Via Jeremy Butler and the SCMS-TV list comes news that the U.S. Copyright Office announced Wednesday six new exemptions to copyright restrictions. Numbered among these exemptions is one of particular interest:

The exemption granted to film professors authorizes the breaking of the CSS copy-protection technology found in most DVDs. Programs to do so circulate widely on the Internet, though it has been illegal to use or distribute them.

The professors said they need the ability to create compilations of DVD snippets to teach their classes — for example, taking portions of old and new cartoons to study how animation has evolved. Such compilations are generally permitted under “fair use” provisions of copyright law, but breaking the locks to make the compilations has been illegal.

Hollywood studios have argued that educators could turn to videotapes and other versions without the copy protections, but the professors argued that DVDs are of higher quality and may preserve the original colors or dimensions that videotapes lack.

“The record did not reveal any alternative means to meet the pedagogical needs of the professors,” Billington wrote.

This is a significant change, allowing for legal circumvention of DRM technologies for pedagogical purposes. If those pedagogical purposes can be extended beyond the classroom to include the texts written by professors, a significant milestone in the protection of fair use will have been reached.

The conversations last week around the notion of a “YouTube for scholars” have had me thinking about what other kinds of tools I'd like to have available in a somewhat altered and scholarship-focused fashion, either within or connected to MediaCommons. Some of this thinking has been affected by Ning, which allows easy development of a wide range of social-software-alikes for individual communities. Jason mentioned being interested in a del.icio.us-style social bookmarking function. I'd really like to have a MediaCommons-based LibraryThing, or perhaps a MediaCommons-based Zotero, to facilitate the development, sharing, and tagging of an extensive bibliography in media studies, with both a giant central repository including all entries, and a means for users to bookmark and index their own entries. What else would you like to have?

With much excitement, I want to call your attention to the first set of submitted “paper” proposals for MediaCommons that are now available for review on the site. We will be accepting proposals up until January 15, 2007.

Aside from promoting a new open-source mode of peer-to-peer review, public proposals are intended to generate conversations about the possibilities for media scholarship in a digital environment.

As my colleague, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, has summarized (far more eloquently than I ever could):

Obviously, the term “paper” doesn't quite apply. While MediaCommons may, at some strategic moment, use print technologies for the further dissemination of the texts that we publish, the use of “paper” here is not meant to suggest any adherence to the traditional journal/book format of scholarly work. We want the texts we publish to use the network's technologies to the fullest, and thus these texts, “born digital,” will never really be reproducible on paper.

While I strongly encourage you to all read these proposals and offer their contributors constructive suggestions on how to further develop their “papers,” the open availibility of these proposals for public scrutiny and deliberation also poses important questions about what types of feedback should be provided and what forms feedback might take.

In an open peer-to-peer review system, how do we provide encouragement and praise, suggestions for improvement, constructive criticism, and creative input that is at once productive and communitarian while also geared toward critically assessing and guiding the work under review into a rigorous, scholarly publication? How do contributors assess what feedback to respond to? How do we make the review process more than just a voting game with your clicker, especially when that vote is not necessarily anonymous?

Peer-to-peer review is essential to both the promotion of scholarly discourse that foregrounds the process of critical engagement over its finished product and also to the selection process of which “papers” will be officially published on the MediaCommons site and when. Our desire is to retool the peer review process in ways that enable it to fulfill more than simply a gatekeeping task, but one that will actually allow for the creation of more innovative, rigorous, and challenging (or, at the very least, as rigorous though decidedly different) scholarship than can typically be produced in print format. As a community, we need to decide on what types of feedback best serve these needs.

We've opened up account registration here at making MediaCommons. In fact, while comments have to this point been open to folks who were unregistered, we're now requiring you to become a registered member in order to participate in our discussions. The intent behind this move is not to close conversations down, but rather to begin building a broad membership base, which will allow you a much richer experience of the site, with a wider range of future options for participation. (Requiring registration also has the added benefit of shutting out the spambots.) Please sign up for your account, and join in.

As we're putting these membership structures in place, I wanted to get some feedback on an idea I've been toying with. This is of course a long-term development issue, and one that won't possibly be solved in the next few days, but I want to get it on the agenda for the development of MediaCommons. I've been thinking about the problem that anonymity poses in scholarly discourse, particularly as related to peer review, and the ways that MediaCommons is working to instill a greater ethos of openness instead of allowing many of the most important kinds of exchange we have be cloaked in secrecy. And I've been puzzling for a while about how we can instill that openness as a virtue without, strictly speaking, requiring it. I mean, there's nothing to prevent anyone from creating an account on the site with a pseudonym. So how do we encourage readers and commenters to take a certain kind of accountability for their participation in the site by using their own names, without getting all totalitarian about it?

A few days ago, it occurred to me: the Amazon.com “real name” tag. Should we come up with some kind of a little graphical badge that indicates, next to a username, that this user is using their real name? Amazon determines the “real name” thing via a credit card; if the name you sign your reviews with matches the one on one of your cards, you get the badge. We might have to be a bit less automated about it, at least at first, but via email address, credentials, or some other kind of data, we could determine who's using their real name and give them the badge.

Is this a valuable, or even feasible, idea? My impulse is to try to make sure that we (a) make it clear to the community that we place a high value on taking credit/responsibility for one's writing on the site, and (b) make sure that any posts signed by, say, “Henry Jenkins” can be authenticated to actually be by the scholar we know as Henry Jenkins.

The comments both on the recent YouTube posts suggest that one useful bit of content MediaCommons might move toward creating, and sooner rather than later, would be a set of instructional guides, walking scholars new to developing technological forms through their processes. For instance, as Jonathan suggests, it would be good for us to develop a set of instructions for digitizing, cutting, and uploading video.

I've also got an idea stirring around in the back of my head about taking a series of talks I've given recently and creating desktop movies out of them, laying in my audio over the slides that I use in the talks. I want to do this in part because several people have asked me for the text of my talks, but the text doesn't really carry the same effect of delivery as does the talk itself. Moreover, because I use my slides as a kind of counterpoint (often ironic) to the text of the talk, the slides can't stand alone, and the talk loses a layer of meaning without them. So I'd love for us to create a set of instructions for how to produce easily distributable movies out of such presentations.

(As an aside, this creates the possibility that one node of the MediaCommons network might focus on archiving and distributing presentations from conferences and other lectures, allowing scholars who weren't able to be present to participate in those events.)

For the instructional guides, though, I'm thinking that a wiki might be the way to go, so that the membership of MediaCommons can create and edit new guides as technologies change. Aside from the two I've mentioned, what other kinds of instructional guides would you like us to produce?

I'm still thinking about the YouTube question today, in part given that the subject of conversation in my English seminar (Writing Machines) yesterday was distributed authorship and social software, and in part given that my Media Studies seminar (Authorship) has been making heavy use of YouTube all semester, and is now moving into a couple of weeks of discussing Free Culture and The Anarchist in the Library.

What I'm wondering is in part the questions raised by Avi, Ben, and Virginia yesterday — if we could remake YouTube as a scholarly tool, what would we change about it? But I'm also curious what other modes of media sharing, discussion, and production might be useful for MediaCommons authors and readers to use. What media sharing platforms are you using now? (For me, it's mostly just Flickr, though I've got a SlideShare account, too.) How do you use them? What do you like about them, and what do you wish were different? What other kinds of file sharing and discussion platforms would you like to have available? And if you were building a network of scholars who were developing and sharing work collaboratively, how would you want to make use of such file sharing? Would you want it to be integrated into the network, or would links from members' profile pages to their Flickr/SlideShare/whathaveyou accounts be sufficient?

Via MediaCommons supporter Cathy Davidson comes the following call for papers:

HASTAC International Conference
“Electronic Techtonics: Thinking at the Interface”
April 19-21, 2007

Deadline for proposals: Dec 1, 2006

HASTAC is now soliciting papers and panel proposals for “Electronic Techtonics: Thinking at the Interface,” the first international conference of HASTAC (“haystack”: Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory). The interdisciplinary conference will be held April 19-21, 2007, in Durham, North Carolina, co-sponsored by Duke University in Durham and RENCI (Renaissance Computing Institute), an innovative technology consortium in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Details concerning registration fees, hotel accommodations, and the full conference agenda will be posted to www.hastac.org as they become available.

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE
The keynote address will be delivered at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke by visionary information scientist John Seely Brown (The Social Life of Information; formerly Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and Director of its Palo Alto Research Center/PARC). Other events include a talk by legal theorist James Boyle (co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Creative Commons, and Science Commons), a conversation among leaders of innovative digital humanities projects led by John Unsworth (chair of the ACLS “Cyberinfrastructure and the Humanities and Social Sciences” commission), and a presentation by media artist and research pioneer Rebecca Allen. The conference will also include refereed scholarly and scientific papers, multimedia performances, an exhibit hall of innovative software and hardware, plus tours of art and scientific installations in virtual reality, learning-game, and interactive sensor space environments.

CALL FOR PAPERS
Six sessions will be devoted to panels with refereed papers on aspects of “interface” spanning media arts, engineering, and the human, social, natural, and computational sciences. Panels will be topical and cross-disciplinary; they will be comprised of papers that are themselves interdisciplinary as well as specialized disciplinary papers presented in juxtaposition with one another.

We will consider proposals for full panels (three or four papers), for paired cross-disciplinary papers on a shared topic, or for single papers.

Topics: Panels might address interfaces between humans and computers, mind and brain, real and virtual worlds, science and fiction, consumers and producers, text-archives and multi-media, youth and adults, disciplines, institutions, communities, identities, media, cultures, technologies, theories, and practices.

Other possible topics: the body as interface, neuroaesthetics and neurocognition, prosthetics, mind-controlled devices, immersion, emergence, presence, telepresence, sensor spaces, virtual reality, social networking, games, experimental learning environments, human/non-human situations and actors, interactive communication and control, access, borders, intellectual property, porosity, race and ethnicity, difference, Afro-Geeks and Afro-Futurism, identity, gender, sexuality, credibility, mapping and trafficking, civic engagement, social activism, cyberactivism, plus all of the other In|Formation Year topics: in|common, interplay, in|community, interaction, injustice, integration, invitation, innovation.

Proposal Submissions: Please send 500-1000 word paper and/or panel proposals to info@hastac.org.

Deadline for Proposals: December 1, 2006.

Full-length papers or power-point presentations will be posted on the HASTAC website prior to the conference. The sessions themselves will be devoted to synopses of the work, followed by a response designed to elicit audience participation. Attendees whose papers are not accepted will be encouraged to display their work at a digital poster session.

CONFERENCE REGISTRATION
Registration will be limited to 150 people. HASTAC will announce a priority registration period for HASTAC In|Formation Year site leaders, followed by open registration.

SCHOLARSHIPS
Some scholarship funding will be available to graduate students to help defray fees and conference costs.

For additional information as well as copies of the In|Formation Year poster, contact Jonathan Tarr, HASTAC Project Manager (info@hastac.org or call 919 684-8471).

HASTAC uses Creative Commons licenses for all of its endeavors. All conference sessions will be webcast, archived, and made available for non-profit educational purposes.

When we first announced the In Media Res component of the Making MediaCommons site, we made the unfortunate mistake of describing it in layman’s terms as “sort of a YouTube for Scholars”.

Our intention was to describe a process by which media scholars would upload media clips along with critical commentary, which would then be available for visitors to the site to view/read and converse about.

Beyond the guff I received from one misinformed scholar who thought that the commenting function was merely an add on, instead of the point of the feature, the YouTube association has raised a number of other concerns, which I would like to present to you all — as both future MediaCommons members and potential In Media Res curators – in the form of a simple question:

Should curators be selecting their clips for In Media Res from the stash of material already available from YouTube?

My esteemed colleague, Ben Vershbow put the yin/yang situation best:

On the one hand this is a good thing. It makes it easy for curators to grab clips and gives us a ready-to-embed, externally hosted video. Resituating a popular media artifact within a more critical discussion also makes sense from a scholarly perspective — reclaiming a bit of the YouTube culture. Then there's the possibility of outreach. MediaCommons could have its own YouTube channel, pulling viewers back into our site.

But the problems this raises are many. First, curators will be tempted to rely just on YouTube for material, which is by no means a comprehensive media library. Second, we do not want to be in any way beholden to YouTube (now Google) or overly reliant on their technical infrastructure. It's unwise both from an archival standpoint (videos are being taken down all the time) and from a political one (YouTube is not a defender of fair use — they'll call you a pirate the minute the lawyers come knocking).

For many curators, there are also the questions of technological know how, availability of resources and, of course, time. Many of you who have expressed interest in curating have indicated that

A) You do not know how to digitize media clips
B) You do not own a Tivo, DVR, and/or DVD burner
C) You do not have a reliable IT person at your University who could digitize a VHS clip for you

We are in the process of developing a simple step-by-step guide for curators to be able to upload materials themselves to the site, but this will still require some accessible digital conversion method and comfort level. This lack of proficiency inevitably makes YouTube a (dangerously) easy road to take for many scholars, to some extent making us complicit with the very systems we are attempting to challenge.

I am a firm believer that it is not the technology that makes for radical practices, but that practices radicalize technology, but it seems here we have a dilemma, so I ask again, this time for the community:

Should curators be selecting their clips for In Media Res from the stash of material already available from YouTube? And, equally as important, what are the alternatives for those less technologically skilled yet radically inclined?

Several of you have e-mailed asking me how to participate on MediaCommons, either the pre-site or the big to-do. While there are many ways to jump in on the conversation, here are some concrete suggestions: Today, I’ll talk about participating on the pre-site.

Making MediaCommons is designed to accommodate academics’ harried schedules. Short regularly updated pieces and features encourage visitors to read and respond quickly. We believe that the collective conversation will be more meaningful to scholars than any one insightful comment:

1) Kathleen and I post to the blog almost every day about how the MediaCommons site might develop; what types of projects might be undertaken and how to generate community dialogue.

These posts are short and they are intended to involve readers in the conversation.

One project that is currently being discussed is about developing a digital global television history.

Obviously, this would be a huge undertaking that would involve a large community of people. No one person has the formula down for how a project like this would take shape. The only way to conceptualize and concretize how a digital global television history might be created is by collectively talking about it.

So, one easy way to get involved in the conversation might be to just sketch out in a couple of sentences what you think a project like this (or others) needs to do, or should look like, or should be careful to take into consideration, or what you feel your contribution might be… Several of you have written expressing interest in this project, and that is fantastic. The more public discussion about it, the more it is likely to take form.

Responses should be entered as comments to the post and will appear instantaneously. Responses need not be more than a sentence or two and even responses that ask for more clarity are welcome.

2) The In Media Res feature is also updated regularly with short clips and commentaries from scholars.

In Media Res is just one mode of multi-mediated scholarship that MediaCommons will offer.

Curators ask their public critical questions about the clips they select as well as provide short, insightful commentary designed to stimulate discussion.

Again, short responses are encouraged.

Many of you have expressed interest in curating a clip for In Media Res and we are excited about working with you on this.

The keys are brevity, both for clip (under two minutes) and commentary (150-200 words), and to ask provocative questions. Think about the best seminar class you ever took or taught and how the right question, asked in the right way, led to a conversational explosion.

For example, Horace Newcomb once screened Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty (the live TV version) and an episode of The Sopranos back-to-back in a graduate seminar and asked the class to imagine what if Tony Soprano was Marty and Clara’s offspring (Nancy Marchand played both Clara and Tony’s mother, Livia while both Rod Steiger’s Marty and Tony’s dad were in the butcher shop business).

On Saturday, I’ll discuss the Calls for Papers section of Making MediaCommons and connect it more explicitly with some of the things that MediaCommons will be doing.

No doubt like many of you, I spent much of my evening last night glued to my television set, flipping between CNN and the networks, trying to keep apprised of developments in the election as best I could. I also kept my laptop nearby, in order to keep an eye my favorite political media blogs (such as Crooks and Liars), in order to get a sense not just of their reaction to the events, but of their reaction to the coverage of the events.

I'm a bit dazed by it all as yet, and what thoughts I have are obviously pretty unprocessed. But I'm interested this morning in the impact that the internet has clearly had on the outcome of this election. This is nothing terrifically new; the last few election cycles have all been affected by the presence of the blogosphere. What's new, for me, is the circulation and discussion of political ads via the network. Ads that were once tied to local or regional television markets — unless something went very wrong, and they got picked up by the network news departments — have suddenly become visible across the country, via YouTube and other video-sharing systems. Of the ten best political ads of this season (according to Salon's Video Dog), most, like Michael J. Fox's ad for Missouri senator-elect Claire McCaskill, which took top honors, came to the attention of a much wider audience through their wide online distribution and discussion.

One of the truisms of recent political life has held that “all politics are local”; I've got to wonder whether this will continue to be so in an age in which media products are so widely dispersed — and, even more, in an age in which those who consume such products are able to respond.