Copyright and Fair Use

I started out by watching the Copyright on Campus video by the Copyright Clearance Center. I liked the animation, and found the content to be interesting. As I watched, I was reminded of my own experience with regard to attempting to properly use copyrighted material over the years. Then I watched Understanding "Fair Use" in a Digital World by Common Sense Media and the Teaching Channel. I found myself feeling less interested as I do not see myself in a middle school setting. Then I watched Should "Happy Birthday" by Protected by Copyright by the PBS IdeaChannel. I decided to watch it because I had recently heard something about this. I thought that I had heard an announcement about the copyright having expired, but the video states that that has not happened yet, so I must have been mistaken.

Then I watched YouTube Copyright Basics with Glove and Boots. I was trying to watch quietly, listening to the audio through my headphones so as to avoid disturbing anyone around me and found myself fighting back laughter. At first, I chose the video from the list because I though it might be relevant to something that I might do in the near future. I was pleasantly surprised by how entertaining the video was. I especially appreciated them calling their own video boring, which I found to be hilarious. While I did appreciate the text that was included in the video, for me, the thing that made it most digestible was the incorporation of humor and I am making a mental note to remind myself to try to include humor in my own work.

When it came to the text resources, I found myself wishing that there was a resource similar to The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL), which I frequently refer to for help with formatting my papers. So, when I saw the Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Center at the top of the list, I was immediately drawn to that. Though I found the site to be a bit dense, I have feeling that I will be referring back to it frequently. Being an "astronomer", I couldn't help but also notice the last entry in the list, "How does copyright work in space?" from the Economist. While I found the article to be interesting, it is not exactly the kind of resource that I was looking for.

As for copyright law in general, I find it to be cumbersome at best. My own personal policy has always been to find explicit mention of permissions at the source of whatever I am trying to use. If I can't find explicit mention, then I contact the source and request permission, in writing. This is what I have done with regard to reproducing content for newsletters, planetarium shows, etc. Now, though, I am not sure if that is proper procedure, not even after having viewed the resources mentioned above. And I am even more concerned about my MMP project. What is okay to post on my website, and what is not? Going forward, I think I will be spending more time on attempting to better understand my rights and the creators' rights, at very least.

Mini Art School: Working with Videos and Moving Images

I have to admit... I struggled with the idea of a storyboard for my website. To me, a storyboard is very linear and a website is not. I see a website as having something more like a tree structure. Also, when I am creating, I have a general outline in my head from which I work everything else out through experimentation. I find the idea of a storyboard for creating a website to be very confining. So, after talking it over with our professor, I decided to do something more like an org chart. I started to create it in Google Docs, but then I realized that the structure I was seeing in my head would be easier to create and edit in a spreadsheet, so I switched it over. I understand that the idea of the first half of this assignment was to create a visual representation of our project. However, my visualization of my completed website is not in terms of pictures, but rather structural organization. My brain is very much like a PC, as opposed to a Mac, so the structure looks something like what you would see if you went to a website's "site map". Here is my rough draft, which will be modified as I work through the project:

As for the video portion of this assignment, I was confused. I couldn't get past the word "text" in the instructions. I feel as though I may have missed something in the reading. Admittedly, I did go through the reading rather quickly so that I could get to creating the video as soon as possible. I was worried that I would not have enough time to finish it. So, I'm not sure that this is what our professor had in mind, but it was a useful activity nonetheless. I used Kizoa, which made it easy to create, but not so easy to download. In order to download it, I would have to pay for the service, which I found out after the fact through a pop-up message. So, I chose to export it to YouTube. That's when I received a pop-up message telling me that I would receive and e-mail message when my video was ready. After waiting rather impatiently for quite some time, I decided to choose another option, the best of which was a link. Here is what I came up with:

http://www.kizoa.com/Video-Maker/d25625037k4564864o1l1/mission-statement

Did I interpret the instructions correctly, or did I miss something?

Mini Art School: Working with Digital Images

When I was young, I loved to capture memories by taking pictures. This was before digital cameras, so I went through a lot of film. I didn't start playing with composition until years later. For me, considering composition became a part of the process of taking a picture, but I still enjoyed editing the images afterward. It was great to be able to change the composition after the fact, especially if I didn't get it right the first time.

This assignment served as a reinforcement for me. Not only did it make me more conscious of how I consider composition when I take a picture, but it also reminded me of the art classes that I have taken over the years. Composition was a huge consideration, especially when setting up a still life.

When I searched my collection of digital images for photos to edit for this exercise, I became aware of how I already set up a composition for a photograph. I tried to keep our Multimedia Montage Project in mind too, trying to find photos that I might like to include on my website. My first thought was to find a picture of Rutgers. This one is one of my favorites:

I used Pixlr Express to play with cropping and ended up with the following composition:

What I find interesting about this composition is that it makes me feel like I am there, breathing the cold air. Before I cropped it, the sidewalk was the focus instead of the air. It was not my intent to generate a sense memory of an experience, but that is what happened for me when I changed the composition, which is really interesting to me.

One of the other photographs that I chose was one of Columbia University:

 The columns inspired me to explore the vertical, as the instructions for this exercise suggested. I came up with the following composition:

I also added a filter which made the image a little bluer, which enhanced the feeling of winter from my perspective. I also like that it made the photo seem older. However, since the focus of this assignment was cropping, I should mention that I like how this composition emphasizes the columns. And I am looking forward to seeing how considering composition influences my projects for the rest of the semester and beyond.

I also chose the color echo and border variation exercises. Here are my two favorite results:

I enjoyed learning to use the dropper tool in a new way. I had never used it to change the color on the fly. As I dragged the dropper around, it changed the color of the item that I was working on at the time in a sort of continuum, so I just kept moving it until the text, for example, became a color that looked visually pleasing against the background that I had colored in the same way. The result of the border exercise is a bit comical to me. I find a lace border on an astronomical image to be hilarious for some reason. I suppose it is the contrast between the traditional and the scientific. It certainly made for a fun exercise, though.