Monday 4 April 2016

Week 10 - Redefining Ownership in the Digital Age : new rules for new objects

Week 10 somehow slipped through the cracks for me and I am making a late blog entry. As an owner of an object, such as a book, it is not uncommon for me to loan books to friends. It's also fun to participate in a “leave a book/take a book” scenario in a cafe, mini library on the street, or in some other context. Lending an e-book, on the other hand, was not initially possible. Amazon has since introduced a lending component to their Kindle whereby you can now lend a book to a friend for 14 days. Even libraries lend a book for a minimum period of 21 days with the possibility of renewal. I’m not sure Amazon allows an lending extension or if it can be lent to that same person more than once. This kind of constraint does not leave you feeling like you really own the object because it is a limiting framework. 

Another example of ownership of a digital object that comes to mind is a bilingual terminology database that used to be called the Banque de Terminologie de l’Université de Montréal (BTUM). This Université de Montréal initiative was eventually acquired by the Translation Bureau of Canada with the goal of standardizing terminology throughout the public service, and was renamed TERMIUM. Fast forward, the database eventually became available to language professionals, largely translators, for purchase on CD-ROM whereby an annual fee was paid and the licence holder would receive updated CD-ROMs every three to four months. As they continued to expand the database and technology changed, the database became accessible online for a monthly fee. For the past six years, online access to the database has been free and it has been rebranded TERMIUM Plus.

At no point did I ever feel like I “owned” this object. I was merely paying for access to it, or renting it. Part of the difficulty in owning this was that it was not a static entity since the database was subject to updates, modifications, and further annotations. 


You are not really buying the “object”; rather you are buying the rights to access and use the object under highly prescribed circumstances. The dematerialization of objects leads to a kind of symbolic ownership of objects. If we can't manipulate them, do we really own them? Certainly protection the measures built into these digital objects, along with digital object identifiers, are indicators of an implicit legal contract and to some extent redefine what ownership is. 

Friday 1 April 2016

Access and UofT E-mail Systems


     This week’s discussion with Bobby Glushko and McKenzie's reading got me thinking about the UofT webmail system and the changes it suddenly implemented a few years back when I was an undergrad. I am concerned with the ownership of email systems such as UTORMail/outlook and their ability to access, alter, and upgrade my account without my consent. 

     In July 2011, the University of Toronto migrated its students from the old UTORMail email system to the new Microsoft Live UTMail+ system. Prior to the deadline for migration, students received a large number of emails from the university reminding them to transfer their accounts to the new system and warning them that it would not be possible to access email accounts in the old system once the deadline had passed and that any data stored in the old system would be lost. These emails not only left students with the impression that they had no say in the decision-making process for major policy decisions: most students found out about the impending migration from these emails, which made it clear that the decision had already been made. Moreover, some of the information provided to students appeared to be contradictory: students were informed that it was possible to opt out of the migration, but it was unclear how this would work if the old system was to be shut down. Finally, the information provided to students also turned out to be inaccurate: email accounts in the old system and the data stored in them remained accessible long after the migration. 

http://email.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/activateUTmail1-300x79.png

     While investigating the issue of the University of 2011 email migration,  I also began thinking about the role played in university policy decisions by the various corporate interests that interact with the university. Partnerships between the corporate world and academia have become increasingly important, and the University of Toronto has naturally followed this trend. Such partnerships are often presented to the student body as a fait accompli, however, with little communication as to how a particular partnership was formed and what the benefits (let alone the potential drawbacks) of the partnership are perceived to be. 
  
     Therefore, owning my email account in this context doesn't mean anything because it can be rendered useless or meaningless if it ceases to exist: the old email account can be acted upon and used to threaten me to comply to the new upgrade. Owning text such as personal emails, essays, drafts, campus work schedules doesn't mean anything if I am not able to freely access it. I know that the outcome after the deadline to upgrade passed was such that I was able to access (and still am able to access) my old account -- however, to be threatened that I may not be able to access this content makes me uncomfortable and makes me wonder exactly how much access UofT really has over this type of private space. 

     Some food for thought - [or questions I'm still debating]: What do I really own versus UofT the 'corporate institution'? How come professors didn't have to make the switch? What privacy concerns are seen as far more significant for professors compared to the student body?


“The past is never dead. It's not even past.” ― William Faulkner

I wish I could go back in time and inform medieval copyists that the work created by their hands will become some of the rarest, prized, and celebrated possessions of academic institutions worldwide. I would specifically go back to medieval Arabia because that is the area of my specialty, and ask copyists to record and creatively (maybe even deceptively) incorporate their family names or biographical snippets within their work.

A major issue with studying Medieval Arabic literature is that while the content comes with a detailed historical account of its quality, the copyists who are spending time with authors of poetry, philosophy, and epistle literature are unannounced. This erasure becomes problematic because artistic features of the work such as images, font, layout and even binding decisions are entrusted by authors to their copyists. Furthermore, since the nature of the work requires copyists to listen while they copy, the speed of the author’s narration is an important aspect of what gets copied and what does not. I don’t mean to say that copyists skip lines or sections of text, but that case endings (specific to Arabic) disappear or are altered due to misinterpretation. Mistaking the case ending of a word in Arabic has immediate consequences as it changes the meaning of the specific word. Also, other misspellings and grammatical mistakes make translation and interpretation of manuscripts difficult. Therefore, a thorough account of the copyists’ intellectual level and educational history would highlight their ability to engage with the material they are working with and better copy/convey ideas.

To provide you with an example I will discuss an Aljamiado manuscript. Please refer to my previous post on Aljamiado for context, or here is a brief history!

The T235 manuscript a trilingual copy of the Qur’an founded in 1878 by Eduardo Saavedra is the only one of its kind in existence. This manuscript is especially fascinating not because of its aljamiado Qur’anic transcription, but because of its expert use of aljamiado, Spanish, and Arabic in creating detailed marginalia. In other words, the Qur’an is transcribed entirely in Spanish and aljamiado, and the marginalia is written alternating between three languages. Both the colophons and the lengthy marginalia and notations are written interchangeably in the aforementioned languages, “…and so intimately entwined are the three languages that a word may begin in one alphabet and continue in another” (López-Morillas). The T235 manuscript was completed in 1606 (just one year!), and is believed to be one of the last manuscripts copied before the indefinite expulsion of the Morisos at the hands of the Christians.


T235 highlights copyist’s style and prominence as a scribe who is fluent in three languages and trusted by aristocrats to take on such a challenging project. This manuscript is reflective of the fear that the community has for their contracts and literatures to be found and so transcribing it in Spanish can potentially fool an army-man into thinking that it is a Bible belonging to a Christian convert and the marginalia are his notations.

However, after all this, I’m sad to say that there is no account of the copyist’s name, family, ethnicity, or even who he is working so efficiently for. These priceless and beautifully orchestrated manuscripts become valuable pieces of history but pay no tribute to the skilled workers who have dedicated their lives to this art.




What Jackson Ossea Would Tell Academics Thirty Years Ago Who Declared the Book Dead Because of Digital Technologies


            Let’s go back to a few years, or even a decade before Kirschenbaum and Darnton were first writing about digital humanities and the futurology of the book, when doomsayers were declaring the print book dead because of the presence of digital technologies. It’s not important how we got there, just go with it.
            As tempting as it would be to show these skeptics my Kobo and angrily explain that we have a disagreement about what death looks like, there’s something else that I think they would be more receptive of. It would be too easy to explain to people that just because something is not on a paper page, it does not mean that it is a separate thing from a book.
            I would articulate that, not only did e-books do a very poor job of killing the book, but that it inspired a wave of avant-garde novels that could not be effectively transitioned from print to digital form without damaging the way in which the reader is supposed to experience them. Academics have tried to argue that many of the most popular instances of these experimental book-forms acted as a precursor to the ways in which readers read electronic texts, but that is not true because of the way that these texts are meant to be red.
            Apart from the obvious example that is Mark Z. Danielewski’s bibliography, several authors have written works that transcend and challenge many of our long-held notions of what a physical book is and how it is we read them. When faced with a challenge, it is the artists responsibility to become innovative or their ideas risk becoming obsolete.
            House of Leaves and Only Revolutions are books which require the reader to acknowledge the book as a physical book because the reader must rotate them in their hands in order to properly experience them. The same is true of so many other titles that have been published by these waves of writers. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes also requires the reader to become more physically involved with the book
            I would want to explain to these academic and less formal pessimists who worry about the book’s future that the book will not die because it will demand innovation, and also that electronic reading is still reading. One of Kirschenbaums’ main points was that the digital form of an object is a representation of a theory of that object. The same is true of different translations of texts as well as different editions of books.
            But even if they wouldn’t see eye to eye with me on that notion, they should be able be much more wide-eyed about the future of the book. The only difference is that the reader will not only have a selection from a library in the hands, but the whole collection between their hands.