Podcasting “How To Think About Scraping”
How to preserve the benefits of web-scraping while targeting the real harms.
Wednesday (September 27), I’ll be at Chevalier’s Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine. On October 2, I’ll be in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab.
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:
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…
