Read | Chris Aldrich

Read My 100,000th Annotation: Looking back, forging ahead! by

Recently, I made my 100,000th annotation with Hypothesis. I know what you must be thinking: Doesn’t she have a life? Why would anyone make 100,000 annotations? Just a few short years ago, I would have dismissed this prospect as preposterous. I disliked reading online and abandoned most online tools at the first hurdle. Yet, here I am, a self-diagnosed annotation addict. (For those of you who don’t know me, I used to work for Hypothesis. Leaving to build open infrastructure didn’t mean that I left the tool behind — far from it!)

I’ve outlined the potentiality of using Hypothes.is as a CMS platform in the past. Heather has apparently taken it to heart and gone full bore.

I hadn’t included it at the time, but private groups are also an interesting way to share ideas and private posts with small groups of people. You could also use those groups as taxonomies for keeping private notebooks as well. While the primary instance of Hypothes.is that many use would technically be considered a silo, keep in mind that it’s open source, so you could technically host it for yourself as an IndieWeb project! Now to get support for Webmention and Micropub! 😉

I’d also recently done a quick survey of some of the bigger accounts I was aware of and suspected that there must be one or two edge cases in the 10,000+ range. I knew a bot user or two were likely way ahead, but figured there was at least one person with a huge number of posts hiding out there. Great to know my hypothesis was right!

Read - Want to Read: The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution by Eric Foner (W. W. Norton & Company)

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar, a timely history of the constitutional changes that built equality into the nation’s foundation and how those guarantees have been shaken over time.

The Declaration of Independence announced equality as an American ideal, but it took the Civil War and the subsequent adoption of three constitutional amendments to establish that ideal as American law. The Reconstruction amendments abolished slavery, guaranteed all persons due process and equal protection of the law, and equipped black men with the right to vote. They established the principle of birthright citizenship and guaranteed the privileges and immunities of all citizens. The federal government, not the states, was charged with enforcement, reversing the priority of the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In grafting the principle of equality onto the Constitution, these revolutionary changes marked the second founding of the United States.

Eric Foner’s compact, insightful history traces the arc of these pivotal amendments from their dramatic origins in pre–Civil War mass meetings of African-American “colored citizens” and in Republican party politics to their virtual nullification in the late nineteenth century. A series of momentous decisions by the Supreme Court narrowed the rights guaranteed in the amendments, while the states actively undermined them. The Jim Crow system was the result. Again today there are serious political challenges to birthright citizenship, voting rights, due process, and equal protection of the law. Like all great works of history, this one informs our understanding of the present as well as the past: knowledge and vigilance are always necessary to secure our basic rights.

References to this book and Foner’s work↬ Kai Wright and John Biewen‘s shows I’ve heard in the past week. ^[1] [2]

Replied to Proposing a Microformats2 Markup for Licensing Information by

Jamie Tanna (Jamie Tanna)

Some recommendations for how to mark up licensing information with Microformats, for making license information machine-discoverable and machine-readable.

Great write up Jamie. Some interesting things to think about and lots of useful examples.

I suspect that for most personal websites the idea of fair use will give people enough protection for reply contexts. Of course it will depend on their jurisdiction as fair use can vary by country or potentially even within countries in terms of how it is applied.

I would almost have to think that barring particular legislation and precedent that people/companies who are explicitly providing Open Graph Protocol or similar meta data on their websites are explicitly granting a license to use that content as the only use for that data on most systems is to provide it for creating contexts on services like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Facebook likely created OGP as a proprietary format to give itself broad legal protection for just such use cases, though I suspect they parse pages and take titles or other snippets when OGP doesn’t exist. Naturally some large systems like WordPress may push OGP into code without the site’s owners being aware of what they’re potentially giving away, so the area is really murky at best. It would be beneficial to consult an attorney to see what their best advice might be or if there are precedents with respect to these areas.

For future reference, here is the relevant section for Fair Use from Title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States:

107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use⁴⁰

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;

(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

Read More than THAT by Dan Cohen (dancohen.org)

“Less talk, more grok.” That was one of our early mottos at THATCamp, The Humanities and Technology Camp, which started at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in 2008. It was a riff on “Less talk, more rock,” the motto of WAAF, the hard rock stati...

THATCamp was non-hierarchical. Before the first THATCamp, I had never attended a conference—nor have I been to once since my last THATCamp, alas—that included tenured and non-tenured and non-tenure-track faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, librarians and archivists and museum professionals, software developers and technologists of all kinds, writers and journalists, and even curious people from well beyond academia and the cultural heritage sector—and that truly placed them at the same level when the entered the door. ❧

I wish I’d known about them before they disappeared.

The only equivalent conference I’ve been to with this sort of diversity was the Reynolds Journalism Institute’s Dodging the Memory Hole conferences. That diversity really does make things magical.

107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use40

107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use⁴⁰