Picturing Intriguing Internet

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a few days, but my reluctance to do anything more complicated than push the “Get Mail” button distracted me: Liz Lawley and several colleagues from RIT, the Rochester Leader and Democrat, and other community leaders have prepared “Picture the Impossible,” an exciting project that engages their audience in a series of games and events. These occasions will accentuate the distinct and admirable features of Rochester’s history, thus instilling civic pride not by mind-numbing grade-school memorization exercises, but by discovery, competitive exertion, and celebration. I’m not surprised to hear that Liz is involved with so on-target a Web enterprise, but I am a little surprised at how much support she has from constitutencies that don’t usually boost such projects. Cheers to Liz, and best wishes to everyone who’s participating!

2 thoughts on “Picturing Intriguing Internet

  1. Thanks, Burke. I didn’t see Nunberg’s piece in the Chronicle, but he posted about Google Books’ metadata catastrophe over on Language Log.
     
    I’ve long argued that full, reliable metadata is one of the ways Official Publishers (of books, films, audio recordings, and so on) stand to differentiate themselves from DIY substitutes (“pirates,” “bootleggers”) — and also to watermark their products in case they need to make a legal argument about their products. I don’t know about other domains, but so far the music publishers have done an embarrassingly poor job with metadata; and the less satisfactory the official, legal product, the greater the incentive to obtain mediocre versions illegally.

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