Search Results

Modern civil society, nonprofits, and foundations are structured to manage the donation of time and money and regulations codify the limits of their use. Going forward, digital data and infrastructure will become additional philanthropic resources. Philanthropic experiments with digital assets require new rules of ownership, shifts in governance practices, and networked institutions. This chapter uses a case study of the Digital Public Library of America to theorize about governance and policy implications for nonprofits and philanthropy in a digital age.

The licensing model has important implications for public libraries. The practice of library lending has depended heavily on the exhaustion principle. But in the context of ebook lending, exhaustion has not given libraries the same freedom they used to enjoy over physical copies. The restrictions imposed by copyright holders allow expansive vendor control over library ebook lending. They not only infringe upon library patrons’ freedom to borrow or access library ebook collection, but also diminish the libraries’ ability to discharge their important cultural functions. The prevalence of digital copies makes it harder for libraries to preserve works that lack perceived economic value or that are subject to censorship. It also threatens the privacy of library patrons and stifles innovation.

Access to ‘all the world’s knowledge’ is an ancient aspiration; a less venerable, but equally vigorous, universalism strives for the borderless protection of authors’ rights. Late 19th-century law and politics brought us copyright universalism; 21st-century technology may bring us the universal digital library. But how can ‘all the world’s knowledge’ be delivered, on demand, to users anywhere in the world (with Internet access), if the copyrights of the creators and publishers of many of those works are supposed to be enforceable almost everywhere in the world? Does it follow that the universal digital library of the near future threatens copyright holders? Or are libraries the endangered species of the impending era, as publishers partner with for-profit Internet intermediaries to make books ubiquitously available? Does access-triumphalism therefore risk giving us not the universal digital library, but the universal digital bookstore? And, whether libraries or commercial intermediaries offer access, how will the world’s authors fare?

The technological shift occurring with mass digitization impacts on established copyright norms and principles in a number of ways. It challenges the common perception of the concept of copyright use; the meaning and function of the work as the subject matter of protection; the grounds of entitlements to rights; and the scope of the exclusivity of such rights. It has been observed that, in many instances, mass digitization begs for a re-definition of copyright from a system of ex ante permission to one where rightholders have merely a right to ‘opt out’ from having their works used in certain ways. This is what has been described as ‘turning copyright law on its head’.

The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), a ten-year project to edit and analyse ancient Sumerian literature, came to an end on 31 August 2006. Like Egyptian, Sumerian is one of the world's oldest written literatures, with a classical corpus comprising some 500 compositions attested in many thousands of manuscripts from the early second millennium bc. This chapter reflects on how ETCSL has changed the practice of literary Sumerology, what it has not been able to achieve, and what could and should still be done. In particular, it argues that the collaborative working that projects like ETCSL foster has brought Sumerological practice much closer to ancient ideals of literacy — ideals that have themselves come to light through quantitative analysis of the ETCSL online corpus.

This chapter speculates on what electronic scholarship of the twenty-first century might look like. The production of high-quality electronic texts and resources is very labour intensive. It is imperative to find ways of making these resources as broadly multipurpose and reusable as possible. This must be done in the context of different theoretical perspectives in scholarship and in the context of a broadening range of users, from undergraduates to senior professors, in high schools and in the community at large for distance learning and for continuing education. Meanwhile, the Internet provides the opportunity for the tools and techniques developed in computing in the humanities to be put at the centre of the scholarly arena.

This chapter discusses the enormous promise of computational approaches to the study of literature, with particular emphasis on digital humanities as an emerging field. By 2008 computers, with their capacity for number crunching and processing large-scale data sets, had revolutionized the way that scientific research is carried out. Now, the same elements that have had such an impact on the sciences are slowly and surely revolutionizing the way that research in the humanities gets done. This chapter considers the history of digital humanities, also known as humanities computing, community of practice, or field of study/theory/methodology, and how revolution in this emerging field is being catalyzed by big data. It also emphasizes the potential of literary computing and cites the existence of digital libraries and large electronic text collections as factors that are sparking the digital humanities revolution.

This chapter discusses new approaches and new methodologies in literary evidence gathering. Science derives conclusions based on evidence, and ideally, is open to new methodologies. Furthermore, science attempts to be exhaustive in the gathering of evidence as much as possible and must therefore welcome new modes of exploration, discovery, and analysis. This chapter emphasizes literary criticism's heavy reliance on associations as evidence and explains how literary studies differs from scientific experimentation. It also considers the advantages of “close reading,” the primary methodology used in the study of literature, and proceeds by looking at the ways that big data—the equivalent to digital libraries in literary studies—is changing the way data sampling is being undertaken. Finally, it describes how new methods of analysis allow us to extract new forms of evidence from the digital library.

Embedded and wireless sensor networks are transforming research in the biosciences, environmental sciences, and other fields. However, these technologies also contribute significantly to the data deluge associated with e-Research and cyberinfrastructure activities. Embedded networked sensing research is a reflection of e-science and thus presents an opportunity to understand the transformation of scientific work and collaborative research, along with the emergence of communities of practice that give rise to new forms of data production. This chapter focuses on embedded sensor networks and their applications in e-Research, especially in “big science” and “little science” as well as digital libraries.

This chapter critiques three particular patents cases in the US and EU that were filed in the 1990s by Indian NGOs and the Indian government. The three patents in question were related to neem, turmeric, and basmati. All three cases caused outrage in India because of the perception that the West was ‘stealing’ traditional knowledge from India. This chapter explains the rhetoric and misinformation surrounding all three cases and explores how the media and the government dealt with these issues at a time when awareness about patent law in India was low. These three cases were followed by the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL). This chapter explores and critiques the rationale for the TKDL and its efficacy in achieving its stated goals.

A South African by birth, white, of German ancestry, fluent in Afrikaans, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick spent six months in her native country in 1993 and a full year in 1994 studying the Soweto uprising. During that time, she assiduously examined the relevant archives but was unable to find any of the posters she knew the marching students carried: . . . From the transcripts and correspondence of the Cillié Commission I knew that the Commission had received, from the police, many posters and banners that had been confiscated during various student marches in 1976. None of them would have fit into a traditional archive document box and, though mentioned on the list of evidence associated with the Cillié Commission, they were initially not to be found. I continued to request that archivists search the repositories—without success. Until, one day, perhaps exasperated by my persistence or wanting to finally prove to me that there was nothing to be found in the space associated with K345, the archival designator of my Soweto materials, one of the archivists relented and asked me to accompany her into the vaults in order to help her search for these artifacts of the uprising! To be sure, there were no posters to be found in the shelf space that housed the roughly nine hundred boxes of evidence associated with the Cillié Commission. But then, as my disappointed eyes swept the simultaneously ominous and tantalizing interior of the vault, I saw a piece of board protruding over the topmost edge of the shelf. There, almost 9 feet into the air, in the shadowy space on top of the document shelves, lay a pile of posters and banners. . . . We can understand Pohlandt-McCormick’s mounting sense of excitement. It is not just the discovery itself; it is the sense of being in touch with the past—literally in touch. It is the knowledge that no photograph can do justice to any 3D object, whether it is a collection of posters, a cache of cold fusion memorabilia, or Enrico Fermi’s Nobel medal.

As religions become commercialized, gurus who proclaim themselves to be the messengers of gods leave behind fortunes in the form of intellectual property, either as books, or audio and video recordings. Temples too claim trademark rights in symbols representing various deities. Where people are quick to take umbrage at being offended due to religious sentiments, it is not surprising that the Trade Mark Act dealt with issue of trademarks that offended religious sentiments. This chapter discusses related questions such as who has the right to use the names of religious figures in trademarks. Or to whom does the intellectual estate of a spiritual leader belong? Or when does an authority decide that a combination of yoga postures or healing techniques can be legally protected? This chapter discusses issues that represent the challenges that intellectual property law faces in the new age.