skill.

Knowledge à la carte

dig2 Comments

At the library.

I love libraries, private or public. I love to browse people’s libraries, to determine something about them. Not necessarily evaluating how smart or well-read they are, but taking notes on what do they buy, what do they collect, what pattern emerges, what book seems to be read often and what seems to be overlooked.

The real fun occurs at the public library. We have a very good one, here in Miami. It has always been a place I can go kill a few hours, browsing and discovering. I spend a lot hours in the 700 (The arts) section and the records bin. Part of my jazz listening education was supplemented by records and tapes borrowed from the library. More recently, I have been borrowing DVDs from the library. They have a good number of Criterion Collection films. The library also subscribe to Film Movement, a dvd-of-the-month club for independent and foreign films. We saw Hop from that series. A very cool film about africans in Belgium fighting the immigration system with the help of an anarchist.

I met a fellow artist at the library, in the DVD section; and she said that she might suspend her Netflix rentals as the library is providing her with all the movies she needs. That would not work for us, but the library does provide us with many children movies and some films like Taxi Driver that I have been taking apart. And that is what I wanted to write about. The library being an essential place for the ‘open source’ and ‘free culture’ movements. I heard a nice argument from Lawrence Lessig, yesterday on the radio show ‘Weekend America, for the need of younger generations to stand on the shoulders of giants and for that younger generation to be able to peek at the underlining of all works to see and learn how things are put together be able to innovate, create or simply imitate. Libraries are great, because they make available materials for one’s pleasure–reading, learning, hacking, probing truths, investigating wrongs and determining self, all for ‘free’. And I am mean free, as in free beer and free speech. There is a tangential matter to discuss, that has to do with The Patriot Act and other restrictions that are being imposed on/by libraries. I’ll discuss that on another day.

The piece in Weekend America also talked about how Virgil wrote poems based on Homer’s poems. The radio show talked about this in the context of remixes and mash-ups. But there is the idea of crafting something new out of what already exists and it resides in the thinly separated region of imitation, interpretation, appropriation and plagiarism. The ‘Free Culture’ movement simply asks that authors and other corporate entities to be less litigious and allow contemporary Virgils to play with the works of contemporary Homers.

free culture t-shirt