20/22 February: Ethical, Legal & Security Issues in the Digital Age

Who owns the past? Exploring copyright issues of the content available online. Understanding “fair use” and how it applies to us. The ethics of putting history online. Keeping yourself safe online.

Before 20 February:

• Dan Goodin, “Why passwords have never been weaker,” Ars Technica, August 20, 2012.
• Mat Honan, “How I Resurrected My Digital Life After an Epic Hacking,” Wired, August 17, 2012.
• Roy Rosenzweig, “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era,” American Historical Review 108, 3 (June 2003): 735–762.
• Library of Congress, “Personal Archiving,” part of the Digital Preservation site.
• Explore the Internet Archive, especially the Wayback Machine.
• Read the introduction to HTML at W3 Schools.
• Introduction to HTML, Mozilla Developers Network
• HTML Element Reference, MDN

During class:

• Create an HTML page from scratch
  • On Mac, how to open HTML in plain text: Open TextEdit, open Preferences, click Opena and Save, click Display HTML files as HTML code.

Before 22 February:

• Watch: The Amen Break
  *If you are interested in the legal issues involved in hip hop & sampling, you can instead watch the entire Copyright Criminals program ( ~56 min), but it’s not necessary!
• Cohen & Rosenzweig, Digital History, ch. 7, “Owning the Past?”
• Read: Copyright: An Overview, Cornell University Law School
• Read: “Four Industry Experts Explain What’s Wrong with Current Copyright Law,” Fader, June/July 2015
• Read about Creative Commons licenses, including the “license deed” for each license

During class:

• Explore: George Mason Copyright Office, sections on copyright and fair use.
• Explore: GMU’s Basic Security Practices.
• Assess the usage restrictions on the following materials:
  • Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1788)
  • 1924 Immigration Act May Never Get 1927 Test
  • Time Magazine Corpus of American English
  • TV Archive
• Add a copyright notice and, if you wish, an open-access license to your blog. (You should do this for every website you create in this course.)

After class:

• Anything that you want me to know?
• BLOG: What did you learn about web security? Who has access to your information? What is the significance of government surveillance? of corporate surveillance? Which level of copyright/open access have you selected for your blog? What do you plan to select for your final project? Why? What copyrights and licenses have been assigned to the sources you’ve used so far in this class? (Go back and look.) What potential limitations will you encounter for your final project?

Reading for 27 February:

• Read: James Grossman, “Big Data: An Opportunity for Historians?” Perspectives on History, March 2012.
• Read: Graham, Shawn, Ian Milligan, Scott Weingart. “Putting Big Data to Good Use: An Overview,” The Historian’s Macroscope.
• Explore: Historical Census Data, University of Virginia Libraries
• *I’ll provide you an excerpt (in a spreadsheet) of TBD Database, which we will use in class.

• Watch Alan Jacobs, “The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction,” lecture, Hudson Institute, June 3, 2011.

[IT Requirement: 3 and 5]