Author Archives: C. Berman

Understanding Creative Commons Licenses

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It doesn’t matter if you’re a student, a scholar, or just someone with a blog: we all run into issues finding images that you’re allowed to use on your website, in your research, or in an advertisement. While copyright laws have avenues for use, it’s not guaranteed that you can use the image you want, and the process of getting access to that image may be slow. That’s why looking at images with a Creative Commons license are a great alternative to traditional copyrighted images.

A Creative Commons license is a more flexible option than copyright and can be used on images, or basically any other kind of shareable work. When a creator chooses a Creative Commons license, people do not need to ask for their explicit permission to use their work. However, that doesn’t mean that the creator gives up control of the image; rather, they choose one of six current options for their Creative Commons license:

  • Attribution: The most lenient license. The attribution license lets others do what they please with your work, so long as they credit the original creator.
  • Attribution-ShareAlike: Similar to the attribution license, though all derivatives of the original work must be licensed under identical terms to that original.
  • Attribution-NoDerivs: This allows others to use the work as they please, so long as they do not change or manipulate it, and credit the creator.
  • Attribution-NonCommercial: This license allows people to use and tweak the work freely, except for commercial enterprises. The derivative works do not have to be licensed under identical terms.
  • Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: Same as above except derivative works must be licensed under identical terms.
  • Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs: The most restrictive license. Others may download the work, but they cannot change them or use them commercially.

All-in-all, most Creative Commons works have “some rights reserved.” As a consumer, you have the responsibility to look up license of any Creative Commons work you hope to use (which isn’t very hard – most of the time any limitations are listed).

Here are some examples of images with differing Creative Commons licenses:

The only stipulation on this image is that I must provide proper attribution. “Albert Cavalier King Charles Spaniel” was taken by Glen Bowman on July 21, 2013 and is hosted on flickr.com.

This image of a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel only requires creator attribution. It can be used commercially so long as I acknowledge Glen Bowman, the photo’s creator. So if I so chose, I could hypothetically edit this photo to use as a welcome banner on my Cavalier King Charles Spaniel appreciation blog, include it in a PowerPoint I use for my veterinary school class, or copy it in an advertisement for my dog-walking business.

This Creative Commons licensed image requires proper attribution. “Cavalier King Charles Spaniel” was taken by James Watson (kingjimmy81) on August 17, 2013, and is hosted on Flickr.com.

This image of a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel has a more restrictive license than the above image. You can share the image in any medium or format, but you must give appropriate credit to James Watson, the creator. You cannot use it commercially, and you cannot distribute derivatives of the photo. So I could include this on my Cavalier King Charles appreciation blog with proper attribution, but could not edit it to make it into a banner on the homepage. And while using it in my veterinary school PowerPoint is still okay, I could not use it in an advertisement for my dog-walking business.

If you’re interested in finding Creative Commons works, you can use the Creative Commons Search function, which links up to various search engines, including Google, Google Images, Wikimedia Commons, and Flickr. If you’re interested in learning more about Creative Commons licenses, check out the Scholarly Commons’ Creative Commons basics page, as well as our use/creation of Creative Commons licenses page. If you’re interested in learning more about intellectual property in general, visit the Main Library’s Intellectual Property LibGuide, or get in touch with the library’s copyright specialist, Sara Benson (srbenson@illinois.edu).

Using an Art Museum’s Open Data

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*Edits on original idea and original piece by C. Berman by Billy Tringali

As a former art history student, I’m incredibly interested in the how the study of art history can be aided by the digital humanities. More and more museums have started allowing the public to access a portion of their data. When it comes to open data, museums seem to be lagging a bit behind other cultural heritage institutions, but many are providing great open data for humanists.

For art museums, the range of data provided ranges. Some museums are going the extra mile to give a lot of their metadata to the public. Others are picking and choosing aspects of their collection, such as the Museum of Modern Art’s Exhibition and Staff Histories.

Many museums, especially those that collect modern and contemporary art, can have their hands tied by copyright laws when it comes to the data they present. A few of the data sets currently available from art museums are the Cooper Hewitt’s Collection Data, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts metadata, the Rijksmuseum API, the Tate Collection metadata, and the Getty Vocabularies.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has recently released all images of the museum’s public domain works under a Creative Commons Zero license.

More museum data can be found here!

Whimsical Data

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Photograph of a Yorkshire terrier in a field of yellow flowers.

It’s finally springtime!

It’s April! After what felt like eternity, it’s starting to warm up here at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. So today, in celebration of spring, we’re going to take a look at few whimsical data sets that have made us laugh, smile, and think.

Dogs of NYC

Dogs of NYC was published by the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in 2013. The department collected data on 50,000 New York dogs, including their name, gender, breed, birth date, dominant, secondary and third color, and whether they are spayed/neutered or a guard dog, along with the borough they live in and their zip code. WYNC used this data to explore dog names and breeds by area, and Kaylin Pavlik used the data to show the relationship between dog names and dog breeds.

What made us laugh: How high the TF-IDF score for the name Pugsley was for Pugs as compared to other breeds.

What made us think: Does the perceived danger of a dog breed influence what people name them?

UK Government Hospitality wine cellar annual statement

Each year, the UK publishes an annual statement on the Government Wine Cellar, which they describe as being “used to support the work of Government Hospitality in delivering business hospitality for all government ministers and departments”. The first report was published in July 2014, and the latest was published in September 2017.

What made us laugh: Government Hospitality has an an advisory committee that meets four times a year and are known as Masters of Wine. They are unpaid.

What made us think: With threats to government transparency across the globe, it is nice to see data that some may brush off as inconsequential, but actually deals with large sums of money.

Most Popular Christmas Toys According to Search Data

Published by Reckless in November 2017, this data set shows search data based on the Toys R Us catalog (RIP) that shows which toys, video games, and board games were most popular among different age groups. Favorite toys included the Barbie Dreamhouse, Furby Connect, Razor Crazy Cart, and R2D2 Interactive Robotic Droid.

What made us laugh: The Silly Sausage game was one of the most searched board games during this period.

What made us think: Toys play a pivotal role during childhood development. It’s a little astonishing to see that, despite all of her critics, Barbie still reigns supreme in the 2-4 year-old age group.

Do you have a favorite data set? Let us know in the comments!

Edward Ayers: Twenty-Five Years in Digital History and Counting

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Photograph of Edward Ayers.We are so excited to be hosting a talk by Edward Ayers next week! We hope you’ll join us on March 29, 2018 from 4-6 PM in 220 Main Library.

Edward Ayers has been named National Professor of the Year, received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama at the White House, won the Bancroft Prize and Beveridge Prize in American history, and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He has collaborated on major digital history projects including the Valley of the Shadow, American Panorama, and Bunk, and is one of the co-hosts for BackStory, a popular podcast about American history. He is Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities and president emeritus at the University of Richmond as well as former Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America, published in 2017 by W. W. Norton.

His talk will be on “Twenty-Five Years in Digital History and Counting”.

Edward Ayers began a digital project just before the World Wide emerged and has been pursuing one project or several projects ever since. His current work focuses on the two poles of possibility in the medium: advanced projects in visualizing processes of history at the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond and a public-facing project in Bunk, curating representations of the American past for a popular audience.

See you there!

Random Facts: Copyright Edition

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Source: Openclipart

This post was guest authored by Scholarly Communication and Publishing Graduate Assistant Paige Kuester.

Just in case “Copyright” is one of the categories when you finally make it on Jeopardy!

  1. Facts aren’t copyrightable

Generally, unless there is some creativity in the expression associated with them, facts aren’t copyrightable. Even if you were the first person ever to know that particular fact, unless you express it in a creative fixed way, there’s no way that copyright can attach to facts.

  1. Monkeys have yet to successfully go to court and claim copyright

While this fact seems like a statement of the obvious, if you are not familiar with the Monkey Selfie case, you’ll be surprised to learn that accomplishing this was the goal of PETA recently. It’s probably a good thing that the case settled (though unsuccessfully in the eyes of monkeys that are garnering for copyright everywhere) with the owner of the camera agreeing to donate a percentage of proceeds gained from the picture to habitat protection, because how else would we have gotten access to some of these images? However, it is questionable if images taken by animals are even copyrightable at all.

  1. Just because you can’t find the © symbol, does not mean that a work does not have copyright.

Since 1989, works no longer require a copyright symbol to have copyright attached to them. Which makes having a copyright easier than in previous eras, but makes it less obvious that a work in copyrighted in general. Of course, there are benefits to including one.

  1. Plagiarism doesn’t just plague the lazy.

Apologies in advance.

  1. You own a copyright.

At least, if you have ever written anything creative down in a fixed medium that was your own idea, you own one. Probably more than one, including marker scribbles and grocery lists and papers that you wrote in high school. As long as you don’t transfer your rights, you will hold that copyright for your entire life plus seventy years.

Make sure you share your winnings with us.

For more information about copyright, check out this undergraduate journal library guide, this Author’s rights guide,  or contact our copyright librarian, Sara Benson.

Sources:

Bailey, Jonathan. (2010). 5 Things that Can’t Be Copyrighted. Plagiarism Today.  Retrieved from https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2010/01/08/5-things-that-cant-be-copyrighted/

Bailey, Jonathan. (2015). 5 Great People Who Plagiarized. Plagiarism Today.  Retrieved from https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2015/02/10/5-great-people-who-plagiarized/

New Media Rights. (2011). II. What Can and Can’t Be Copyrighted? New Media Rights. Retrieved from https://www.newmediarights.org/business_models/artist/ii_what_can_and_can’t_be_copyrighted

Post, David. (2017). No Monkey Business Here: The Monkey Copyright Case is Over–For Now. Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/09/17/no-monkey-business-here-the-monkey-selfie-copyright-case-is-over-for-now/?utm_term=.1624b07a5524

Open Access and… Animals?

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Image of a blue and white bird flying over a lake with mountains in the background.

Source: Pixabay.

This post was guest authored by Scholarly Communication and Publishing Graduate Assistant Paige Kuester.

The modern research landscape is an asset for biologists, zoologists, conservationists, etc. They can track animals, check up on them, figure out what is helping or harming their environment, and report or adjust accordingly. They tag animals and create twitter handles for them to tweet out their location (source). They can also create crowdsourcing research methods in order to utilize the interest of the public. And with open access, researchers can easily pass this information on to the public, so that they can create even more awareness and participation, too.

Great, right?

Maybe not. Think about who else has access to that information.

Poachers. Yes, we are still living in an age of poachers. This isn’t just your Tarzan poachers tromping through the jungle, though there is still some of that. This is much more threatening.

Poachers don’t have to track animals anymore, because scientists are doing that for them. Poachers can just gather data posted online through open access sources, and plan out their trip. Crowd-sourced research and tourists apps can also provide this information. If poachers are really nifty, they can tap into radio signals and the like that are sending out locations from the animal tags to the researchers.

One way that researchers can combat this is to not post such specific locations and data on animals that are likely to be poached, especially when publishing with an open access journal. Those in charge of apps can not make information about endangered species publicly available. It is a little more difficult to deter signal hackers, but monitoring and adding more security to these is one way to curb this unfortunate trend.

Open access is great, spreading information about awesome and endangered animals is great, but leaving them vulnerable to exploitation is not so much. It is a bit like Facebook. Sharing your location and your Friday night plans may be fine when you know it is just your friends seeing this information, but when making it public, maybe don’t advertise that you are going to out of your apartment for weeks on end, leaving your valuables alone and unmonitored. While animal privacy rights are not yet a thing, a little courtesy can go a long way in protecting those who don’t have a say.

Sources:

Hewitt, Sarah. (2017, June 5). Scientists Are Debating Whether Animals have a Right to Privacy. Motherboard. Retrieved from: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43ydkb/animals-privacy-tracking-data-science-journals-open-access-banff-national-park

Scheele, Benjamin, and David Lindenmayer. (2017, May 25). Scientists Are Accidently Helping Poachers Drive Endangered Species to Extinction. The Conversation. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/scientists-are-accidentally-helping-poachers-drive-rare-species-to-extinction-78342

Welz, Adam. (2017, September 6). Unnatural Surveillance: How Online Data is Putting Species at Risk. Yale Environment 360. Retrieved from http://e360.yale.edu/features/unnatural-surveillance-how-online-data-is-putting-species-at-risk

Introducing the Scholarly Commons Project Forum

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A logo for the Scholarly Commons Project Forum.

The Scholarly Commons Project Forum is an hour-long bi-weekly meeting space for scholars who are interested in Digital Humanities questions regarding data and text. These meetings are an opportunity for informal, open-ended conversations about research where we will discuss conceptual, methodological, and workflow issues for projects. Those projects may be at any stage of development, whether still formative or largely complete. The goal is to think together about how to develop robust Digital Humanities research, whether as beginners interested in trying out DH techniques or those with more experience, and to make that research more legible to others.

These conversations will be facilitated by Interns at the Scholarly Commons, and will be held Mondays in Main Library 220 from 2:00-3:00 pm, starting March 5, and every two weeks following. Please RSVP to sc@library.illinois.edu.

Endangered Data Week is Coming

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The Endangered Data Week logo

Did you know that Endangered Data Week is happening from February 26-March 2? Endangered Data Week is a collaborative effort to help highlight on public datasets that are in danger of being deleted, repressed, mishandled, or lost. Inspired by recent events that have shown how fragile publicly administered data is, Endangered Data Week hopes to promote care for endangered collections by publicizing datasets and increasing engagement with them, and through advocating for political activism.

The Endangered Data Week organizes hope to cultivate a broad community of supporters for access to public data, and who advocate for open data policies and help cultivate data skills and competencies among students and colleagues. During Endangered Data Week, librarians, scholars and activists will use the #EndangeredData Twitter hashtag, as well as host events across the country.

While this is the first year of Endangered Data Week, the organizers hope to work both on the momentum of similar movements, such as Sunshine Week, Open Access Week, and the #DataRescue, and to continue organizing events into the future.

What are you doing during Endangered Data Week? Let us know in the comments!

Celebrating Frederick Douglass with Crowdsourced Transcriptions

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A flier advertising the Transcribe-a-thon, which includes a photo of Frederick Douglass

On February 14, 2018, the world celebrated Frederick Douglass’ 200th birthday. Douglass, the famed Black social reformer, abolitionist, writer and statesman, did not know the date of his birth, and chose the date of Februar

 

y 14, 1818 to celebrate his birthday. This year, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of his birth, Colored Conventions, the Smithsonian Transcription Center, and the National Museum of African American History & Culture partnered together to host a Transcribe-a-thon of the Freedmen’s Bureau Papers in Douglass’ honor.

The Freedmen’s Bureau Papers consist of 2 million digitized papers through a partnership between the Smithsonian Transcription Center and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. It is the largest crowdsourcing initiative ever hosted by the Smithsonian. The Freedmen’s Bureau helped solve the everyday problems of formerly enslaved individuals, from obtaining clothing and food to helping find lost family members. The Bureau operated from 1865-1872 and closed due to opposition from Congress and President Andrew Johnson.

The Transcribe-a-thon was held on February 14th from 12-3 PM EST. According to the Smithsonian Transcription Center, over 779 pages of the Freedmen’s Bureau Papers were transcribed during this time, 402 pages were reviewed and approved, and 600 new volunteers registered for the project. Over sixty institutions hosted Transcribe-a-thon locations, many of which bought birthday cakes in Douglass’ honor from African American-owned bakeries in their area. Meanwhile, Colored Conventions livestreamed participants during the event.If you’re interested in seeing more from Douglass Day 2018, check out the Smithsonian Transcription Center’s Twitter Moment.

The Douglass Day Transcribe-a-thon was a fantastic example of people coming together and doing fantastic digital humanities work together, and for a great cause. While crowdsourced transcription projects are not new, the enthusiasm for Douglass Day is certainly unique and infectious, and we’re so excited to see where this project goes in the future and to get involved ourselves!

 

New Scholarly Commons Space Coming

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If you haven’t heard, the Scholarly Commons is in the process of creating a new, collaborative space with construction beginning in 2019. We have a few mock ups of the space as it is currently imagined, and would love for our patrons to tells us how they feel about them! Below are the mock ups, then a series of questions to help guide your responses, which you can either put in the comments or email to sc@library.illinois.edu.

Thanks everyone!

  1. What do you like best about these drawings?
  2. What do you like least about these drawings?
  3. What is missing from this space?
  4. Large-screen presentation area in the middle of the space – thumbs up or thumbs down?
  5. Is there too much/not enough/the right amount of couch-type seating in these design examples?
  6. Do you like that there are two group presentation spaces or would having just one larger presentation space be preferable?
  7. Are there too many, two few, or just enough small group spaces?
  8. What is missing from these drawings?
  9. What could you imagine doing in spaces set up like this?
  10. What do you think about the furniture in these renderings?
  11. Would you want adjustable-height tables in the space? Why?
  12. What would make it easier for you to work on your research in this space?
  13. What would make it easier for you to collaborate in this space?

Let us know your thoughts!