Berkman Projects Tableing at the Talk and Tinker Session from 4-6p.m.
Each of the below institutional Berkman projects will have representation at the Berkman Center Fall 2013 Open House Talk and Tinker session from 4-6p.m.
Staff working with each of the institutional projects are eager to share information about the big research questions they are considering, meet potential future collaborators, and solicit ideas. Other Berkman community members will also be around to share more about their individual activities and points for connection. You may come for any portion or time of this session.
The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse
Open House Point of Contact: Adam Holland
The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse is a comprehensive and wholly transparent online database of cease and desist notices related to online content. The project aims both to educate the public about the different kinds of cease and desist letters—both legitimate and questionable—that are being sent to Internet publishers, and to provide as much transparency as possible about the ecosystem in which such notices are issued. The Chilling Effects database allows researchers to investigate the extent to which complaints are being made within the boundaries of existing law. For more information, visit: http://chillingeffects.org/
CopyrightX
Open House Point of Contact: Ana Enriquez
Taught by Director Terry Fisher and offered during Spring 2013 on the edX platform, CopyrightX was also emblematic of creative approaches to online learning and teaching. A twelve-week networked distance-learning course, the course explored the current law of copyright and the ongoing debates concerning how that law should be reformed through a combination of pre-recorded lectures, live webcasts, and weekly online seminars led by Harvard Law School teaching fellows. When designing the course, Prof. Fisher and the course team considered ways of improving upon the dominant design features of many emerging MOOCs. In particular, their model utilized innovative features including limited enrollment and small discussion sections; experimental combinations of materials and technologies; live events that were attended by both the HLS students and the CopyrightX TFs, along with the edX students, who viewed and discussed the presentations in real-time. The course team is still analyzing the rich body of data generated by the course, but early indicators suggest that the course was a success in terms of the utility of small group discussions (which seem to have enhanced learning and retention), and the development of knowledge of both the teaching fellows and the students about the copyright system. Going forward, CopyrightX will act as an important model from which to build and experiment with additional Center-supported online courses, including the second iteration of the course in Spring 2014. Lectures and reading materials may be found online: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/CopyrightX_Homepage.htm
Cyberlaw Clinic
Open House Points of Contact: Chris Bavitz, Dalia Topelson, and Kit Walsh
Harvard Law School‘s Cyberlaw Clinic, based at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, provides high-quality, pro-bono legal services to appropriate clients on issues relating to the Internet, new technology, and intellectual property. Students enhance their preparation for high-tech practice and earn course credit by working on real-world litigation, client counseling, advocacy, and transactional / licensing projects and cases. The Clinic strives to help clients achieve success in their activities online, mindful of (and in response to) existing law. The Clinic also works with clients to shape the law’s development through policy and advocacy efforts. The Cyberlaw Clinic was the first of its kind, and it continues its tradition of innovation in its areas of practice. The Clinic works independently, with law students supervised by experienced and licensed attorneys. In some cases, the Clinic collaborates with counsel throughout the country (including lawyers at Cooley LLP) to take advantage of regional or substantive legal expertise. For more information, visit: http://cyberlawclinic.berkman.harvard.edu/.
Digital Problem-Solving Initiative
Open House Points of Contact: Nathaniel Levy
The Digital Problem-Solving Initiative (DPSI) at Harvard University is an innovative and collaborative project piloted in Fall 2013 that brings together interested students, faculty, fellows, and staff and enables participants to work in teams on practicable and concrete digital use cases – problems and opportunities – across the university. The pilot offers students and other participants a novel opportunity to enhance and cultivate competency with digital tools and online activity as teams engage with research, creative production, and policies governing the digital world. Incubated at the Berkman Center in collaboration with partners around the University, this applied problem-solving initiative is a complement to traditional courses of study. The pilot program provides an exciting opportunity to work with experienced mentors and engage with real use cases in a range of sectors, build something tangible and useful, and inform the development of the program. Admitted students will be invited to join the Berkman Center’s inaugural class of DPSI pioneers and offered the opportunity to expand digital competencies and networks in a fast-paced and highly collaborative entrepreneurial environment. Teams will benefit from interdisciplinary and cross-institutional collaboration, in addition to peer-to-peer learning and mentorship; participants will develop skills that are useful for solving complex problems – both in the university and professional context – through practical training and experimentation. In addition to a rich, networked learning environment and an emerging community of practice, the program will offer students and mentors a unique opportunity to invent, build, and shape the increasingly digital environment in which they live, learn, work, and create. For more information, visit: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/dpsi
We are currently accepting applications from Harvard students who wish to be a part of the DPSI pilot and become a “Berkman DPSI Pioneer”. Applications will be accepted and reviewed on a rolling basis through Monday, September 9 at 11:59 PM ET. To learn more, visit: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/dpsi/getinvolvedharvardstudents
DMLP
Open House Points of Contact: Jeff Hermes and Andy Sellars
Founded in 2007 as the "Citizen Media Law Project," the Digital Media Law Project (DMLP) works to ensure that individuals and organizations involved in online journalism and digital media have access to the legal resources, education, tools, and representation that they need to thrive. The DMLP carries out its mission through five core initiatives: (1) its detailed Legal Guide on media and business law topics for non-lawyers; (2) its searchable Database of Legal Threats directed at online publishers; (3) its nationwide attorney referral service, the Online Media Legal Network; (4) its Research & Response initiative to address breaking issues and trends in digital media law; and (5) its regularly-updated Blog and Newsletter on current issues in media law, technology law and journalism. For more information, visit: http://www.dmlp.org/
H2O
Open House Point of Contact: Dustin Lewis
H2O is a suite of online classroom tools developed and provided by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society in collaboration with the Harvard Law School Library. H2O allows professors to freely develop, remix, and share online textbooks under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License (per the Terms of Service). H2O is based on the open-source model: instead of locking down materials in formalized textbooks, we believe that course books can be free (as in “free speech”) for everyone to access and, just as important, build upon. Currently, H2O is geared primarily toward law professors, though the platform can be used across intellectual domains. For more information, visit: http://h2o.law.harvard.edu/
Herdict
Open House Point of Contact: Ryan Budish
Herdict collects and disseminates real-time, crowdsourced information about Internet filtering, denial of service attacks, and other blockages. Based at the Berkman Center at Harvard University, it is the first and only large-scale project of its kind. When individuals can’t access a site, they can report that experience to Herdict through browser toolbars, e-mail, Twitter, or Herdict.org. Herdict aggregates this data to create a real-time map of global Internet health. This data can be sorted and visualized by country, URL, and date, creating a picture of changes as they are happening. As more of peoples’ lives move online, tools like Herdict will become increasingly important. The brainchild of Harvard Professor Jonathan Zittrain, Herdict is a natural progression from the OpenNet Initiative. Whereas OpenNet views Internet filtering through an academic lens, Herdict uses crowdsourcing to present a rougher, but more timely analysis. Herdict’s name is a portmanteau of 'herd' and 'verdict.’ We seek to gain insight into what users around the world are experiencing in terms of web accessibility; or in other words, determine the herdict. For more information, visit: http://www.herdict.org and http://www.herdict.org/HerdictQueryAPI.pdf
Internet Monitor
Open House Point of Contact: Rebekah Heacock
Internet Monitor studies the means, mechanisms, and extent of Internet content controls and Internet activity around the world by compiling, curating, and analyzing quantitative data on the state of the global Internet. Internet Monitor also conducts research on key events and new developments in Internet freedom, incorporating technical, legal, social, and political analyses. For more information, visit: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/internetmonitor/
Internet Robustness
Open House Point of Contact: Geneve Bergeron
The Internet Robustness project will develop, test and pilot technologies to deliver on the promise of the URL, or "Uniform Resource Locator": that information placed online can remain there, even amidst network or endpoint disruptions. The project's approach is to enable operators of Web servers to enter easily into mutual aid arrangements, such as mirroring other participants' content and having the deed reciprocated, so that the failure of any one participant to remain online allows others to preserve what was there. This project is designed to improve the resiliency and robustness of the Web in a wide variety of Internet contexts around the world, offering an alternative route to Web content in the event of intentional blocking, hacking or denial of service attacks, or unintentional hosting or server failures. The project's ultimate aim is to make for a more robust and stable Web, from Silicon Valley to London to Beijing to Tehran. For more information, visit: https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/internetrobustness
Media Cloud
Open House Point of Contact: Amar Ashar, Hal Roberts, and David Larochelle
Media Cloud, a joint project between Berkman and the Center for Civic Media at MIT, is an open source, open data platform that allows researchers to answer complex quantitative and qualitative questions about the content of online media. Using Media Cloud, academic researchers, journalism critics, and interested citizens can examine what media sources cover which stories, what language different media outlets use in conjunction with different stories, and how stories spread from one media outlet to another. For more information, visit: http://mediacloud.org
metaLAB (at) Harvard
Open House Point of Contact: Matthew Battles
metaLAB is a research and teaching unit at Harvard University dedicated to exploring and expanding the frontiers of networked culture in the arts and humanities. metaLAB is founded on the belief that many of the key research challenges and opportunities of our era — fundamental questions regarding experience in a connected world, democracy and social justice, the boundaries between nature and culture— transcend divisions between the arts, humanities and sciences; between the academy, industry, and the public sphere; between theoretical and applied knowledge. metaLAB’s home on the 4th floor of 42 Kirkland Street at the Graduate School of Design metaLAB serves as an institutional hub for Harvard’s digital art, design, and humanities communities while actively collaborating with partners both locally and worldwide. For more information, visit: http://metalab.harvard.edu/
Perma
Open House Point of Contact: Shailin Thomas
Perma is a service that creates citation links that will never break. When a user creates a Perma link, Perma archives a copy of the referenced content, and generates a link to this irrevocable, unalterable hosted instance of the site. Regardless of what may happen to the original source, if the link is in a published citation, the archived version will always be available through the Perma link. Readers who click on a Perma link are taken to a page that lets them choose to go to the original site (which may have changed since the link was created) or see the archived copy of the site in its original state. Perma is an online preservation instrument developed by the Harvard Law School Library in conjunction with university law libraries across the country and other organizations in the “forever” business.
Privacy Tools for Sharing Research Data
Open House Point of Contact: David O'Brien and Alexandra Wood
In Fall 2012, with support from the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace program at the National Science Foundation, the Berkman Center kicked off a four-year collaboration with the Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS) at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) called the Privacy Tools for Sharing Research Data Project. Leveraging the expertise that each participating institution brings from the fields of law, policy, applied mathematics, computer science, statistical analysis, and social science, the project seeks to develop tools, methods, and policies to further the tremendous value that can come from collecting, analyzing, and sharing research data while more fully protecting the privacy of individuals involved in such studies. Prof. Phil Malone leads the Berkman Center’s role in this project, drawing on the Center’s legal expertise and practical experience to distill key definitional issues, explore new regulatory frameworks, and contribute to the larger project customized legal instruments that take into account the specific needs of researchers while enabling reliable mechanisms for protecting research subjects’ privacy, transparency, and accountability. For more information, visit: http://privacytools.seas.harvard.edu/
Student Privacy
A key element of our growing suite of privacy efforts, the Student Privacy Initiative is designed to prompt and sustain a multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder conversation on student privacy. The project began this spring with a closed-door conversation with representatives from industry, academia, policy, and the non-profit world who are engaging with key questions regarding how privacy issues intersect with existing policy regimes, as well as with emerging developments in educational theory and institutional practices. Emerging from the conversation were important ideas for next steps, including data-driven and research-based analyses of emerging business models and pressures tied to data collection and “big data.” The Initiative plans to consider student privacy and “the cloud” in a holistic way that ultimately hones a shared set of practices designed to support the many potential benefits of cloud-based technologies in educational settings.
More information about Student Privacy initiatives may be found at the Youth and Media table.
Youth and Media
Open House Points of Contact: Sandra Cortesi and Paulina Haduong
Youth and Media encompasses an array of research, advocacy, and development initiatives around youth and technology. By understanding young people’s interactions with digital media such as the Internet, cell phones and video games, we seek to address the issues their practices raise, learn how to harness the opportunities their digital fluency presents, and shape our regulatory and educational frameworks in a way that advances the public interest. For curent and past projects see: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/youthandmedia
Return to Berkman Center Fall 2013 Open House