Starting at 9 pm PDT tonight, YouTube will make 10,000 Creative Commons videos available to anyone using YouTube’s video editor. Initially the Creative Commons library will be loaded with videos from C‑SPAN, Public.Resource.org, Voice of America, and Al Jazeera, and you can bet that more content providers will be added down the line.
This partnership will let video/filmmakers unleash their creativity and produce some extraordinary video remixes – à la Donald Discovers Glenn Beck – without running the risk of legal complications. And because the Creative Commons library will be stocked only with videos released under a less restrictive CC-BY license, the resulting remixes can have commercial ambitions. A boon for some.
Finally, we shouldn’t miss another important component of this partnership: Moving forward, any videomaker can release their own creative work under a CC license on YouTube. Fast forward 6 t0 18 months, and the Creative Commons library will be vast, and the remix opportunities, endless. A good day for open culture.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the University of Wisconsin-Madison put together one of the finest history programs in the United States, and it was anchored by George Mosse, a German-born cultural historian who authored 25 books covering the English Reformation, Lutheran theology, Jewish history, and fascist ideology. Though he died in 1999, Mosse still remains a legendary figure in Madison, and now the university (where I did my undergraduate work — in history, no less) has dusted off recordings of his courses and made them freely available online.
Three of his courses tie together into a nice package, offering a long look at European Cultural History. The first course takes you from 1500 to 1800, covering the Renaissance, Reformation, English Revolution, Enlightenment, and French Revolution. The second course moves from 1660 to 1880, focusing on the ideas that changed Europe. It’s essentially an intellectual history that traces the rise of Enlightenment thinking, German Romanticism and Idealism (including Hegelianism), the birth of liberalism and Marxism and beyond.
And, finally, the last course focuses on the critical period 1880 — 1920. Here we have a survey of the cultural revolt against bourgeois society, the rise of modern culture (figures like Nietzsche, Freud, & Brecht take center stage), the damage wrought by World War I, and the beginnings of fascism in Europe.
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Ever since Jack Kirby and Stan Lee created the very first installment of the The Uncanny X‑Men for Marvel in 1963, the beloved team of mutant superheroes known as the X‑Men have conquered almost every medium in popular culture from television to video games, to movies and of course comic books. Their enduring popularity isn’t hard to understand: What American teenager (redundant, we know, since all Americans are basically teenagers) could ever say no to an angsty band of telegenic outsiders who are perpetually reviled and persecuted for the very attributes that make them superior?
But there’s more than narcissism at play. The core of the X‑Men myth — genetic mutation — is something scientists have been learning how to manipulate for decades, and now it’s just a matter of time before we know how to build X‑Men of our own. But just as in the case of nuclear bombs, killer viruses and 3‑D action movies, the fact that we can make them doesn’t mean we should. In the above video from Emory University, Bioethics professor Paul Root Wolpe explores this moral dilemma via the latest iteration of the beloved mutants’ saga: X‑Men: First Class (In theaters June 3rd, and, praise be to Mendel, NOT in 3‑D).
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
Inspired by Tyler Cullen’s project in New York, Dan Maas hit the streets in London and asked “Hey! What Song are You Listening To?” The tracks, listed below the jump, appeal a bit more to my geezerish tastes. By the time we reach Krakow we should be in good shape … (more…)
Last month, Terje Sorgjerd gave us a jaw-dropping video of El Teide, Spain’s highest mountain, and home to one of the world’s best observatories. This month, he returns to his native land and films the Lofoten archipelago, situated at the 68th and 69th parallels of the Arctic Circle in northern Norway. Filmed between April 29 and May 10, Sorgjerd captures what he calls “The Arctic Light,” a profusion of color that naturally occurs two to four weeks before you see The Midnight Sun. Yes, it’s yet another time lapse video, but oh is it pretty …
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The 2MASS Redshift Survey (details here) took 10 years to complete, and it has now yielded the finest 3D map of the universe ever made, cataloguing more than 43,000 galaxies within 380 million light-years from Earth. The new map was presented last week at the 218th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. You can view the map in a much bigger format here and, as one user suggests, you may want to “right click and save as desktop background.”
The University of Pennsylvania hosts an extensive and pretty remarkable audio collection of modern and contemporary poetry, with a generous helping of prose writers thrown in. Directed by Al Filreis and Charles Bernstein (whose U. Penn experimental poetry courses are themselves works of art), the collection includes hundreds of names you’ll recognize immediately, and others who are not household names, but ought to be.
For more poetry, don’t miss the readings in our collection of Free Audio Books.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Variety, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
What did the U.S. capital look like 200 years ago? Finding a satisfactory answer to this question is very difficult since there are very few reliable images, maps and written accounts from Washington’s early days. This is why Dan Bailey, director of the Imaging Research Center (IRC) at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, has approached architectural historians, cartographers, engineers, and ecologists to “recreate a ‘best guess’ glimpse of the early city.” The video above is the result of the IRC’s work, showing a city that was, they say, “a rough work in progress.”
Nothing was polished. The scale of the federal city was that of a person, not of immense marble bureaucracy. There were cabins and barns on the Capital Lawn. The first fence around the Capitol was to keep the cows out. Congressmen came to town for the legislative sessions, many times sleeping 3 to a room in a boarding house, and working in unfinished buildings.
An in-depth article about the ongoing project was published in The Washington Post.
By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
A few years ago, we posted about an ambitious project out of the University of Nottingham called The Periodic Table of Videos. The project is pretty much exactly what it sounds like – an online periodic table in which each and every element gets its own brief introductory video, “starring” the researchers and faculty of the university’s chemistry department. Video journalist Brady Haran has kept each episode loose and unscripted, and the scientists’ enthusiasm for their subject is infectious, even — or perhaps especially — when their experiments go awry (Keep an eye out especially for the wonderfully wooly Professor Poliakoff, whose hair alone should earn him first billing).
We were delighted to learn that the PTOV has just been awarded a very well-deserved Science Prize for Online Resources by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In fact, the project has proven so successful overall that Haran has embarked on a similar collaboration with the university’s physics department, and he’s also brought the chemists back for a new series about molecules. The most popular video from that series, which we’ve posted above, addresses a question that has kept us all up till dawn at least once in our lives: What happens when a cheeseburger is dunked in hydrochloric acid?
Don’t miss the free chemistry courses listed in our collection of 380 Free Online Courses.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly
“Solitude,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden, “is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervish in the desert.” If you’re searching for solitude these days, even in Times Square, you won’t need much diligence–just an iPod and a pair of earbuds. But watch out! Your solitude might be shattered by Tyler Cullen, a student filmmaker at the School of Visual Arts, who recently had the audacity to say to his fellow New Yorkers: Hey You! What Song Are You Listening To?
Tucked away in the crowded southern Indian city of Chennai, in the shadow of the Wallajah Mosque, is an unflattering building. But what happens inside the building is remarkable. Every day since 1927, a dedicated team has worked tirelessly to create a handwritten newspaper, The Musalman (in Urdu: مسلمان). Today, there’s a team of six workers who work on the newspaper daily. Four of the workers are known as katibs, writers dedicated to the ancient art of Urdu calligraphy. They have the most modest of facilities: two wall fans, three light bulbs, and one tube light in an 800-square-foot building. But watching the video, you learn how this newspaper has survived for three generations — everyone who works there is absolutely devoted to the task. In fact, they are prepared to work on The Musalman until their “last breath,” an undeniable passion.
In the modern era where almost every published work is created digitally, it is refreshing to see the tradition of calligraphy endure with The Musalman. We can only hope the rest of us can appreciate The Musalman’s history and its efforts to survive as much as its dedicated readers do.
Eugene Buchko is a blogger and photographer living in Atlanta, GA. He maintains a photoblog, Erudite Expressions, and writes about what he reads on his reading blog.
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Starting at 9 pm PDT tonight, YouTube will make 10,000 Creative Commons videos available to anyone using YouTube’s video editor. Initially the Creative Commons library will be loaded with videos from C‑SPAN, Public.Resource.org, Voice of America, and Al Jazeera, and you can bet that more content providers will be added down the line.
