Additional
sites based specifically on the readings:
--> Read McKenzie Wark's Virtual Knowledge in the Library of Babel
--> See what you can find out about Kurzweil. Here, use this relatively new search engine: Alta Vista. And don't forget to see what hits you can get on the other search engines.
--> You might want to read Terry Abraham's "Books to Bytes: Libraries and the Internet". Abraham further develops Kurzweil's thinking on virtual libraries.
--> Can you draw parallels between Eco's article on enchanted castles (CR, Chapter 1) and Ted Nelson's project?
--> Barlow's article can be found at HotWired. Try an experiment: After having read the article in CR, read as much of it as you can on your monitor. What differences do you experience, besides the obvious ones, say, of not being able to write in the margins?
New sites on
Virtual Libraries, E-'Zines, and Copyright:
--> Read Denise Hamilton's "Hart of the Gutenberg Galaxy", which is an online and papertext article on Michael Hart who is co-founder of the Gutenberg Project (Wired 5.02 [Feb. 1997]: 108, 110, 112, 114-116,118).
--> Read the previous link on
Crosley Bendix along with Critical Art Ensemble's
"Utopian Plagiarism...". Setting aside the concept of "plagiarism,"
Bendix, like the Critical Art Ensemble, argues for the concept of
"appropriation." He says: "I believe it has to do with deep stuff like
media saturation and the opportunity for self-defense against media
coercion that appropriation engenders.
It also has to do with the
Surrealist/Dada
concept of
detournement.
In modern terms, appropriation is often about culture jamming-capturing
the corporately-controlled subjects of the one-way media barrage,
reorganizing them to be a comment upon themselves, and spitting them back
into the barrage for cultural consideration. A sometimes nasty (but wholly
appropriate) response to a society in decline and denial."
--> Here is an interesting case: Dennis Erlich vs. the Church of Scientology. Erlich was arrested for disseminating copyrighted material of the Chruch of Scientology on alt.religion.scientology, an internet newgroup. | Updates on this case: The Church of Scientology vs. the Net. | But what additional material on this case can you find on the Web? Here, try searching with the term 'Scientology' by way of Lycos and HotBot. (Never use only one engine!) This could make a good project or case study!
--> Here's a site and a question for you about whether or not copyright laws have been broken. When I (VJV) selected articles to include in CyberReader, I had to contact each of the publishers and get permission to reprint. In most cases, of course, my publlisher and I had to pay a permission fee for each article. For example, we had to pay a fee to Harcourt Brace for about a ten-page selection from Umberto Eco's Travels in Hyperreality (the selection is entitled "Enchanted Castles" and is in Chapter 1 of CR.) When developing this website, I discovered the following link: eco000.txt. Is there a way to tell if this is a legal inclusion of a major chunk of Eco's book? Do you find a statement "reprinted by permission of..."? Is such a statement necessary? How would you go about informally investigating whether or not this cyberreprinting of the opening section of the book is legal? (I myself wonder how long this link will be good!) As you browse around on the WWW, what other apparent copyright violations do you find? What is your attitude toward such apparent infringements? Argue pro and con. One last thing: If you slightly modify the URL for this site, you can discover many other works besides Eco's. The URL is "http://darwin.clas.virginia.edu/ ~tsawyer/DRBR/eco000.txt." If you drop off the file code "eco000.txt," you will get Index of /~tsawyer/DRBR/ ... a bundle of texts!
Additional publications:
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