Google’s Book Search gets most of the press but Microsoft has also been active in the large-scale digitization of both in copyright and out of copyright books for their search engine. At least until recently. I hope Microsoft’s short-sighted decision to phase out their book digitization programme does not encourage Google to do likewise. We academics have also lost out - the same decision also put paid to Microsoft’s “Live Search Academic” engine which shadowed Google Scholar.

LSE Research Online has been substantially re-vamped since the last time I looked. You can browse a mix of full text and abstracts of work from our department here, and if you register you can make saved searches that email you when new material arrives or which you can subscribe to as RSS feeds. This link should be to an RSS feed of full text items from our department as they arrive (please comment if the link does not work).

Note: The repository is not even close to representing the entirety of the department’s output (it currently contains 195 items, 81 of which are available in full text) but hopefully it will become increasingly useful as staff and students learn about and use it.

I have mixed feelings about writing this but it is dawning on me that LibriVox - a group of public-spirited people making out of copyright texts into public domain audiobooks by reading them - could be one example of a problematic trend enabled by the Internet. That trend is - as the subject line suggests - the manner in which the Internet enables the free distribution of ‘good enough’ products at the expense of paid-for content.

In this case it concerns me that the existence and growth of free public domain audiobooks read aloud by members of the public could make it increasingly unprofitable to put out paid-for audiobooks of public domain material. This would be a shame because the quality of the readings is so variable. I find myself listening along happily to a work like F Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise or The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin only to be brought up short by a weird mis-pronounciation by one of the volunteer readers.

In principle there is no problem here - if listeners find such a problem they might complain and someone from the Librivox community might volunteer to re-read the offending chapters. Unfortunately the work of reading audiobooks isn’t easily editable once complete as a textual composition is, which means to fix even a simple problem (like someone persistently mispronouncing the hero’s name) you would have to ask someone to spend at least a half an hour re-recording a whole section (or would have to do it yourself). Unfortunately also I imagine volunteer readers would not take kindly to having their public-spirited work criticised - everyone thinks they can read aloud. So it seems likely such problems will go largely unremarked and un-addressed.

I wouldn’t want to put you off trying out Librivox - their hearts are definitely in the right place, the results are mostly at least adequate and if you want something a little different to listen to on your iPod it would be well worth checking out their growing catalogue for yourself. But if you have the cash and want to listen to something public domain that you really expect to enjoy and attend to, I encourage you to check out commercial sites like Audible and keep the professional audiobook industry in business.

David Brake

Wikipedia in English has a couple of things working for it. English is the international language of science and a first or second language for most of those already connected to the Internet. The population of people from whom the core editing population is likely drawn - literate people in developed countries with good Internet access and enough time after their basic needs are met to devote to a volunteer project - are also largely English speakers. But it turns out according to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (speaking at TED), only about 1/3 of accesses to Wikipedia are to the English language part.

When I heard him say this I immediately wondered (given the fact he admits that 600-1,000 people make up the ‘core’ of wikipedia’s editors) how many people are primary contributors in other languages? It turns out in the case of Swahili at least the answer appears to be just four, and only one of them is African (living in America).

When contributor numbers are low and when the big English language volunteer community at Wikipedia can’t keep an eye on things (because they can’t read the language) what is to prevent individuals or groups with an axe to grind exploiting the Wikipedia brand? Has anyone looked to see whether the entries on the causes of AIDS written in small African languages are consistent with current science or lean towards crackpot theories? What does the Chinese language version of Wikipedia say about the ‘June 4th incident’ at Tiananmen Square and is its ‘neutral point of view’ account significantly different from that of the English language version of the same event? I just checked on this and a Google translation of the Chinese language account seems to tone down the casualty figures, saying something like “specific figures are not known, there are hundreds of thousands of view” while the English version says “Estimates of civilian deaths vary: 23 (Communist Party of China), 400–800 (Central Intelligence Agency), 2600 (Chinese Red Cross). Injuries are generally held to have numbered from 7,000 to 10,000″.

This is of particular concern given that it recently emerged that selected Wikipedia articles will be installed on the $100 laptops being produced by the One Laptop Per Child Consortium. Is there a danger that articles in non-English languages (selected by whom?) may not be produced to the standards held by the English-language Wikipedia and yet may be seen by impressionable children as the infallible wisdom of the Internet handed down in their magic boxes?

But I’d like to end on a cheerful note. If the students who receive these laptops are very lucky their teachers could use Wikipedia articles as a way to introduce critical media literacy. They might be told that these Wikipedia articles are written by ordinary people like them and can be edited by them. It would be pleasing to think that the dearth of Internet content aimed at developing countries could be tackled, at least in part, by those nations’ schoolchildren.

David Brake

There is now an official site about the One Laptop Per Child project and the announcement of this prompted a small explosion of debate about their merits on the Association of Internet Researchers mailing list . It has encouraged me to blow the dust off the collection of links I have been holding on to since November and to weigh in myself a bit on the subject.

Others’ Criticism:

• Institute for the Future of the Book: hundred dollar laptops may make good table lamps “it’s hard not to laugh at the leaders of the free world bumbling over this day-glo gadget, this glorified Trapper Keeper cum jack-in-the-box (Annan ended up breaking the hand crank), with barely a word devoted to what educational content will actually go inside, or to how teachers plan to construct lessons around these new toys.”
• Further criticism in more depth by the (competing) Fonly Institute. I agree with their issues completely, though I think they rather ‘over-sell’ the problems. I do fear as they do that if this device doesn’t fly it might make it more difficult to get any future interest in a better thought through ICT programme based on low-cost computing.
• Ethan Zuckerman also frets about one key aspect the Fonly Institute and others highlighted: the optimistic forecasts by the laptop’s designers that students will spontaneously fiddle with and create with them.

Description

• A week ago Ethan produced an excellent in-depth technology overview which reveals among other things that while the laptops will be human-powered the hand-crank has been eliminated from the design.
• An eight minute video tour of the device was the first I came across several months ago - it might be interesting to compare to the overview above.
• If you are interested in description of the project from its leader there is a 55 minute video interview with Negroponte about it (which I haven’t managed to listen to yet).

My thoughts on the AoIR debate

I would say most of the discussion on the mailing list has been critical of the OLPC project. Much of the criticism is for reasons I agree with but some seemed a little doctrinaire. This is not an ‘inferior’ technology as Christian Fuchs suggests - it is an appropriate one. Even if ‘conventional’ laptops costing ten times as much were made available in the countries where the OLPC will be trialled, they would arguably be less useful as they would be less durable and would rely on more expensive components and software. These laptops will not tie their users in to Western commercial technology and standards as Christian fears (at least not any more than they are already) because they are based solidly on open source software. And rightly or wrongly these are not aimed at the countries whose inhabitants live on $2 a day - they are aimed at middle-ranking developing countries like China, India and Brazil which have enough money to consider this kind of investment in their children (though I would still argue that this major sum spent in ‘conventional’ ways on teachers or books would yield a better result).

Lastly, Jeremy Hunsinger says there is no plan for teacher or student training to go with these devices. This would of course be a big concern if true. It is true that the designers appear to have weirdly utopian ideas about children teaching themselves using these laptops with little or no teacher intervention (as echoed by Wojciech Gryc). See for example the OLPC FAQ - note it does not even mention as a question the need for training kids to learn with them and it says, among other things:

While the younger generations who are affected by this project become more computer literate and technologically developed in a modern sense, they will begin to have a more profound social leverage than their elders. The formative years of childhood, and the education received during that time span contribute to a wholistic result, which will present a tremendous contrast between those who have been given a computer-based education and those who have not.

Which is techno-utopianism at its finest. I can only hope that (since the wiki is open to anyone to edit) this is the view of a OLPC ‘fellow traveller’ not the staff. It is true that there have been a few promising pilots that demonstrated even Delhi slum children will teach themselves how to use computers out of sheer curiosity given the chance but I would be amazed if there has been enough research on how this works and under what conditions to satisfy the academic pedagogical community (has there been thorough discussion of pilot projects like the ‘hole in the wall’ one yet in academic journals and conferences?).

In any event I am a little more optimistic - since pilot organizations will be investing a lot of money (relative to their budgets) on these devices I would hope some of them at least will devote some careful thought to the issues that Jeremy and others pointed out and turn deaf ears to the OLPC team’s assurances that these are pure ‘machines for learning’ - no teacher input required.

David Brake

TakeAway - ‘the Festival of do it yourself Media’ is on in W London. This sounds like a great idea and I hope events like this one take off across the country. So much of government policy about the digital divide is about enabling people to consume Internet media - little effort seems to be going into helping people produce their own. My only concern is that the programme does look a little ‘art world’ inward-looking. I wonder whether it will manage to reach out to people not already integrated in the art and techie communities…

In response to comments by the “Cream gang” here’s a brief and I hope final statement of why I think their approach to improving the public’s digital rights situation is wrong.

I agree with them that the public is currently unlikely to rally behind any calls for (for example) a roll-back of the number of years of copyright protection or controls on DRM. Unlike them I don’t think that if we give corporations their heads they will eventually overstep and make themselves fatally unpopular. I don’t believe they are that stupid - they will push copyright as far as the public will accept and no further.

I think we both agree however that the public will accept a situation which is worse than it needs to be - mainly because they don’t really understand what might be possible if things were different. (I think however that the row over Google Books might just provide one easy to grasp example of how excessively strict copyright protection damages the public interest).

I also agree that lobbying the Guardian and the Register et al is a bit of a waste of time since as Nick Mailer, Martin Coxall et al point out they are already converted (though by all means keep lobbing them the press releases - after all it costs little to add a few names to the list).

I think however (and this is where we differ essentially) that there are a large number of elected representatives who have not thought through copyright issues and are not that interested in them but who could be persuaded to take the right path through reasoned argument even if there are no votes in it for them. That’s where the focus of the Open Rights Group should be (and I imagine where it will be). Not in lobbying Internet users or the general public but in presenting persuasive arguments about the public good to key expert decision makers.

Of course it would be better if the public understood the issues and got on board but there are large swathes of policy-making that take place without substantial input from the public as a whole because the public as a whole doesn’t care enough about the issue in question.

The Open Rights Group (which does need a proper website not just a blog) has been launched as a kind of British Electronic Frontier Foundation. I’m sure it will do some sterling work but it’s a shame that almost immediately some digital rights extremists (an unlikely grouping) came along to a brainstorm for its founding and put a cat among the pigeons by being very rude about it (entertainingly).

It’s hard to take seriously their argument that corporations should be encouraged to behave more and more badly until their digital abuses are recognised by the public, but they seem to have managed to spark a lot of online flaming. You’d think the respondents, most of whom have more than a decade of online experience would know better than to respond to trolling?

Update: The ORG doesn’t have a ‘proper’ website yet but when searching for something rights related I did find the Campaign for Digital Rights which seems to share a lot of the ORGs objectives and has quite a bit of useful information about the state of UK and European law and why it should be changed.