Today’s links Podcasting “How To Think About Scraping”: How to preserve the benefits of web-scraping while targeting the real harms. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Podcasting “How To Think About Scraping” (permalink) This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, “How To Think About Scraping: In privacy and labor fights, copyright is a clumsy tool at best,” which proposes ways to retain the benefits of scraping without the privacy and labor harms that sometimes accompany it: https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-think-about-scraping-2db6f69a7e3d?sk=4a1d687171de1a3f3751433bffbb5a96 What are those benefits from scraping? Well, take computational linguistics, a relatively new discipline that is producing the first accounts of how informal language works. Historically, linguists overstudied written language (because it was easy to analyze) and underanalyzed speech (because you had to record speakers and then get grad students to transcribe their dialog). The thing is, very few of us produce formal, written work, whereas we all engage in casual dialog. But then the internet came along, and for the first time, we had a species of mass-scale, informal dialog that also written, and which was born in machine-readable form. This ushered in a new era in linguistic study, one that is enthusiastically analyzing and codifying the rules of informal speech, the spread of vernacular, and the regional, racial and class markers of different kinds of speech: https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/24/because-internet-the-new-linguistics-of-informal-english/ The people whose speech is scraped and analyzed this way…Pluralistic: Podcasting "How To Think About Scraping" (25 Sept 2023)