On Sat, 13 Nov 2004 22:56:23 -1000 (HST), Karen Lofstrom <lofstrom@lava.net> wrote:
On Sat, 13 Nov 2004, Jim Tinsley wrote:
I'm afraid, John, that you are missing a great deal, as am I. We are both rather lowly, and obviously can't grasp the Big Picture that is so clear to those unencumbered by experience of making etexts, and who have lots of time to contemplate the Big Picture since they aren't spending their time actually doing useful work for PG.
I'm one of the people who wants scholar-friendly editions and I've proofread my 14K pages over the last year and half. Not to mention a little scanning and post-processing.
Yes, you have, and by virtue of that you're due a better answer. But the answer is one you've heard before, so I'm not sure how much good repeating it is going to do. The answer is not PG-specific; it's common wisdom: "If you want something done, do it yourself", or, extrapolating from advice to writers: "Show, don't tell." There's also "The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single footstep", and "Better to light one candle than curse the darkness". Take your pick. Nothing in PG ever happened because someone said that other people should do things. When Michael typed in that first text, it wasn't because some friend bemoaned the lack of e-texts and said that Someone Should Do Something About It. When Charles Franks created DP, it wasn't because anyone nagged him. We're in the middle of trying to hammer out a good XML solution, so that issue is a bit hot, but it didn't get as far as it has, nor will it get resolved, because anyone insisted others should work for their agenda; it got as far as it has because a few people who believed in it as a way forward actually rolled their sleeves up and did the work. And they are the ones who are going to make it happen. I could give many examples of smaller ways in which PG changed, and all of them had some person or persons behind them, who actually did the work, because they thought the work should be done. Often, people think they've got a good idea. Sometimes they work toward it. Of those who work toward it, some give up, some discover that it wasn't a good idea after all, and some show that it was a good idea, and find others to join them in the work. Very often, somebody identifies a need, but identifying that need doesn't cause progress all by itself. Charles thought, back in 2000, that page images would become desirable in the future. This wasn't revolutionary -- people had been talking about it in PG for some time -- but the difference was that he _did it_. And so PG will have, someday, when we work out the mechanisms, all or most of the page scans that went through DP. I thought, a year or so ago, that page scans were about to become practical, and we built it into the new filesystem structure, and I worked with a couple of producers to get samples posted. Now we've got some posted, and there are going to be more. If you like that idea, work towards it! If you don't, ignore it. I'm personally not convinced that _I_ should spend the hours of my life pursuing your agenda. If you want to convince me that I should, show (don't tell) me what such a "scholar-friendly" program and its output would look like; because you surely are not going to convince me any other way*. [Footnote *: And that by itself might not be enough either; I'd want to believe that academics really would _use_ it. And BTW, I really wish it were possible to ask Dorothy Parker to define the difference between an academic and a scholar. I bet it'd be a good one! :-) ] If I wanted to do something towards a "scholar-friendly" PG, I'd first draw up a list of specifications for a candidate text, and then compare them against Charlz's writings about an OLS, against "competitor" sites like Bartleby and Perseus (and the OTA, if I felt in need of a laugh!) and against any statements I could find made by academics, and revise my list accordingly. I would then seek out and collar one or more academics, and ask them what would persuade them to use etexts in their work -- say, as the prescribed edition of a class text. I might well have made what I felt was a good example of what they would want to show them, so they could criticize by comparison -- blind laundry-lists of requirements are often unhelpful. I would incorporate what I thought best from that experience into a prototype "scholarly e-text". I would show this to anyone who would look, and several people whose eyes I'd have to tape open for the experience, in PG or outside, and ask for comments and for other people to join me. Around that time, I would start to get an idea whether I was on the right track or not. Given that we have 14,000 texts available, and that starting from any one of them massively cuts the work needed to produce some form of whatever you think of as a "scholarly e-text", it is obscenely frustrating to hear people exhort _me_ to work toward _their_ goals, when all the material is there for them to do it themselves. But you, at least, have helped towards getting those 14,000 books posted, and I therefore credit you with some standing, and grasp of what is involved. If you want to work toward your goal, you'll have to convince me by showing, but you won't have to tape my eyes open. :-) jim