So what would this mean for those with an interest in digitization? Despite being a new legal framework, the proposal may lead to some familiar problems for cultural heritage institutions. Many of you are aware of the problem of orphan works in copyright. This is where the owner of a protected work is unidentifiable or uncontactable, and because they can’t be found it follows that they can’t grant permission to others to copy their work.
Archive
With measurement comes the power to categorize and control. These are technologies that enable us to be judged at a distance, to be identified as a threat or a sales opportunity just by the way we look. Facial recognition takes this further. Not only can we be reduced to a set of externally-verifiable measurements, but these measurements are assumed to somehow constitute our identity.
I’m here at MITH today, and I wanted to talk a little bit about digital humanities from my position as an interested outsider. I’ve always kept a finger in academia, at first through game studies and people studying video games, and more recently through electronic literature and those fields. I’m not going to go into a “what is it?” debate because I know everyone who’s in digital humanities is very tired of those, but we know when we see it, right?