parker higgins

Happy birthday to me

Today’s my birthday. And although I believe that the traditional “Happy Birthday” song is in the public domain but for copyfraud of enormous proportion, it’d still be nice to partake in a new musical tradition. The Free Music Archive held a contest this year to write a new birthday tune. They picked some pretty great winners!

If singing isn’t your jam, I recommend today only the Open Goldberg free culture recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variation 26. The whole collection is great, but 26 for my birthday.

Susan B. Anthony teaches Elizabeth Cady Stanton how to use an iPad

I made this goofy picture for something on Twitter, but I want to make sure I save this one for posterity. Anyway, here’s Susan B. Anthony teaching elder stateswoman Elizabeth Cady Stanton how to use her new iPad.

What did Jay Z and Paul McCartney think of the Grey Album?

I’ve been working on a writing project around the Grey Album, and that’s required a lot of research and digging into events that unfolded in 2003 and 2004. In some ways that’s incredibly frustrating: nearly every link I encounter is broken and requires more searching or an Internet Archive lookup,¹ and in some cases can’t be dug up at all. But in other ways it’s great, as the years between have been plenty of time for new information to come to light and sometimes heated issues to cool down.

One basic thing is that, in the years since the Grey Album was released, Jay Z and Paul McCartney have both said on the record that they considered it a tribute and weren’t bothered by its creation.

Jay Z was asked by Terry Gross on Fresh Air in 2010, when he was doing promotion for his book “Decoded”. Here’s what he said:

Paul McCartney was asked less directly on a BBC1 special called “The Beatles & Black Music“. The whole special is fascinating, but here’s what he had to say about the Grey Album in particular:

I haven’t found any record of Ringo commenting. If you find it, please let me know.

Scripts for book scanning

I had the pleasure of using Noisebridge’s book scanner to “rip” a couple of rare or unusual books I had lying around. So far as I could tell, none of these had been digitized yet, so that’s kind of exciting. Here’s a picture of me at work, taken by Maira.

Anyway, the scanner is really great, and a work in progress, so for now all it does is dump the photographs—high res images taken by DSLRs affixed to the machine—as sequentially numbered JPEGs in a directory on an attached computer. For a 600 page book, that’s over a gigabyte of photos, and not terribly useful as a digitized book.

So I used ScanTailor, which is a great piece of free software, to take a page that looked like the one on the left and (basically running on autopilot) output one like that on the right.

But then I had a directory full of TIFFs, which looked great but were not as portable as a PDF or OCRed to be treated like text. With a little help from smart people like Eric and Seth, I was able to write a script to loop through that directory and output a big PDF, and another to run the images through Tesseract and output an OCRed text file.

These are really really simple scripts (which is good because I’ve got no idea what I’m doing), but in case those are useful to anybody I’ve put them up on GitHub (and even released those three-line loops into the public domain, ha.)

The next step, I think, is manual proofreading. Unfortunately, I don’t think that can be scripted.

Remarkable selfies from the public domain

In honor of the Oxford Dictionary Online selecting “selfie” as its word of the year,¹ here are a few examples of remarkable selfies from the public domain. Why might a work–selfie or otherwise, be in the public domain?

Perhaps it’s old enough that the copyright term has lapsed. In the US that is definitely the case if the work was created before 1923, and so certainly includes this first-ever selfie by Robert Cornelius from 1839²:

A selfie might also be in the public domain if it were taken by a US government employee in the course of his or her work. Not many government employees take selfies, but astronauts definitely do.

What else isn’t eligible for copyright? According to the Copyright Compendium, section 202.02(b) and section 503.03(a), works must have human authors to be eligible. Which means this selfie by a Black Macaque is not eligible, no matter what the camera owner (and his employer) insist.

It’s easy to get bummed out about how much Congress and the Courts have undermined the public domain in the US in the last several decades. But there’s still plenty to celebrate in there.