Using the social graph, one can find the connections between seemingly disparate groups of people on different services. Most of the projects in the area are focussed on social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and so on. There is, however, a layer of social information that was created before this. Letters were, and still are, used as a method of communication. To some extent it is the Internet before the technology became available. There is a host of data that is shared in each missive. For example, the author and their correspondent. That is only the tip of the metadata though:

• What are they writing about?
• Whom are they writing about?
• When was the letter written?
• Where was it written?

The Open Letters project, grew out of some musings when working on the timeline for the Open Milton website. I could see the links between the texts and some of the events but I was curious about how things linked together. Neither texts nor authors exist in a vacuum. Authors write to other people – agents, authors, casual acquaintances, friends and family – and they write about books. Sometimes they write about books that they have read, sometimes about what they are writing.

From these we can infer what books, authors, or authors who influenced the author or were being influenced at the time. From this, we can see the growth of the social graph into the cultural graph. Essentially it is the same notion as the social graph but the cultural graph links items like books, poems and events together. In itself it means nothing but linked to the social graph, it allows the user to discover who is being written to whilst a book was being written. Is the author talking to other authors or only to his agent about it?

Charles Dickens was a prolific letter writer which is why he was chosen as the first author for the project. From his own letters, we can see him writing to authors, such as George Eliot or Wilkie Collins, and scientists like Charles Babbage, inventor of the Difference Engine or his agent about his works in progress. His letters shed some light into the nineteenth century literary world but also contextualises it within the wider world. His wide range of writing gave me a chance to cast widest net possible and set up as many nodes on the graph.

A brief peak at the correspondents to whom Dickens was writing about the Pickwick Papers, Dickens’s first novel, suggests that it more than just a book but an item of conversation which is revealed through his letters about the book. He managed to offend Mr David Dickson, a reader, with a passage in the novel, though invited W C Macready to a dinner to celebrate its publication. Later in his life, he wrote to Wilkie Collins, the author, complaining that “I have never seen anything about myself in print which has much correctness in it–any biographical account of myself I mean”. The set of letters sheds a little light into the public and private worlds of Dickens, from his mortification at offending a reader to complaining about his own portrayal. He comes alive as a person rather than just an author as does his social graph and the relationships with his correspondents is illuminated by the way that he addresses them with varying degrees of formality.

Now that the site is set up, the next step is to complete the set of Dickens letters which his daughters edited and published from the Project Gutenberg texts. The next major step is to try and collect the letters of his correspondents and from them the new correspondent nodes. As well as HTML representations of the letters, the project uses RDF, reusing Dublin Core and Friend of a Friend (FOAF) with its own extensions for the collection of letters called letter. Rufus Pollock has already created a graph that visualises the relationships between authors, time of begin written to and the number of times to which they were written and timelines for the letters are being developed.

There are, of course, more things that I would like to do but the major one task is building the collections of letters under open licenses. The project can be contacted through the open-literature mailing list if you would like to find out more or to contribute.

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The Durationator is a project based at Tulane University Law School in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA that is creating a separate software tool that will also help a user determine the copyright status of any given work.  Our goal is to be able to determine the copyright status of any work in any jurisdiction in the world.  Our main focus is U.S. law, but we have an international component that looks at individual countries as well, particularly non-EU countries, as we know that the EU will be well documented fairly soon from OKFN’s work.  We have been excited about finding a community in OKFN that is interested in the public domain, and more specifically the copyright status of works.

Our team hopes that this is our last summer of intense research.  (But we won’t hold our breath as we are already finding new areas of concern).

One of our main focuses has been on developing a tool that can educate people as to the intricacies of copyright law as well as determine the actual status of any work.  As such, our vision for our software has been user based - the user looking for an answer provides the information to the software themselves which then gives them an answer.  This is one reason why we believe our system is complementary to OKFN’s - a system that gives the green light, and a system that allows a user to play with various scenarios.

We will begin the testing phase this summer, and are looking for interesting candidates/partnerships to pursue our work.  We are also starting to think about what to do with our little monster, and so further suggestions on that are also very welcome.

We have had great fun with this project and we look forward to chatting more about our great adventure into copyright and coding. We are also hosting our Second “Future of Copyright” Speaker Series at Tulane Law School next year, which we are just starting to organize. Our speakers will include Julie Cohen, Kenneth Crews, Jane Ginsberg, Jessica Litman, William Patry, and Jule Sigall.

Please take a look at durationator.com to view a two minute video explaining what the Durationator seeks to do, as well as to play with a sample path based on the “Statute of Anne,” the first modern copyright statute.  Additionally, feel free to follow us on our blog or on twitter to check in on our research status this summer!

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The project allows the public to explore data on UK public spending over the past 6 years, in an intuitive way using maps, timelines and graphs. The latest release includes:

• A new mini-app called ‘Where are the cuts?‘ which will capture and visualise spending cuts as they happen.
• A new dashboard for visualising and exploring spending by region, type or over time - breaking down the jargon to make it easier to understand official spending categories.
• A new Where Does My Money Go? data store. This houses all the cleaned-up, nicely formatted data, sourced from many different government departments, and makes it available both via the web and and an API, enabling others to reuse, investigate and re-present the data.

In addition to new information about the spending cuts, the Where Does My Money Go? project plans to represent detailed information from the COINS database, the ‘holy grail’ of spending data, which George Osborne committed to publishing shortly after this election.

Dr Rufus Pollock, Economist from the University of Cambridge and Director of the Open Knowledge Foundation, comments:

It is crucial that the public are able to understand how they will be affected by the cuts to be announced on Monday - which depends on having a ‘bigger picture’ of where spending currently goes. We will be working hard to show the implications of spending cuts as they are announced and to track speculation about where cuts will be made in the future. Our project aims to close the loop between public information on spending and the public.

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Yesterday, it was announced that Wikimedia Germany, Creative Commons Germany and TextGrid are releasing a large collection of “culturally valuable” texts either in the public domain or under a CC-BY license, which is compliant with the Open Knowledge Definition.

From the press release:

The research group TextGrid recently obtained the texts of the online library zeno.org with financial support from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). This digital collection is the most comprehensive of its kind in the German-speaking areas and contains texts from the beginning of printing to the first decades of the 20th century.

TextGrid, Wikimedia Germany and Creative Commons Germany are now cooperating in order to make this collection of texts freely usable for the general public. Wikimedia will soon make the collection available with the assistance of TextGrid. Subsequent use of the texts will be possible without restriction if they are comprised of contents that are in the public domain (particularly in terms of the digitalized texts themselves). If additional data for providing access is included (bibliographic metadata, for example), it will be covered under the license CC-BY 3.0 de.

We were also interested to read the following comment from Dr. Heike Neuroth, TextGrid Project Manager at the Lower Saxony State- and University Library Göttingen:

The primary task of the Digital Humanities is no longer digitalization, as it was in the 90s, but instead the methodically innovative development of structured data sets. With this cooperation we will make access to this information possible not only to research communities but also to the general public.

At the Open Knowledge Foundation, we’ve also very interested in new ways of analysing, visually representing and otherwise exploring digital humanities texts - from our annotation and text analysis tools in projects such as Open Shakespeare and Open Milton to our Working Group in the Humanities which we’ve had on the backburner for a little while.

Many congratulations to Wikimedia Germany, Creative Commons Germany and TextGrid for the new release - and we look forward to the material going live online and learning more about what the collection contains!

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The event opened with two days of lectures, papers and debate around the areas of public data re-use and visualization. Highlights included a review of works by the Sunlight Foundation, and an exciting presentation of green lifestyle applications in development for Helsinki’s City as Living Factory of Ecology project, as well as stimulating presentations by Ben Cerveny of Stamen Design, and artist Aaron Koblin.

Project presentations took the form of a market in which initiators laid out their ideas in order to recruit collaborators. During the next two days and the following weekend, working groups came together around each of the concepts, to be developed over the ensuing fortnight.

Outcomes

Experience shows that it’s very difficult to judge at the outset which of these projects will deliver the most interesting or usable results, when success depends on many diverse factors. So I was thrilled to see that two of the projects that seemed particularly viable at the start of the seminar yielded such interesting results.

The team working on Madrid’s Kultur-O-Meter produced a detailed poster showing how the city’s cultural budget is distributed. With so much emphasis on the interactive, it’s refreshing to see how a very simple static model can be used to present detailed information concisely and elegantly. I particularly like how the design shows very clearly where the uncertainties lie. Accompanying their presentation is an account of the challenging process of data gathering and analysis (in Spanish).

Piotr Adamczyk, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art developed a timeline framework for exploring the museum’s extensive collection, which could be a wonderful resource for visitors and curators when it’s done. Props also go to the team behind New Political Interfaces for their fun and well-designed toy for visualizing political discourse online.

Liz Turner is founder of visualization studio iconomical and designer of Where Does My Money Go?

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The Community College Open Textbook Project, California Digital Marketplace, and the Open Knowledge Foundation invite those with an interest in open textbooks to a meeting on Wednesday, May 20th at 1330-1530 pm PDT (2130-2330 GMT or 2230-0030 CET).

The meeting will be primarly focused on metadata, tagging, interoperability issues, and repository efforts for open textbooks.

If you are in California, you can attend in person at the Foothil College Campus - otherwise you can participate virtually. Further details, including how to participate and an agenda, can be found on the wiki at:

• http://wiki.okfn.org/opentextbooks/3

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In the past, we have been involved in Open Everything London and Open Everything Berlin.

John Britton, who organised Open Everything Hong Kong, is now organising an Open Everything NYC event which will take next Saturday 18th April.

It should be a great opportunity to meet other people interested in ‘openness’ - from open knowledge to open source software! Details are as follows:

• When: Saturday 18th April 2009, 0800-1800
• Where: UNICEF Headquarters, United Nations Plaza in New York, NY
• Attendance: Free, see Open Everything NYC for details on registration.

The blurb:

Open Everything (global site) is a collection of events scattered all over the world, organized by ordinary people just like you. The purpose of the event is to explore and discuss ‘open’. The interpretation of the idea is in the hands of attendees, and each event differs from the next.

Let there be no confusion, Open Everything is not a tech conference. There is much more to ‘open’ than technology, part of the goal of the event is to bring the less known aspects of ‘open’ to the attention of the general public.

At Open Everything NYC 2009 there will be two invited guest speakers and a number of open sessions left in the hands of attendees. Feel free to come prepared with a topic to share, discuss, or present. Also feel free to act spontaneously and lead a group discussion with no preparation at all. The magic of the event is that it is open and we’re all free to contribute as we desire.

The event is free and open to the public, we do require that you register so we can give you a fancy name badge and maybe even a T-shirt. We’d also like to know how many people to expect so that we’re prepared.

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• where: Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL, London
• when: 28th March 2009, 1030-1830
• home: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/
• register: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/register/

If you plan to attend, and haven’t registered yet - we encourage you to book your ticket now as space is limited!

OKCon 2009: speakers and sessions

There will be two main sessions on ‘open knowledge for development’ and ‘open data and the semantic web’. In addition there will be plenty of open space - which currently includes talks ranging from visualising historical data to public domain fashion. Speakers will include:

• Rufus Pollock, Open Knowledge Foundation
• Jordan Hatcher, Open Data Commons
• Leigh Dodds, Talis
• Jeni Tennison, London Gazette + RDFa
• Tom Scott, BBC
• Mark Charmer, AKVO
• Simon Parrish, Aidinfo
• Vinay Gupta, Appropedia
• David Bollier, OnTheCommons + Author of Viral Spiral
• Sebastian Hellmann , DBpedia
• Hugh Glaser, University of Southampton
• Adnan Hadzi, Goldsmiths + Deptford.tv
• John Dalziel, The Computus Engine
• Julian Todd, Public Whip
• Andrea Rota, Liquid Culture + Yuk Hui, Goldsmiths
• Harry Halpin, University of Edinburgh + W3C
• Humphrey Southall, A Vision of Britain

Full details are available at the programme page and the provisional open space schedule.

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After the success of open everything Berlin last December (see documentation), the newthinking network and CC Salon Berlin teamed up to put on another event in Berlin last night:

• CC Salon Berlin and openeverything focus - Feb. 26 (CC Blog)
• openeverything focus + CC Salon (Michelle Thorne’s blogpost)

I was invited to speak - and gave an overview of the Open Knowledge Foundation, our projects, events, the background and rationale behind the Open Knowledge Definition, and a quick walkthrough of CKAN.

After me was Sebastian Moleski from Wikimedia Deutschland talking about the large donation of images from the German Federal Archives to Wikimedia Commons:

Starting on Thursday Dec 4, 2008, Wikimedia Commons witnessed a massive upload of new images. We received nearly 100,000 files from a donation from the German Federal Archives. These images are mostly related to the history of Germany (including the German Democratic Republic) and are part of a cooperation between Wikimedia Germany and the Federal Archives.

These images are licensed Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Germany License (CC-BY-SA). Wikimedia Germany and the Federal Archives have signed a cooperation agreement that, among other things, asserts that the Federal Archives owns sufficient rights to be able to grant this kind of license.

The donation received good press coverage (see articles in the New York Times, and Spiegel Online) and is an outstanding example of a cultural heritage institution making material available under an open license. (The other high-profile example is Flickr Commons. There’s an interesting blog post comparing the two here.)

To demonstrate CKAN in action, I created a commons-bundesarchiv entry for the collection.

Another interesting project I learned about was Valkaama - a movie where all the source material is openly licensed. (The creators have also been working on an Open Source Film Definition.)

If you’re in or around Berlin and interested in participating in similar events in the future, there’s a list of future events on the the Open Everything Berlin Mixxt Network. Also, if you want to stay in touch with people interested in all things open, see:

• open knowledge Berlin local group
• ok-berlin mailing list

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• Wem gehört das Wissen? Informationspolitik in Deutschland (Shorter German version)
• Public Interest Information Policy in Germany (Longer English version)

The piece finishes with three policy suggestions:

1. Support legislation as well as licensing and pricing policies that support public re-usability of Public Sector Information. The creation of a national register of PSI assets, and the commissioning of a country-wide and cross-sector report would help to inform appropriate activity in this area.
2. Support mandates for open access to publicly funded research. These should target higher education institutions, as well as funding bodies and umbrella organisations.
3. Keep the public domain in the public domain. Encourage publicly funded cultural heritage institutions to allow digital copies of their holdings to be re-used by the public. Encourage the adoption of intellectual property law and policy that takes account of public interest, as well as private interests.

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