Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Nov. 6 Meeting: New Media & Law

The next meeting of the New Media Working Group will be on Nov 6 at 5pm in the BCNM commons. In conjunction with Takeovers and Makeovers, the BCNM-sponsored conference planned by Kris Paulsen and other new media students, we will be reading a piece by Rebecca Tushnet called "Payment in Credit: Copyright Law and Subcultural Creativity." The conference is among the first to bring together artists and art scholars, lawyers and legal scholars, and technology professionals all together to discuss the issues around appropriation and fair use.

The full paper is up on the NMWG reading list here:
http://nmwg.notlong.com/

Takeovers and Makeovers: Artistic Appropriation, Fair Use, and Copyright in the Digital Age:
http://bcnm.berkeley.edu/takeovers/

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Next Meeting THU 10/16: Stanford Bound

Our next meeting is scheduled for Thursday, October 16th but will be nontraditional in two respects: 1) We'll be traveling across the bay to Stanford and 2) We'll probably leave from Berkeley around 12:15 and head back around 3, so it will involve a longer time commitment than usual.

Why, you might ask, is it worth your time to visit our historic rival, and on a weekday no less? Because Henry Lowood, Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections and Film & Media Collections at Stanford (http://www.stanford.edu/~lowood/) as well as current co-director of the Stanford Humanities Lab (http://shl.stanford.edu/), has very graciously offered to speak to us and even show us around (with our very own Eric Kaltman's help).

Lowood's current research interests include the following areas:

* History of computer game design
* Creation and curation of digital archives
* Computer games as a medium of performance
* History of military simulation

Most recently, Lowood has helped develop a gaming collection/archive at Stanford and is part of a new multi-institution initiative for "Preserving Virtual Worlds," funded by the National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program of the Library of Congress.

Please let Alenda Chang (alenda@berkeley.edu) or Ryan (ryanshaw@ischool.berkeley.edu) know if you would like to come on the 16th, and if so, whether or not you need a ride, can drive others, or would prefer to get there/leave on your own.