P-list archive 2.0

[Mark Kohut]

No skills and I want what is most wanted.

On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 8:25 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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