Berkman Summer Interns 2008

From Wired’s Listening Post comes the following Gene Simmons quote:

“The record industry is dead,” he mourned to AOL. “It’s six feet underground and unfortunately the fans have done this. They’ve decided to download and file share. There is no record industry around so we’re going to wait until everybody settles down and becomes civilized. As soon as the record industry pops its head up we’ll record new material.”

Simmons seems to think that “becoming civilized” is somehow synonymous with “buying Kiss records.” I would submit that, for Digital Natives, Simmons – if they indeed know him at all – is known as that guy with the big tongue from “Celebrity Apprentice” and the knock-off Ozzy Osbourne with another reality show about his family. As to the second, that brings them up to speed with what real metal fans have known for 30 years.

– Jacob-Kramer Duffield

Or How Three Groups Realized Common Ground

Things started out with what must be the 8th round of personal introductions. But nobody minded as there were new faces, and it provided yet another opportunity for the interns to learn one another’s names.

At least that’s what I was used it for.

After a brief note on tagging relevant material for delicious, and a reminder that by next week the intern community must decide upon the summer’s group trip, Carolina Rossini of Copyright for Librarians spoke up. She explained that her project had recently realized some common ground with two other groups, the Digital Natives project, and Adam Holland’s work with Lewis Hyde. As a result, Rossini explained, the three groups now were working in tandem and had great collective energy that allowed for rich collaboration and support. It was, as Rossini, explained as though the three groups had become a sort of triple helix, each representing a different community of education. Copyright for Librarians, of course, represented librarians, Adam Holland’s worked was geared towards teachers, and the Digital Natives project was interested in students.

Rossini then turned it over to Adam Holland, who further elaborated on his own research and the common ground it shares with other work at the Berkman Center. Working with Lewis Hyde, Holland hopes to create a guide line for fair use, one that improves upon existing guide lines that are often produced by content holders, who wish to restrict fair use. Holland feels that not enough people take advantage of the fair use provision in copyright law, largely because of corporate intimidation and conservative institutional policies that wish to avoid conflict by not even chancing fair use appropriation. The challenge, of course, is that fair use is a loose, non-explicit option for copyright that is hard to quantify and explain to the average citizens

Holland hopes that because of a recent 8-page publication, Best Practices in Fair Use, people will take more confidence in employing fair use. Moreover, it may follow that the community will come to see this terms, “best practices,” as standards and will therefore naturalize this standards toward codified law.
that the community will come to see this terms, “best practices,” as standards and will therefore naturalize this standards toward common cultural paradigms.

Nikki Leon and Jacob Kramer-Duffield, both with the Digital Natives program, then spoke up for the third strand of the triple helix. Both felt that the group’s current work responded to a recent survey, which demonstrated that most teachers do not understand what is the domain of copyright and what is fair use, particularly fair use for education. The group has taken this as an incentive to inform, hoping to follow-up on this statistic and seeking to educate educators such that they will feel confident in fair use and producing creative commons content for other educators. Kramer-Duffield, explained that the current manner of implementing this mission should take the form of various web videos, and explanatory media, packaging certain lessons.

John Randall, also with the Digital Natives project, followed that this was only the first of three phases for implementing/responding to the idea of digital natives. The summer interns, however, were quick to admit that they were likely to only see the first phase, and simply create a frame work for the later work. Randall also discussed Scratch, an MIT web-app and interface that allows for cheap, easy, animation. As an interface, Scratch is “a cross between Flash and visual basic” according to Randall, but has proved to be an interesting space for kids to engage with copyright and plagiarism issues, when users began “borrowing” material, or making subtle tweaks to existing work and calling it their own.

Carolina Rossini cautioned that while this projects may address local issues, over target American education, they will have repercussions all over the world and may serve as a model for the international community that are being to consider these same issues for their country and education systems.

Holland rejoined that it is important that his work represent “an aggregate wisdom,” a knowledge that many people have contributed to, discussed, and come to a consensus, so that it may be helpful for society at large. Otherwise, it represents a single perspective, that however strong, lacks support and therefore is not as informed as a consensus-based guideline might prove.

“The basic goal is to shift people’s perspective from where copyright is the bogeyman,” said Kramer-Duffield, “to a place where people might think of it as fluid, as something to engage with.”

– Zachary McCune

Others will have their own thoughts on today’s excellent Berkman Luncheon session with Anne Balsamo, “Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work,” but I’ll focus on spinning out a little further some of the ideas that came up at the talk. As I noted, I come at this from a Library and Information Science context, so the production and future not just of libraries but of librarians is pretty important in any discussion. Given always-scarce resources, one of the key functions of librarians is (and always has been, and always will be) that of curation and collection development: the determination of which things are included and which are not. Digital libraries and repositories certainly make the marginal cost of storing the next book extraordinarily low, but their maintenance is very much not zero, so this will be just as much of a problem going forward as it always has been.

David Weinberger noted the tendency of any curation project towards canonization, saying that “these are the good books and these are not,” and I don’t disagree – moreover, that’s the point, as every library should seek to serve its community and constituency as well as it can. But there’s nothing that says this needs to be a top-down process – indeed it never has been entirely, as generations of reference librarians can attest from continual questions as to why they don’t have ____.

Social media tools can, as with anything else, make this a much more democratic process. Just as the physical design of public libraries undergoes a public planning and review process, so too can librarians engage their constituencies in collaborative processes to determine what needs are and aren’t being served by existing (or not-yet-existent) collections. That being said, at the end of the day it’ll still be the library professionals that open up in the morning and close in the evening, whether they’re looking after books, computers, or the exciting new kinds of resources and affordances that Balsamo mentioned in her talk (e.g., scanners, 3D printers, sewing machines, etc.). After curation, library and information professionals also take on the exceptionally important role of intermediary: for every generation, libraries can serve this key function of providing access to scarce knowledge and information resources, for the transmission or creation of knowledge, and they can (and should) best serve patrons by facilitating access to those knowledge resources, whatsoever they may be.

Even as easy as replicating 1s and 0s has become, there will never be a virtual equivalent of Borges’ Library of Babel – resources, and the means of accessing and interpreting knowledge will remain scarce. Whatever physical and conceptual changes might happen to the places and ways of accessing, interpreting and creating knowledge, we will still need to have publicly available and accessible places in which to do so, and people to facilitate those interactions.

-Jacob Kramer-Duffield

It’s a little crowded in the Berkman Center’s physical domain. Interns (myself included) cluster into the kitchen, the conference room, the library, or any other space with power outlets and chairs that appears unoccupied in the cozy environs of 23 Everett Street. Don’t be misled. We are a happy bunch, and closeness in physical proximity only makes us a more cohesive pack of interns.

Whatever space the Berkman lacks in “the real world,” the Center more than makes up for with expansive digital real estate. The Center’s website is as deep as it is wide (which is saying a lot of about its archives) and contains any number of links to projects, and initiatives currently underway. There is also a rich, digital neighborhood of Berkman blogs, which covers everything from the personal lives of staffers and fellows, to official journals of on-going research. Like I said, it might not be the biggest place in meat space, but on the internet it feels endless.

Pleasantly endless.

Which brings us to the 2008 Interns Blog, another notable addition in the bustling digital metropolis of the Berkman Center online. In this space, the summer’s 30+ interns will be posting updates on their work and research at the Center in addition to personal introductions and notes on their time at Harvard this summer. We are a fascinating bunch, I can tell you. Doctoral candidates, law students, and undergraduates alike compose this year’s pool, all sharing the unique perspectives, and experiences on issues of contemporary networked culture and societal paradigms.

Please join us in discussing these issues by commenting on posts you find fascinating, engaging, misleading, off-the-mark, on-target, etc. Please feel free to add new insights or angles for us interns to consider. It will much appreciated.

In any case, welcome to the 2008 Summer Interns Blog at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. We hope you enjoy the conversations of this digital kitchen, where we interns can stretch out for a moment with our ideas in the vast void of cyberspace, without bumping shoulders.

– Zachary McCune