Comments for R. Stuart Geiger

Comment on Response: Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City by William Mitchell by drew

drew — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 13:58:48 +0000

Given the Arab Spring and the London Riots it would appear Mitchell was right all along, sorry Stuart.

Comment on The Lives of Bots by Joseph Reagle

Joseph Reagle — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 20:37:31 +0000

Well done, I think it is one of the best papers in the collection!

Comment on Closed-source papers on open source communities: a problem and a partial solution by Jodi Schneider

Jodi Schneider — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 16:03:07 +0000

The SPARC addendum was designed to allow authors to keep key rights when publishing. It’s very easy to use, and I’d recommend doing that:
http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/addendum.shtml

ACM doesn’t permit the SPARC addendum (I don’t know why–their claim seems to be it’s redundant due to self-archiving permissions they already give you). They also take extreme care when licensing images; I’ve been asked to provide written documentation (i.e. more than a link to licensing policy) regarding screenshots from Wikipedia.

For your articles already published in closed sources — there’s little harm in asking whether you can post them. Even if their answer is “no”, that’s one more time the publisher hears “you’re not doing it right”.

Hopefully you’re already blogging research summaries about what you’re publishing!
Meanwhile, I’ll plug AcaWiki — a CC-BY research wiki — as a place to summarize your own and others’ articles:
http://acawiki.org/

Comment on Closed-source papers on open source communities: a problem and a partial solution by Brian Carver

Brian Carver — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 16:19:52 +0000

Stuart’s idea re charts and graphs is a nice one. I’d also be reluctant to say that “for the most part” charts and graphs are not subject to copyright. Certainly in many cases that will be true, particularly where there is only one or very few ways of expressing the underlying facts and where the figure represents reality. However, there is certainly room for creative expression in research paper figures and the threshold for being granted copyright is very low. There’s also a concern about facing a “selection and arrangement”-style copyright claim. For those reasons, adopting a general practice of licensing all figures CC-BY seems like a nice loophole technique for dealing with the dinosaur publishers that still stomp around braying, “All your rights are belong to us.”

Comment on Closed-source papers on open source communities: a problem and a partial solution by Joseph Reagle

Joseph Reagle — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 14:33:08 +0000

Thanks for the “shoutout” Stewart . This is an important (and often frustrating) issue. I find one of the odd/ironic implications of publishers policies is I’m more likely to find a preprint/author’s copy than the actual “published” one. In any case, I wanted to note that while it did take some discussion with MIT Press, in the end, I and (I think) the Press are pleased with the idea of publishing the CC version one year after publication. (The Press itself has to deal with concerns from its sales and distribution channels.) So, I’m looking forward to putting the whole book up under a CC license in about 3 months.

Comment on Closed-source papers on open source communities: a problem and a partial solution by Greg Grossmeier

Greg Grossmeier — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 23:21:11 +0000

On the issue of summarizing your works for others, and licensing that summary under a CC license, we should all be doing this already, and doing this in Acawiki: http://acawiki.org/Home

Those summaries are all CC:BY and can be used in Wikipedia where appropriate. But, equally important, is the ability to use these summaries for teaching and learning.

Comment on Closed-source papers on open source communities: a problem and a partial solution by Greg Grossmeier

Greg Grossmeier — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 23:19:20 +0000

Regarding licensing charts and graphs under a CC license:

That is actually a little overkill. Charts and graphs, *for the most part*, are not subject to copyright (another way of saying that is they are “ineligible for copyright”). This means that A) you do not need the permission of the copyright holder to reuse them and B) asigning a CC license is actually not allowed as CC licenses only apply to things that are subject to copyright.

For more on this, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-ineligible (of course)

and, a recent court case:
http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/fdocs/docs.fwx?submit=showbr&shofile=10-2144_002.pdf
This is a 7th Circuit Court of Appeals case that outlines that the figures and even the mathematical model are not subject to copyright.

Comment on Helvetica: A Documentary, A History, An Anthropology by Matthew

Matthew — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 04:26:58 +0000

I largely agree with your analysis – I too felt it was lacking a deeper analysis when I first saw it. I enjoyed watching it but it told me nothing new about this part of my toolkit (that has an outsized halo). However, as a designer in a society that undervalues design*, I came to embrace this film for another reason: it justified my existence. Its mythmaking makes the narrative accessible to more people and has made everyone in whose company I’ve watched the film literally nod, often unconsciously, in a way that essentially justified my adult life.

*With the exception of the stock market, oddly enough. But that’s another story.

Comment on The Lives of Bots by Digital Media and Learning conference 2011 | Mark Danger Chen

Digital Media and Learning conference 2011 | Mark Danger Chen — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 22:00:37 +0000

[...] the sharing of work, ownership, privacy, “safe” space, and the nature of the interwebs. Stuart Geiger gave a very entertaining and eye-opening talk about Wikipedia bots and collective response to automated procedures, touching on guidelines and policies and how they [...]

Comment on Perils of Keyword-Based Bibliometrics: ISI’s ’1990 Effect’ by Ed Stern

Ed Stern — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 16:21:16 +0000

Although keyword based through the 90s, search fields now can (I think) scan an entire document for words entered through document processing with OCR-like software. Google Books is one example, where documents originally produced only in print and scanned are now searchable digitally. Would a text-based search over keyword provide more robust results avoiding the effect here? This would assume that any included searchable journal had also completed a text-recognition project on all previous publications included in the given collection. Certainly room for error if documents are excluded or mis-scanned, but there must be a way that OCR’d documents can be quality-checked for searchability first. Thoughts?