Went to a meeting with Morgan tonight with people presenting their research plans and directions. It was interesting, but also sad. This is the second event I've been to in the last month where I've encountered academics with datasets that were not under copyright but were afraid to make use of them because they didn't know enough about US copyright or because they were afraid to upset some controlling institution ("I don't want to piss off that museum", etc).

I don't blame the academics in that meeting. Nobody should have to know the amount of bullshit I know about copyright these days. We should be in a less terrible environment. But it's still sad. (One person refuted my comment that "this isn't under copyright because it's data" with "yeah but it's not data, it's metadata, so that's different, right?")

Also kind of sad to see the state of tooling for manipulating data. Morgan learned how to program in Python over the summer, and so has a project where she's manipulating some data. But most people in the room are using very desparate methods of perusing data. One presentation was entirely on how there was a web user interface for a dataset this scholar needed, but they needed to search for anonymous sources, but there was no way to select "search for something where there is no author", because not putting an author in the search engine meant "you don't need to know the author".... but the scholar was studying the pattern of anonymous sources. Only by chance did they happen to find someone who had scraped the "metadata" off the site, and they were able to use that, and with some (very) scrappy Excel usage, made it by.

One person at the meeting was someone who teaches students and faculty programming literacy for the school, so she was very interested in learning about Morgan's experience learning programming over the summer. She remarked that even though the need for programming tools applies in the humanities, most of the people who approach her are from the sciences. We both agreed though, there's no reason the humanities shouldn't become more programming literate, and these presentations were good examples. There was some discussion about how Python lowers that barrier to entry, but even in Python's manual there are examples about computing Fibonacci sequences which makes some up-and-coming programmers feel like they aren't qualified and back out.

The upside to all this? The other week John Resig of jQuery fame gave a presentation on programming meets art history with his project at http://ukiyo-e.org/ and many audience members (including those at the local museum) were exuberant to participate. John made the point, now that museums are asking him to work with them, he probably could not have made the progress he did if he asked for permission in the first place, he would have been turned down. Once it became so obviously useful to have image recognition algorithms going over such a wide corpus of works institutions are coming to him instead. (John also made it clear that he didn't consider himself the expert here, and is happy to have the experts working with him, which I think helped the atmosphere of the room amongst other things.)

After the presentation, I hung around with a couple of Morgan's colleagues. "I'd love to use that software on my area of research", they said. "But there's no way I could convince the relevant institutions to let me do it... and I'm afraid to do it on my own, because then I'd burn that bridge." Yep.