Response to Matt MacArthur
In a comment on my most recent blog post, NMAH's Matt MacArthur brought up a major and valid criticism of the enthusiasm of myself and others like me for open data initiatives:
Mike touches on an important point about what people actually *want* from the Smithsonian (and museums in general). I heard a very interesting presentation from the Powerhouse Museum in Australia recently. They have had their collection database available via download/API for a while now – they are leaders on this openness” front. What they have found is that while this is was a radical/exciting development among proponents who care about such things, in reality hardly anyone has made use of it. This is particularly true for the education audience, who they thought would be eager to use raw data in the ways that you mention. Instead, teachers and students continue to gravitate toward specific bits of content that support their curriculum, and the more traditional, mediated “online exhibit” type of material. Maybe this will change and it still may be an important avenue for the Smithsonian to pursue. But for now, the evidence available to me shows that the public demand to see a lot more of the Smithsonian’s “stuff” online along with reliable interpretation, and have some social functionality around that content, is much greater than the demand to “walk away with our stuff and do whatever they want with it.”
On the one hand, I can't argue with this line of reasoning. First off, the people who will want to access raw data online is always going to be smaller than the number of people who will want to just look at it, consume it passively. Much like the number of people who use their computers to program, do complex modeling, or calculate is always going to be smaller than the number who use them for entertainment and communications.
Of course, some people say that the fact that most of us just play games, surf the net, and write email means that the personal computer is dead in the water and devices like the iPad are the future. What these people overlook is that the iPad is not a very good device for doing innovative programing or developing next-level software. If you want computers to keep developing on the software level, you need keyboards and processing power. Just because the majority could get by with an iPad-like device doesn't mean we should stop producing PCs, or that we should stop producing them at a price point that keeps a low barrier to entry so that merit is more important than deep pockets in the long march to innovation.
The situation when it comes to digital archives and exhibitions is not that dissimilar. You want to give the majority of people what they want-- if grandma is scared of computers, but comfortable with the iPad, by all means, get her an iPad!-- but as long as doing so doesn't interfere with the enjoyment of the more passive-consuming majority(1), you also need to be designing keeping in mind the innovators, the hackers, the bleeding-edge early adopters... in other words, you need to design for the developers, as well as the average consumer.
The audience may not be there, at least not at first. But these considerations have to be made from the beginning, to be incorporated into the heart of the code from the get-go, or else it's going to be nearly impossible if the demand picks up. This is part of what makes the Smithsonian Commons such a awesome and ambitious project-- it's going to have to cobble things from the many different, often privately-contracted and sometimes proprietary CMSs and databases that the various museums of the Smithsonian system, and bring it all together into one place. This is no easy task because when the different projects were begun, they were not designed to interoperate.
It's important, when beginning a project like the Smithsonian Commons, to design the project so that it is capable of maximum openness. It's easier to nail some doors shut than it is to tear down walls.
Similarly, while the case of the Powerhouse Museum might be somewhat discouraging-- all this great openness and nobody using it-- the Powerhouse Museum is not the Smithsonian. No other museum is the Smithsonian. The SI is "the world's largest museum complex and research organization," according to the home page. The Smithsonian is large enough that, if the Commons is implemented well, it could counter this trend of disuse. The Smithsonian Commons could be a tipping point.
People won't develop the tools if there's not a potential audience for them. If the SI works with other museums like the Powerhouse to ensure interoperability and good data standards, it's enough of a behemoth that the SI's working on opening up might actually encourage development and use for the Powerhouse Museum. If people can design tools that allow you to digitally manipulate, analyze, and play with the combined collections of an entire international network of museums, suddenly you're looking at something with enough potential use, and enough potential audience, that it might be worth doing.
I'm not saying this will happen necessarily, of course. I can't predict the future. But I can see that the Smithsonian is uniquely positioned to help push this sort of thing into reality. I'd hate to see that opportunity squandered because of a lack of perceived interest.
It may well be that the average user will always be the casual browser, the person who wants to see the stuff, along with a little social functionality. But arguments of "demand" shouldn't be applied to openness and APIs. There's a moral argument to this, for institutions with a public service mission, but let's look beyond that to a completely pragmatic view. With computers, "demand" isn't a fixed quality. The world only needs so many eggs. With computers, however, demand is a constantly shifting value, because demand created by tools. And tools that can be developed by outsiders with little to no cost other than time can suddenly prove quite important.
Look at Twitter clients-- when the website first launched, I doubt there was much perceivable demand for standalone programs that simply talked to a website that let you post SMS-sized messages on the web. But Twitter was created with an open and robust API, and clients emerged and multiplied. They're key to the site's success-- I doubt I would keep using Twitter as much as I do if I always had to navigate back to and refresh the website. Making it an always-on part of my desktop makes it invaluable by comparison.
Fostering a dev community is a way to ensure a small but powerful group of passionate early adopters. It can bring new and unexpected functionalities to the project. And if people start building tools that take advantage of the Commons's wide-open API and data standards, they may just come up with a cool tool that brings even more casual users even deeper into the project. Why bet on the fact that they won't, and close the project off? Isn't it better to hope they do and leave the possibility open?
Finally, I'd like to suggest that while I said it's likely that casual users will always be the core of the user base, the numbers may be shifting. Google's recent unveiling of their Android App Inventor points toward some of the folks with the deep pockets and the big brains actually investing time, money, and energy into lowering the barriers to application development in some interesting ways. If the Smithsonian Commons were interoperable with App Inventor, wouldn't that be an amazing project for beginning students interested in software development, or the use of new media in traditional disciplines?
(1) The notion of the average visitor's experience of museums-- or experience of any form of media or spectacle for that matter-- as being "passive" is one that I find deeply problematic, but that's a matter for a different post.
Thoughts on the Smithsonian Commons
Reading the Smithsonian's recent announcement of the debut of the Smithsonian Commons Prototype and playing around on that page has left me feeling rather ambivalent, with more questions than answers.
I like the impetus behind the project-- it's ambitious and well-intentioned. Integrating the Institution's many web presences, putting them in an environment where the user has more control of how they use and experience it, allowing guests to collect and curate, themselves, rather than maintaining the position that curation is a rarefied activity best left to experts-- these are commendable goals, and the Commons, if it lives up to the promises of the Prototype page, will deliver on these things. But part of me feels like it's just... insufficient.
"Vast, findable, shareable, and free" is a great start. But it's not enough. What is lacking is any definition of openness, or any commitment to a specific vision of what openness means.
The goal of the project seems to be an opening up of the Smithsonian to a wider public-- and I think that's a great goal. But I worry that where the prototype has currently settled is may be giving more lip service to the principle of openness than it is embracing what that principle entails. This is where I start to have a lot of questions.
The prototype page promises that the Commons represents a "dedicat[tion] to stimulating learning, creation, and innovation through open access to Smithsonian research, collections and communities." And yet how open will that access truly be? In the four video use-cases presented by the prototype page, I see very little openness with data. I primarily see a more social approach to playing in the Smithsonian's sandbox. Letting others play in your sandbox is definitely a step toward openness, but true openness is letting others walk away with your sand and do whatever they want with it.
To put it another way: "Screws better than glues." Ownership is about the ability to alter, remake, use, remix, or hack. And you need to give your visitors data, not just let them see it. Being open with information in the digital age means not just allowing people to look at your books, but letting them walk away with a copy and seeing what they can do with it. Until that point, you're not really being open. You're just being transparent.
Openness is a moving target, of course. There's "open" and then there's open. And there are some indications that the project has the potential to be truly open. But they are somewhat ambiguous. In the use-case videos, two things are mentioned that give me hope that this could be a truly open project.
The first thing was that, in the video of the teacher, she is able to download her collection from the Smithsonian Commons and use it-- in this case, by making a Powerpoint for her fourth-graders out of images of Teddy Roosevelt she has gathered. This is hardly particularly exciting-- she could have done the same thing by mastering the elusive "left mouse click" technique. But is this all the download function will allow you to do, or is it just a failing of imagination on the part of this hypothetical teacher? I want to know-- how much metadata will be downloaded when you use that download tool? What format will your data come in? Will it be a rich enough data set to let you really do something with it?
But second, and perhaps more excitingly, the Smithsonian Commons will have an API. Of course, that can mean a lot of things. Will this API be available to any developer who wants to incorporate Smithsonian resources into his or her own site, or is it an internal API that allows all the various SI museum sites and digital archives (which run on a variety of different CMSs) to interoperate and participate in the Commons? And if it is public-- how expansive will it be? Some APIs are limited to highly specific functionalities, where others really let you get into the guts of the thing and really do something innovative. Which will this be?
People trust Google. Not everyone, of course, and as Jeff Jarvis has been pointing out a lot lately, a lot more Americans do than Europeans. But ultimately, it's a trusted company. They have access to everything on my phone, my email, they have access to 98% of my search activity... Normally, I'd say that anyone who trusted a profit-driven company that much was either crazy or stupid. And yet I do it. Why?
There's a couple things. One is openness. Even before the Data Liberation Front initiative, Google was fairly good about letting me export my data. I can take my ball and go home, because they let me own my data, even if they also own my data.
But the other one-- the really big one-- is their commitment to not being evil. The adoption of the motto "Don't be evil" was a step toward the creation of a certain type of culture-- one that was constantly asking certain fundamental questions when coming into new projects-- What does it mean to be evil? Is this new project evil? Can it be used for evil? Do its implications for malfeasant use overwhelm its potential for good or convenience?
Openness, like I said, is a moving target. What the Smithsonian needs to do, in approaching this project which has the potential to be really revolutionary, is to work on creating a similar culture, one that is always questioning openness. What does it mean to be open? How open can we be, here? Is this project being executed in the most open way possible?
As a publicly supported institution, openness should be seen as a moral obligation, a key element of the SI's mission. Public institutions need to see "open" as the default, not the exception. And yet, looking through the SI's web and new media strategy wiki, I don't see that sort of discussion going on. The adjective "open" is used a lot, but there's not as much grappling with what it means, or what it implies.
I hope none of this comes off as negative toward the Smithsonian or toward the Smithsonian Commons project. I think it's a great idea. As the Jefferson Library's Eric Johnson has pointed out, in some ways, Smithsonian 2.0 is really getting back to the organizational structures of Smithsonian 0.2. Under Spencer Baird's tenure, the Smithsonian's collections grew exponentially because of the crowdsourcing of knowledge in the form of specimens sent in by amateurs and hobbyists. Moreover, many of those doing the curation and gatekeeping during this period were, likewise, not exactly formally trained. They learned by doing-- on-the-job training that taught how museums work by forcing you to make a museum work.
It's natural that some museum workers-- like many in academia-- will have resistances to openness. After all, museums and universities are the great organizers of Knowledge. Their identity is often contingent upon their reputation for being able to separate wisdom from hokum, to selectively place that seal of approval on the true and disavow the false. And years and years of schooling and job experience are invested in credentialing, in the creation of the trust necessary to make such pronouncements authoritative and accurate. Openness can be seen as threatening to this, with its non-hierarchical structures, armchair experts, and "wisdom of crowds." Working toward a truly open model for a project like the Smithsonian Commons is, in some ways, going to be an uphill battle. But the first step of that battle has to be changing the discourse, actually forcing people to discuss, tease out, interrogate the principle of openness.
For the Smithsonian to move forward and remain relevant, not to mention for it to remain true to its mission as a public institution-- it needs to take a hard look at these questions when beginning a project with as much potential as the Smithsonian Commons.
The Smithsonian Folklife Festival began today. There is a quote from Secretary S. Dillon Ripley, under whose tenure at the SI the Folklife Festival began, that pertains just as much to the advent of the Smithsonian Commons as it does to the founding of the Festival: "Take the objects out of their cases and make them sing."
The Smithsonian Commons is a project that could well have just that ability, to unbind the vast collective knowledge of the Smithsonian Institution and put it out there for the whole world to experience.
The question of openness can be reduced to this: you can take the objects out of their cases. But do you just want to put them in front of a worldwide public, or to put them in their hands?
Why “Hack the Academy”?
From the moment it was announced almost a week ago, I was excited about the Hacking the Academy project. As a fan of Oulipo and Oubapo, the notion of trying to crowdsource the meat of an edited volume in a single week is particularly exciting to me. I think that imposing constraints, even arbitrary ones, can be a very effective technique that can foster creative thought, new ideas, and force one to re-assess convention. Which, of course, is all in keeping with the very spirit of the book.
However, as I began to explain the project to friends outside the digital humanities, even my academic friends who just aren't plugged into the world of computer-based methodologies in humanistic research and pedagogy, I got a lot of confused looks and cocked heads when I mentioned the title.
"What does that mean, exactly?" was a common reply.
The metaphor of hacking is central to this project. And I think it's extremely apt. But the term is a subtle one, and frequently misused in public discourse. To avoid preaching to the choir-- to make this project more comprehensible and useful to readers who may be coming from a less technical background-- I think it's important to talk, briefly, about what "hacking" means, and what it might mean to "hack the academy."
Popular Images of Hackers
From news accounts, film, and television, most people have a certain concept of what the term "hacker" means. And it's not a term with many positive associations. News accounts over the last twenty-six years or so have constructed a notion of hackers as a dangerous element-- young men in basements, ruthlessly attempting to subvert any notion of security in the age of networked computers. Hackers endanger national security by cracking into national security networks. (Which, after all, is how the net was born-- out of DARPA's ARPANET.) Hackers are trying to steal your personal data. They want to steal your passwords, and empty your bank account. They are malevolent, egotistical, and avaricious.
Movies like WarGames and 1995's Hackers bring a more human face to hackers, portraying them as young men (they are almost always portrayed as men) who are driven by youthful exuberance, curiosity, and misled idealism who nevertheless get involved in a very dangerous game of violating security. And from sources like these we get the imagery that dominates the public imagination about hackers: dark rooms, incessant typing into Unix terminals, sometimes strange three dimensional object-oriented graphical user interfaces with which the hacker virtually flies through towers of pure information.
However, all of this focuses simply on crackers, a specific subgroup of hackers who "crack" security systems. The term itself has a far more expansive, impressionistic meaning.
The Meaning of "Hack"
The Jargon File presents a wide variety of meanings to the term "hack," as well as a short article on the topic. There are many definitions of "hack," some of them seemingly deeply contradictory. And yet there is, in the final analysis, a unity to the term.
Originally, the term was used to describe code. There were two opposing meanings to calling a piece of code a "hack." One, it is expertly written, efficient, and does precisely what it is intended to do, with eloquence. The other was that the code was hastily written, sloppy, and essentially only just good enough. It was a workaround, the software equivalent of a hardware kludge.
As mutually exclusive as these two connotations of the term may seem, however, both the polished, impressive hack and the quick-and-dirty hack have a fundamental similarity. They are both born of a certain relationship to a certain type of knowledge.
Hackers are autodidacts. From the earliest hackers working at large research universities on the first networks to anyone who deserves the term today, a hacker is a person who looks at systemic knowledge structures and learns about them from making or doing. They teach themselves and one another because they are at the bleeding edge of knowledge about that system.
Through that type of knowledge-seeking and knowledge-creation, you may approach a fork in the road with a particular problem you are working on, and you have to decide to either go for an ugly hack or an eloquent hack. But either way, the product is functional, it does something, and it is innovative. And it is a product of your relationship to that systemic knowledge structure-- to the computer languages, networking protocols, etc.
The culture of the first people to use the term "hack" produced a second-order meaning, as well. A hack is a practical joke, a playful subversion or gaming of a system. The MIT Gallery of Hacks presents a fascinating history of such hacks on the MIT campus, from CalTech's cannon mysteriously disappearing and re-appearing at MIT to a Campus Police car appearing on the roof of the MIT dome. These "hacks" aren't really so different, however, from the software hacks discussed above. There is a sense of play in coding, too-- it is not apparent to everyone, but it is there. And the fundamental action here is the same: it's the clever gaming of complex systems to produce an unprecedented result.
The Hacker Ethos
Learning about and improving highly complex systems by playful innovation is at the core of what I would call the "hacker ethos." The fact that this is about a relationship to knowledge systems means that the term has, over the last thirty years or so, come to be applied to an ever-growing assortment of activities.
This was very apparent when a group of us at THATCamp 2010 attempted to put together the beginnings of a syllabus on "Ethical Hacking for the Humanities." The more we discussed what should be included, the more amorphous the whole endeavor began to feel. Just a sampling of the things that were mentioned:
- Life Hacking, the application of scripts, codes, and tricks to make one's life more productive and efficient.
- Case Modding, the modification of computer cases to create functional artwork.
- Phone Phreaking, the gaming of telecommunications systems to get free calls
- iPhone Jailbreaking, the act of hacking an iPhone to run non-Apple-approved software.
- Ikea Hacking, the use of modular Ikea furniture components to create other types of furniture not offered
- Game Modding, the revision of computer games (and creation of new games) by the alteration and cannibalization of existing game code.
...And that's just a partial list.
But in each of these activities, you can see the kernel of the same hacker ethos. Each of these activities is based on the use of playful creation to enrich knowledge of complex systems, whether you're making furniture from the complex system that is the Ikea catalog, or learning how to game Ma Bell for free calls to Bangalore.
This sort of playful creation should not be unfamiliar to academics. It's not dissimilar to the Situationist International's concept of détournement, or Dick Hebdidge's notion of subcultural style systems. It's Levi-Strauss's bricolage re-imagined for a time when computers have replaced magic.
A different approach to this hacker ethos can be found in what Eric Steven Raymond has described as "The Hacker Attitude." Raymond discusses five elements that he feels are central to the hacker attitude, which is born of what I'd describe as its general ethos:
- The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.
- No problem should ever have to be solved twice.
- Boredom and drudgery are evil.
- Freedom is good.
- Attitude is no substitute for competence.
...I'd argue that a great number of academics would agree with most if not all of those statements, though they might not want to admit to it.
Why Hack the Academy?
Many of the entries in this project offer answers to this question, and I don't have the space or time here to even begin fully answering it. Let me sketch out a few thoughts, however.
The academy is approaching a new integration with revolutionary new technology. We've quickly gone from computers in the classroom to classrooms inside computers, and to the integration of new media into the very fabric of classroom interaction. Computer-based research in the age of ubiquitous, fast, and cheap computing is changing very fundamentally our approaches to research, collegiality, and collaboration. Pure information is getting cheaper and more easily accessible, while the mental and coding chops to process the glut of information are becoming more and more valuable in the new knowledge economy.
We can see two highly complex systems-- computer technology and the academy, one complex by nature and one deeply complex by force of history-- colliding and hybridizing. And as this happens, we are faced with a situation where even the very clever people on the cutting edge who have working knowledge of both systems cannot fully synthesize them and predict outcomes. We don't know what this hybridization will amount to. So all we can do is steer it by getting out there and learning more by creative creation. You have to make the tools that steer the future of academia, or that future will be steered by whomever has the best sales pitch to the administrators. We have to create tools and efficiencies that improve the way we do things, because only by so doing can we fully understand the new world we inhabit.
In other words, we have to embrace the hacker ethos.
There's a lot to be bleak about when you look to the future of higher education. The academic job market is grim. The publishing system seems on the verge of economic collapse. Universities are quickly becoming prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of students, who are in turn forced into an exploitative system of student loans. The system, to some of us, appears to be broken.
But when a system fails, you hack around it. Some hacks may be eloquent and subtle, they may be almost poetic. Others are nasty hacks that only really serve in a single work case-- but in either case, you've routed around the problem. You've fixed something. You've improved functionality. And likely, you've learned a little something yourself about the functioning of the system you're working with, and will be better prepared next time you find a bug.
The hacker ethos, in the end, might save us-- or at least prolong the life of the academy as we know it.
And finally, there is that sense of play. It's something that "serious" academics don't get to explore as often as they should. Play is good for the soul-- it reinvigorates, brings joy, renews commitments. It makes things fun. And it is also good for the intellect. Play leads to types of problem-solving and synthesis that would otherwise be impossible. There's a reason that "clever" means both funny and smart. And reading through the submissions to this project, I think that's one theme that comes back again and again. We're working on fixing things, yes, and we're trying to figure things out. But we're also having a heck of a lot of fun.
The academy, ultimately, can only be invigorated and improved by an infusion of the hacker ethos that goes beyond the Computer Science departments and infects all the disciplines. It has the potential to help fix problems in the system, deepen our understanding, and make our lives a little more fun.
So yes, we should go out and hack the academy.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Why Digital Lectures Don’t Work…
Why Digital Lectures Don't Work, and What We Can Do About It
...A video I did for my Digital Storytelling class final project.
While many who use digital technology in education are attempting new and innovative approaches to teaching over the internet, the use of videotaped lectures is still commonplace in distance education and in open education initiatives. This video argues that the lecture a classroom technique that can be argued to be vestigial at best, even in the classroom ought to be updated rather than reproduced in the online classroom, by paying attention to the limitations and strengths of online video as a medium.
My primary goal is to encourage people to think about the way that various media affect how we communicate, that there should be different pedagogical approaches online than in the classroom.
It seems rather obvious, but theres also a lot of tone-deaf stuff out there. And my pet peeve is the use of recorded classroom lectures for open ed and distance learning programs.
The only thing more boring than a bad lecture is a decent lecture on Youtube.
COPYRAGE
My Digital Storytelling class is covering copyright this week, and while my classmates have definitely offered some articulate and cogent points on the topic in their blog posts, I'm deeply discouraged by the apparent emotional effect of reading a couple hours of information on copyright. The prevalent emotions that people describe after this week's reading are fear, discouragement, and sadness.
I'd like to offer an alternative: Rage. Anger and indignation. I know, we're supposed to be educators, academics. Dispassionate. Objective. We're supposed to keep our heads low, to save our politics and our opinions for obscure monographs that nobody reads. Educators may be "liberal" or "progressive," but certainly not radical. We're the theory folks-- leave the praxis to someone else.
I think it's time we all channel our inner Howard Beale and say:
I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth; educators are having to make due with even less, and at the same time we're told that digital instruction is the future. We're expected to be high-tech and given little institutional support and no legal guidance.
We know this is an untenable situation. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we have had another 20,000 copyright suits and 30,000 more on the way-- as if that's the way it's supposed to be!
We all know things are bad -- worse than bad -- they're crazy.
It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my Youtube mashups and let me use a copyrighted picture in my PowerPoints now and again, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."
Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.
I want you to get mad!
I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and No Child Left Behind and the state budget cuts and the infringements on our right to Fair Use.
All I know is that first, you've got to get mad.
You've gotta say, "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value! I have a right to free expression!"
So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell,
"I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!!"
Teaching, researching, and scholarship are all spelled out in our copyright law as protected activities that entitle one to protection under fair use. We shouldn't let ourselves be cowered.
And while that passage was written before there was a need to take into account issues like digital pedagogy, I'd argue that it provides for "multiple copies for classroom use" provides a spirit-of-the-law coverage. And don't even get me started on Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, and its implications for the current state of copyright.
But the fact is, copyright law in America is broken, it grows more and more restrictive, and monied corporate copyright holders have the means to bury individuals, even when those individuals work within the letter of the law with regard to copyright.
And in reaction to this, as we saw in Bound by Law?, documentarians-- even those who operate in accordance with fair use laws-- are forced to take an array of CYA measures, including paying for clearances that shouldn't be necessary, editing out key scenes that they can't afford to clear, and paying exorbitantly for Errors and Omissions Insurance.
So where does that leave us as academics, educators, and students? If we need to be developing these digital skills, to be come digital storytellers ourselves... and if the internet allows us to engage students in a truly multimedia way that is deeply compelling-- it's no wonder that we look at the hoops that filmmakers jump through with fear. 'Cause teachers have even fewer financial and other resources than even low-budget filmmakers. But we can't let that push us away from the inevitable direction of education, and we can't just keep everything we do behind the walled garden of BlackBoard. At least I couldn't. Not in good conscience.
Instead, we have to take the opposite approach. We have to assert, and assert loudly, that just because we use digital technology doesn't change the fact that we are academics, teachers, and students. This may mean coming into conflict, at times, with administrators and University Copyright Offices. It may mean getting a few takedown notices and cease and desist letters... That just means you're doing something right, if it lands in the hands of higher-ups and people outside the school.
Thinking about it, I realized that the provisions protected by fair use and free speech-- teaching, research, scholarship, criticism, and parody-- that represents something like 99% of everything I do, when it comes to re-purposing other people's copyrighted material. That could change some day, and I am fine with that, but until it does, I'm just going to go ahead under the assumption that if I'm doing it, then it's fair use. I refuse to distract myself from the more important issues of scholarship, social and political commentary, communication with students, etc. by the thought of the possibility of copyright lawyers swooping in like Dementors and hitting me with a lawsuit.
So I leave you with a little image I created. Yeah, it's got a couple copyrighted figures in it, from some big companies: McDonalds, Disney, Warner Brothers, and Windows. But I just don't care. It's satire. And the purpose of this blog is academic. That's protected. And plus-- I'm doing it, it must be fair use.
