Year: 2004

Accountability

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date April 4, 2004

The recent discussions about backchannels reminds me of the discussions about comment registration and editing, which, in turn, reminds me of the old discussions we had about Creative Commons. What do all these seemingly disparate items have in common?

With each, there is a tradeoff between personal freedom and accountability.

I wrote about Creative Commons back when it first released in 2002 in a writing called Bombs Away. In it I wrote:

The confustion about CC Licenses occurs not because we don’t understand the intent behind the licenses, but because we don’t understand how to interpret the use of the licenses. This is no different than any other aspect of law.

My first thought was, “Has that typo been there this entire time?” But once I got beyond this, I find I still, even after all this time, agree with that statement. Jonathon Delacour was one of the few who agreed with me on being cautious about these licenses and pointed out some additional problems:

Therein lies the source of my uneasiness about the Creative Commons Licenses: nothing I’ve read about the licenses (on the Creative Commons website and elsewhere) explains in a persuasive manner why granting such a license is truly in the interest of the creator of the work-whereas both observation and experience have led me to the conviction that self-interest is the single most reliable indicator of human behavior.

Later, in another post, Inspiration is not Derivation I wrote:

Ultimately the question of inspiration compared to derivation compared to interpreation reduces to: does the need of the new artist to re-interpret or create a derivation of the original work take precedence over the need to respect the original artist’s wishes? This is a question that can never be answered by copyright law because it is an issue of respect as it is balanced agains innovation.

My first reaction was, “Have those types always been there?” Again, though, I find that my opinion has not changed on this issue. If anything, after my indepth readings of such great artists as Emily Dickinson, James Agee, and Walker Evans, I believe even stronger in the rights of the original artist.

In a later writing I quoted AKMA, responding to another discussion:

Once I decide to turn loose my expression on the world, other folks will do plenty of things with my texts few of which will be governed by concern for my innermost thoughts. If my thoughts need that degree of protection, I can jolly well not release them to the public.

(Like most of us who have moved to a different naming structure, AKMA’s old links are broken and I’m not sure what the new file name would be.)

I remember Emily Dickinson’s unhappiness at her poems being modified when published, and Wallker Evans’ insistentence that the fleas removed from an engraving from one photo be returned, and I wonder at where the accountability to their genius ends, and others freedom to innovate begins.

Aaron Swartz once said that authors who hold their copyright past the recoup of costs were thieves:

The theft of authors who don’t (or worse, publishers or other people who have taken their copyright) is far worse than the so-called piracy of copyright infringers, even if the infringer would have paid the author had they not infringed. Instead of one person (the author) losing something, the entire public loses. Congress should take fast action to prevent further such thefts from their constituents. (An easy and surely uncontrovertial step would be for copyrights to expire after the author’s death.)

Authors who hold copyrights are thieves, but people who download music and don’t pay for it, are not. While I can agree that Hollywood and the music industry and even the book industries have gone too far in their fight to hold on to their property rights that doesn’t mean I agree that the public domain has a right to anything, like a petulant child wanting another lolly.

And if we value an artist’s work, are we not accountable to them above and beyond issues of copyright?

When Movable Type came out with a one-click approach to adding CC licenses to a site, we again raised the issues we’d raised before, primarily because we wanted those who would think to blindly push that button (because everyone else is doing it) to think about it before doing so. What was interesting is that whatever arguments we introduced, they were perceived as emotionally loaded and we were challenged to provide explanations of our side that were not pie-in-the-sky or harangues.

Looking back at three years of debates and discussions, the most common form of pushback has been to reduce any argument counter to our own viewpoint to emotional terms, so that it is then more easily discounted. However, we are told, we can do so because weblogs aren’t really news – they’re OpEd.

We demand from others accountability for their writing, but we reserve for ourselves freedom of expression, to describe what other say as biased or paint it just so that it may be more easily dismissed. Rogers Cadenhead joins with others to blast Ben Hammersley and Guardian for an article on RSS/Atom, demanding that Ben be held accountable for his past associations with RSS. But when Rogers was challenged about his own association with Userland he replied:

I would compare this weblog to a newspaper column, where you expect commentary colored by opinion, rather than a news article that strives for objectivity and fairness.

But then I told him in an email, that though we’re indulging in our usual weblogging shooting across the bow, and it doesn’t really mean anything, by taking this issue to the Guardian’s management, not to Ben, we were not only questioning Hammersley’s journalist integrity, we were threatening his livelihood.

Where’s the accountability in this?

Returning to Creative Commons, I seem to be implying that all the eloquence was on our side, while the other was a big bad bully and that’s not true either, as the recent classy demonstration of the benefits of Creative Commons so aptly proves.

Of course I have to point the finger of accountability at myself, and I wince when I see some of my past postings on these topics. Walker Evans would accuse me of the most blatant sentimentalism, and I would have to agree as I read what I wrote barely a year ago on this issue:

I have branded myself outsider, if not outcast, in some weblogging circles by not embracing Creative Commons without hesitation, and not being 100% behind the anti-copyright/pro-public domain movement

The rest of the post was quite good, but it was ruined by the histrionics of the opening sentence, and I found myself doing so in more than one post, and comment, associated with some of my more controversial writings. Providing a counter-point to popular opinion if such is what we believe is a goodness, and even an obligation; but doing so and then acting the martry afterwards is a cheap trick, and weakened whatever points were made in the original argument.

But this post is overlong and I’ll continue on Accountability and backchannels and comment editing in the next.

Weblogging

Sleeping dogs

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date April 4, 2004

I have two more anniversary retrospective pieces to write, but the going is slow because so many of the old links are broken. In some cases the weblogs, and the webloggers are gone–and when I did stop thinking about them?

Mostly though, we changed weblogging tools, or there was a time when all of us Movable Type users were convinced that we needed to go with a different file naming structure, and hence most of us broke our links. We thought we had proper redirects in place, but over time, and with moving servers or a lack of interest in maintaining such old archives, the links no longer work.

Perhaps we were never meant to revist old discussions. I read the comments now on the older posts, and I see a lot of names of people who have since gone silent–either by cutting the association, or just a gradual drifting away. I think I wrote something on this once; that we’re not supposed to have such sharp details on old conversations, and that’s why our memories grow faint over time.

When I remember the discussions long past, I seem to remember that they were more eloquent–passionate, rather than acrimonious, intense rather than angry. Then when I finally recover the original writing, sometimes I think I am going to destroy every last one of my archives.

Rather than trying to decipher the mapping between old links and new, I resorted to using Google to recover the posts, typing in a person’s name and few words about the topic. Success! I find the old posts, but gradually, I found myself distracted by the entries returned by the search engine. As I look down the page, I see other old references to the same writing, or writing about writing, from other weblogs and webloggers, and I found myself just typing in names, by themselves, and skimming the pages.

Try it for yourself, typing in one or two or more weblogger’s names, and a topic (such as Creative Commons) or just the names themselves, though the blogrolls play havoc with the results. It’s an interesting experience. Not one I necessarily recommend.

One should never do retrospectives in weblogging.

Now, why is it we weblog, again?

Photography

Area 44

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date April 4, 2004

Today was a beautiful day, warm and sunny, and I headed to Area 44 to see if the dogwood were in bloom yet.

Found plenty of blooms, but no dogwood.

I won’t go to Area 44 in the summer because the ticks are so thick there, but I wanted to catch the dogwoods this year. I walked along the trail, facing into the sun, but couldn’t see any blooms. When I turned around, silhouetted against the dark blue sky, I could see hundreds of trees with new barely new buds. I couldn’t see the dogwood because the light was in my eyes. Next week, though, the area is going to be thick with blooms.

On the way back, I was amused to see the remains of an old property sign in the stream that cuts through the conservation area. It’s not unusual to find all sorts of things in the waters of Missouri because of flooding.

Anyone want some prime Missouri flatland? Near the water.

I’m still taking photos. I’m just not particularly worried if they’re ‘commercially’ viable. Which means I don’t have to lug around 20 pounds of camera equipment, and take photos other people want.

Just me and my digital, looking for neat opportunities.

Photography Writing

Walker Evans: I am a writer

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date April 3, 2004

I am not a Walker Evans expert, but from my recent readings about him, I sensed there were three significant events in his life that shaped the man, and subsequently, the photographs we’ve come to cherish.

One of the events I briefly mentioned in the last Walker Evans writing, and that was his search for a particular style of photography. Rejecting the existing photographic styles of the time– which either disregarded the strengths of the camera in favor of artificially created scenes, or sought to tug emotion from the viewer–Evans sat in a library looking through all 50 issues of a the photographic journal, Camera Work until finding what he was looking for: Paul Strand’s photograph of a blind woman, shown below.

In this picture, Evans saw an uncompromising realism unfettered by any emotional hooks. There was no attempt to make the woman into something either to be admired or pitied; nor was there an attempt to make a ‘pretty’ picture, or a noble one. Combined, this realism and lack of emotionality formed the basis for Evans’ own style of photography: unsentimental, realistic, and unstaged. In other words: objective.

A search for objective truth in art wasn’t unique to Evans–many of the creative people of that time shared this philosophy about their work. But objectivity was almost an obsession with Evans, and we can trace the roots of this to his upbringing and the second pivotal event in his life: the separation of his parents when he was in his teens.

Evans came from a relatively affluent family, and his father was a prominent marketing and advertising man, a profession Evans was later to term one of the bastard professions. His mother was from a wealthy family, and liked nothing more than to be a figure in society.

Evans had an relatively happy childhood until they moved from his home near Chicago to Ohio, when his father got a new job. It was in Ohio that his father began an affair and subsequently left his mother. Evans, already lonely from the loss of his childhood friends was left confused and unsure, and the previously outgoing boy began to draw inwards, away from his contentious family.

His mother, whose world was drastically upset, begin to live vicariously through her children, determined that they were going to have happy, prosperous lives (with her a central part in each). She was, in many ways, an outwardly sentimental woman, but at the same time, she was not demonstrative or terribly affectionate.

Within the Evans family, before and after the separation, sentiment was both an artificial promise and a means to an end. Through his father, Evans saw sentiment used as a tool to lure people into buying a product or service: after all, what better way to build a successful advertising campaign then to incorporate images of cute babies, small puppies, and happy American families. From his mother, Evans perceived sentiment woven into a complex fabric consisting partially of denied security and affection, a great deal of manipulative guilt, and even some frustrated sexuality.

Though it’s not as fashionable to lay praise for a person on their early childhood experiences, it’s difficult to deny the impact Evans’ parent’s separation, and their behavior both before and after, had on his search for both objectivity, and anonymity, in his work.

To get a better understanding of Evans’ objectivity, compare his photographs of sharecroppers during the Great Depression with those of another very famous photographer of the time: Margaret Bourke-White.

A month before James Agee and Walker Evans took off on their trip that would result in the book, Now Let Us Praise Famous Men, Bourke-White took off for similar reasons with the well known writer, Erksine Caldwell.

Margaret Bourke-White was not a person who waited for a photograph to happen. Whenever they arrived at a potential scene, she would direct the people, telling them not only where to stand but what type of emotion to display on their faces. From Belinda Rathbone’s biography of Walker Evans:

White relied on Caldwell to guide her to the people she wanted to photograph, but once there she went to work “like a motion picture director”, remembered Caldwell, telling people where to sit, where to stand, and waiting for a look of worry or despair to cross their faces. Under her direction, passive, weather-beaten, and cross-eyed sharecroppers were turned into characters in a play, playing themselves.

Bourke-White even went so far as to arrange objects in a scene, for which she was scolded by her co-author (and husband), Caldwell. Unusual behavior considering the following quote:

I feel that utter truth is essential,” Bourke-White said of her work, “and to get that truth may take a lot of searching and long hours

Bourke-White would enter churches during services and start taking pictures, once going so far as to climb in through a window one time when she found the door locked during a service.

Evans, on the other hand, was reluctant to intrude. Rather than ask to enter a church, he would take photos of the outside. He wouldn’t touch any objects within a scene, and when taking pictures of people, he would allow them to pose themselves, or he would wait to take the picture until their initial stiffness from being in front of the camera wore off.

More importantly, he refused to make the people into objects of pity, which, after all, would imply sentimentality. If Bourke-White’s photos inspired one to want to change the fate of the people, Evans inspired no such humanitarian impulses. One never feels guilt, when looking at an Evans’ photo. Or pity, or humor, or desire. All one feels is interest, admiration, sometimes astonishment…and a little envy, but that doesn’t arise from the subject.

So what was the third event that was so significant in Evans life? Well, in actuality it was a non-event.

When Evans was a young man, he convinced his family to send him to Paris to study the language and literature. At that time, photography was only a hobby for him, he wanted to be a writer. And there was no better time for an aspiring writer to be in Paris, with the likes Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Parker, Ezra Pound, and someone whom Evans admired above all others, James Joyce, living there.

Evans would hang out at the book shop where Joyce would appear every day, watching other young men and women seek Joyce’s company, to shake his hand and try to engage him in conversation–an impossible task with the monosyllabic Joyce. The shop owner offered an introduction between Evans and Joyce, but Evans shied away from his chance to meet his hero, something that he’d talk about for many years into the future.

When Evans returned to New York at the end of the year, photography gradually overcame his interest in writing, inspired in part, I believe, by James Joyce. After all, what could Evans write that had not been written by others such as Joyce? And how could he shine in a field as luminous as this? All those who write experience these moments of doubt when we read another’s writing that is so brilliant that we are left feeling humbled and inadequate. Humility, not to mention being second, third, or even tenth best, is not something that Evans would have lived with, comfortably.

But the camera, the camera now, that was fresh territory. And with the camera he could grab his quick sketches of life, in pictures rather than words. Whatever interest he had in writing, could not sustained with his growing passion for photography.

Evans would later say:

Oh yes, I was a passionate photographer, and for a while somewhat guiltily, because I thought that this is a substitute for something else—well for writing, for one thing. But I got very engaged and I was compulsive about it too. It was a real drive. Particularly when the lighting was right. You couldn’t keep me in.

I can agree with Evans, that photography can quickly become a substitute for writing. One image can so easily convey information that may take thousands of words to do, and less eloquently.

A few weeks ago, when I started digging more deeply into Walker Evans’ life, I was asked by a magazine to provide a portfolio of photos, including any better quality digital ones. I asked Charles, a photographer who has worked with magazines in the past to give me advice on printing the photos, which he was very generous to provide. He also shared with me anecdotal stories about photography students preparing their portfolios, each professionally printed and bound

But I looked at my little digital images, all of them at 72 DPI, and my slides, and my nice, but not great inkjet printer and asked myself, “What the hell are you doing, Shelley?” just about the same time I read, …I was a passionate photographer, and for a while somewhat guiltily, because I thought that this is a substitute for something else—well for writing, for one thing….

And it is thankfully, and with relief that I gave up the nonsense about being a stock photographer for magazines, or an art photographer, or any kind of professional photographer, and return to what I love: writing. Because I am a writer.

Books

Pocket this

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date April 3, 2004

Brand: O’Reilly Pocket References and Guides

Concept (from the site):

O’Reilly’s Pocket References and Pocket Guides are comprehensive, inexpensive, compact, and easy to use. Our Pocket References provide you with quick lookup of the hard-to-remember details of programming and web syntax, while our Pocket Guides are short, focused tutorials that explain the basics of new technology, as well as valuable power user tips.

Books reviewed:

Derrick Story’s Digital Photography Pocket Guide and Digital Video Pocket Guide

Google Pocket Guide by Tara Calishain, Rael Dornfest, and DJ Adams

In a word: Brilliant

Slightly longer word:

Of all the O’Reilly brands, I think the Pocket Guide and Reference series is the one with the most potential for explosive growth. Inexpensive books that focus on either syntax (for the references) or on quick in-the-field how-tos (for the pocket guide) that can easily fit into a purse or camera or computer bag–how can they go wrong?

For instance the Digital Photography Pocket Guide by Derrick Story (caveat: one of my favorite O’Reilly people) contains these little tutorials about finding yourself in a specific photographic situation, such as taking a photo of a tall building under certain conditions, and then provides quick, easy to apply advice that encompasses the photographic concepts that apply in this situation (issues of perspective and changing camera angle) and what you can do with your digital camera to make the shot work.

Have a digital camera and want to do a panoramic? Have a particular photograph you want to capture but part of it is overexposed? Want to take a closeup of a flower? The premise of this book is that these are specific questions people have when taking pictures, and Derrick provides simple and easy to follow instructions that suit most digital camera types. Rather than provide a book that covers the basics of photography, it provides how-tos, and to be honest, most people buying a digital camera today don’t want to know the history of photography–they just want to take nice pictures of their grandkids.

By keeping the books focused, they’re small enough to carry with you, and inexpensive enough that by the time you’ve mastered the little tips and tricks, you’ve gotten your money’s worth.

O’Reilly can and should look at going beyond just the digital world with this series. There’s potential in them little bitty books.

Now, returning to my question of writing this type of book: would I be interested?

Answer: oh yes, indeedy.

From a writer’s viewpoint, what I like about the series is that you can write a book in a month, two at the most, and be done. After working on 15 books that are several hundred pages each, it would be nice to do a book that was finished simply and quickly; one you don’t have to worry about covering every little nuance of the topic. Writing computer books can be very tiring, as you try to balance the production needs of keeping books to a specific brand and number of pages, but still provide enough material to cover any number of reader’s interests in the future. When you have a book that’s at about 100 small pages (probably about 50 pages in a regular computer book), you can’t meet everyone’s needs, so you can focus on one particular aspect, and just go to town.

In addition, there are some topics that really fit a smaller book. The Google Pocket Guide strikes me as this type of book, with its focus on how to maximize your use of Google’s services.

The only thing holding me back would be the fact that most of the topics I’d be interested in doing a Pocket Guide or Reference on, have already been done. This includes MySQL (by George Reese, whom I know from long ago early JDBC days, and there’s none better when it comes to databases), SQL (by Jonathan Gennick, O’Reilly’s DB Man, so SQL’s been thoroughly covered), Linux (darn, I didn’t see this one at first and thought ‘Ah Ha!’, and then saw it in the list), and various assorted other topics.

However, given a week or two, I think I could come up with some fresh topic ideas. And if O’Reilly starts dabbling its toes in ponds outside of the digital genre, there’s a world of possibilities.

You can get most of these books for about 10.00US on Amazon. I imagine there might also be a time when O’Reilly will package related books into a nice DVD boxed set type of package, and you could save even more, but that’s only conjecture on my part.