Who owns notes from professors’ lectures?

Today’s Gazette has a story in which I’m quoted about a new online service called Notesac (a rather unfortunate name). While it is mostly a banal case of a) students sharing notes and b) someone skimming profits off something at universities that wasn’t previously fully monetized, the real story here isn’t reported. The unfortunately-named “notesac” …

Work for Hire and Oxford University Press

Steven Shaviro recently posted about pulling out of an Oxford University Press collection because they wanted to define his contribution as “work for hire.” This is objectionable for lots of reasons, but in particular because academics should retain the right to be associated with the ideas we produce, and so long as we’re above board …

Audio in Digital Humanities Authorship: A Roadmap (version 0.5)

Background: 0.1. Existing digital humanities work has largely reproduced visualist biases in the humanities: work with images and audiovisual texts has been thus far assumed to be more primary than work with sound as a text. And yet, sound is one of the major areas where huge gains could be made in digital publication. As …

Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, Week 1

okay, surprise, we’re back. I’m here in Los Angeles for the NEH/Vectors Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities (and there’s something in the title about American Studies, but I’m here on Mellon money and don’t really count as an American Studies person as far as I can tell, so please forgive me that …

Media Piracy Report and SSRC Theater

The SSRC just released a report on media piracy in emerging economies. I haven’t read it yet, so I can’t comment on the findings, but if you click the link, you’ll find an interesting discussion of the pricing structure as itself a demonstration of the arguments in the book. As an added part of that …