P-list archive 2.0

[David Morris]

I've got no skills to offer, but I agree that the archives are chock full
of riches that do equal, in fragments, any published Pynchon scholarship.
No unified theories, but lots of gems.

The flame wars back then were epic, and I contributed my share in those
wars. Trolls were relentless too. There were factions and non-combatants.
Exciting times.

David Morris

On Monday, April 4, 2016, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've exchanged some email lately with John Krafft and with Murthy
> Yenamandra and "Oliver Xymoron" (just guessing here: not his real name).
> M&O were progenitors of the list, the listserv (which was vanilla software
> by 1992) and of the message archive: "I custom-wrote all the archive
> software ages ago and haven't touched it since the previous century,"
> says Oliver.
>
> M&O did us a all a great free service. I think that threading through all
> the repetition, chitchat, flame wars and trollery of 24 years at
> https://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l, there's as much Good Stuff
> about Pynchon --readings, commentarty, sources, links -- as in Pynchon
> Notes or in the 20 top critical books on TRP.
>
> But damn, it's a bitch to find -- or, having found a given post, to follow
> the exchanges dscended from it through whimsical header changes and
> "Re:Re(2):Re: GRGR7 - Pointsman's Toilet (was: Vidal's Plastic (was: Ford
> F150 Transmission Tips))". Because it's text-based, it clogged with HTML
> tags as we made the transition to web mail apps and inline links... and
> then there are the 30KB tails of quotebacks on a two-line post. It's no
> secret -- or surprise --   that many new list subscribers take one look and
> never wrestle with it again.
>
> So: picture the archive migrated to Drupal or another modern textbase/CMS
> platform
>
> With full Boolean options (search for "rocket and (not-banana"), "find
> this verbatim string," adjacency searching (find "pyramid" and "god" only
> if within x words of each other), etc
>
> With a 2D branching-tree display mode so you could see posts' ReplyTo
> relationships like ancestors in a family tree, expanding and collapsing
> branches as you choose which "child" discussion thread to follow
>
> With the ability to save, edit and reuse complex searches, and to save as
> a link a particular branched path of multiple messages...
>
> And make it all faster and prettier and HTML/web-oriented from the ground
> up, so it could at some future date work closely with, e.g., Tim Ware's
> Pynchon wikis
>
> This would all be volunteer, of course, using either freeware or a
> donated/university site license for commercial software. It would need some
> actual developer hours -- also donated. And no matter how good the code
> that "cleans up" the existing metadata for export to the new framework,
> there will always be godknowshowmany posts that break the automatic parsing
> -- i.,e. need human eyeball preview beforehand or review and manual
> re-tagging afterward.
>
> But none of it happens without a consensus on what capabilities we would
> like. I have feeelers out to some knowledgeable people about what
> capabilities are no-brainers, and what are unrealistic for a no-budget
> crowdsourced project. If you know this stuff, dive in.
>
> And even if you don't, please speak up about what you'd like the archive
> to be.
>
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