Pull quote: “ProQuest adds that the online version of the work will include ‘monthly updates to tables, deep searching at the line-item level, powerful facets for narrowing search results, image and spreadsheet versions of all current and historical tables, along with links to provider sites.’ It will be available as a stand-alone product or as part of ProQuest’s preexisting ‘Statistical Insight’ database, which covers subjects in economics, business, market research, and the social sciences.”
Pull quote: “The aggregation of individual data does not a commons make.”
Pull quote: “By making things like the National Fuel and Gas Code, the standard for safety in wood and metal ladders, or the standards for safety and hygiene in water supplies readily available to all without restriction, we make society better. People can read the standards and learn, they can improve upon them by making searchable databases or better navigational tools, they can build new kinds of businesses. Innovation and education are just two of the benefits of opening up this world, but at the root are basic issues of democracy and justice. We cannot tell citizens to obey laws that are only available for the rich to read. The current system acts as a poll tax on access to justice, a deliberate rationing and restriction of information critical to our public safety. That system is morally wrong and it is legally unconstitutional.”
Pull quote: “A TED talk, at this point, is the cultural equivalent of a patent: a private claim to a public concept. With the speaker, himself, becoming the manifestation of the idea. And so: In the name of spreading a concept, the talk ends up narrowing it. Pariser’s filter bubble. Anderson’s long tail. We talk often about the need for narrative in making abstract concepts relatable to mass audiences; what TED has done so elegantly, though, is to replace narrative in that equation with personality. The relatable idea, TED insists, is the personal idea. It is the performative idea. It is the idea that strides onstage and into a spotlight, ready to become a star.”
Pull quote: Libraries are examples of spaces dominated by noncommercial values, a semi-permeable membrane between the market for books and the democratic need for a knowledge commons. A noncommercial ethic can coexist alongside markets, and all can thrive. But public goods and noncommercial spaces can’t coexist with a market fundamentalism that believes all public goods and noncommercial spaces are evil, at least not if that market fundamentalism controls the laws. The more or less successful drive to extend intellectual property rights into perpetuity and to wither the public domain into nonexistence is a good indication that the ethic motivating libraries isn’t winning many political battles.”
