P-list archive 2.0

Tue Apr 5 12:58:53 CDT 2016

Yeah: it's hard to find netizens behaving badly, so ten-year-old slanging
matches in an archive devoted to a notoriously highbrow novelist should
*definitely* go viral.

On Tue, Apr 5, 2016 at 1:21 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:

> I started lurking on the list in 2004, when the flame-wars had more or
> less ended (though I did witness at least one prominent poster get hounded
> and shamed off the list). But it occurs to me: maybe all this rancorous
> stuff, along with all of our less-finer moments, is best lost in the
> impenetrable noise of the listserv.
>
> Laura
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Monte Davis
> Sent: Apr 4, 2016 10:15 PM
> To: John Bailey
> Cc: Mark Kohut , pynchon -l
> Subject: Re: P-list archive 2.0
>
> What the p-list looks & feels like to me day to day is... gmail. To
> someone else, Outlook, or Thunderbird, or...
>
> I'm not talking about any change at all to the listserv front end, or
> about replacing email with some "structured" wiki discussion tool, let
> alone about <gahhh> policies. Talking ***only*** about making posts in the
> archive easier to find (search) and discussions easier to follow (linkage
> parsing and display).
>
> e.g. I couldn't care less whether anyone posts in plain text or HTML, but
> there is no upside for anyone to the drooling swathes of HTML tags in the
> current HTML-unaware archive.
>
> Likewise, if you're reading archived post B and the interface always
> allows you to see (say) header and opening words of ancestor post A and
> descendant posts C1,C2,C3... and to click readily to full text of any /all
> of them... I see no upside to retaining (or at any rate displaying) all the
> old "On April 4 John Bailey wrot..." auto-quoteback appends below.
>
> I love the anarchy (except when I hate it (but neither wish nor would try
> to change it.)) I'm well aware that most subscribers rarely if ever visit
> the archive, and don't plan to proselytize its use should it become the
> nifty accessible place I'd like it to be. Such an archive would be much
> more useful to Pynchon students and scholars who aren't regular posters...
>
> to new subscribers and lurkers who might like to sample and explore more
> broadly than this month's flow...
>
> and to those of us (very possibly a minority, and that's fine) who'd like
> there to be something lasting and maybe even cumulative in all this.
>
> On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 9:19 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> To alter the P-list's structural qualities might necessarily have an
>> effect on its implicit politics. The crap search function and the fact
>> that most people don't post in plain text is part of the list's
>> anarchic qualities, and any reform will impose new hierarchies. The
>> possibility of moderation - even by default - could come up, as could
>> other forms of censorship. I imagine everyone here would fight against
>> that, of course, but the form an online conversation takes definitely
>> affects its content. Compare the P-list with Facebook pages, which are
>> very limiting in the kind of discourse they allow.
>>
>> Absolutely not against what you're proposing, though! Just waffling.
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 5, 2016 at 10:53 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > 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.
>> >
>> >
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160405/aa9ad8e1/attachment.html>