Project Bamboo, afternoon session two
Four/six, Mark Williams, Dartmouth College, “Building Media Studies Wikis”
Explosion of content suddenly, feeling pain about coping with it all; how do we think about this in context of community, sustainability, public interest? Can we look toward the media industry to have them help us build these wikis? E.g. history of network news, asking the broadcast companies to help.
Maybe tiered access to these wikis, recognizing that scholars are different from the general public, documentary filmmakers, etc? On what scale? Restrict by campus, by Bamboo participants?
Fair use: balancing copyright interests. Bamboo with its profile as scholarly consortium might be able to drive a wedge into entrenched copyright interests, to protect scholarly goals and guarantee the public sphere. Context: Teach Act (expanded to cover distance learning; wikis as part of that), Media Studies (teachers can break encryption to create clips and montages for teaching), library section 108 exemptions.
Scholarly practices: finding areas of inquiry and collaborators, designing the wiki methodologically, etc. Tasks underlying: infrastructure, software selection, finding source materials, handling permissions, making media wiki-friendly, tagging wiki materials.
New contributors to context: orphan works, Fair(y) Use Tale.
Q: Do you envision this as something for students to create/use, or for faculty? Students are enthusiastic, but very few cases of faculty editors. A: Both/and. Permissions become a problem; we need to exercise our fair use rights! We can start locally, and then expand into the world. If we choose the right kinds of topics, we can earn enough public interest to protect ourselves. Both scholarly and class-specific usage possible.
Q: Interested in the scholars-only wiki. Is it bothersome that we exclude independent artists and scholars? A: Sure, it’s a problem, but we have to build a wedge first. Exclusion is not the goal!
Q: Famous orphan work? A: Day-in-the-life family movie, fantastic text, displayed at NYU as an orphan work, brought into LoC’s protection program as a result.