Category — Cultural Informatics

International Memory of the World Conference:
“Communities and memories: a global perspective” is the theme of the Conference to take place in Australia next year.

In association with the Australian Memory of the World Committee and under the auspices of the Australian National Commission for UNESCO, the National Library of Australia will organize the Third International Memory of the World Conference from 19 to 22 February 2008 in Canberra, Australia.

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This looks like it could be something cool.

Public access group challenges Smithsonian over copyrights:
Grabbing pictures of iconic Smithsonian Institution artifacts just got a whole lot easier.

Before, if you wanted to get a picture of the Wright Brothers’ plane, you could go to the Smithsonian Images Web site and pay for a print or high-resolution image after clicking through several warnings about copyrights and other restrictions — and only if you were a student, teacher or someone pledging not to use it to make money.

Now, you can just go to the free photo-sharing Web site flickr.com.

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Carl Malamud and his group are doing some good work on freeing and sustaining the freedom of access to public resources

Software Studies @ UCSD:

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they have a postdoc…

Top Ten Issues of One Laptop Per Child:
1. The Community of Learning vs. The Cult of the North American Individual: The name OLPC is a problem as the focus is on Personal Computers for Individuals ignoring the fact that community feedback is crucial part of learning. Self directed learning cannot be effective without feedback from peers, parents and teachers.

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number one… hits the cultural issue squarely on the head.. should we be exporting our social anomie, individualism, and ‘aculturalization as informationalization’? should we? to what end?

Blogger Perceptions on Digital Preservation:
Blogger Perceptions on Digital Preservation is an online survey from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science. The study team is interested in hearing from all bloggers on their perceptions on digital preservation in relation to their own blogging activities, as well as the blogosphere in general

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this is an interesting project…

Can culture dictate the way we see? – being-human – 04 May 2007 – Print – New Scientist:
Culture can shape your view of the world, the saying goes. And it might be more than just a saying: a new study suggests that culture may shape the way our brains process visual information.

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yes… nice of them to note this… not that phenomenology and semiology haven’t said this 4000 times before and been right…. just that… now they are still right.

Articles:
The Best and Worst Internet Laws
Date: Apr 20, 2007 By Eric Goldman.
Over the past dozen years, the lure of regulating the Internet has proven irresistible to legislators. For example, in the 109th Congress, almost 1,100 introduced bills referenced the word Internet, and hundreds of Internet laws have been passed by Congress and the states. This legislative activity is now large enough to identify some winners and losers. In the spirit of good fun, Eric Goldman offers an opinionated list of personal votes for the best and worst Internet statutes in the United States.

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this is a good read… it covers in a U.S.-centric way some of the most important internet issues of our day.

The Living Edge:
David Sifry has just put up The State of the Live Web, April 2007. To explain the Live Web, he points to a pair of pieces I wrote in 2005. If you’d like a more visual explanation, follow the slides from this talk I gave at OSCON last summer, starting here.

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Doc points toward Dave’s use of some of his work in the live web and more important the communal or collective web as compared to what might be thought of as the individualistic web. Of course, in my view, the www is a policy regime, a device that constrains and constructs relationships, not merely among data, but primarily among humans. The current transformation of the web into user-generation and user-integration is fascinating because it is making possible a much broader mode of awareness, communication, and community construction.

U Michigan Unveils Master’s Degree in ‘Social Computing’:
The University of Michigan’s School of Information (SI) announced a graduate-degree specialization in “social computing” through a Master of Science in Information. The university said the program is the first in the country to focus on social computing, the term describing the wave of open technologies that enable masses of people to interact and exchange and sort information.

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Wow this is an interesting event. I wonder where it will lead.

Linux.com | Linux to help the Library of Congress save American history:
The Library of Congress, where thousands of rare public domain documents relating to America’s history are stored and slowly decaying, is about to begin an ambitious project to digitize these fragile documents using Linux-based systems and publish the results online in multiple formats.

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The sloan foundation has funded this development. It uses scribe, which is a bookscanning system.