Tag Archives: event

Generative AI Meets Open Culture

Posted on by

How can public interest values shape the future of AI?

With the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI), there has been increasing interest in how AI can be used in the description, preservation and dissemination of cultural heritage. While AI promises immense benefits, it also raises important ethical considerations.

WATCH SESSION RECORDING:

In this session, leaders from Internet Archive, Creative Commons and Wikimedia Foundation will discuss how public interest values can shape the development and deployment of AI in cultural heritage, including how to ensure that AI reflects diverse perspectives, promotes cultural understanding, and respects ethical principles such as privacy and consent.

Join us for a thought-provoking discussion on the future of AI in cultural heritage, and learn how we can work together to create a more equitable and responsible future.

Speakers include:

  • Lila Bailey, Internet Archive
  • Jacob Rogers, Wikimedia Foundation
  • Kat Walsh, Creative Commons
  • Luis Villa (moderator), Tidelift

Generative AI Meets Open Culture
May 2 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET
Watch the session recording

Book Talk: Data Cartels

Posted on by

Join SPARC’s Heather Joseph for a chat with author Sarah Lamdan about the companies that control & monopolize our information.

Watch the session recording:

Purchase Data Cartels from The Booksmith

In our digital world, data is power. Information hoarding businesses reign supreme, using intimidation, aggression, and force to maintain influence and control. Sarah Lamdan brings us into the unregulated underworld of these “data cartels”, demonstrating how the entities mining, commodifying, and selling our data and informational resources perpetuate social inequalities and threaten the democratic sharing of knowledge.

About the speakers

Sarah Lamdan is Professor of Law at the City University of New York School of Law. She also serves as a Senior Fellow for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a Fellow at NYU School of Law’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy.

Heather Joseph is a longtime advocate and strategist in the movement for open access to knowledge. She is the Executive Director of SPARC, an international alliance of libraries committed to creating a more open and equitable ecosystem for research and education. She leads SPARCs policy efforts, which have produced national laws and executive actions supporting the free and open sharing of research articles, data and textbooks, and has worked on international efforts to promote open access with organizations including the United Nations,, The World Bank, UNESCO, and the World Health Organization.

Book Talk: Data Cartels with Sarah Lamdan & Heather Joseph
Co-sponsored by Internet Archive & Authors Alliance
Wednesday, November 30 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET
Watch the virtual discussion.

Editorial note: Updated 11/30/22 to include embedded video & remove registration links.

Book Talk: MEME WARS

Posted on by

The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America

Join Amelia Acker in conversation with authors Joan Donovan and Emily Dreyfuss about their new book, MEME WARS, in-person at the Internet Archive, October 14 @ 6pm.

REGISTER NOW

Purchase your copy of MEME WARS from The Booksmith.

Memes have long been dismissed as inside jokes with no political importance. Nothing could be further from the truth. Memes are bedrock to the strategy of conspiracists such as Alex Jones, provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos, white nationalists like Nick Fuentes, and tacticians like Roger Stone. While the media and most politicians struggle to harness the organizing power of the internet, the “redpill right” weaponizes memes, pushing conspiracy theories and disinformation into the mainstream to drag people down the rabbit hole. These meme wars stir strong emotions, deepen partisanship, and get people off their keyboards and into the streets–and the steps of the US Capitol.

MEME WARS is the first major account of how “Stop the Steal” went from online to real life, from the wires to the weeds. Leading media expert Joan Donovan, PhD, veteran tech journalist Emily Dreyfuss, and cultural ethnographer Brian Friedberg pull back the curtain on the digital war rooms in which a vast collection of anti-establishmentarians bond over hatred of liberal government and media. Together as a motley reactionary army, they use memes and social media to seek out new recruits, spread ideologies, and remake America according to their desires.

REGISTER NOW

Book Talk: MEME WARS
October 14 @ 6:00pm PT
IN-PERSON at Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco
Register now for the in-person event

Public Library Lending: An Endangered Core Value of American Democracy?

Posted on by

Since 18th century and pre-Constitution America, libraries have been a public space, a central repository where books could be borrowed, read and returned—a long defended democratic ideal of the public library. But new challenges like book bans and lawsuits against libraries threaten that historic role. Join Brewster Kahle for a discussion about the future of libraries at The Commonwealth Club of California, October 6 @ 5:30pm PT.

Public Library Lending: An Endangered Core Value of American Democracy?
October 6 @ 5:30pm PT
The Commonwealth Club of California
110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium
Register now for the in-person event (virtual attendance available)

Join us April 5 for WHOLE EARTH: A Conversation with John Markoff

Posted on by

Join us on Tuesday, April 5 at 11am PT / 2pm ET for a book talk with John Markoff in conversation with journalist Steven Levy (Facebook: The Inside Story), on the occasion of Markoff’s new biography, WHOLE EARTH: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand.

Watch the session recording now:

For decades Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter John Markoff has chronicled how technology has shaped our society. In his latest book, WHOLE EARTH: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (on-sale now), Markoff delivers the definitive biography of one of the most influential visionaries to inspire the technological, environmental, and cultural revolutions of the last six decades.

Purchase your copy today

Today Stewart Brand is largely known as the creator of The Whole Earth Catalog, a compendium of tools, books, and other intriguing ephemera that became a counterculture bible for a generation of young Americans during the 1960s. He was labeled a “techno-utopian” and a “hippie prince”, but Markoff’s WHOLE EARTH shows that Brand’s life’s work is far more. In 1966, Brand asked a simple question—why we had not yet seen a photograph of the whole earth? The whole earth image became an optimistic symbol for environmentalists and replaced the 1950s’ mushroom cloud with the ideal of a unified planetary consciousness. But after the catalog, Brand went on to greatly influence the ‘70s environmental movement and the computing world of the ‘80s. Steve Jobs adopted Brand’s famous mantra, “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” as his code to live by, and to this day Brand epitomizes what Markoff calls “that California state of mind.”

Watch now

Brand has always had an “eerie knack for showing up first at the onset of some social movement or technological inflection point,” Markoff writes, “and then moving on just when everyone else catches up.” Brand’s uncanny ahead-of-the-curveness is what makes John Markoff his ideal biographer. Markoff has covered Silicon Valley since 1977, and his reporting has always been at the cutting edge of tech revolutions—he wrote the first account of the World Wide Web in 1993 and broke the story of Google’s self-driving car in 2010. Stewart Brand gave Markoff carte blanche access in interviews for the book, so Markoff gets a clearer story than has ever been set down before, ranging across Brand’s time with the Merry Pranksters and his generation-defining Whole Earth Catalog, to his fostering of the marriage of environmental consciousness with hacker capitalism and the rise of a new planetary culture.

Above all, John Markoff’s WHOLE EARTH reminds us how today, amid the growing backlash against Big Tech, Stewart Brand’s original technological optimism might offer a roadmap for Silicon Valley to find its way back to its early, most promising vision.

Purchase your copy of WHOLE EARTH: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand via the Booksmith, our local bookstore.

EVENT DETAILS
WHOLE EARTH: A conversation with John Markoff
April 5 @ 11am PT / 2pm ET
Watch the event recording

Virtual Gathering Welcomes Creative Works from 1926 into the Public Domain

Posted on by

Free from copyright restrictions, the public can now enjoy unlimited access to creative works from 1926 including A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, classic silent films with Buster Keaton, and jazz standards by Jelly Roll Morton.

A virtual party hosted by the Internet Archive, Creative Commons, and many other community co-sponsors on January 20 celebrated the availability of the newly released material. This year’s festivities also welcomed nearly 400,000 sound recordings from the pre-1923 era into the public domain as a result of the Music Modernization Act passed by the U.S. Congress.

“What a big win for our country, especially for libraries and archives that preserve our cultural history,” said U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) of the newest crop of creative work entering the public domain, including the early sound recordings. “It’s also a big win for our artists, who can now freely use these classic recordings and transform them into new works.” [WATCH the segment with Senator Wyden.]

Wyden has supported groups that advocate for balanced copyright laws that support public access. In the recent federal legislation addressing compensation in the music industry, he pushed back against a provision that would have locked up older recordings for almost 150 years from their publication.

“These restrictions defied common sense, and they would have been a major disadvantage for historians, academics and American cultural heritage,” said Wyden, who helped secure a better deal that allowed sound recordings to be public property each year. “The Music Modernization Act was not our first rodeo, and I’m certain it is not going to be our last. I look forward to working with all of you closely in the days ahead, continuing the fight for balanced IP laws that work for all Americans.”

Meredith Rose, senior policy counsel with Public Knowledge, a consumer advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C., said the new federal legislation is a “huge game changer” for libraries. For the first time, sound recordings before 1972 can be made available for noncommercial and educational uses with no restrictions or threat of statutory damages. [WATCH this segment.]

Also speaking at the event was Jennifer Jenkins of Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School. She shared a video highlighting the range of work becoming open this year from Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises to the film “For Heaven’s Sake” with Harold Lloyd and poetry by Langston Hughes. [WATCH this segment.]

“Public domain enables both creativity and access to preservation,” Jenkins said, noting some classic works have been lost to history. “For those that have survived, it’s time to discover or rediscover and breathe new life into them.”

A musical part of the program featured performances by Citizen DJ and Roochie Toochie and the Ragtime Shepard Kings.  There was also an interview with Colin Hancock, a musician and historian who has built his career playing early jazz, blues and ragtime music and using period technology to record it. [WATCH this segment.]

Professor Jason Luther of Rowan University explained how his students research 78rpm records from the early 20th century through the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project to create podcasts. Two of his students shared their excitement in being able to access these vintage recordings and make connections to artists’ work of today. (Read more about Luther’s project in this blog post.) [WATCH this segment.]

The work of writers, musicians, filmmakers, scientists, painters should be consumed, built upon and enjoyed, said Catherine Stihler, chief executive officer of Creative Commons: “I see the public domain as a gift. A package of time, wrapped in excitement of discovery and revitalization that sheds light on the past and enriches the present.” [WATCH this segment.]

The Public Domain Day event was organized by the Internet Archive and co-sponsored by SPARC, Creative Commons, Library Futures, Authors Alliance, the Bioheritage Diversity Library, Public Knowledge, ARSC, the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain, and the Music Library Association.

[Cross-posted blog with SPARC]

Why CDL Now? Digital Libraries Past, Present & Future

Posted on by
Register now: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_b4R4ayfzSj2-GIvbpabumA

Libraries have historically been trusted hubs to equalize access to credible information, a crucial role that they should continue to fill in the digital age. However, as more information is born-digital, digitized, or digital-first, libraries must build new policy, legal and public understandings about how advances in technology impact our preservation, community, and collection development practices.

This panel will bring together legal scholars Ariel Katz (University of Toronto) and Argyri Panezi (IE University Madrid/Stanford University) to discuss their work on library digital exhaustion and public service roles for digital libraries. They will be joined by Lisa Radha Weaver, Director of Collections and Program Development at Hamilton Public Library, who will discuss how library services have been transformed by digital delivery and innovation and Kyle Courtney of Library Futures/Harvard University, a lawyer/librarian who wrote the influential Statement on Controlled Digital Lending, signed by over 50 institutions. The panel will be moderated by Lila Bailey of Internet Archive.

August 3 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET
Register now: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_b4R4ayfzSj2-GIvbpabumA

Background reading

LEARNING FROM RECORDED MEMORY: 9/11 TV News Archive Conference

Posted on by

LEARNING FROM RECORDED MEMORY: 9/11 TV News Archive Conference

Co-sponsored by Internet Archive and New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, Tisch School of the Arts

Wednesday, August 24, 4:00-6:00 pm; reception follows

New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, 721 Broadway, 6th Floor, Michelson Theater, New York, NY 10003

This conference highlights work by scholars using television news materials to help us understand how TV news presented the events of 9/11/2001 and the international response. Our collective recollection of 9/11 and the following days has become inseparable from the televised images we have all seen. But while TV news is inarguably the most vivid and pervasive information medium of our time, it has not been a medium of record. As the number of news outlets increases, research and scholarly access to the thousands of hours of TV news aired each day grows increasingly difficult. Scholars face great challenges in identifying, locating and adequately citing television news broadcasts in their research.

The 9/11 Television News Archive (http://archive.org/details/911) contains 3,000 hours of national and international news coverage from 20 channels over the seven days beginning September 11, plus select analysis by scholars. It is designed to assist scholars and journalists researching relationships between news events and coverage, engaging in comparative and longitudinal studies, and investigating “who said what when.” What kinds of research and scholarship will be enabled by access to an online database of TV news broadcasts? How will emerging TV news studies make use of this service? This conference offers contemporary insights and predictions on new directions in television news studies.

SCHEDULE

4:00:  Welcome: Richard Allen, Chair, Department of Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU
4:05:  Brewster Kahle, Founder and Digital Librarian at the Internet Archive
4:15:  Brian A. Monahan, Iowa State University
4:25:  Deborah Jaramillo, Boston University
4:35:  Marshall Breeding, Vanderbilt Television News Archive
4:45:  Mark J Williams, Department of Film and Media Studies, Dartmouth College
4:55:  Carolyn Brown, American University
5:05:  Michael Lesk, Rutgers University
5:15:  Beatrice Choi, New York University
5:25:  Scott Blake, Artist
5:35:  Discussion
6:00:  Reception (Remarks by Dennis Swanson, President of Station Operations, Fox Television)

SPEAKERS

Welcome: Richard Allen, Chair, Department of Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University

 

Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive

“Introducing the 9/11 TV News Archive”

Brewster Kahle is the founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive in 1996.   An entrepreneur and Internet pioneer, Brewster invented the first Internet publishing system and helped put newspapers and publishers online in the 1990’s.  

 

Brian A. Monahan, Iowa State University

“Mediated Meanings and Symbolic Politics: Exploring the Continued Significance of 9/11 News Coverage”

In-depth analysis of television news coverage of the September 11 attacks and their aftermath reveals how these events were fashioned into “9/11,” the politically and morally charged signifier that has profoundly shaped public perception, policy and practice in the last decade.  The central argument is that patterned representations of 9/11 in news media and other arenas fueled the transformation of September 11 into a morality tale centered on patriotism, victimization and heroes.  The resulting narrow and oversimplified public understanding of 9/11 has dominated public discourse, obscured other interpretations and marginalized debate about the contextual complexities of these events. Understanding how and why the coverage took shape as it did yields new insights into the social, cultural and political consequences of the attacks, while also highlighting the role of news media in the creation, affirmation and dissemination of meanings in modern life.

Brian Monahan has extensively researched news coverage of 9/11, resulting in a number of scholarly presentations and a book, The Shock of the News: Media Coverage and the Making of 9/11 (2010, NYU Press).

 

 

Deborah Jaramillo, Boston University

“Fighting Ephemerality: Seeing TV News through the Lens of the Archive”

The experience of watching the news on TV as events unfold is often complicated by the space of exhibition — typically, the domestic space. When hour upon hour of news is catalogued and archived — placed in a space of focused study — the news and the experience become altogether different. What was meant to be ephemeral acquires permanence, and what is usually a short-term viewing experience becomes a rigorous, frame-by-frame examination. In this presentation I will discuss how the archive challenges researchers to adopt new ways of seeing and explaining TV news.

Deborah L. Jaramillo is Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Television, Boston University.

 

Marshall Breeding, Vanderbilt Television News Archive

“An Overview of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive”

Marshall Breeding will give a brief overview of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive and how it carries out its mission to preserve and provide access to US national television news.   He will relate the incredibly diverse kinds of use that the archive receives, including: academic scholarly research; individuals seeking coverage of themselves or family members that may have appeared on the news in life-changing events; those needing historic footage for current journalism, documentaries or other creative works; or corporations or non-profits researching news coverage of their vested topics.  Breeding will also outline some of the constraints it faces in how it provides access to its collection.

Marshall Breeding is the Executive Director of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive and the Director for Innovative Technology and Research for the Vanderbilt University Library.

 

Mark J. Williams, Department of Film and Media Studies, Dartmouth College

“Media Ecology and Online News Archives”

Online TV news archives are a crucial digital resource to facilitate the awareness
of and critical study of Media Ecology.  The 9/11 TV News Archive will fundamentally
enhance our capacity for the study of historical TV newscasts. Two significant
research and teaching outcomes for this area of study are A) to better understand
the role of television news regarding the mediation of society and its popular
memory, and B) to underscore the significance of television news to the goal of
an informed citizenry.  The 9/11 TV News Archive will enhance and ensure the continued
study of the indelible tragic events and aftermath of 9/11, and make possible
new interventions within journalism history and media history, via online capacities
for access and collaboration.

Mark J. Williams is Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies, Dartmouth College.

 

Carolyn Brown, American University

“Documentation and Access: A Latino/a Studies Perspective on Using Video Archives”

This talk will explore the possibilities and potential of using accessible video news archives in two areas: immigration research in the field of communication and documentary journalism. I will speak of the significance of video news archives in my current film, The Salinas Project, and discuss my continuing research on Latino/as and immigration in the news.

Carolyn Brown is Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at American University. She produced daily news shows for MSNBC News and Fox News Channel, and has worked as a producer and senior producer in local news in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Phoenix.

 

Michael Lesk, Rutgers University

“Image Analysis for Media Study”

Focusing on television news coverage of the 9/11 attacks, this talk will outline strategies for automatic quantitative analysis of television news imagery.

After receiving a PhD degree in Chemical Physics in 1969, Michael Lesk joined the computer science research group at Bell Laboratories, where he worked until 1984. From 1984 to 1995 he managed the computer science research group at Bellcore, then joined the National Science Foundation as head of the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems, and since 2003 has been Professor of Library and Information Science at Rutgers University, and chair of that department 2005-2008. He is best known for work in electronic libraries, and his book “Practical Digital Libraries” was published in 1997 by Morgan Kaufmann and the revision “Understanding Digital Libraries” appeared in 2004.  He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, received the Flame award from the Usenix association, and in 2005 was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He chairs the NRC Board on Research Data and Information.

 

Beatrice Choi, New York University

“Live Dispatch: The Ethics of Audio Vision Media Coverage in Trauma and the Legacy of Sound from Shell Shock to 9/11”

What experiential narratives—sensory, aesthetic and political—are invisible to those exposed to traumatic events? Considering September 11, 2001, the media coverage of the event is predominantly visual. People drift in and out of news footage, covered in dust and ash as they exclaim that witnessing the attacks was like watching a movie . In contrast, the wailing of sirens, the staccato thud of feet running from the stricken towers, and the chaotic overlap of voices break through—sometimes even swallow—the visual narratives spun for 9/11. For contemporary American traumatic events, this inquires into how porous the sensory modalities are in experiencing and remembering shock. How, after all, do sensory representations of traumatic events leave in/visible marks on documentation? I address these questions by exploring sound as an alternate modality, evoking a different level of traumatic indexicality. First, I draw attention to the sensory discrepancy between audio and visual content dispersed for American traumatic events, taking 9/11 as the focal event. By investigating the most highly represented media vehicles in the event—television and radio—I delve into a critical visual-acoustic analysis, looking specifically at FDNY radio transmissions and NY1 Aircheck news footage. Finally, I examine the discursive legacy sound imparts in moments of American crisis from shell shock accounts in the late 19th – 20th century to post-9/11 narratives of post-traumatic symptoms. In delineating this legacy, I hope to reveal the ways in which these documented discourses evolve past preconceived sensory boundaries in the experience of trauma.

Beatrice Choi is an NYU MA Graduate from the Media Culture Communication program. She has worked with the 9/11 archives for a year as a Moving Imagery Exhibitions Intern at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, and recently completed a thesis on Post-Traumatic Landscapes, focusing primarily on post-Katrina New Orleans.

 

Scott Blake, artist

“9/11 Flipbook and Quantitative Media Study”

Scott Blake has created a flipbook consisting of images of United Airlines Flight 175 crashing into the south tower of the World Trade Center. Accompanying the images are essays written by a wide range of participants, each expressing their personal experience of the September 11th attacks. In addition, the authors of the essays were asked to reflect on, and respond to, the flipbook itself. Not surprisingly, the majority of the essayists experienced the events through news network footage. Blake is distributing his 9/11 Flipbooks to encourage a constructive dialog regarding the media’s participation in sensationalizing the tragedy. To further illustrate his point, Blake conducted a media study using the 9/11 TV News Archive to count the number of times major news networks showed the plane crashes, building collapses and people falling from the towers on September 11, 2001.

While best known for his Barcode Art, Scott Blake has created new works that are scandalous, witty, fun, pornographic, humorous and about a thousand other adjectives viewers might use when seeing them for the first time. A self-described “frivolous artist,” he mows over conceptual and visual boundaries to make work that is as thought provoking as it is entertainingly tongue-in-cheek.

RECEPTION

Remarks by Dennis Swanson, President of Station Operations, Fox Television

THANKS TO

We thank the many people at New York University and Internet Archive who have helped to make this conference possible.