Academia – Page 4

Understanding the 2006 DMCA Exemptions

If Emerson was correct that genius is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in the mind simultaneously, the American legal system just gained enough IQ points to join Mensa. Already, our collective legal mind was showing its vast intelligence trying to square the liberties of the people with the demands of government and industry. For instance, in Alaska you can possess up to an ounce of marijuana legally, but can be charged with a felony for possessing more than four ounces or for selling the “illegal” drug. (Lesson: don’t buy in bulk.) If you’re gay you can legally join the United States military, but you can’t talk about being gay, because that’s illegal and you will be discharged. And now, more pretzel logic: as of last week, it is illegal to break the copy protection on a DVD or distribute “circumvention” technologies, but if you’re a film or media studies professor you can break the copy protection for pedagogical uses. But how, you might ask, would a film or media studies professor with no background in encryption, programming, and hacking crack the copy protection on a DVD?

Good question. It was the first question I posed last weekend to Peter Decherney as my addled brain tried to grasp the significance of the new exemptions to the DMCA granted by the Librarian of Congress, James Billington. Peter is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and deserves all of our thanks for spearheading the effort to put some cracks into the DMCA. (Full disclosure: Peter is a very good friend. But I still think—objectively—that he deserves an enormous amount of praise for persevering in the face of the MPAA’s lawyers to get the exemption for film professors. He told me the MPAA doggedly fights every proposed exemption, reasonable or not, so this was a long way from a trivial exercise.) It’s unfortunate to see many initial reactions to the new exemptions lamenting that they are only for three years or that they merely enshrine the DMCA’s destruction of fair use principles.

Well, sure. These new exemptions are indeed limited in scope and in an ideal world Peter and his colleagues should not have had to ask for these rights or fight for months to get them. (And then do the process all over again in 2009.) But there are a few bright spots here for those of us who believe that the balance between the rights of copyright owners and users of their content has swung much too far in the direction of the former.

First, as Peter pointed out to me, the exemption for film and media studies professors is the first time an exemption has been carved out for a class of people. It’s not hard to imagine how this opens the door for other groups of people to evade the strict rules of the DMCA. Most obviously, many of my colleagues in the History and Art History department at George Mason University use film clips in their courses. Shouldn’t they be exempt too? Shouldn’t a psychology professor who wants to store clips from films on her hard drive to show in class as illustrations of mental phenomena be allowed to do so? The MPAA will undoubtedly say no every step of the way, but you can see how a well-reasoned and reasonable march of exemptions will begin to restore some sanity to the copyright regime. Academia could merely be the beachhead.

Second, and related to the first point, getting a DMCA exemption is a daunting task, especially for those of us without legal training. Peter and his colleagues have provided a blueprint for academics seeking other exemptions in the future. It would be good if they could pass along their wisdom. Thankfully, they have already set up a website that will serve as a clearinghouse of information for the “educational use of media” exemption. A plainspoken description of how they got the exemption in the first place would be helpful as well.

Finally, the new exemptions have raised the odd contradiction I mentioned in the introduction to this piece, a contradiction that helpfully highlights the absurdity of current law. Film professors can now legally proceed in their work (saving clips from DVDs for their classes), except that they have to break the law to do this legal work (by encouraging and participating in an illegal market for cracking software). Similar absurdities abound in the digital realm; recently the MPAA went after a company that fills iPods with video from DVDs the iPod owners have bought.

So now the question becomes: Does our legal system follow the dictates of Emerson’s genius, or of common sense? And how do those moderate pot smokers in Alaska get their marijuana, anyway?

December 3, 2006 Add Comment

Professors, Start Your Blogs

With a new school year about to begin, I want to reach out to other professors (and professors-to-be, i.e., graduate students) to try to convince more of them to start their own blogs. It’s the perfect time to start a blog, and many of the reasons academics state for not having a blog are, I believe, either red herrings or just plain false. So first, let me counter some biases and concerns I hear from a lot of my peers (and others in the ivory tower) when the word “blog” is mentioned.

Despite the fact that tens of millions of people now have blogs, the genre is still considered by many—especially those in academia—to be the realm of self-involved, insecure, oversexed teens and twentysomethings. To be sure, there are plenty of blogs that trace the histrionics of adolescence and its long, tortured aftermath. And there’s no denying that other blogs cover such fascinating, navel-gazing topics as one man’s love of his breakfast (preferably eggs Benedict, if you must know). And—before I throw too many stones in this glass house—I too have indulged in the occasional narcissistic act in this column (not to mention the “shameless plug” for my book, Digital History, in the right column of my home page).

But this common criticism of the genre of the blog has begun to ring hollow. As Bryan Alexander of the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education recently noted at a meeting I attended on emerging web technologies and higher education, a remarkably wide range of blog styles and genres now exist—including many noteworthy examples by professors. There are blogs by historians providing commentary on current events, blogs by journalism professors dissecting mass media coverage of health news, and blogs by whole academic departments, like Saint Cloud State University’s astronomy department.

Blogs are just like other forms of writing, such as books, in that there’s a whole lot of trash out there—and some gems worth reading. It just depends on what you choose to read (or write). And of course many (most? all?) other genres of writing have elements of self-promotion and narcissism. After all, a basic requirement of writing is the (often mistaken) belief that you have something to say that’s important.

Second, no rule book mandates that one adopt the writing style of a hormone-crazed college student. Professors, especially those in the humanities, have spent a great deal of their lives learning how to write prose, and to write in a variety of styles for different purposes: monographs, popular works, reviews, lectures to students, presentations to colleagues. For this blog I’ve adopted a plainspoken prose style with (I hope) a little humor here and there to lighten the occasional technically complex post. I’ve also carefully avoided the use of extreme adjectives and hyperbole that are common on the blogs the academic critics love to hate. I’m proud to say I’ve used only a handful of exclamation points so far. This “casual rationalist” voice is but one option among many, but it’s a style I’ve crafted to disarm those who believe that blogs can be nothing but trouble for the careers of graduate students and professors.

Another factor that has distanced professors from blogs was anonymity. Most early blogs, and especially the ones the media liked to cover, were anonymous or pseudonymous. But I would say that the vast majority of new blogs are clearly attributed (even if they have odd monikers, unlike the boring dancohen.org). Attribution and its associated goods, such as responsibility and credit, should make academics feel better about the genre.

Moreover, as I pointed out when I began this blog last year, a blog is really just a series of “posts” (whatever those are; I began the post you’re reading by calling it an “article,” because at almost 2,000 words it feels less like a post-it note than a legal pad). There’s no blogging requirement to discuss botox or baked beans or boyfriends, or to write short, snarky bits rather than long, balanced, thoughtful essays. A failure to understand this simple point has kept too many serious folks like professors on the sidelines as the blogosphere has exponentially expanded.

The addition of professorial blogs to the web will enrich the medium greatly. The critics of blogging are perhaps onto something when they note that the blogosphere has too many people writing on too few topics (does the world really need another blog on the latest moves of Apple Computer?). Although they frequently teach broad, introductory courses, professors are hired and promoted because they are specialists who discover and explain things that few others understand. For these theorists and researchers, blogging can be a powerful way to provide “notes from the field” and glosses on topics that perhaps a handful of others worldwide know a lot about. While I tend to avoid the hot term of the moment, professors are the true masters of the “long tail” of knowledge.

When I was in graduate school, the Russian historian Paul Bushkovitch once told me that the key to being a successful scholar was to become completely obsessed with a historical topic, to feel the urge to read and learn everything about an event, an era, or a person. In short, to become so knowledgeable and energetic about your subject matter that you become what others immediately recognize as a trusted, valuable expert.

As it turns out, blogs are perfect outlets for obsession. Now, there’s good and bad obsession. What the critics of blogs are worried about is the bad kind—the obsession that drives people to write about their breakfast in excruciating detail.

Yet, as Bushkovitch’s comment entailed, obsession—properly channeled and focused on a worthy subject—has its power. It forges experts. It stimulates a lifelong interest in learning (think, for a moment, about the countless examples of “retired” professors still writing influential books). The most stimulating, influential professors, even those with more traditional outlets for their work (like books and journals) overflow with views and thoughts. Shaped correctly, a blog can be a perfect place for that extra production of words and ideas. The Chronicle of Higher Education may love to find examples of Ph.D.s losing a tenure-track job because of their tell-all (anonymous) blogs, but I suspect that in the not too distant future the right type of blog—the blog that shows how a candidate has full awareness of what’s going on in a field and has potential as a thought leader in it—will become an asset not to be left off one’s CV.

The best bloggers inevitably become a nexus for information exchange in their field. Take, for instance, Lorcan Dempsey’s blog on matters relating to libraries and digital technology. It has become a touchstone for many in his field—my estimate is that he has a thousand subscribers who get updates from his blog daily. Overall, I suspect his blog has more actual readers than some print publications in his field. Looking for influence? A large blog audience is as good as a book or seminal article. A good blog provides a platform to frame discussions on a topic and point to resources of value.

Altruistic reasons for writing a blog also beckon. Writing a blog lets you reach out to an enormous audience beyond academia. Some professors may not want that audience, but I believe it’s part of our duty as teachers, experts, and public servants. It’s great that the medium of the web has come along to enable that communication at low cost.

Concerned about someone stealing your ideas if you post them to a blog? Don’t. Unless you decide otherwise, you have the same copyright on words you write on a blog as those published on paper. And you have the precedence that comes with making those words public far earlier than they would appear in a journal or book.

Worried about the time commitment involved in writing a blog? The constant pressure to post something daily or weekly? This was my stumbling block a year ago when I was thinking of starting a blog. I’m busy; we’re all busy. What I’ve found, however, is that writing a blog does not have to take a lot of time. Promoters of blogs often tell prospective bloggers it’s critical to post frequently and reliably. Nonsense. Such advice misunderstands what’s so great about RSS (Really Simply Syndication), the underlying technology of blogs that notifies people when you have a new post. RSS “pushes” new material to readers no matter the interval between posts. RSS is thus perfect for busy people with blogs who are naturally inconsistent or infrequent in their posting schedule. If you post every day, then readers can just visit your site daily; if you post six times a year, randomly (when you really have something to say), RSS is the technology for you. Without it, no one would ever remember to visit your website.

RSS also allows aggregation of blog “feeds” so that by mixing together a number of RSS files an audience can track the goings-on in a field in a single view. I would love to see a hundred historians of Victorian science have blogs to which they post quarterly. That would mean an average of one thoughtful post a day on a subject in which I’m greatly interested.

For those who need further prodding to get past these worries and biases, blogging as we know it (or don’t know it, if you are unfamiliar with the use of RSS “news readers”) is about to change. Seamless support for RSS is now being written into the most commonly used software: email programs and web browsers. Rather than having to figure out how to manage subscriptions to blogs in a news reader or on an off-putting “Web 2.0” site, the average user will find soon find new posts along with their email, or beckoning them from within their browser. And new versions of Blogger and other blog software has made it easier than ever to start a blog. In other words, blogs are about to become much more accessible and integrated into our digital lives.

Now, I’m aware the irony of imploring, on a blog, professors who don’t have a blog to start a blog. I fear I’m preaching to the choir here. Surely the subscribers to this blog’s feed are blog-savvy already, and many undoubtedly have their own blogs. So I need your help: please tell other professors or professors-to-be about this post, or forward the URL for the post to appropriate email lists or forums (if you’re worried that the long URL is difficult to cite, here’s a tiny URL that will redirect to this page: http://tinyurl.com/ptsje).

But wait—haven’t I just asked you to be an accomplice in a shameless, narcissistic act typical of blogs? Perhaps.

August 21, 2006 60 Comments

The Perfect and the Good Enough: Books and Wikis

As you may have noticed, I haven’t posted to my blog for an entire month. I have a good excuse: I just finished the final edits on my forthcoming book, Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith, due out early next year. (I realized too late that I could have capitalized on Da Vinci Code fever and called the book The God Code, thus putting an intellectual and cultural history of Victorian mathematics in the hands of numerous unsuspecting Barnes & Noble shoppers.) The process of writing a book has occasionally been compared to pregnancy and childbirth; as the awe-struck husband of a wife who bore twins, I suspect this comparison is deeply flawed. But on a more superficial level, I guess one can say that it’s a long process that produces something of which one can be very proud, but which can involve some painful moments. These labor pains are especially pronounced (at least for me) in the final phase of book production, in which all of the final adjustments are made and tiny little errors (formatting, spelling, grammar) are corrected. From the “final” draft of a manuscript until its appearance in print, this process can take an entire year. Reading Roy Rosenzweig’s thought-provoking article on the production of the Wikipedia, just published in the Journal of American History, was apropos: it got me thinking about the value of this extra year of production work on printed materials and its relationship to what’s going on online now.

Is the time spent getting books as close to perfection as possible worth it? Of course it is. The value of books comes from an implicit contract between the reader and those who produce the book, the author and publisher. The producers ensure, through many cycles of revision, editing, and double checking, that the book contains as few errors as possible and is as cogent and forceful as possible. And the reader comes to a book with an understanding that the pages they are reading entail a tremendous amount of effort to reach near-perfection—thus making the book worthy of careful attention and consideration.

On the other hand, I’ve become increasingly fond of Voltaire’s dictum that “the perfect is the enemy of the good”; that is, in human affairs the (often nearly endless) search for perfection often means you fail to produce a good-enough solution. Roy Rosenzweig and I use the aphorism in Digital History, because there’s so much to learn and tinker with in trying to put history online that if you obsess about it all you will never even get started with a basic website. As it turns out, the history of computing includes many examples of this dynamic. For instance, Ethernet was not as “perfect” a technology as IBM’s Token-Ring, which, as its name implies, passed a “token” around so that every item on a network wouldn’t talk at once and get in each other’s way. But Ethernet was good enough, had decent (but not perfect) solutions to the problems that IBM’s top-notch engineers had elegantly solved, and was cheaper to implement. I suspect you know which technology triumphed.

Roy’s article, “Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past,” suggests that we professional historians (and academics who produce books in general) may be underestimating good-enough online publishing like Wikipedia. Yes, Wikipedia has errors—though not as many as the ivory tower believes. Moreover, it is slowly figuring out how to deal with its imperfections, such as the ability of anyone to come along and edit a topic about which they know nothing, by using fairly sophisticated social and technological methods. Will it ever be as good as a professionally produced book? Probably not. But maybe that’s not the point. (And of course many books are far from perfect too.) Professors need to think carefully about the nature of what they produce given new forms of online production like wikis, rather than simply disparaging them as the province of cranks and amateurs. Finishing a book is as good a time to do that as any.

June 21, 2006 Add Comment

No Computer Left Behind

In this week’s issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education Roy Rosenzweig and I elaborate on the implications of my H-Bot software, and of similar data-mining services and the web in general. “No Computer Left Behind” (cover story in the Chronicle Review; alas, subscription required, though here’s a copy at CHNM) is somewhat more polemical than our recent article in First Monday (“Web of Lies? Historical Knowledge on the Internet”). In short, we argue that just as the calculator—an unavoidable modern technology—muscled its way into the mathematics exam room, devices to access and quickly scan the vast store of historical knowledge on the Internet (such as PDAs and smart phones) will inevitably disrupt the testing—and thus instruction—of humanities subjects. As the editors of the Chronicle put it in their headline: “The multiple-choice test is on its deathbed.” This development is to be praised; just as the teaching of mathematics should be about higher principles rather than the rote memorization of multiplication tables, the teaching of subjects like history should be freed by new technologies to focus once again (as it was before a century of multiple-choice exams) on more important principles such as the analysis and synthesis of primary sources. Here are some excerpts from the article.

“What if students will have in their pockets a device that can rapidly and accurately answer, say, multiple-choice questions about history? Would teachers start to face a revolt from (already restive) students, who would wonder why they were being tested on their ability to answer something that they could quickly find out about on that magical device?

“It turns out that most students already have such a device in their pockets, and to them it’s less magical than mundane. It’s called a cellphone. That pocket communicator is rapidly becoming a portal to other simultaneously remarkable and commonplace modern technologies that, at least in our field of history, will enable the devices to answer, with a surprisingly high degree of accuracy, the kinds of multiple-choice questions used in thousands of high-school and college history classes, as well as a good portion of the standardized tests that are used to assess whether the schools are properly “educating” our students. Those technological developments are likely to bring the multiple-choice test to the brink of obsolescence, mounting a substantial challenge to the presentation of history—and other disciplines—as a set of facts or one-sentence interpretations and to the rote learning that inevitably goes along with such an approach…

“At the same time that the Web’s openness allows anyone access, it also allows any machine connected to it to scan those billions of documents, which leads to the second development that puts multiple-choice tests in peril: the means to process and manipulate the Web to produce meaningful information or answer questions. Computer scientists have long dreamed of an adequately large corpus of text to subject to a variety of algorithms that could reveal underlying meaning and linkages. They now have that corpus, more than large enough to perform remarkable new feats through information theory.

“For instance, Google researchers have demonstrated (but not yet released to the general public) a powerful method for creating ‘good enough’ translations—not by understanding the grammar of each passage, but by rapidly scanning and comparing similar phrases on countless electronic documents in the original and second languages. Given large enough volumes of words in a variety of languages, machine processing can find parallel phrases and reduce any document into a series of word swaps. Where once it seemed necessary to have a human being aid in a computer’s translating skills, or to teach that machine the basics of language, swift algorithms functioning on unimaginably large amounts of text suffice. Are such new computer translations as good as a skilled, bilingual human being? Of course not. Are they good enough to get the gist of a text? Absolutely. So good the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency increasingly rely on that kind of technology to scan, sort, and mine gargantuan amounts of text and communications (whether or not the rest of us like it).

“As it turns out, ‘good enough’ is precisely what multiple-choice exams are all about. Easy, mechanical grading is made possible by restricting possible answers, akin to a translator’s receiving four possible translations for a sentence. Not only would those four possibilities make the work of the translator much easier, but a smart translator—even one with a novice understanding of the translated language—could home in on the correct answer by recognizing awkward (or proper) sounding pieces in each possible answer. By restricting the answers to certain possibilities, multiple-choice questions provide a circumscribed realm of information, where subtle clues in both the question and the few answers allow shrewd test takers to make helpful associations and rule out certain answers (for decades, test-preparation companies like Kaplan Inc. have made a good living teaching students that trick). The ‘gaming’ of a question can occur even when the test taker doesn’t know the correct answer and is not entirely familiar with the subject matter…

“By the time today’s elementary-school students enter college, it will probably seem as odd to them to be forbidden to use digital devices like cellphones, connected to an Internet service like H-Bot, to find out when Nelson Mandela was born as it would be to tell students now that they can’t use a calculator to do the routine arithmetic in an algebra equation. By providing much more than just an open-ended question, multiple-choice tests give students—and, perhaps more important in the future, their digital assistants—more than enough information to retrieve even a fairly sophisticated answer from the Web. The genie will be out of the bottle, and we will have to start thinking of more meaningful ways to assess historical knowledge or ‘ignorance.'”

February 20, 2006 1 Comment

Data on How Professors Use Technology

Rob Townsend, the Assistant Director of Research and Publications at the American Historical Association and the author of many insightful (and often indispensible) reports about the state of higher education, writes with some telling new data from the latest National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (conducted by the U.S. Department of Education roughly every five years since 1987). Rob focused on several questions about the use of technology in colleges and universities. The results are somewhat surprising and thought-provoking.

Here are two relatively new questions, exactly as they are written on the survey form (including the boldface in the first question; more on that later), which you can download from the Department of Education website. “[FILL INSTNAME]” is obviously replaced in the actual questionnaire by the faculty member’s institution.

Q39. During the 2003 Fall Term at [FILL INSTNAME], did you have one or more web sites for any of your teaching, advising, or other instructional duties? (Web sites used for instructional duties might include the syllabus, readings, assignments, and practice exams for classes; might enable communication with students via listservs or online forums; and might provide real-time computer-based instruction.)

Q41: During the 2003 Fall Term at [FILL INSTNAME], how many hours per week did you spend
communicating by e-mail (electronic mail) with your students?

Using the Department of Education’s web service to create bar graphs from their large data set, Rob generated these two charts:

Rob points out that historians are on the low end of e-mail usage in the academy, though it seems not too far off from other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. A more statistically significant number to get (and probably impossible using this data set) would be the time spent on e-mail per student, since the number of students varies widely among the disciplines. [Update: Within hours of this post Rob had crunched the numbers and came up with an average of 2 minutes per student for history instructors (average of 83 students divided by 2.8 hours spent writing e-mail per week).]

For me, the surprising chart is the first one, on the adoption of the web in teaching, advising, or other instructional duties. Only about a 5-10% rise in the use of the web from 1998 to 2003 for most disciplines, and a decline for English and Literature? This, during a period of enormous, exponential growth in the web, a period that also saw many institutions of higher education mandate that faculty put their syllabi on the Internet (often paying for expensive course management software to do so)?

I have two theories about this chart, with the possibility that both theories are having an effect on the numbers. First, I wonder if that boldfaced “you” in Q39 made a number of professors answer “no” if technically they had someone else (e.g., a teaching assistant or department staffer) put their syllabus or other course materials online. I did some further research after hearing from Rob and noticed that buried in the 1998 survey questionnaire was a slightly different wording, with no boldface: “During the 1998 Fall Term, did you have websites for any of the classes you taught?” Maybe those wordsmiths in English and Literature were parsing the language of the 2003 question a little too closely (or maybe they were just reading it correctly, unlike faculty members from the other disciplines).

My second theory is a little more troubling for cyber-enthusiasts who believe that the Internet will take over the academy in the next decade, fully changing the face of research and instruction. Take a look at this chart from the Pew Internet and American Life Project:

Note how after an initial surge in Internet adoption in the late 1990s the rate of growth has slowed considerably. A minority, small but significant, will probably never adopt the Internet as an important, daily medium of interaction and information. If we believe the Department of Education numbers, within this minority is apparently a sizable segment of professors. According to additional data extracted by Rob Townsend, it looks like this segment is about 16% of history professors and about 21% of English and Literature professors. (These are faculty members who in the fall of 2003 did not use e-mail or the web at all in their instruction.) Remarkably, among all disciplines about a quarter (24.2%) of the faculty fall into this no-tech group. Seems to me it’s going to be a long, long time before that number is reduced to zero.

January 15, 2006 1 Comment

Welcome to My Blog

Like so many others who enjoy the sound of their own voice and the sight of their own words on a printed page—I would estimate this group as a majority of humanity—I have increasingly felt the urge to write a blog. Blogging has obviously emerged as one of the remarkable, unique products of the web, providing for the first time a nearly frictionless way to immediately reach a worldwide audience with your thoughts.

Having written for paper media, I’ve experienced the frustration of the glacial pace of most publications. In academia this problem is particularly acute. For instance, I completed the first draft of a book chapter I wrote on nineteenth-century mathematics in May of 2002; I finally got to see it in print in May of 2005. Even in the best cases (and there are not many), an academic journal article generally takes a full year from the time you have completed most of the work on the article to the time it shows up on the pages of the journal.

On the other hand, maybe there’s not much urgency in seeing the latest on Victorian mathematics. As far as I know, all of the mathematicians I discuss in the book chapter remain dead, or at least oddly unproductive; those who are interested in their lives and work would just as well wait for a considerate, thoughtful, and complete article regardless of how slowly it took to arrive in print. And unlike in the sciences, there is rarely concern about precedent. My book on the larger history of pure mathematics in the Victorian era has taken about full decade between inception and completion, but I haven’t had many sleepless nights worrying that someone else has duplicated my work or theories.

So here’s the rub, and I suspect I’m not alone in this view: while I’m attracted to the instant gratification of publishing to the web, I’ve more often than not found blogs to be dissatisfying. Perhaps it’s absurd elitism or years of reading overly long tomes. But it’s a feeling that’s hard to shake. The ease with which one can post means that it’s often too easy to post the half-baked and the half-written.

So for this blog I’ve tried to set a higher mark for myself (the elitism now unites with an unwise masochism). While my posts may not be daily, I hope that they will function more like well thought out mini-articles, and transfer to this blog’s audience my understanding of the digital humanities in as great a depth as possible.

Stay tuned for posts explaining how to do for yourself experimental digital work (e.g., how to use the Google Maps API to build your own interactive historical map); posts communicating in a plainspoken way some of the more complex topics in computer science in ways that hopefully will spark ideas among humanists; and posts exploring the implications of new technologies and methodologies for teaching, learning, and researching in a digital age.

I hope that you’ll also join the conversation by emailing me at dcohen@gmu.edu if you have any comments or suggestions.

November 14, 2005 1 Comment