P-list archive 2.0

Wed Apr 6 06:39:34 CDT 2016

Now you've got me imagining a satiric tale about an ambitious but
non-technical academic who pontificates on an early listserv. He goes on to
become the acclaimed herald and prophet of digital humanities, mostly
because he latches onto "virtual communities" and "the cloud" before his
peers.

Only decades later, when an equally ambitious grad student comes gunning
for him with ill-advised material from the listserv, does he discover that
the archive was wide open to the internet all along. "You mean
non-subscribers can see it? Whaddya mean 'no login, no password'? Whaddya
mean 'should have used an alias and an email address without my name in
it'?"

On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 3:02 AM, matthew cissell <mccissell at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
>          Laura, I see your point about people's possible embarrassment,
> but I don't think it outweighs something more important which is the
> developing contours of the literary field, specifically around the writer
> TP. Why is it important? Well, if you accept Gerald Graff's idea of
> teaching the controversy (I do) then these little spats or flame wars are
> the struggles that shape the field. It could be quite interesting for
> future students to look back at how people with differing theoretical POV's
> (the deconstructionist taking on the New Historicist, so to speak) exchange
> their competing versions/ readings of the text.
>
> One of the greatest problems for future scholars will be finding these
> documents. Think about it. I can go to a monastery about 2 hours away and
> see the first words written in Spanish or Basque (marginalia from about 900
> years ago). With digital decay being what it is, when documents and files
> are lost to the virtual void there is no telling if they will be able to be
> found 500 years on.
>
> Moreover, by the time someone gets around to trudging through it all to
> find out what was said on the P-list in 1998 most of the people involved
> will not be concerned about what people think of some comments from 30
> years back. Don't ya think?
>
> That's my two bits.
>
> Ciao
> Matt
>
> On Tue, Apr 5, 2016 at 7:21 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
>>>
>>
>> - Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160406/e4471217/attachment.html>