A wonderful meeting with intellectual buzz yesterday at MetaMedia Labs with Alison Wylie and the MetaMedia directors. Discussing the interface of intellectual property rights, digital interface and design, engagment with place beyond embodiment, and the future of academic collaboration, matters of new media served as a nodal point connecting thinkers and practitioners in the philosophy of archaeology.
Amongst other specific topics discussed, were ideas on Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) and the ramifications for the movement, driven by scholar.google and digitization of academic library holdings, of e-texts and the publishing future for a discipline such as archeology. This delves into the informatic liberation movement, or digital democracy as its more friendly epithet, and what action (if any) archaeologists will take on the matter.
While many may prefer to remain sidelined or insular from the ensuing informational revolution (particularly in terms of distribution and accessibility), oddly enough the litigation begun for cultural property rights from Indigenous/stakeholder claimants may equally force the issue for mid-lined archaeologists as such copy-”rights” are beginning to merge into issues of digital copyright and information conveyance. We see this happening with the move to digital information (as simple as on-line .pdfs and digitized images to library cataloging and archiving on servers) and the archiving of data sets in archaeology which has been widely encouraged – most recently by UNESCO. Such protection or claims to digitized heritage will be litigated with regard to soft copyrighting which is somewhere between ”all rights reserved” and ”public domain”/no rights. Two early developers at the forefront of this information sharing accord came out of a Stanford Law-Silicon Valley team-up and are linked below:
creative commons
scientific commons
For media practioners and archaeologists involved, this seems to be precisely the ethical way forward, which is to make data open, free and available to all (researchers/stakeholders alike), while retaining the minimum of attribution. Archaeology would not be alone, as public culture has already moved in this direction. Like Michael was saying, this is really where the creative artist world is going in terms of information sharing; he mentioned the visual/performing arts, but for independent minded musicians, this is also where it is at.
So this brings us to the cross-roads of: digital mediation of archaeological knowledge + property rights with specific respect to on-line/fuzzy realm of cultural production (where copyright laws do not yet fully exist/bind) + push for ”informatic liberation” or digital democracy and the fostering of inclusion (to maintain ideal of free, accessible information and for us as archaeologists to facilitate this). This is why I am in particular wanting to push this usage of mediation: its semantic derivation, legal connotation and enhanced conveyance-of-information-via-new-media association all hook up synergistically.
New territory for insights and inclusive collaboration.