Is Creative Commons Flexible Enough for Historians?

Gumby and Monkey, by Joe (CC-BY-SA)

Creative Commons licenses are incredibly useful. They're easy to use. More and more people understand them. It's even possible to do web searches of Creative Commons content making it easy to find content you can use with confidence. The Open Access movement, particularly in the UK, seems to be promoting Creative Commons licensing as the best way to move towards open access to research, because it means we can (largely) leave lawyers out of it all and implement a standard set of licenses that everyone understands (or should understand). I see the practical merits in that and am a big fan of keeping costs at a minimum. But I also see the counterpoint, that many historians feel Creative Commons just isn't designed for them (see my previous post on Alternative Licensing). Sometimes that feeling is based on a misunderstanding. Sometimes, I think, it's justified. In the interest of opening that discussion, I thought I'd present a couple of scenarios in which I believe Creative Commons is not flexible enough for historians looking to manage the rights associated with their research.

For all of these scenarios, let's assume the work in question is an academic monograph written solely by me.

1) Supporting certain derivations

What I want: I'd like people to be able to translate my book into a range of formats (braile, French, audio, stage performance) without having to ask me, provided that every effort is made to ensure that the translation accurately represents the arguments and positions of the original, and the translator is listed as such on the title page or where applicable. This reuse is only permitted if the entire work is included in the translation.

Why this is important to me: I'm a big supporter of accessibility; I wouldn't want anyone working to provide access to my work for the blind to feel they were prevented from doing that good work by a legal restriction.

Why CC is not sufficient: CC-BY would allow this type of reuse. But it would also allow someone to translate only the introduction, or to pick and choose parts and rearrange them in a way that changes my message. I'm worried if they do that someone might get the wrong idea about my work. You may not think that's important, but it's my book and my reputation, and I am worried. I could use a 'no derivatives' license, CC-BY-ND, but I do want to allow certain types of derivatives under certain conditions.

2) Supporting certain commercial reuses

What I want: I'd like professors creating course readers to feel empowered to use parts of my book with their students. I'd also like private individuals to be able to use individual chapters in edited collections with modest print runs (let's say less than 500). I don't want Evil Publishing Ltd to be able to do the same without asking.

Why this is important to me: I'm a big supporter of ensuring students and my colleagues have access to my work. I also think it's important to support small entrepreneurs. But I know that the publishing industry is big business, and if they're going to make big money from my ideas, I think it's fair to ask that I get a cut of that. Anyone who has ever licensed stock imagery to use on a website or in print knows that the price of the license changes with the number of 'impressions'. In essence, the bigger the advertising campaign, the more money they want to charge you to use the image. This merely attempts to apply those types of restrictions on my book.

Why CC is not sufficient: CC-BY wouldn't give me the power to put the restrictions on Evil Publishing Ltd that I believe is important. Forcing me to use CC in this instance forces me to give away rights I would like to hold onto.

* * *

Those are just a couple of simple examples, which I don't believe are far fetched when considering licensing and reuse from the historian's perspective. For them to work, I think at the very least we need to adopt a CC-BUT license, in which creators are allowed to add restrictions to their license. As I said before, if the concerns of licensors aren't met, they won't get on board. I'd like them on board, but that may need to come at the expense of what seems on the surface to be a simple CC solution.

Programming Historian 2 Lessons I'd Like to See

I've been actively part of the Programming Historian 2 team for the past two years and I've been really pleased to see so many people using and learning from the site, including a number of university courses. I learned to write Python code from the original Programming Historian, and I still regularly reference skills and techniques found in the lessons in my day-to-day research.

My role as an editor of the project means I help guide lessons contributed by others through peer review and editing. I'm also always looking around the blogosphere for people working on cool new techniques or writing guides of their own that I think would be useful for practicing historians. For the most part this is a passive process. I sit, I wait, and I watch. But every once in a while I come across something I'd really like to see. So rather than wait, I thought I'd post my personal wish list of Programming Historian 2 lessons I'd like you to write for all of us.

In no particular order:

• How do you turn a spreadsheet into a database and write custom queries? The jump from an Excel spreadsheet which you can see to a MySQL or sqlite3 database that you can't see is not an easy one. A lesson on making this leap would be well received and widely used I would imagine.
• What the heck do you do with topic models? The entire digital humanities world seems fixated on topic models these days. Our most popular lesson by far is a tutorial on Getting Started with Topic Modeling and MALLET. But what are the cool things we can do once we HAVE generated topic models? What can we know? How do we use it responsibly? How do I interpret all these numbers and topics?
• What can we do with our sources once they've been downloaded? I see so many people using programming to curate sources, but far fewer people asking historical questions of their sources using programming. What are some of the ways we can actually answer questions about the past with programming?

I'd be very happy to hear from anyone who'd like to take on these challenges and create a Programming Historian 2 lesson, or from anyone with an idea of their own they think others could benefit from. Check out our submission guidelines and be in touch.

Tricks for Transcribing High-Contrast Historical Reproductions

If you spend enough time as a historical researcher, you're bound to come across the black blob. The blob - also referred to by its more technical name: "those letters I can't make out because of the stupid contrast levels on the reproduction" - is far more common than many of us would like, especially in online databases containing copies of original historical materials. It may not be the fault of the digitizers; the problem may have first occured decades ago when the source was transferred to microfilm or microfiche. Whatever the cause, it forces many a historian to squint and hypothesize about what lays behind. This post will provide a possible solution to the blob, using free software and straightforward techniques. It will not work in all cases, but it may conquer some blobs.

The above image is an unadulterated screenshot of a Vagrancy Removal Record from Middlesex County in the 1780s, found on the London Lives website. The original source contains lists of names of those forceably removed from Middlesex County. We've clearly got an Elizabeth "Eliz" and a Joseph here. But the contrast on the image is too high to make out their surnames. London Lives does offer full transcripts of everything on the website. Unfortunately, the transcribers were unable to decypher the names and left these particular entries incomplete. We too could pass them by, but if we are interested in what's underneath we can turn to a photo editing program to make an attempt.

This tutorial uses GIMP, a free open-source image processing program not unlike PhotoShop. Feel free to use the program with which you are most comfortable.

Step 1: Save the Original Image

I was using a Mac, so I took advantage of the handy screen capture feature (Cmd + Shift + 4), which allowed me to snag only the part of the image I was interested in correcting. Alternatively you could save the whole image by right-clicking it and using the "Save As" feature.

Step 2: Open the Image in an Image Processing Program

As mentioned above, if you do not already have an image processing program, try out GIMP. It is free after all.

Step 3: Adjust Brightness / Contrast

Open the "Brightness/Contrast" box located under the "Color" menu. Increase the brightness and contrast. In this example I've changed brightness by 118 and contrast by 103. Play with the sliders to get a result that works best for your particular source. You may even find it works better for you if you decrease one or the other. If you max out the values and need even more brightness or contrast, click OK and re-open the same dialogue box. This will allow you to repeat the process. You should notice some of the black blob beginning to fade and reveal hints of what might be underneath. This will probably occur first closer to the edge of the blob. You may now have all the information you need to finish the transcription. If so, great. If not, keep reading.


Step 4: Colorize

This feature is also located under the "Color" menu. This will help us to make the hidden letters pop out from amidst the shades of grey and black. Feel free to play with the sliders here to see if you can brighten up the results to the point where you are comfortable reading them. Sometimes I find it helps to decrease the "lightness" value while increasing the "saturation".

If you are still having trouble reading the words you can go back and repeat the process by again adjusting the contrast and brightness, and fiddling with the colours even more. If that doesn't work, you can move on to step 5.


Step 5: Trace What you Can See

For this step I like to use a USB tablet and pen, which lets me write to the screen in a fashion that's a bit more natural feeling than trying to draw using my mouse. If you don't have one you can do it with a mouse too. Choose the pen tool from the Toolbox and reduce the "Scale" of the brush to something appropriate for the size of the handwriting. Next, choose a nice bright colour that will stand out against the background colours you have chosen. Then, take your time and trace over whatever letters or bits of letters you can see.


As you can see from this example, we have been quite successful. What was once a "man Eliz" and a "ll Joseph" is quite obviously a "Hayman Eliz" and a "Hill Joseph". We did not get every part of every letter, but we did get enough new information to piece together the missing names.

This process may take a few minutes, but it can be worthwhile if your project depends upon decyphering the letters beyond the black blob. Unfortunately, it will not work in all cases. For this technique to work you do need a black blob with some shading variation. Computers store images as a series of coloured pixels with values ranging from completely black to completely white. Many black blobs are actually very dark grey blobs that look black to our eye. If there are shades of grey in your blob, and those shades correspond with the hidden letters underneath, as is often the case, then this technique may help you peel back the black and find what you are looking for.

Happy transcribing.

Academic and Public Historians: Working together?

Sean Kheraj, a postdoctoral student at the University of British Columbia recently defended his doctoral thesis on the environmental history of Vancouver's famous Stanley Park. In most people's books, that' makes him an expert on the field.

Sean was recently asked to write a review of the Vancouver Museum's exhibit, "The Unnatural History of Stanley Park." The experience, which Kheraj likened to "witnessing the physical manifestation of my dissertation as a museum display," was a challenge for him. Every detail that the museum had gotten wrong popped out. But, rather than posting a negative review, Kheraj reflected on the role many academic historians could be playing as consultants in instances that they choose not to.

It's something that came up a lot last year in our UWO Public History discussions, but perhaps not something that regularly enters the consciousness of many academic historians.

You can read the review at http://niche.uwo.ca/foresthistory/resources/exhibits