Categories
Documents

Mother Jones Fascinating Murder Mystery with an NRA Twist—and Documents

Mother Jones has a fascinating, longer look at an early murder mystery associated with none other than the NRA’s general counsel, Robert Dowlut. It would seem that Dowlut was originally convicted of second degree murder, a conviction that was later overturned.

In an act I’ve come to expect from Mother Jones, the publication has also provided easy access to all of the documentation that provided the basis for the story.

Journalists can’t always provide all of their background material, but when they can, they should. This allows others to review the material, enabling them to either agree or disagree with the writer based on the same material, if the writer forms a conclusion. At a minimum, this sharing ensures open access to documents that may be difficult for non-journalists to obtain—documents that may form the basis for other, future works.

There is nothing to agree with or disagree with in the Mother Jones article, since it’s very careful to remain neutral and factual in its retelling of the older story (and the more recent activities Dowlut has undertaken for the NRA). But the author, Dave Gilson, provides much to think about.

Categories
Books Writing

Writing from the bleeding edge

One of the challenges writing a book on technology is not only do you need to put words together in some form of coherent, possibly even interesting, manner, but you also have to understand the underlying technology enough to be able to explain it to others.

You can’t just “talk” about the technology, you have to understand it.

Not a problem, except when you’re getting into bleeding edge technology, like some of the ECMAScript 6 objects I’m covering in the second edition of my JavaScript Cookbook.

All you can do is work with the object, work with the object, and work with the object until you go from, “I hate this object. I hate this object. I really f**king hate this object” to, “Oh hey, this object isn’t so bad.”

Then you can write about it in the book.

Categories
Burningbird

Do I look pretty? Web site design tedium

I think I need a new look for my web site. Singular, now, since I merged everything back into one space. I decided people find stuff via social media anyway, so why worry about separating topics into separate web sites.

Besides, what a pain to manage.

But now, I think I need a new look and I haven’t a clue what I want. I see two trends in modern website design among the looks I’ve been exploring. I call them the Minimalist and the Maximalist.

The Minimalist is the design you see at the Node.js Blog and a lot of other primarily techie sites (though I am seeing it at New York Times and other major publications). It’s centered, minimal, no sidebars, few graphics—clean and plain. These pages are so trim, they load before you even know you want to see them.

The Maximalist is similar in being typically centered, but the similarity ends at that point. It features graphics. Sometimes, a lot of graphics. Enough to choke a server. They catch your attention, though. And you get a strong visual about the story even before you read the headline.

There are several Drupal themes that support the Maxamalist view, with sliders along the top front page, and full size photo headers on separate pages. I haven’t seen much in the Drupal world that embraces the Node.js Minimalist look, but it’s so simple, it could be easy to create.

The thing is, nothing feels right. I want to use HTML5 elements, and incorporate accessibility, as well as embrace responsive web design for the mobile world. Lots of Drupal themes to choose from, but none have reached out and slapped me across the face and demanded I pay attention.

So I guess I’ll just hang here with my plain black and white and burnt bird look, until something says, “Hi. You like me. You really like me.”

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Categories
Documents Legal, Laws, and Regs

Who owns the law?

I follow several legal cases, most related to animal welfare, climate, the environment, or agriculture and food. Like others, I have a PACER account, which gives me access to most court documents at the federal level, but at a price. I’m not overfond of the cost, as I’ve noted in the past, but I am, at least, grateful for such simple access to the documents.

I also re-publish the documents for access by all, and that includes discovery material and and evidence exposed during a trial. If it’s posted by PACER, it’s public domain. When I pay for PACER I’m paying for access to the system, not the documents. So far, no cease and desist letters, knock on wood.

I also re-publish other interesting government produced documents I find. Most are from US agencies, but some are from states. So I was surprised when reading about the experiences of Carl Malamud, creator of Public.Resource.Org, when he was attempting to access statutes for several states. He recounts his experiences in the excellent article, Who owns the law? Technology reignites the war over just how public documents should be, in the June edition of the ABA Journal:

During the January hearing, Malamud spoke about how, during the past year, he has been targeted by opponents that have blurred the distinction between government entity and private organization. For example, state and local governments often contract private publishers like West or LexisNexis to produce and publish their official codes. In 2013, Georgia, Idaho and Mississippi asserted copyright protection after Malamud posted their laws on his website. “While it is clear that the law has no copyright, a few states have evidently not received the memo,” he says.

Idaho, for instance, claimed in its cease-and-desist letter that it owned a copyright in the “analyses, summaries and reference materials” contained in the annotated code. However, the state went one step further and claimed copyright protection for the native statutory content itself, stating that Malamud needed a license (which could be provided free of charge) if he wanted to use it on his website. Georgia also claimed copyright infringement, writing in its takedown letter that while “the state asserts no copyright in the statutory text itself,” Malamud allegedly copied annotated text, which the state claimed was copyrighted. Mississippi made a similar claim, noting that LexisNexis, which published the code, had provided a clean, unannotated copy of the code that was available for free.

To Malamud, that’s a false distinction. He says the codes are not independent endeavors by private companies but are, instead, clearly labeled as official state laws.

A copyright on state code? Impossible.

Sure enough, when I tried to pull up the Georgia state code, as linked from the official George state web site I get this—an assertion that I can access a free copy of the code, only if I acknowledge that the material is copyright the state of Georgia.

A copyright on state code? Oh, hell no.

If the state wants to allow a private entity to annotate the state code, then the private entity can provide a link to the annotated copy. It’s the state’s responsibility to provide direct access to the code without asserting any form of copyright that must be agreed to before the individual can access. The material is prepared with tax payer funds and therefore is public domain. More importantly, as Malamud notes, laws that impact on citizens must be freely available to the citizens.

Not just state laws, though. Malamud also posts standard organization regulations, and is currently involved in lawsuits related to the standards organizations’ claims of copyright. It brings up an interesting question: we can consider that a private entity has rights to material it produces, but what happens when the material it produces is referenced in laws?

The organizations claim that they shouldn’t lose their copyright just because the regulation is referenced in law, but Malamud notes that “Access to justice should not require a gold card.”

Or even a plain old bank debit card, which is what I use with PACER.

The ABA Journal article is a fascinating and informative read, especially for those interested in open document access.

For more on Malamud’s legal cases, the Electronic Frontier Foundation provides access to the court documents for the Sheet Metal and Air Conditional Contractors court case, and Archives.org provides access to the documents for the most recent American Educational Research Association case, uploaded via RECAP. I’m rummaging around for the court documents related to the American Society For Testing and Materials court case and counterclaim. Recent filings in both show them being reassigned from Judge Emmet Sullivan, a judge I’m very familiar with, to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan.

Categories
Just Shelley

Walker Evans: I am a Writer

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 the photographic journal, Camera Work until finding what he was looking for: Paul Strand’s photograph of a blind woman, shown below.

strand_blind.jpg

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 a 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 than 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.

walker1.jpg

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, weatherbeaten, 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

peddler.jpg

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.

walker2.jpg

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 bookshop 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, 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 be sustained alongside 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.