The Acephalous Archives and a Broader SEK Project

As some of you have noted over the course of the past several months, the Acephalous archives have come down because of the sunsetting of TypePad in 2025. Acephalous did not constitute the entirety of SEK’s body of work but it was an important and beloved part of that body, often including vignettes that were hilariously insightful but hard to place at more mainstream publications. Fortunately, I have an archive of everything, and over the past few days I’ve been building out an archive site.

Unfortunately we have run into a problem with the archive. Those of you who were familiar with Scott’s work understand that his specialty was Visual Rhetoric, which is to say he explored the political, social, and cultural elements of imagery and film in digital media. This means that his work relied heavily on digital imagery, much of it drawn from screenshots of television, film, cartoons, and so forth.

Publishing material like this was possible in the context of the Old Blogosphere, when copyright on images was rarely enforced and generally only on a case-by-case basis. Today, republishing Acephalous with the images would result in massive liability for the owner of the site (me) as web crawlers would find the images and report them to the various vulture IP law firms that handle such cases. Fair Use, which Scott indicated in conversation that he had hoped to rely on, is a defense but not a prophylactic, meaning that the defendant (myself) would be required to make affirmative defense of how he used the images… which is not practically possible.

So this would seem to put us at an impasse. However, I have had a larger project in mind of which the restoration of Acephalous is only a part. In the immediate wake of SEK’s passing we gave some thought to pulling together an edited volume of his best work. It had been my expectation that Steve Attewell would play a leading role in this project and we had discussions to this effect. Steve’s passing was tragic on its own and was also obviously a major setback for this project.

Given Steve’s passing I had expected crowdsourcing to be part of this, as SEK had a substantial body of work across many sites that would have made it an enormous task for one or two people. So let me suggest the following: We move the crowdsourcing element of the project up on our notional timeline so that it’s part of the restoration of the Acephalous Archive. This would result in the following rough order of operations:

• Stage 1: Cleanse and restore the Acephalous Archive
• Stage 2: Identify candidates across Scott’s body of work for inclusion in an edited work
• Stage 3: Make decisions about what and how much to include in an edited volume (s)
• Stage 4: Acquire permissions for work
• Stage 5: Find a publisher

I have spoken with Scott’s family and they are supportive of the project. I think that the best way to move forward is not through our comment system (although I appreciate any and all suggestions in comments) but rather through e-mail; if you would like to be part of this project at any of the five stages or if you know someone who would like to be part of it, please e-mail me at the address in the left sidebar. Once I have a better sense of what we have available in terms of labor I’ll establish some kind of gated site for the Acephalous Archive and we can begin work.

Thanks for your time. SEK was a unique voice even by the standards of the Old Blogosphere, and I think it is incumbent upon us to make sure that as much of his work as possible is available to as many people as possible. Legal advice would also be welcome if you think I’ve gotten the copyright issue wrong. For what it’s worth I feel the same way about Steve Attewell, and when the time comes I’d like to pursue the same course of action.