New series and new licence
[posted by Gavin Robinson, 3:23 pm, 14 January 2013]
I promised that I’d get back to blogging in January. I’ve finished the last freelance contract, but I’m just about to start a bigger one so I won’t be blogging as much as I’d planned. Instead of what I said I was going to do, I’ll be posting a transcript of an early-modern document every month, with links to images and some explanation of what it’s about. This means that my blogging will be exclusively early-modern for at least six months. The series starts tomorrow with accounts of horse losses in the English Civil War, which will make a nice transition from last year’s cavalry series and partly answer a question that people are always asking me.
The other big news is that I’ve changed my Creative Commons licence to attribution only. This means that you (yes, YOU) are free to modify and re-use my blog posts for any purpose, including commercial use, as long as you attribute it to me. The new licence DOES NOT apply to any posts deleted before today. Also, I’m not waiving any of my moral rights, so no defamatory false attribution, please. I was already planning to make this change before Aaron Swartz died, partly to save me from the trouble of having to give permission for commercial use when people ask for it, and partly to prove that CC-BY doesn’t automatically help neo-nazis. The downside is that I have to pay myself £1,500 per post in Blog Processing Charges, but I’m hoping I might get some free taxpayers’ money to cover that, because I’m a businessman too and so my profits should be just as important as publishing companies’ profits.
Comment by Brodie Waddell — 5:06 pm, 19 January 2013 [permanent link to this comment]
Wonderful to have you posting again and it’s great to hear that we’ll get at least six months of early modern material. Transcriptions are always welcome, adding to the stock of archival primary sources available online.
Thanks for drawing my attention to the issue of licencing blog content. I think your approach seems sensible, but it’s something we at the Monster haven’t discussed yet.
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 11:37 am, 20 January 2013 [permanent link to this comment]
While making the transcripts I’ve found that some documents aren’t as exciting as I thought they would be, but at least it’s regular updates while I’m busy.
Comment by Dave Geldard — 12:03 pm, 25 February 2013 [permanent link to this comment]
Gavin
Any material is better than no material when it comes to early modern primary sources. Afterall material you may not find exciting may well still be interesting to those of us without access to the width of material you have. Kep up the good work.