The document discusses the historical context and complexities of data re-use in the arts, noting that while it has always been integral to the culture, it often differs from data use in sciences. It explores the concept of intertextuality and provides numerous examples across literature, visual art, and music demonstrating how artists have drawn upon previous works. The presentation concludes by posing questions regarding the implications of creative research and data ownership in the arts.

1. 
‘Found’ and ‘After’
A short history of data re-use in the Arts
Martin Donnelly
Digital Curation Centre
University of Edinburgh
Research Data Management Forum #10
University of Oxford, 4th September 2013
If the work is stylistically a copy after another
artist's work, that artist should also be
mentioned (e.g., Thomas Cole after Asher B.
Durand).

2. Contents
 Argument / overview
 Intertextuality
 Exemplars
 Text
 Visual
 Music

3. Argument / overview
 There’s nothing new about data re-use in the Arts; in fact it’s an
integral part of the culture, and always has been
 However, it’s often more complicated than data re-use in other
areas (such as the Sciences)
 For starters, people tend not to think of their sources or
influences as ‘data’
 Also, the value and referencing systems are quite different
 And research / production methods are not always rigorously
methodical
 This presentation offers a number of examples of data re-use in
the Arts, with commentary tying each to common data
concepts

4. Intertextuality
 Term coined by Julia Kristeva in 1986
 “a text’s dependence on prior
words, concepts, connotations, codes, convention
s, unconscious practices, and texts. Every text is an
intertext that borrows, knowingly or not, from the
immense archive of previous culture”
- Adolphe Haberer. “Intertextuality in Theory and Practice.” Literatura 49.5 (2007)
 "the networks are many and interact, without any
one of them being able to surpass the rest; this
text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of
signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we
gain access to it by several entrances, none of
which can be authoritatively declared to be the
main one”
- Roland Barthes. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Noonday (1974)
 It’s not a huge conceptual leap from here to Linked
Open Data…

5. Exemplars I: text
Tom Phillips, A Humument (1970, 1986, 1998, 2004, 2012…)

6. William Shakespeare
 With a few exceptions, Shakespeare did not invent the plots of his plays. Sometimes he
used old stories (Hamlet, Pericles). Sometimes he worked from the stories of
comparatively recent Italian writers, such as Giovanni Boccaccio—using both well-known
stories (Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing) and little-known ones (Othello). He
used the popular prose fictions of his contemporaries in As You Like It and The Winter’s
Tale.
 In writing his historical plays, he drew largely from Sir Thomas North’s translation of
Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans for the Roman plays and the chronicles
of Edward Hall and Holinshed for the plays based upon English history. Some plays deal
with rather remote and legendary history (King Lear, Cymbeline, Macbeth).
 Earlier dramatists had occasionally used the same material (there were, for example, the
earlier plays called The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth and King Leir). But, because
many plays of Shakespeare’s time have been lost, it is impossible to be sure of the
relation between an earlier, lost play and Shakespeare’s surviving one: in the case
of Hamlet it has been plausibly argued that an “old play,” known to have existed, was
merely an early version of Shakespeare’s own.
 Encyclopaedia Britannica, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/537853/William-
Shakespeare/232445/Shakespeares-sources

7. T.S. Eliot
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

8. Alasdair Gray

9. Variations on a theme
This Is Just To Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
William Carlos Williams
Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams
1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.
2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.
3
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.
4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!
Kenneth Koch
Jist ti Let Yi No
(from the American
of Carlos Williams)
ahv drank
thi speshlz
that wurrin
thi frij
n thit
yiwurr probbli
hodn back
furthi pahrti
awright
they wur great
thaht stroang
thaht cawld
Tom Leonard
There is a whole page of versions of this poem at
http://www.wildhoneypress.com/voices/Williams.htm

10. ‘Found’ poems
Edwin Morgan, Collected Poems (1996) Manchester: Carcanet

11. Exemplars II: visual
Jordan Parsons, Rhizome 1 (2012)

12. A Humument / Tree of Codes
 Treated books, book sculptures…
Tom Phillips, A Humument (1970, 1986, 1998,
2004, 2012…) – based on W.H. Mallock’s A
Human Document (1892)
Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes (2010) – based
on Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles (1934)

13. Found / readymade
 Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917) and L.H.O.O.Q. (1919)

14. Intermedia / sculpture
Tom Deininger, Self-Portrait (2007?)

15. Collage
Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife through
the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic (1919)

16. Cartoons
 Martin Rowson, after Donald McGill…

17. Exemplars III: music
Sylvano Bussotti, from 5
Piano Pieces for David
Tudor (1959), reproduced
(with a misspelling) in
Deleuze and Guattari’s
Mille plateaux (1980)

18. ‘Found’ sounds
 e.g. John Cage’s Imaginary Landscapes
 Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for 24 performers
at 12 radios (1951)
 Imaginary Landscape No. 5 for magnetic tape
recording of any 42 phonograph records (1952)
 “It is thus possible to make a musical
composition the continuity of which is free of
individual taste and memory (psychology) and
also of the literature and ‘traditions’ of the
art. The sounds enter the time-space centered
within themselves, unimpeded by service to
any abstraction, their 360 degrees of
circumference free for an infinite play of
interpenetration....” (John Cage, Silence:
Lectures and Writings, 1961)

19. Hip hop
 DJ Kool Herc developed the style that was the blueprint for hip hop music. Herc
used the record to focus on a short, heavily percussive, part in it: the "break".
Since this part of the record was the one the dancers liked best, Herc isolated,
changed to the other, and later, prolonged it. As one record reached the end of
the break, he cued the other record back to the beginning of the break, thereby
extending a relatively small part of a record into a "five-minute loop of fury".[9]
 This innovation had its roots in what he called "The Merry-Go-Round"—a
switching from break to break done at the height of the party. Herc told The New
York Times that he first introduced the Merry-Go-Round into his sets in
1972.[10] The earliest known Merry-Go-Round involved playing James Brown's
"Give It Up or Turnit A Loose" (with its refrain, "Now clap your hands! Stomp
your feet!"), then switching from its break into the break from "Bongo Rock"
by The Incredible Bongo Band, and from "Bongo Rock"'s break into that of "The
Mexican" by the English rock band Babe Ruth.[11]
 Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJ_Kool_Herc

20. Sampling
 The Verve, “Bitter Sweet Symphony” (1997)
(Ashcroft…)
 The Andrew Oldham Orchestra, “The Last Time”
(1966) (Jagger/Richards)
 The Rolling Stones, “The Last Time” (1965)
(Jagger/Richards)
 The Staple Singers, “This May Be The Last Time”
(1955) (trad.)

21. Open Source music?
 The Shamen, Progeny (1991)
 “WE’RE SICK OF REMIXING THIS… SO HERE ARE THE BITS: GO DO IT YOURSELF!”

22. Questions for discussion
 How helpful are the preceding examples in thinking about
Arts research data in the HE sector?
 Where does creative research begin and end?
 What problems does practice-driven research introduce?
 How can we differentiate between funded research and
unfunded personal expression?
 What are the financial/ ownership issues accompanying
creative research?
 To what extent is non-digital material a problem?
 Which other disciplines share these issues?
 Is there merit in trying to pin these questions down?

23. Contact
 Martin Donnelly
 Digital Curation Centre
 University of Edinburgh
 Email: martin.donnelly@ed.ac.uk
 Twitter: @mkdDCC