Orphan Works and Collective Memories: On Setting Up A "318 Civil Movement" Archive

The "318 Civil Movement", also called the Sunflower Movement, started on March 18, 2014 by a group of students and activists. They occupied the main chamber of the Parliament of Taiwan (the Legislative Yuan). For about three weeks, the occupied chamber was transformed into a theater of protest. The place was decorated with voluminous amounts of art works and other materials sent in by the supporters. There were numerous acts of performance and speech, streamed live by volunteers all the time during the entire occupation.

When the activists started to plan for a withdraw from the chamber, researchers at Academia Sinica also prepared for a full-scale preservation of the artifacts present in the chamber. A digitization and archiving effort started shortly afterward. A public accessible catalog to the "318 artifacts collection" was made available on March 18, 2015. As most artifacts were not documented with their creators when they were collected, researchers face interesting issues of authorship and ownership. We will report on how we deal with this collection of (pseudo) orphan works, including a classification for copyright labeling, a scheme for creators to self-identify their works online, and the use of Creative Commons Licenses in encouraging them to release their works to the public so as to further strengthen collective memories of the movement. We will also discuss several technical issues in hosting the archive using open source packages and tools.

For a catalog of the "318 Civil Movement" Archive, please visit http://public.318.io . For a small expo of the collected artifacts and some commentaries, please visit http://expo.318.io (in Chinese language only, sorry).