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The datafied book and the entanglements of digitization (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate )
Author(s) -
Murrell Mary
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
anthropology today
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.419
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1467-8322
pISSN - 0268-540X
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8322.12129
Subject(s) - commons , digitization , appropriation , context (archaeology) , sociology , assemblage (archaeology) , media studies , scholarly communication , world wide web , political science , law , epistemology , publishing , computer science , history , philosophy , archaeology , computer vision
This paper explores how technologists, lawyers and librarians in the United States are complicating the social relations of the book as they attempt to navigate around and through the constraint of copyright in the pursuit of an online future for books. My context for this exploration is Google's appropriation of copyrighted books, data scientists' remaking of those books into data, and the subsequent publication of that data with a Creative Commons licence. I show how the datafication of books plays a crucial role in ‘opening’ the book, and yet I also suggest that, in an unstable moment where governance structures are in motion around data itself, the overcoming of former constraints engenders new ones.