I’m not a ‘curator’, an interesting debate on the nature of online attribution. The bone of contention is the proposed Curator’s Code, ‘a system for honoring the creative and intellectual labor of information discovery by making attribution consistent and codified, the celebrated norm.’ While the CC is dressed up with a fashionably designed website (imagine a small letterpress shop in Gotham City with a direct uplink to the Hubble Telescope), the idea of taking the relatively rigid and formal conventions of academic attribution and translating them to a website doesn’t sit very well with us. It’s not just that we’re lazy, but that the lack of proper attribution is not the same as plagiarism or copyright violation; no-one is losing out financially by not being credited with an online ‘discovery’. There is undeniably a joy in finding something ‘new’ and then sharing it with others. The reality is that there’s no way of knowing who found something first, such is the seething mass of trends, fads and ‘cool links’ circulating on any given day. Besides, the rabbit hole of attribution can sometimes be dark and deep – how far must we descend to discover the one original source? As a ‘link blog’ with only a small percentage of original content, we tend to agree with Marco“: ‘And that’s how I feel about links in general: the source author creates something worth linking to, and the rest of us can link as we see fit, regardless of how we found it.’
//
Other things. Top 10 Japanese Houses. These round ups are starting to have a K-Tel quality to them / images of Victorian Homes / above, the commercial space station concept from a couple of years ago, at Astrowright / Transcendental Life, ‘a visual journey through life at the Tamworth Lyceum‘. Not the Tamworth we were expecting / Devid Sketchbook, fine art tumblr. Which means some nudity / how to be a Soviet girl: For you! Girls! (at this, that and also, etc.).
One Response to Infinite monkeys and infinite links