A little while ago I posted some ideas for a project called OpenPhilosophy.org, which would enable users to transcribe, translate, annotate and create collections of philosophical texts which have entered the public domain.

I’m very excited to say that the project has secured some funding from JISC, who champion digital technology for use in higher education in the UK. The project will be a collaboration between Goldsmiths, University of London, the University of Oxford and the Open Knowledge Foundation. It will also involve students and staff at other institutions in the UK and further afield.

The project will develop an open source platform called TEXTUS, which will enable users to create, manage and interact with collections of texts. TEXTUS will power OpenPhilosophy.org. The platform will be developed with input from students and staff who will be using OpenPhilosophy.org in their teaching and research. It will have a strong emphasis on creating something beautiful, simple, intuitive and user-centric.

It will benefit from the wisdom of a distinguished Advisory Board of philosophy professors and digital humanities experts, which currently includes:

• Frederick Beiser, Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University
• Tobias Blanke, Head of the Centre for e-Research at King’s College London
• David Bourget, Director of the Centre for Computing in Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy, University of London
• Andrew Bowie, Professor of Philosophy and German at Royal Holloway, University of London
• Dan Cohen, Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University
• Simon Critchley, Professor of Philosophy at New School for Social Research, New York and Editor of The Stone philosophy forum at the New York Times
• Manuel Dries, Research Fellow in Philosophy at University of Oxford
• Christian J. Emden, Associate Professor in German Studies at Rice University
• Stefan Gradmann, Library and Information Science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
• Kenneth Haynes, Professor of Comparative Literature and Classics, Brown University
• Derek Matravers, Professor in Philosophy at the Open University and Lecturer at the University of Cambridge.
• Nigel Warburton, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University and Co-founder of the Philosophy Bites podcast

In the first phase of the project we will be developing a prototype of the TEXTUS platform, and sourcing and selecting public domain philosophical texts to include in OpenPhilosophy.org.

If you’d like to be kept in the loop, you can request an invite to test the project when it is ready. If you’d like to come and help out, you are warmly invited to join us on the public open-philosophy discussion list. You can also follow @OpenPhilosophy on Twitter.

Pictures of Roman Ondák’s “Table” (Berlin, 2010) by Marc Wathieu, CC-BY.

TEXTUS is an open source platform for working with collections of texts and metadata. It enables users to transcribe, translate, and annotate texts, and to manage associated bibliographic data.

Here’s the rationale:

The combination of freely available digital copies of public domain works, open bibliographic data and open source tools has the potential to revolutionise research in the humanities. However there are currently numerous obstacles which mean that they are often under-utilised by scholars and students in teaching and research:

• From classic literary and cultural works, to letters, drafts, notes, and other historical documents, there is a huge amount of freely available public domain material that is highly relevant to scholars and students engaged in research in the humanities. But these works can be difficult to find, difficult to work with, and works by a given author may be scattered in a variety of locations. Search results may be confusing or unclear. Automated Optical Character Recognition of texts may be inaccurate or incomplete. The metadata for the work for may be unclear and the provenance and rights status for a given digital edition may be unknown. It is not always clear how to cite passages from digital editions of public domain works.
• Over the past few years, libraries and other cultural heritage organisations have been releasing open data about works they hold. This has the potential to be a rich resource for scholars interested in building scholarly bibliographies and working with large collections of texts. While there are a growing number of tools and services for working with bibliographic data, many researchers may not know how to use these, and online bibliographies may not link through to digital copies of public domain works which are available online.
• There are a growing number of open source tools for transcribing, translating and annotating texts. However many of these are one off projects and it may not be clear how to deploy the tools in relation to a given text or collection of texts.

Here’s what it would do:

The TEXTUS platform will enable users to:

• Transcribe texts from images, PDFs or other non-machine readable sources.
• View texts and translations side by side – and create new translations of texts for use in teaching or research.
• Annotate texts, and share annotations with groups of users, or with the public.
• Curate, share and export collections of bibliographic metadata (scholarly references), including metadata associated with texts published on the platform.

Here’s a peek under the hood:

TEXTUS builds on and utilises existing best of breed open source components and software packages such as:

• Annotator – an open-source Javascript tool to enable annotations to be added to any webpage
• Bibserver – which includes numerous tools, services and standards for working with bibliographic metadata
• Open Literature – which powers OpenShakespeare, OpenMilton and other sites
• Public Domain Works – a nascent directory of works which have entered the public domain in different countries around the world
• Scripto – an open source tool that enables users to contribute transcriptions to online documentary projects
• WordPress – due to its popularity, ease of use, and extensive plugin system, TEXTUS will use WordPress as its main CMS

If you’re interested, you can join discussion on the Open Knowledge Foundation’s open-humanities mailing list.

But how can we use pictures to represent processes? Otto and Marie Neurath’s Isotype Institute from the 1940s was interested in using pictures to represent processes as well as numbers. For example, here’s one showing how Reuters’ news editorial process works:

Here’s a few more which aim to compare various aspects of political systems in different countries:

Here’s another much more recent example showing how laws are passed in the US, which was a winner of the Sunlight Labs Design for America competition:

I’d love to see more information graphics that helped people to understand official processes. For example:

• Local decision making
• How lobbying works
• How elections work – from ballot box to outcome
• Legal processes in particular areas – e.g. immigration
• International organisations – e.g. the UN security council
• Public finance – from taxation to budgeting to expenditure
• Public procurement

One could imagine that graphical representations of an official process could have common elements that could be used to represent similar processes in other countries – for example icons to represent voters, lobbyists, political representatives, laws, decisions, revisions, budgets, and so on.

One could do something like the Noun Project‘s Iconathon aimed at building a set of icons to help to represent official processes. The Iconathon 2011 produced a suite of collaboratively designed new civic symbols which anyone is free to use:

I’m sure Marie and Otto Neurath, who pioneered the Isotype picture language (International System of TYpographic Picture Education) would heartily approve. For comparison, here are some of the Isotype designs created by Gerd Arntz, who produced over 4000 symbols for the Isotype picture language:

For several years I’ve been meaning to start OpenPhilosophy.org, which would be a collection of open resources related to philosophy for use in teaching and research. There would be a focus on the history of philosophy, particularly on primary texts that have entered the public domain, and on structured data about philosophical texts.

The project could include:

• A collection of public domain philosophical texts, in their original languages. This would include so called ‘minor’ figures as well as well known thinkers. The project would bring together texts from multiple online sources – from projects like Europeana, the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg or Wikimedia Commons, to smaller online collections from libraries, archives, academic departments or individual scholars. Every edition would be rights cleared to check that it could be freely redistributed, and would be made available either under an open license, with a rights waiver or a public domain dedication.
• Translations of public domain philosophical texts, including historical translations which have entered the public domain, and more recent translations which have been released under an open license.
• Ability to lay out original texts and translations side by side – including the ability to create new translations, and to line up corresponding sections of the text.
• Ability to annotate texts, including private annotations, annotations shared with specific users or groups of users, and public annotations. This could be done using the Annotator tool.
• Ability to add and edit texts, e.g. by uploading or by importing via a URL for a text file (such as a URL from Project Gutenberg). Also ability to edit texts and track changes.
• Ability to be notified of new texts that might be of interest to you – e.g. by subscribing to certain philosophers.
• Stable URLs to cite texts and or sections of texts – including guidance on how to do this (e.g. automatically generating citation text to copy and paste in a variety of common formats).

The project could also include a basic interface for exploring and editing structured data on philosophers and philosophical works:

• Structured bibliographic data on public domain philosophical works – including title, year, publisher, publisher location, and so on. Ability to make lists of different works for different purposes, and to export bibliographic data in a variety of formats (building on existing work in this area – such as Bibliographica and related projects).
• Structured data on secondary texts, such as articles, monographs, etc. This would enable users to browse secondary works about a given text. One could conceivably show which works discuss or allude to a given section of a primary text.
• Structured data on the biographies of philosophers – including birth and death dates and other notable biographical and historical events. This could be combined with bibliographic data to give a basic sense of historical context to the texts.

Other things might include:

• User profiles – to enable people to display their affiliation and interests, and to be able to get in touch with other users who are interested in similar topics.
• Audio version of philosophical texts – such as from Librivox.
• Links to open access journal articles.
• Images and other media related to philosophy.
• Links to Wikipedia articles and other introductory material.
• Educational resources and other material that could be useful in a teaching/learning context – e.g. lecture notes, slide decks or recordings of lectures.

While there are lots of (more or less ambitious!) ideas above, the key thing would be to develop the project in conjunction with end users in philosophy departments, including undergraduate students and researchers. Having something simple that could be easily used and adopted by people who are teaching, studying or researching philosophy or other humanities disciplines would be more important that something cutting edge and experimental but less usable. Hence it would be really important to have a good, intuitive user interface and lots of ongoing feedback from users.

What do you think? Interested in helping out? Know of existing work that we could build on (e.g. bits of code or collections of texts)? Please do leave a comment below, join discussion on the open-humanities mailing list or send me an email!

If a text is widely known and published more than a century and a half ago, chances are that it will be freely available on the web to read and download. Every person with an internet connection has access to a vast wealth of cultural and historical material: novels and poems, essays and manifestos, constitutions and scriptures.

As well as accessing and sharing this material, the law says that anyone can translate and republish works which have entered the public domain. But translations constitute new creative works and are hence covered by copyright and related rights, which means that by default they cannot be shared online.

This is, of course, perfectly understandable. There is money to be made from producing new translations of classic works, which means publishers and translators are incentivised to assert their rights. Literary translation is a fine art: translators must unpick constellations of connotation and navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of fidelity and perspicuity as they reconstitute the work they are translating into its target language. It is natural to reward translators in the same manner we reward authors of original texts – for translations often are new literary works. Things like Seamus Heaney’s rendering of Beowulf, Baudelaire’s Edgar Allen Poe, or Schegel’s Shakespeare testify to this. So if I want to read a work in a language that I do not understand, I must go to a bookshop and buy a new translation. Such is life.

But wouldn’t it be nice if some new translations of public domain texts were freely available for people to read online? If the commercial translations were complemented with a stronger culture of translators sharing the fruits of their labour?

One could imagine this could be encouraged with a mixture of stronger norms and alternative incentives. For example, students could be encouraged to share translations made during the course of their studies. There could be more avenues for scholars and professional translators to publish works which they are unlikely to get a contract to publish or derive income from, such as shorter or more obscure works. And there could be awards, stipends or bursary funds for outstanding translations of public domain works which were freely published on the web.

At the Public Domain Review we’ve been thinking about how a literary translation fund for public domain texts might work. We’re currently thinking:

• There could be an initial focus on short works (e.g. under 10,000 words), with a token stipend or cash prize to recognise outstanding translations.
• It could be overseen by an advisory group of writers, scholars, translators, publishers and critics – who would help to give direction and focus to the fund, evaluate submissions and publicise it.
• Translations would be published under a Creative Commons Attribution or Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license and uploaded to the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg or Wikisource.
• It could be financially supported by a mixture of cultural and academic funding bodies and augmented with sponsorship from the private sector (publishers, literary publications, technology companies, etc).

We’d like to try and launch a small fund to do this to coincide with Public Domain Day 2012. Do you have thoughts about how this could work? Know of anything like it that already exists? Or know people or bodies who might be interested in supporting this? If you have any cunning ideas, please do send me a message or leave a comment below!

In my research I often wonder about whom and what the people I’m reading read. Did Wittgenstein read Nietzsche? Did Nietzsche read Hegel? Did Hegel read Shakespeare? Did Shakespeare read Chaucer? Did Chaucer read Sophocles?

Knowing which texts a given writer was aware of (and which they probably weren’t aware of) can help us to understand them and their works better. For example, I may notice a certain idea or metaphor in a text, which reminds me of something someone else has written a hundred years before. Is it possible they knew about the earlier text? Is there evidence they were acquainted with it (directly or indirectly)? Similarly I may notice something in a text which reminds me of something which somebody said much later. Is there any evidence of influence? Is a comparison anachronistic? Did the author of the passage I’m reading know about another influential essay or tract on the same topic pubished a couple of decades earlier? Knowing what someone read gives us a sense of where they are coming from, gives us a sense of the contours of what Gadamer would call their Horizont, their ‘horizon’.

Large scale collaborative research in the humanities does not always make sense. Many academics may feel that they scarcely have time apart from teaching and admin to do their own research (writing books, etc), let alone big research projects with people with whom they do not know, and whose work may be only approximately or tangentially related to their own. Certainly people sitting on research funding councils and so on should be careful not to unreflectingly promote collaborative research models in arts and humanities disciplines from other research areas, for example in the sciences, where large scale collaboration is ubiquitous or necessary. That said, I do think that a lot of meta level activities – such as creating and maintaining comprehensive bibliographies – are more suited to being undertaken by large communities of scholars working in collaboration, rather than by lone experts in isolation. Mapping influence in intellectual history is arguably an endeavour where it is desirable to have as much input as possible from as many pairs of eyes as possible.

How might we get started? How can we enable collaboration between scholars to start systematically mapping influence between different writers? To start with we have an increasing amount of freely reusable information about authors and works, e.g. open data from the British Library, the Library of Congress and elsewhere. These can often tell us who wrote what, and the dates of publication of work, and the birth/death dates of authors. Building on this, we could create a basic tool which enable scholars to create new relations between these basic elements, and to explore those relations.

Ideally one would want to have a minimal number of these relations, and for each of these to be as well formed and unambiguous as possible, and each able to be substantiated with some kind of textual reference. E.g. rather than having ‘author X was influenced by author Y’ or ‘author X was aware of author Y’ one would want to break these down into very simple, concrete things like:

• Work A quotes from Work B
• Work A cites Work B
• Work A alludes to author X
• etc

One could even imagine using other sources (library lending data, lecture lists, reading lists, catalogues, letters, notes and other sources) to try to systematically establish things like:

• Author X corresponded with author Y
• Author X met author Y
• Author X was taught by author Y
• Author X attended lectures on author Y
• Author X possessed a copy of work A
• Author X borrowed book A from a library
• etc

This kind of tool would have to be used with a good measure of caution, to ensure one does not:

• Shoehorn one’s interpretation of influence into a certain pre-defined (and to a certain degree, arbitrary) scheme. Hence the first cluster of relations may be more solid start than the second, which are a bit more tentative.
• Take this kind of data as anything other than a very rough guide, an initial basic reference pointing scholars to further sources and citations, which should be interpreted carefully. As I blogged about recently , I don’t think guidance from digital tools will replace immersion in a given domain any time soon!

The image above is from Timothy Stotz, and shows teacher-student relationships between artists, 1435-1935

• http://energy.publicdata.eu/

I wrote a brief piece for the Guardian, titled Europe’s energy targets: are they a feat or a breeze?. An excerpt:

Joe Public’s understanding of energy production, energy consumption and the energy mix across Europe may be patchy and anecdotal at best. We all know that Sweden produces more renewable energy than the UK, but how does Latvia compare to Poland? How much of Greece’s energy is from hydro or solar power? How much does Finland depend on imported energy? How much of Belgium’s energy is used in transport or agriculture? How has energy production changed in Romania in the last ten years? Who’s winning the renewables race? Who’s hitting their targets and who has furthest to go?

While one can dig around in reports to extract figures or charts, or skim tables to spot patterns, it is nevertheless hard for the non-expert to get a sense of the overall shape of Europe’s energy. However, possessing this kind of picture is critical in order to have an informed debate or to be able to evaluate what kinds of options are viable. There will never be any substitute for immersion in an area to get to know its intricacies – but for the uninitiated there is no shame in using a map (or a GPS!) to get to know the lay of the land!

Hence a couple of weeks ago a small team here at the Open Knowledge Foundation decided to have a crack at making something that would use open data from different sources to make European energy easier to understand for those who don’t know much about it, in time for the European Council meeting today.

The launch was also picked up by the Zeit Online, who interviewed me about it, and concluded: “Mehr davon bitte“. More is on its way.

Now the Public Domain Review has just gone live, to coincide with Public Domain Day 2011:

• http://publicdomainreview.okfn.org

The first post is on the works of Nathanael West, whose works enter the public domain today in many countries around the world.

If you’d like to follow the review, you can sign up to the mailing list or follow the Twitter account.

Our daily lives are permeated by the past. Newspapers are full of commemorations of persons and occurrences we deem to be culturally and historically significant. Calendars are stuffed with births, deaths, battles, inventions, catastophes, riots, murders and miracles.

“X hundred years ago today”, we are told, ships were sunk, saints were born, cures were found, and nations were freed. A quick look in the news for this phrase brings up articles about a flood, a battle, a constitution, a murder, a stunt and a railway journey. The BBC News dedicates a whole section of its website to looking back through the archives at what happened ‘On This Day’ X number of years ago. Google frequently changes its logo to celebrate “holidays, anniversaries, and the lives of famous artists and scientists”.

What determines what we remember (and what we don’t) is no doubt the subject of countless books, articles, theses and seminars. Recently Mark Twain’s 175th birthday was commemorated in Tahoe, while it was noted that Tolstoy’s death was not commemorated in Moscow.

Traditionally what ‘we’ choose to commemorate has been (at least in part) determined by all powerful newspaper editors, government officials and calendar publishers. Now digital technologies combined with an unprecedented amount of freely available, structured historical information allow us, at least in principle, to have a more personal relationship with the past. There’s nothing to stop us from being able to choose who and what we want to be reminded about, who and what we want to commemorate. There’s now a vast amount of readily available information that could be used to inform me about dates that I might interested in. For example, a quick glance on Wikipedia shows me that yesterday was the birthday of Thomas Carlyle and Rainer Maria Rilke, and today is the birthday of Christina Rossetti and Fritz Lang.

On the one hand this kind of thing might seem fairly frivolous, like what kind of wallpaper we have or what colour the bike shed is. In some ways this is no doubt true. History is like a nice kind of paint that we use to decorate stuff with, or a fashion accessory for pundits or public bodies. Just like we use busts for buildings, and surnames for streets, we use anniversaries and centenaries as a cunning way (a ‘hook’) to generate filler for weekend supplements, or as an excuse for a party. On the other hand our relation to the past is important. What we (as individuals or as societies) consider valuable and significant is reflected in our relationship to what has gone before us. (And learning more about the past might be intrinsically valuable…)

It would be great to see an open web service that lets users receive notifications related to historical persons or occurrences they are interested in. This could be ambiently plugged into existing social networking sites, mobile applications, or website widgets. Users could say what kinds of people and topics they wanted to be notified about, or it could do something more clever like harvest and process relevant information from things like bookmarks, booklists, wishlists, citation lists, and so on, to guess what users were interested in.

Journalists and critics could use the service to look for interesting centenaries, or serendipitously discover lesser known figures, or curious events that they may not otherwise have known about. Museums, libraries, archives and galleries could use it to highlight interesting items in their collections. Academics could use it to plan public lectures, or publishers could use it to commission new monographs or collections of articles.

This kind of service (tentatively called ‘Historical Hooks’?) could gradually enable people to have a more dynamic relationship with the past, replacing centralised curation and filtering for what is ‘noteworthy’ by editors and event organisers with something much more distributed. This might mitigate some of the ‘bunching’ around Big History and Great Figures (e.g. heroes, geniuses, leaders, etc), and create opportunities for people to find out about more interesting minor figures: from poets, painters, and architects, to botanists, lawmakers and reformers. The long tail of commemorandia?

So how can I find interesting public domain works to enjoy? At the moment there are many wonderful non-profit projects like the Internet Archive, the Open Library, Project Gutenberg, and Wikimedia Commons whose mission it is to bring as much high quality cultural and historical material online as possible for anyone to download, print, scribble on, view on their phone or eBook reader, make collages out of and so on.

But apart from things I already know that I might be interested in (from Shakespeare to Schubert to Sherlock Holmes) how can I find other things that I might like? Typically one might look to things like the London or New York Review of Books, the TLS, or newspaper supplements to serendipitously discover interesting works — but these tend only to cover public domain material when new editions are published, when there are special exhibitions or when there is a special anniversary or centenary. There are numerous periodicals and blogs that include discussion of public domain works, but many of them are quite specialised (e.g. aimed at academic peers, audiophiles, or art historians).

Hence there seems to be space for a publication aimed at a general audience that features and reviews interesting public domain works. Enter the Public Domain Review:

The Public Domain Review is exactly what it says on the tin: a web-based review of works which have fallen into the public domain.

Each week an invited contributor presents an interesting or curious work with a brief accompanying text giving context, commentary and criticism.

Over the next couple of months we are going to be looking out for interesting material to review, and interesting reviewers who might consider contributing. The aim is to launch on Public Domain Day 2011 (1/1/11) and to keep a steady pace of a review per week. If you are interested in receiving the reviews in your inbox, you can sign up to the mailing list!