Yikes, there he goes again blogging about attribution.
Yeah. It is a frequent topic here. Sometime a little around a year ago (my searching through my backlog of posts pins it to early December 2014), I started added a photo credit to the bottom of my blog posts. I had noticed that with the featured images used in my blog theme, there was no place to provide an attribution as I typically do as a caption.
Since the format was pretty consistent, I thought a bit about doing some theme hacking and add a custom field to my posts, and some template code to automatically display it at the bottom of the post.
Maybe I did not try hard enough, I could not get my theme to do this. And besides, if it was outside my post, it would not appear in my RSS feeds (not without more hacking).
But then I would end up doing remixes of images, or coming across some really whacky ones, and plenty where it was just not clear what the rights were. Or, to be frank, I think the whole “can I use it or not” is stupid when I am not selling anything, not making anything but fun, not stealing anything, just remixing into something new.
In August 2015, I made a remix of a book cover to have some fun with Pat Lockley, converting the cover from Bowling Alone into something obviously different for Tweeting Alone (its pretty solid Photoshop work, you should check it out). My photo credit statements get a bit more sarcastic.
I start adding my own jokes. SO far, no one has ever even responded to them. Being at the end of long posts might be a factor.
It does get messy with mashups, eh? Who should sue me, Gardner Campbell or Eli Wallach for overlapping them?
Well, I got tired of sifting through my posts. I have quite a few more where my attribution is more question or rant.
And recently it dawned on me that “attribution” or “credit” is more associated with what one might say is called for by legal rule or license print. What I have started doing is not only the attribution, but a bit of story of how I even got to the image.
So this is my new approach. It turns my attribution into little blog posts. And heck, most people will not even bother giving credit for media they use in their blogs, do I really think anyone will actually narrate their process?
I don;’t know. Nor care.
This is what I am choosing to do.
Because there can be more to attribution than rote following a bunch of rules and procedures.
Top / Featured Image : Transformation of the stress tensor in three dimensions a creative commons licensed image from Wikimedia Commons. At one time in my schooling I might have understood the force diagram.
Found my searching Google Images (with filter licensed for use) on “Transformation”, after failing to find the kind of image that spoke to be searching on “evolution”, and maybe just “story”. I never know what exactly to do with SVG images so I grabbed a screenshot.
I love the continual care you are giving this. Attribution is the flip side of open. Recently I’ve been using Flickr to find pictures with ‘No known copyright restrictions’ for most posts featured image and noting that at the bottom of the post. Not as interesting as a story but a start.
I love your work on attribution. I try and often include descriptions in my Flickr uploads, but I do not bring these across to my posts.
Just wondering whether you use any plugins etc to add such content to your posts? For example, a lot of people include an ‘Originally posted …’ I have been wondering about this. Is it a plugin?
I guess that is supposed to be a stamp of originality in case someone wholesale republishes your stuff elsewhere. I’d bet there are a few plugins to do this.