Access Equality and the Capitalist Digital Divide

In the past week or so, the European Court of Human Rights issued a ruling with potentially great ramifications in Europe (minus Belarus, of course; if you don't understand why that is, please read up on post-Soviet Belarus and Alexander Lukashenko): "For the first time in a judgment on the merits, the European Court of Human Rights has clarified that a conviction based on copyright law for illegally reproducing or publicly communicating copyright protected material can be regarded as an interference with the right of freedom of expression and information under Article 10 of the European Convention." While it does not suddenly make any and all copyright infringement legal by any means, the ruling sets up three requirements that must be proven in court for the case not to be a human rights violation: the case "must be pertinently motivated as being necessary in a democratic society, apart from being prescribed by law and pursuing a legitimate aim."  This is a huge step forward for every European citizen's information rights, of course, and is exceedingly pertinent to digital humanities scholars, especially those who wish to work with more contemporaneous materials (the number of which increases when considering that such materials can easily extend back through approximately a hundred years, in terms of copyright being in effect).  While it will still take time to see the specifics that this ruling will entail, it has definitely increased the difficulty of bringing a case seeking damages, and it will be easier for academics to form a legal defense around the use of copyrighted digital materials in an academic, non-profit environment.

Now if only we could get such a ruling in America, but unfortunately this country is locked in the control-freak throes of the capitalist digital divide and our slavery to not just the profit, but the ever-increasing profit.  Even as digital devices become more affordable and we see the tangible resource-driven aspect of the divide shrinking around us (although many unfortunately assume that it has shrank much more than it has in actuality), we still enforce a digital information divide through the cost of artificial access restraints (e.g. DRM, licensing) beyond the truly unavoidable restraints of infrastructure.  Institutions such as libraries have been able to help off-set such access costs in the past more easily, but for now companies are able to exercise information monopolies with practically no restraint, such as in the ridiculous bargaining power publishers are allowed against libraries when selling e-books.  Until we address these abuses of copyright in the United States, until we address that information needs to be regarded as something people have a right to and understand that it is not just a capitalist commodity to be sold to the highest bidder, we will not be able to completely escape this divide, and there will always be those unfortunate souls punished simply because they wanted to access information, because they wanted to engender such access, and because they desired to encourage information literacy and education.  This not only unfairly impacts digital humanities scholars along capitalist lines (e.g. you can only work with the materials your school can afford to access, putting scholars at more financially endowed institutions at a significant advantage, regardless of merit on the scholar's part, especially considering the increasingly political nature of appointments when more money is involved), it also allows capitalist control over what we study; if a corporation or wealthy individual doesn't want something researched, why not put it in a price range that would turn away academia?

Of course, this doesn't even touch on other problems with the digital divide in America, such as the increasing gap between the upper and lower classes, and the severe defunding of education, leaving better education accessible primarily to those lucky enough to afford it.  There is much wrong in America when it comes to information rights, capitalism, and the digital divide, and digital humanities scholars must be aware and help in the fight against these wrongdoings.

My Deathly Dataset

The topic for my dataset is one of the biggest topics in everyone’s lives, but gets talked about too little in proportion to its significance, probably due to the difficulty many have with it: death.  Of course, since there are so many differently angles from which death can be discussed, this prompted me to try and include as many of these angles as possible in my dataset.  For example:

-        Witnesses to death

-        The afterlife

-        Justifications for death

-        Murder

-        Suicide

-        Genocide

-        War

-        The bereaved

Because of this sprawling approach to the topic, I decided that I would focus on the literature, film, painting, history, etc. that I have already studied and collected in my life.  While I of course have prior familiarity with all of them, I have never made a concerted effort to look at this common thread through these materials as a whole.  As such, it was interesting to see the variety of works I knew that I could bring into this dataset.  I can’t say that I ever thought I would be grouping together Beetlejuice, the Bible, the Zodiac Killer, and Yukio Mishima.

As an American who grew up in North Carolina, Finland, and Ohio, I unsurprisingly have a more-or-less Eurocentric viewpoint that heavily biased my dataset to works from, the history of, and the predominant religions of Europe and the Americas.  Because of this, I did make a concerted effort to draw on my background in Asian Studies, as well as my ongoing self-education in international politics, news, and history, to bring in works, images, and events from the world outside of Europe and the Americas.  This was not too difficult when it came to Asia, since I have made concerted studies in that area, but I still feel that Africa and Oceania are not as represented as I would have liked for them to be, as well as parts of South America, since I am more familiar with North and Central America.  This dearth is especially true of religious works, images, and events, as I am nowhere near as familiar with non-Eurocentric religions as I would like to be.

The majority of my materials were found on Wikipedia (as well as other Wikimedia Commons sites), Project Gutenberg, Google Books, sing365.com, IMSDb, and darklyrics.com.  The rest were all found on various blogs and other web sites via searching on Google.  And I must mention, I do wish Google Books had better support for downloading plain text files, as I found two medieval works I wanted from there to be illegible when I used OCR on the PDFs I downloaded.  And if it weren’t such a time-consuming pain (and if it weren't for half of them being on blu-ray, which has horrendous DRM), I would have loved to rip many of the films I own on disc to have included in my dataset; instead, I’m settling on just the scripts.

To download a copy of my dataset as a zip file, click here.

Collaboration in the Digital Humanities: Truly New, or Pulling Back the Curtain?

Welcome to the inaugural post of my blog on the digital humanities, DH Deluge (a nod to my long defunct creative writing blog, Oneiric Deluge).  Although the layout may be a bit clunky for now, I hope to get more into the guts of this thing and make it a bit more attractive in the future.  In the meantime, hopefully the content will be enough to draw you in. ;)  And now, to move onto that content!

I recently saw an intriguing thought on the @dh+lib Twitter (technically, it was a re-tweet, originally posted by @coblezc): "What's new about DH [digital humanities] is that work is done collaboratively, but many humanities scholars want to work independently." (It had two hashtags, I removed them, as they didn't really add to the content of the tweet; deal with it.)  While I definitely agree with the sentiment that scholars in the humanities do prefer doing their research independently, or at least claiming it independently (I mean, who doesn’t want to be able to say, “This is my work, and I did it without anybody else’s help!”), I must question whether the collaborative nature of work in the digital humanities is truly something new.

Much research in the humanities is conducted the same way: a variety of sources are gathered, be the primary, secondary, tertiary, etc., and those resources are then used to cite precedence and examples, to point out support amongst other scholars, to point out the mistakes others before have made.  For this type of research to be legitimate, those sources must come from someone other than yourself; thus there is an inherent collaborative nature to the research we’ve always been doing.  A humanities scholar cannot simply go out and observe “humanities in action” the way a geologist might go out and study rocks directly; but even then, the geologist himself is only able to practice his craft because of the work others have done before him in his field.  Truly, any research is to some degree built on inherited knowledge, with us standing on the shoulders of our predecessors.  Or perhaps stamping on them.  Or leaping off of them into a ravine.  It varies from situation to situation.

Now, I’m sure some might say that this is not the point of the quote above: it is more about direct collaboration in the humanities, scholars working with each other in ways that the humanities has not allowed before, be it because of impracticability, social stigma, or what have you.  To that I would say that anyone who believes the digital humanities is encouraging direct communication is to some degree a fool.  It is no more direct than collaboration by letter, by telephone, by telegram has been: there is still the artificial intermediary brokering the deals amongst the scholars.  All that digital technology has done is speed up modes of indirect communication to such a degree that it gives a false impression that the collaborators exist in the same space.

However, I would still say that there is something new that digital humanities has brought to the collaborative nature of humanities research: transparency.  Whereas before we could so easily hide the fact that we weren’t generating our works in private rooms we occupied one-to-a-person, within which our ideas were born inside of minds working all on their very own, hiding our collaborations behind citations and private correspondences, digital technology has shown that none of our rooms really had any locks on them— and our collaborative nature has been laid bare for all the world to see.