Kategorie: English Corner
Video tutorials on Automatic Text Recognition (ATR)
How a widely used ranking system ended up with three fake journals in its top 10 philosophy list
Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700
New home: https://celm.folger.edu/
Many UK museums still claim copyright in simple reproductions of 2D public domain works
https://douglasmccarthy.com/2024/06/schrodingers-copyright/
“Outdated interpretations of copyright law, restrictive reuse policies, technical protection measures, and inappropriate use of Creative Commons licences are frustrating access to public domain heritage in UK museums. This leads to a bizarre situation we might call ‘Schrödinger’s copyright,’ where the same artwork by the same artist is labelled ‘in copyright’ by one museum and ‘public domain’ by another – simultaneously – echoing Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment.
Cultural institutions are custodians of large and important repositories of public domain works. Their public missions matter, as do the ways they provide access to their collections. The opportunity cost of restrictive practices is vast—many missed chances to reach, inform, and engage people with cultural heritage. Open access remains ‘a road not taken’ for many UK museums.
Some hope that THJ v Sheridan will inspire more open policymaking in UK museums, which is long overdue. Are museums motivated and resourced to do so, or are they mired in the unsatisfactory status quo? We shall see.”
Ireland: Launch of first national guidelines on Open Access publishing
Fraudulent papers are flooding scientific journals
Predicting the Availability of Digital Surrogates of English Novels (1836, 1838)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.00513 (2020)
“Library digitization has made more than a hundred thousand
19th-century English-language books available to the public.
Do the books which have been digitized reflect the population
of published books? An affirmative answer would allow book
and literary historians to use holdings of major digital
libraries as proxies for the population of published works,
sparing them the labor of collecting a representative sample.
We address this question by taking advantage of exhaustive
bibliographies of novels published for the first time in the
British Isles in 1836 and 1838, identifying which of these
novels have at least one digital surrogate in the Internet
Archive, HathiTrust, Google Books, and the British Library.
We find that digital surrogate availability is not random.
Certain kinds of novels, notably novels written by men and
novels published in multivolume format, have digital
surrogates available at distinctly higher rates than other kinds
of novels.”
“We find that of the 126 novels, 106 (84%) have at least one digital
surrogate available in the major digital libraries.”
Video: Folk Magic in Medieval and Early Modern England
Reporter’s Guide to Investigating War Crimes
Nazi-Era Provenance of Museum Collections: A research guide
Open Access: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/238763
Google’s “AI Overview” can give false, misleading, and dangerous answers
Thought to be destroyed by Nazis, books of the Lublin Yeshiva Library are turning up
https://www.lootedart.com/news.php?r=WN8NVR160621 (Thanks to HR)
Video: Historic Children’s Voices Symposium
Link rot: 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later
https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/17/when-online-content-disappears/
“[W]e collected a random sample of 50,000 English-language Wikipedia pages and examined the links in their “References” section. The vast majority of these pages (82%) contain at least one reference link – that is, one that directs the reader to a webpage other than Wikipedia itself.
In total, there are just over 1 million reference links across all the pages we collected. The typical page has four reference links.
The analysis indicates that 11% of all references linked on Wikipedia are no longer accessible. On about 2% of source pages containing reference links, every link on the page was broken or otherwise inaccessible, while another 53% of pages contained at least one broken link.”
Mechthild’s Medieval Mystical Manuscripts Online
“MMMMO (Mechthild’s Medieval Mystical Manuscripts Online) is a project that aims to visualize the handwritten tradition of the Liber Specialis Gratiae by Mechthild of Hackeborn on an interactive map. The map can be accessed fia the following URL: https://helftamysticism.org“.
Illuminated manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (1966-1973)
Springer has broken its DOIs
Henry the Exuberant
Five years ago, an anonymous Wikipedian made their sole contribution: the claim that Emperor Henry II was also known as St Henry “the Exuberant”. This can now be found in at least 6 books, including three by academics and one by a monk. https://t.co/hGDjv7pKVi #medievalTwitter pic.twitter.com/Fl7eMTftYj
— Mark Thakkar (@brunellus) April 30, 2024
LMSYS Chatbot Arena: Benchmarking LLMs
Video: Constantin I. Karadja (1889-1950), the Righteous Bibliophile and his Mediaeval Manuscript Fragments
Video: The History of Marginalia: medieval manuscripts
The EU imperative to a free public domain: The case of Italian cultural heritage
“The Italian transposition of Article 14 CDSM Directive and the Italian Courts’ rulings reveal an attempt to impose new forms of exclusivity on cultural heritage that may go even further than copyright restrictions, thus becoming what scholars describe as ‘pseudo’ or ‘surrogate’ copyright.
This results in violating the principle of the numerus clausus of intellectual property rights and a significant distortion in the implementation of EU law in the country.”
Arsenic-laced books removed from National Library of France
Strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs) are an important topic
Milewska, Paulina; Nowicka, Zuzanna: The Ball is in the Game: Opportunities for the Protection of Freedom of Expression at the EU Level arising from Real Madrid vs Le Monde Case, VerfBlog, 2024/4/24, https://verfassungsblog.de/the-ball-is-in-the-game/, DOI: 10.59704/036d42efb824dade.
9 Georgian nationals arrested for stealing antique books
“During an action day supported by Europol and Eurojust and executed on 24 April 2024 in Georgia and Latvia, four Georgians suspected of stealing antique and rare books from libraries across Europe were taken into custody. In total, the criminal group is believed to be responsible for the theft of at least 170 books, causing financial damages amounting to around EUR 2 500 000 and an immeasurable patrimonial loss to society. Some of these stolen historical artefacts were sold via auction houses in St. Petersburg and Moscow, effectively making them irrecoverable.”
