Melanie Dulong de Rosnay, Juan Carlos De Martin (eds.): The Digital Public Domain: Foundations for an Open Culture (2012)

Digital technology has made culture more accessible than ever before. Texts, audio, pictures and video can easily be produced, disseminated, used and remixed using devices that are increasingly user-friendly and affordable. However, along with this technological democratization comes a paradoxical flipside: the norms regulating culture’s use — copyright and related rights — have become increasingly restrictive.

This book brings together essays by academics, librarians, entrepreneurs, activists and policy makers, who were all part of the EU-funded Communia project. Together the authors argue that the Public Domain — that is, the informational works owned by all of us, be that literature, music, the output of scientific research, educational material or public sector information — is fundamental to a healthy society.

The essays range from more theoretical papers on the history of copyright and the Public Domain, to practical examples and case studies of recent projects that have engaged with the principles of Open Access and Creative Commons licensing. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in the current debate about copyright and the Internet. It opens up discussion and offers practical solutions to the difficult question of the regulation of culture at the digital age.

With a foreword by Charles R. Nelson
Publisher Open Book Publishers, Cambridge, UK, 2012
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license
ISBN 978–1-906924–46-1
220 pages

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Gary Hall (ed.): Digitize Me, Visualize Me, Search Me: Open Science and its Discontents (2011-)

“One of the aims of the Living Books About Life series is to provide a ‘bridge’ or point of connection, translation, even interrogation and contestation, between the humanities and the sciences. Accordingly, this introduction to Digitize Me, Visualize Me, Search Me takes as its starting point the so-called ‘computational turn’ to data-intensive scholarship in the humanities.

The phrase ‘the computational turn’ has been adopted to refer to the process whereby techniques and methodologies drawn from computer science and related fields – including science visualization, interactive information visualization, image processing, network analysis, statistical data analysis, and the management, manipulation and mining of data – are being increasingly used to produce new ways of approaching and understanding texts in the humanities – what is sometimes thought of as ‘the digital humanities’.” (from Introduction)

Publisher Open Humanities Press
Living Books About Life series

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PDF (PDF’d Introduction with hyperlinked articles)