For submitting the winning entry, Suzie will win our (to-be-named-later) Grand Prize. In addition, the voters named her the recipient of several special prizes, such as: Best Depiction of Reality in Libraries Over the Last 40 Years; Coloring Outside the Lines Award; Gratuitious Metadata Award; Best Mashup of Humor and Depression; Best Re-Purposing of a Pony Tail; Stereotypical Librarian Attention to Detail Award; Wordiest Coloring Contest Entry Evar.

Edit: Funny stuff redacted at Suzie’s request. Sorry, Suzie: didn’t mean to get you in trouble with humorless overlords.

All the entries had strong points, points that were recognized by the voters with the following special awards:

• Entry 1 : Best Use of Color as an Accent; Best Use of Grayscale
• Entry 2 : Best Use of a Rainbow Wig Outside a Sporting Event; Best Hairpiece and Implants; Taste the Rainbow Award
• Entry 3 : Advocacy Award for Including the Value of Library Materials; Best Use of Hearts Award; Best Promotion of Scientific Literature
• Entry 4 : Twilight-tastic Award; Best Redheaded Character Since Pippi Longstocking; Best Tattooed Librarian; Best Reader’s Advisory Dialogue
• Entry 5 : Best Use of Purple Hues; Best Depiction of Fluevogs
• Entry 6 : Best Striped Desk; Best Non-Hazardous Alert Use of Diagonal Lines; Diversity Award for Depiction of a Non-White, Non-Fluroscent Librarian
• Entry 7 : The Vividly Green Patron Award; Best Use of Vivid Colors; Outreach to Leprechaun Patrons Award; The Pretty In Pink Award;
• Entry 8 : Best Use of Library Supplies; Most True-To-Life; Most Like My Library Award

Thank you so much to all who participated and for your patience as I let this contest go on longer than intended.

Watch this space for more news about upcoming LSW zines.

Ted Shawn in Malaguena with Martha Graham from the NYPL Digital Gallery

I confess that I tend to think of copyright law and its interpretation and practice in much the same way as people reportedly think of the weather: I’m frequently complaining about it, but never actually doing anything about it. In a meeting at the Denver Public Library on Wednesday, I got a chance to do something small about fair use.

The Dance Heritage Coalition (DHC) has undertaken a fair use project, intended to clarify fair use for dance materials in library and archival collections. The stated objective of the project is “to reach a consensus on a fair and balanced approach to using presumptively copyrighted materials to meet our mandate as cultural conservators and educators.”

In so doing, the DHC intends to produce a document similar to the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use. Such a document is not legally binding, but it can be used (among other occasions) when talking to people like campus legal counsel–people whose job it is to be conservative and avoid exposing the institution to risk.

As part of that project, the DHC has convened eight of these focus group discussions across the country with librarians, archivists, and others who work with dance history and scholarship. I won’t say exactly who was in attendance because we were operating under the Chatham House Rule which states:

When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.

It seems easiest for me to follow that rule if I just don’t identify anyone. It will also make it clearer that all the impressions and interpretations below are my own. I’ll just say that I found the group to be impressive, drawing mostly on people from Denver and Boulder institutions who have some responsibility for dance materials. Some were humanities generalists like myself, while others worked primarily with dance or performing arts collections. There were a few people with deep ties to the dance community in Colorado, either as choreographers, performers, critics, or as friends of major regional figures.

The conversation was interesting, since so many of the participants worked so closely with dancers and choreographers. There was great consideration given to how to respect the work not only of the choreographer but also the performer, the photographer, the musician, and all the creative artists who typically collaborate on the dance documentation that ends up in libraries and archives. There was a lot of talk of “stewardship” and providing context and education. In other words, while the group was keen to share their collections, they were not cavalier about the rights of artists and donors; far from it.

Here are a few more odds and ends:

• One person had the quote of the day when she was talking about copyright being the “big C” that everyone is worried about and how we needed to position Fair Use as the “big F. U.” We all burst into laughter. She didn’t mean it that way, but there’s an EFF slogan in there somewhere. “Say F. U. to copyright zealots with Fair Use!”

• We discussed those cases where an archive might have huge holdings of videos of a company’s performances; say, every single performance of a certain work over a season. Oddly, I found that I felt that making everything available online seemed more fair than just selecting certain “best” performances or videos. To cherry-pick the “best” seems more like publishing and less like fair use. (Again, that is a personal statement of what I was thinking on Wednesday, not the consensus of the group or what I expect the DHC to put forward in their document.)

• An attendee mentioned seeing a choreographer’s iPod or iPhone where he stored hours of dance clips from sources unknown and of dubious provenance: downloaded from video sharing sites, excerpted from movies of the 30s and 40s, sent to him by colleagues, etc. It sounded like it was his dance sketchbook. What a great frontier in archival collecting: the artist’s iPhone!

One more personal story, and this time I will name names. I was a theatre major at Northwestern University from 1988 to 1992, and I did some modern dance there. I know that the dance world is small, so after our fair use discussion, I asked if anyone had connections with Chicago dance and if anyone had known my teacher, Tim O’Slynne. Mary Wohl Haan, the Boulder Arts Commission’s Dance Bridge Coordinator, said “yes! I was going to ask you that when you said you had been at Northwestern! Tim and I were evil twins for years.” And this woman who I had just met a few hours before gave me a hug as we remembered Tim who had died of AIDS in 1994.

And I hope this isn’t too sentimental, but I thought that this is why this discussion is so important. Tim has been dead for almost fifteen years now, and if there is an archive that has photos or videos or other documentation of his work as a dancer and choreographer and teacher, I think we owe it to the world to get it out of the attic and make it as available as we can before he’s forgotten instead of waiting for a hundred years when all possible copyrights have expired and we’re all dead. Yes, there will be cases when it is clear that copyright concerns preclude sharing. But dance is fugitive and ephemeral in the best of circumstances, and the more libraries and archives and museums can do to make it less so, the better.

• Digital Scholarship in the Humanities is a fairly new blog by Lisa Spiro. She kicked off the year with a three-part roundup on the subject of Digital Humanities in 2007 (part 1, part 2, part 3). Many of the links below are in those three posts, though I heard about some of them from other sources.
• Dan Cohen and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason seem to have interesting new announcements every week. These are the folks behind the citation tool Zotero and a platform for online media collections called Omeka that I’m eager to get my hands on. Plus there is their latest project…
• THAT Podcast, or The Humanities and Technology Podcast. The first episode featured an interview with Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress.
• Dorothea Salo points us to the Bamboo project, a proposal to the Mellon Foundation to fund the development of a shared technology platform to support arts and humanities research. At least I think that’s what it is; the report is in my “printed but not actually read” pile for now. (They might think of getting the History and New Media guys to come up with a new name for the project, as “Bamboo” is gonna be a royal pain to google.)
• The relatively new DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, which bills itself as “an open-access, peer-reviewed, digital journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities.”
• Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives by Ed Folsom appeared in PMLA 122 (5), Oct. 2007. The link, I’m sorry to say will only help you if your institution subscribes to PMLA. The article is a very interesting look at how the database can be seen as a literary genre unto itself, based on the author’s work as co-editor of the Walt Whitman Archive. I plan to write more about this article, once I have read the responses that were published in the same issue.

Attentive readers of this blog will be familiar with the name Jessy Randall. Jessy is my friend and colleague, and the curator of Special Collections at Tutt Library.

As I may or may not have mentioned up to now, Jessy is also a poet. Her first book, A Day in Boyland, was published earlier this year by Ghost Road Press. It’s a wonderful book. She writes about love and heartbreak and all that great stuff in a way that is personal and contemporary, honest but not sappy. You don’t have to take my word for it, as several of the poems from the book are online: A Day in Boyland, Boys on Bikes, and The Revenge.

She read from the book last week as part of the Colorado College Visiting Writers Series. On the poster for that series (which also included Salman Rushdie this year), Jessy was described as “delightful” and “edgy.” I told her that I thought it was a neat trick to be both delightful and edgy, and she replied that “delightful” = “female” and “edgy” = “funny.”

There were more adjectives flying around at the reading when CC poet and faculty member David Mason finished introducing Jessy by saying “After the reading, we’ll leave time for question so you will have a chance to ask Jessy what it is like to be a wacky, sexy, librarian poet.”

I, of course, didn’t ask that question as I already know what it is like (except for the poet part).

Anyway, the point is, you may not get the chance to hear her read, but you need to buy the book, for yourself or for your library. You can buy it from the publisher or the usual online mega-store

[Note: this post contains no spoilers, as I know nothing. I make no promises for the Potter-related links; some of them certainly contain spoilers or link to pages that contain spoilers. -SL]

I am what you’d call a casual Harry Potter fan. I have read all of the books– with the exception of Deathly Hallows–some more than once. I enjoyed them all, and I’ll read the new one some time in the next few months. I have seen bits and pieces of the movies on TV. I own no Potter paraphernalia or costume pieces.

But I do find the culture around these books interesting, especially the mania for spoilers and pirated copies that has surrounded the publication of the last few volumes in the series

Some blog posts this week–Jessamyn West’s Previews and spoilers in a 2.0 age and its subsequent update, where she noted that she had linked to apparently bogus Potter spoilers, and that there are multiple pirated electronic editions which themselves my be compromised with bogus information inserted via image manipulation techniques; plus Boing Boing’s take and the obligatory MetaFilter thread–had me thinking about book piracy, 18th-century-style.

I’m not an expert on the subject, but I think of Robert Darnton‘s paper, “The Science of Piracy” (available as an MS Word document). This is a paper that the distinguished historian of the book presented at the Center for the Study of Books and Media December 2004 Conference.

Right at the outset of his address, Darnton makes it clear how much piracy was going on in 18th century France (pp 2-3):

I would go so far as to argue that by 1770 most of the current literature available in France–aside from chapbooks, devotional tracts, and professional manuals–came from the pirate publishers outside the kingdom as well as from some who operated clandestinely within it.

So far that sounds more like the present-day music industry than the book publishing industry. Today, I don’t think I’d be going too far out on a limb in guessing that most of the music files on people’s computers are unauthorized copies.

On page 9, Darton talks about those pirates who, like Potter’s pirates, could beat the official publication date:

More important, the pirates were so quick off the mark, thanks to secret informers and proofs filched by workers in their pay, that they sometimes beat the original publisher to the market, and they were likely to damage his profits long before he could sell off his first edition. They easily undercut him, because they paid nothing for the manuscript and used relatively cheap paper. Sometimes they followed the original closely, producing true contrefaçons or counterfeit copies. More often they aimed their product at a broader public by eliminating illustrations, abridging the text, and purging the edition of everything that smacked of “typographical luxury.” If they went far enough down market, they might not harm the original edition at all.

Is photographing each opening of the book with a Canon Rebel 350 sufficiently “down market?” Certainly these pirate editions will have zero effect on sales in the US and UK.

But Darnton is clear that the pirates’ main motivation was sales and profit, exchanging many letters in their “market research” to determine exactly which books should be pirated and sold in which locations: “With adequate information and good enough timing, the pirates could make a killing”(9).

What is the motivation for piracy now? Surely no one is making a dime on all those torrents on Pirate Bay. I suppose it is natural human curiosity combined with natural human competitiveness to be first, and natural human cussedness to not let anyone tell them that they can’t do such a thing.

It seems that Rowling and her publishers are generally unamused by the piracy, or at least that is the line they have to take publicly. Darnton tells us that Voltaire had to talk a bit of a good game to his publisher, too, even as he passed along his proofs to the pirates himself. From page 11:

Voltaire was happy to oblige, because by then he no longer cared about making money from his pen. After more than fifty years of experience with publishers, he knew every trick in their trade; and he also had learned to put the tricks to use for a higher cause: the diffusion of Enlightenment, the campaign to écraser l’infâme. He therefore agreed to supply Ostervald with a copy of Cramer’s proofs, corrected and expanded, provided that everything took place behind Cramer’s back. Voltaire was happy, that is, to pirate himself. It was a way to multiply copies. Besides, he knew that the Questions would be pirated anyway–strange as it sounds to apply such a term to an illegal book. By cooperating with the STN, he could control that process, while touching up the text with additional audacities that he also could disavow.

So Voltaire could be even more outrageous in the pirated version of his already illegal book. That’s not analogous with Rowling’s situation of course. But commenters in the MetaFilter wonder if some of the apparently bogus torrents were actually seeded by the publisher to sow confusion about the actual text.

I wonder how easy it will be to find these pirated Potters a few years from now. Darnton can do his work on Enlightenment publishing practices because he was able to read a huge archive of correspondence of the Societe typographique de Neuchatel, along with the end products–the pirated and official books themselves–in libraries. Who will have all this Potter stuff for another Darnton in 250 years? Will it be a library like the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, or more like the Internet Archive, or an individual enthusiast / private historian’s site like Jason Scott’s textfiles.com? Does it matter?

“Good Copy Bad Copy” looks at the current copyright environment and what it means to artists, media companies, and consumers. That might sound a little dry, but they build up the story they want to tell with long, interesting segments with a fascinating variety of people. Yes, they get people you have probably heard of like Lawrence Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Dan Glickman (CEO of the MPAA), and DJ Danger Mouse, but the most interesting interviews come from people you have almost certainly never heard of like Charles Igwe, a Nigerian film producer; Rick Falkvinge, of the Pirate Party, Sweden; and DJ Dinho, a “Techno Brega” DJ in Brazil. I agree with Jason Scott that this global reach, with interviews and street footage from all over the world, is what makes this documentary special.

By structuring the film this way, with all these interesting people in all areas of music and motion picture production, performance, and sales, “Good Copy Bad Copy” stays away from the kind of black and white view the title might imply. Instead, it looks at different approaches toward making art and making money, destabilizing what we think of as the “natural” system of artists, labels/studios, and consumers.

One of my favorite segments was on the massive Nigerian film industry. Near the end of the documentary, Charles Igwe, the Nigerian film producer, sums things up this way: “You need to take a look at your environment–the limitations of your environment, the advantages of your environment–and then do things which are peculiar to you. And be proud of them.” Which sounds like great advice to me.

Here is the preview, which doesn’t give enough of a taste of the scope I’m talking about, but might give you enough of the flavor:

Click To Play

I have a hard time sitting through any movies these days, and I found this fascinating. It clocks in at just under an hour, so it won’t be a huge investment of your time, but I think it will be a rewarding investment.

A. to commemorate the day that the action of James Joyce’s Ulysses took place in Dublin and B. the day that those of us who sweated through reading Ulysses can remind everyone of that fact. Ahem.

So, to make up for missing Bloomsday, I give you a–let’s say “unique”–version of “Danny Boy”:

But the sci-fi meme has reminded me to talk about my current reading project: to read the works of Shakespeare.

More bardolotry after the jump…

Tags: shakespeare, meme

At the end of 2005, I set the goal of reading all the plays and poems–in more or less the order in which he wrote them–in two years. I’ll re-read the one I have already read, as I’d like the steady diet of histories and problem plays broken up with the major tragedies and comedies.

I can’t say that I have really kept up the necessary pace this year, though: of the 38 plays, I have only read seven: Henry VI parts 1-3, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, and King Lear (read out of order, as two of my co-workers had never read it and wanted to). So I have a lot of work to do if I want to finish by this time next year.

As for the meme, here’s the part where I list all the ones I have read or seen. If you’d like to continue the meme, go for it.

The order of the list below comes from the Wikipedia entry Chronology of Shakespeare plays, which, like a lot of Wikipedia, is accurate enough for my purposes (it’s also different than the list in my Oxford Collected Shakespeare). There is no way to precisely date most of Shakespeare’s plays.

I have put in bold the plays I have read and italicized those I have seen on stage or screen.

It seems silly to mark plays that I hate/love (as was part of the sci fi meme), but I have added comments where I thought appropriate.

• Henry VI, Part I
• Henry VI, Part II
• Henry VI, Part III
  • If you are ever forced at halberd-point to read one of the Henry VI plays, choose Part III.
• Richard III
  • I love Olivier’s winking, scenery-chewing performance in the film. Antony Sher’s Year of the King–in which he describes his interpretation of Richard III (on crutches)–is my favorite book about acting.
• Comedy of Errors
• Titus Andronicus
• Taming of the Shrew
  • I was thinking I had seen this, but then realized it was that episode of Moonlighting.
• Two Gentlemen of Verona
• Love’s Labour’s Lost
  • Read it and can’t remember a damn thing. There are some guys in the forest?
• Romeo and Juliet
• Richard II
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• King John
• The Merchant of Venice
• Henry IV, Part I
• Henry IV, Part II
• Henry V
• Julius Caesar
• Much Ado About Nothing
• As You Like It
• The Merry Wives of Windsor
• Hamlet
  • I saw Val Kilmer (!) in the title role at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in 1988. The aesthetic was post-punk with music from PiL and similar acts. I liked it at the time. Michael Mullin, in Shakespeare Quarterly (JSTOR link) was less impressed: “The production celebrated eclectic gimmickry….Yet the actors seemed to take themselves seriously.”
• Twelfth Night
• Troilus and Cressida
• All’s Well That Ends Well
• Measure for Measure
  • Saw this at the RSC in Stratford in 1991. It was in previews, and I happened to sit next to director Trevor Nunn, who took notes throughout. I was too timid to say anything to him.
• Othello
  • Saw Patrick Stewart in the title role in a reverse-race production at Washington DC’s Shakespeare Theatre Company. Stewart was fine, but the actor playing Iago and the direction were poor.
• King Lear
• Macbeth
  • They did a production of Macbeth when I was in college that was set in a very primitive society. My roommate said that the costumes looked like carpet remnants.
• Antony and Cleopatra
• Coriolanus
• Timon of Athens
• Pericles Prince of Tyre
• Cymbeline
• The Winter’s Tale
• The Tempest
• Henry VIII (w/John Fletcher?)
• The Two Noble Kinsmen (w/John Fletcher).

Bonus: The Things I Will Not Do When I Direct A Shakespeare Production, On Stage Or Film, a hilarious (if incredibly long and uneven) list of Shakespearian no-nos. I believe I put this on my del.icio.us linkblog some time ago, but it deserves another link. Most of these are so specific, that it is obvious that whoever added the item to the list either sat through such a production, was a cast member in such a production, or perhaps was even the director who perpetrated the absurdity. Here is just a taste:

1. I will not employ a conception of Caliban which would require him to wear a ghastly furry costume reminiscent of a hypothetical offspring of Chewbacca and the Wolf from Into the Woods.
2. Also, I will not require Caliban to hump Stephano’s leg while telling him about Miranda, no matter how big a laugh it will get.

I found that list via the MetaFilter thread, which is itself worth a read as MeFi’ers add their own “dont’s” to the list, and an interesting discussion on simplicity, gimmickry, and interpretation of Shakespeare ensues.

If you decide to continue this meme, please leave me a comment with a link.

The always-interesting blog fade theory pointed out the wonderful eye-candy site, Misprinted Type 3.0, by Eduardo Recife.

I don’t really know what is going on there, but I like it!