P-list archive 2.0

Tue Apr 5 13:06:26 CDT 2016

It was an integral aspect of the P-list at what could be called its height,
and should be preserved.

David Morris

On Tuesday, April 5, 2016, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','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
>> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','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
>>> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','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
>>> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','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
>>> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','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
>>>
>>
>>
>
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