3: Building Community
With Creative Commons, scholars can post information online and put a Creative Commons license on it that allows it to be shared in ways the author sees fit. Particularly with the advent of new digital tools for analysis, Creative Commons will allow for the collective advancement of scholarship in ways unimaginable before the Internet. (See a brief explanation here.)
Creating an online presence is not only an important piece of self promotion, but also a critical part of being a connected and engaged scholar. Humanities scholars have come a long way since H-Net (Humanities and Social Sciences Online) was established in 1991. H-Net ran on a listserv model–connecting people through individual email accounts. That early model has since been replaced with tools that are more decentralized and open–replacing a network that had only one hub with many interconnected networks with countless nodes. But the goals of the scholarly community are in many ways the same: to create and foster an open and active place of intellectual exchange. Today, a variety of digital venues are remaking how humanities scholars work and contribute to their field.
I’m a little confused about precisely what Creative Commons does. I went to their website and read about the different levels of licensing, and about the three different versions of the license (legal code, reader code, and machine code). Does the machine code embed within the text and actively prevent people doing things with it that are against the license? Or does it just make it easier to track violations? Would it be even possible to encode all copyrighted text with some sort of barcode that prevented it from being edited, copied, or pasted