http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net http://m.readwriteweb.com/archives/internet_activist_aaron_swartz_indicted_for_data_t.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29 For a long time, it was the folks who downloaded music or movies illegally that faced the wrath of government prosecutors. So the unsealing of an indictment today against Aaron Swartz, former Reddit-er and founder of Demand Progress, for the illegal download of some 4 million-odd academic journal articles may sound a bit unusual.
Demand Progress has issued a statement suggesting Swartz's actions were akin to "checking too many books out of the library." But the government clearly disagrees as the charges include wire fraud, computer fraud, and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer. Schwartz now faces up… ]]> Wed, 20 Jul 2011 04:10:10 -0700 http://m.readwriteweb.com/archives/internet_activist_aaron_swartz_indicted_for_data_t.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21514 Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?

How to make sense of it all? I have no answer to that problem, but I can suggest an approach to it: look at the history of the ways information has been communicated. Simplifying things radically, you could say that there have been four fundamental changes in information technology since… ]]> Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:03:34 -0700 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21514 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00v4s8v/Night_Waves_Is_the_Book_Dead/ Philip Dodd goes to one of Britain's largest second hand bookshops and is joined by a panel of publishers, authors and an audience of readers for a public debate that tackles the vexed question: Is the book dead? As e-books outsell hardbacks for the first time is reading itself facing a future that is empowered or impoverished?

The venue is Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland, which famously occupies a former railway station. Onstage with Philip will be guests writer David Almond, author of the prize-winning novel Skellig, Chris Meade of the Institute for the Future of the… ]]> Thu, 21 Oct 2010 03:10:00 -0700 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00v4s8v/Night_Waves_Is_the_Book_Dead/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/7903230/The-love-of-the-high-end-heist.html Books have long been the object of desire, a desire that in intensity (among the susceptible) is stronger than for sex. Bibliomania, the obsession to possess books, was first recognised as a disease by doctors at the end of the Eighteenth Century, and many learned tomes - themselves now the object of bibliomanes’ desires - have been written on it.

Not long ago I bought a small volume, Book-lovers and Book-thieves, that suggested that the two types of person were very similar, and often one and the same, covetousness easily defeating honesty. Everyone knows that to lend… ]]> Fri, 13 Aug 2010 04:30:00 -0700 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/7903230/The-love-of-the-high-end-heist.html http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2010/01/05/small-is-beautiful-a-discussion-with-aaaarg-architect-sean-dockray/ One of my favorite websites is the semi-obscure digital library known as AAAARG (don’t even try googling. You just get pirate-themed sites). The site is a sundry collection of critical documents – many of them highly treasured theoretical classics, others obscure anarchic tomes and legal texts – presented in a simple, sleek alphabetized index of .pdfs.

The idea from the beginning was that AAAARG’s collection would grow organically, since anyone can upload a text to the site. But what takes this beyond basic p2p sharing is the way the index relates to the site’s other peer features:… ]]> Tue, 01 Jun 2010 14:08:00 -0700 http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2010/01/05/small-is-beautiful-a-discussion-with-aaaarg-architect-sean-dockray/ http://www.ninakatchadourian.com/languagetranslation/sortedbooks.php The Sorted Books project began in 1993 years ago and is ongoing. The project has taken place in many different places over the years, ranging form private homes to specialized public book collections. The process is the same in every case: culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom. The final results are shown either as photographs of the book clusters or as the actual stacks themselves, shown on the shelves of the library they were drawn from. Taken… ]]> Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:20:00 -0700 http://www.ninakatchadourian.com/languagetranslation/sortedbooks.php http://canopycanopycanopy.com/8/inside_the_mundaneum Otlet was the first to imagine all the world’s knowledge as one vast “web,” connected by “links” and accessed remotely through desktop screens, and because of this he can be seen as the kooky grandfather of the Internet. From the beginning of his career as a lawyer and bibliographer, Otlet wrote prolifically and prophetically about how information could be organized and transmitted. He developed the Universal Decimal Classification system (UDC), an expanded form of the Dewey Decimal Classification system that assigned individual numerical subject codes to documents, allowing them to be searched and cross-referenced in a standardized manner. His later… ]]> Thu, 22 Apr 2010 02:39:00 -0700 http://canopycanopycanopy.com/8/inside_the_mundaneum http://www.tnr.com/article/the-love-culture?page=0,0 In early 2002, the filmmaker Grace Guggenheim--the daughter of the late Charles Guggenheim, one of America’s greatest documentarians, and the sister of the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, who made An Inconvenient Truth-decided to do something that might strike most of us as common sense. Her father had directed or produced more than a hundred documentaries. Some of these were quite famous (Nine from Little Rock). Some were well-known even if not known to be by him (Monument to a Dream, the film that plays at the St. Louis arch). Some were forgotten but incredibly important for understanding American history in the… ]]> Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:17:00 -0700 http://www.tnr.com/article/the-love-culture?page=0,0 http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6703852.html?industryid=47109 The future of reading is very much in doubt. In this century, reading could soar to new heights or crash and burn. Some educators and librarians fear that sustained reading for learning, for work, and for pleasure may be slowly dying out as a widespread social practice. Only at living history farms will we see people reading. For decades the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has been studying the reading habits of adult Americans, issuing a series of reports with rousingly alliterative titles such as “Reading at Risk” (July 2004) and “Reading on the Rise” (January 2009). Sometime in… ]]> Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:30:00 -0700 http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6703852.html?industryid=47109 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21514 Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the ]]> Sat, 31 Oct 2009 05:19:00 -0700 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21514 http://chronicle.com/article/Googles-Book-Search-A/48245/ Whether the Google books settlement passes muster with the U.S. District Court and the Justice Department, Google's book search is clearly on track to becoming the world's largest digital library. No less important, it is also almost certain to be the last one. Google's five-year head start and its relationships with libraries and publishers give it an effective monopoly: No competitor will be able to come after it on the same scale. Nor is technology going to lower the cost of entry. Scanning will always be an expensive, labor-intensive project. Of course, 50 or 100 years from now control of… ]]> Thu, 17 Sep 2009 02:24:00 -0700 http://chronicle.com/article/Googles-Book-Search-A/48245/ http://www.ubu.com/film/borges.html Directed by Philippe Molins - Although honors came late in life to Jorge Luis Borges, his unique worldview had begun to emerge even as a child. This program examines the life and literary career of the charismatic Argentine writer, as well as the thematic, symbolic, and mythological underpinnings of his works. Archival interviews with Borges; his mother, Leonor Acevedo de Borges; his second wife, Maria Kodama; and collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares provide insights into the private Borges, while readings from “The Mirrors,” “Dreamtigers,” “The Plot,” “The South,” “The Aleph,” and other landmarks of Latin American fiction demonstrate his virtuosity as… ]]> Thu, 06 Aug 2009 13:23:00 -0700 http://www.ubu.com/film/borges.html http://spacecollective.org/projects/The-Total-Library Books that redefine reality - or - How to redefine the book... ]]> Thu, 29 Jan 2009 03:58:00 -0700 http://spacecollective.org/projects/The-Total-Library