As I noted in today’s blog post for EC&I831 class, I’ve been reading Jaron Lanier. And doing that makes me think about attribution. At the very least, I would like to attribute as much of the stuff I find on the web as possible, particularly stuff that is created “from scratch”, both textual and visual.
So today I followed a link from Rodd Lucier in Twitter: http://twitpic.com/31l7sc. It’s the image you see on the left. I noticed that Rodd wrote a query at the bottom for Badd_moon, the person who posted the image, about whether the images were licensed for sharing. With Lanier on the brain, I tried to track it down. On Badd_moon’s Twitpic page, karohemd said:
This led me here so I tweeted that the artist was Scott Beale (laughingsquid in Twitter) and his FAQ said the images were licensed for Creative Commons, so I tweeted that. But then I scrolled down the page and found the real attribution:
Sao Paulo ad agency Moma Propaganda created a wondeful series of retro future ads for Facebook, YouTube and Skype as part of the “Everything Ages Fast” ad campaign for Maximidia Seminars.
and the update saying high-res images could be downloaded from Maximidia.
This seemed like a lot of work to find out who made an image, but I was glad I did it (and not just because Rodd mentioned me on his blog). I somehow felt better knowing that whoever made these (I still don’t have an artist’s name) was paid for his work. By someone. Somewhere in Brazil. I think.
Lisa,
I watched this conversation with interest and was also following some of the clicks to find out the artist but I ran out of time before my next meeting – so thank you for the information. Thanks to Rodd too for the original link. The graphics are really fabulous and I agree that attribution is important. Whoever did that should get credit!
Sometimes I get a bit mired in attribution, especially when dealing with specific citation requirements. I love how you include screenshots of tweets in your blog postings; it really brings the twitter conversations alive but I wonder how one would attribute a twitter comment in an academic paper. As my twitter follow list gets more academic, this seems more and more likely.
Thanks, Giulia, for sending me off on another search! 🙂
This one was quicker. Is this helpful at all? http://gunther-eysenbach.blogspot.com/2009/04/how-to-cite-twitter-how-to-cite-tweets.html
Wow, thanks for that quick response – I’m a bit embarrassed this was addressed a whole year and a half ago! I guess I could have looked it up too (thanks for not sending me a letmegooglethatforyou swf!)
I’m reading your other post now about Lanier and I’m trying to control my visceral reaction to him; the same reaction I felt when I read his book. I’ve been mulling this over for a while now so I should be ripe for a response.