David's Latest Blog Posts

October 20-22, 2011

David Meurer will be attending and presenting a paper at the 2011 Second International Conference on Culture and Computing at Kyoto University, Japan, Oct. 20-22, 2011. The paper is entitled "Towards a Dialogic Archive: Canadian Copyright Law, Digital Archives, and Fair Dealing." He will be part of a session on Digital Archives chaired by Geoffrey Rockwell.

Bill Kennedy and I had the opportunity to meet with archivists from around the world at the 2009 Association of Canadian Archivists conference "Rights, Responsibilities, Trust: Archives and Public Affairs".

Google is defending users rights in response to New Zealand's proposed section 92A amendments.

Statistics provided by Google suggest that the erosion of users rights is occurring in a multitude of ways at the intersections of business and communications technologies. The ease with which allegedly infringing uses are surfaced, and unsubstantiated takedown notices issued for the purpose of advancing a commercial position demonstrates the perils of an information culture oriented around restrictive interpretations of copyright and intellectual property law.

Preserving Carnival

York University and Dr. Christopher Innes, the Canada Research Chair in Performance and Culture, recently hosted the international conference “Carnival, ‘A People’s Art’, and ‘Taking Back the Streets’”. As chair of the “Preserving Carnival” panel I had the opportunity to meet with a small group of international scholars and archivists to discuss preservation methods, strategies and challenges relating to carnival.

Timeline was developed by MIT's SIMILE (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments) project. It interfaces data from an XML file with javascript and css for a visually rich, scrollable and draggable chronology interface. The tool is open source and potentially deployable within or in connection with Artmob archives for arts partners with an interest in visual chronologies.

A juried selection of rarely seen, difficult to find European films will soon be available online, for free. European Film Treasures, as the site will be known, is projected to include a collection of approximately 100 films at the time of its initial launch in April.