One reason I suggested the Gnu GPL as a text was for its unfamiliarity of form. It’s a software license, a genre often viewed but rarely read. I’ve clicked through many, barely registering the dense legalese, meaning I’ve probably promised to sacrifice my first-born to Bill Gates. The GPL, to its great credit, has a clear and concise preamble. But nevertheless, it is a legal document, written to withstand exacting juridical scrutiny.

As digital humanists, we shouldn’t be frightened of such things, for we make tools to deal with such difficulties. Whether the texts are in another language, damaged, obscured, fragmentary, long-winded, self-referential, or simply too numerous – not forgetting that no text is so transparent that one simple reading will comprehend it entirely -we can hack them.

One popular way of doing this is with wordles. These are, in essence, visualized concordances. The words are weighted according to frequency, then displayed as clouds. There are various options for colour, layout and font, but these do not reflect any aspect of the text, being more for aesthetic appeal, and as such a cause for their popularity. (The creator of Wordle, Jonathan Feinberg, discusses this in Viégas et al, “Participatory Visualization with Wordle.”)

So here I present the three versions of the Gnu GPL as wordles. They are made from the 100 most used words, filtered for the common and ordinary (‘the’, ‘and’). I have attempted to minimize the extraneous as much as possible, having the words displayed horizontally, (near) alphabetically, in plain, plain black and white.

Wordle of the 100 most used words in the Gnu GPL v.1.

Wordle of the 100 most used words in the Gnu GPL v.2, 1991.

Wordle of 100 most used words, GPL v.3, 2007.

By taking the three versions, I’m treating the GPL historically, as changing over time. The most obvious and startling finding is that the term ‘program’ has dramatically declined in use from version 2 to version 3, changing the whole picture from being arrow-shaped to more cloud-like. (The algorithm for laying out the words is in Viégas et al.)  Its synonym, ‘Work’ has risen in its place. ‘Free’ has declined proportionally,  but in absolute terms, the story is quite different: it features in v.1 23 times, v.2 28 times, and v.3 20 times. ‘Freedom’, not found in the graphics above, rises from 3 usages in v.1, to 4 in v.2, and 8 – doubled – in v.3.

I could spend all day pouring over these things, but I’ve probably spent too long already when I have a dissertation to write. In any case, the purpose has been to suggest ways of reading the Gnu GPL, and will leave discussion to the convivial atmosphere of the meetings.

NB: The code behind wordle.net is owned by IBM, and closed. A free version, that allows adjusting and playing with the code, would be most desirable.

Reference: Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, Jonathan Feinberg, “Participatory Visualization with Wordle,” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 15, no. 6, pp. 1137-1144, Nov./Dec. 2009, doi:10.1109/TVCG.2009.171 Behind a paywall, sadly, but abstract available.

They’re relevant to the Digital Humanities, and what we’ve been discussing, in numerous ways:

• They show the human culture around the code, both implicitly (styles of writing, ways of thinking about a problem) and explicitly (Stallman’s description of sharing at MIT). The humanity around the digital, one can say.

• We face very similar problems with sharing other things, like data and findings. That sharing is fundamental to learning; too much material is being locked up under dubious copyright claims and illiterate t&cs, never mind paywalls.

• Talking of paywalls, both texts have a subtle attitude to commerce, seemingly unconcerned with money but overtly opposed to monopolisation.

And of course, we use the fruits of these works.

More than that, I think these texts can be read in very different ways: beyond being a license, the GPL can be seen as a ‘hack’, repurposing copyright into copyleft; a history of debate and struggle is found across its three revisions (and its offspring for web-deployed software, the Affero GPL); the Gnu Project is history, philosophy, polemic and an embodiment of sheer will. Reading differently is what the (digital) humanities does.

Further discussion is for the pub; this is just to suggest some suitable – and interesting! – reading around which to talk.