9.491 Humanist and the Web

Humanist (mccarty@phoenix.Princeton.EDU)
Fri, 26 Jan 1996 20:06:12 -0500 (EST)

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 9, No. 491.
Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (Princeton/Rutgers)
Information at http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/

[1] From: Heyward Ehrlich <ehrlich@andromeda.rutgers.edu> (40)
Subject: Re: 9.476 Humanist Web page

Willard:
Webmaster sought? I'm not volunteering but would like to remind
everyone that the hits possible with search engines on the Web often
have almost no overlap with hits attained through conventional bibliographic
means, paper or electric. How should a humanistic webliography (urlography?)
be structured? In a recent check list I prepared I itemized about 20
different ways of structuring a Web page. The opposite ends of the
spectrum seem to be the "personal," conversational page -- and the
impersonal alphalist. A Humanist Web page could be structured by source,
gateway, author, subject, content, etc -- or all of these. I started a
department home page in September 1994. Each time I try to revise it --
about every 3 months -- I end up making a wholly new page because the
primary URLs and secondary cross-references are growing too fast to permit
"revision." I gave a demo and poster for a Humanities Web page at the
ACH/ALLC meetings in Santa Barbara last July. It was seriously out of
date by September.

What remains to be done that has not been done by Jack Lynch or
Voice of the Shuttle, to name but two?

But if there is some interest in Humanist fielding its own
candidate, I am willing to collect URL's with short comments that anyone
posts to Humanist or sends to me and gather them in one place. My e-mail
address is
ehrlich@andromeda.rutgers.edu
and they will be linked to the top menu of the English dept.home page
http://www.rutgers.edu/runedge.html
where there are already more than a thousand URLs of interest,

Surely a more systematic approach in future would include

o A Web questionnaire for Humanist members and others.
o A form for URLographic classification, description,
evaluation, and updating.
o CGI scripts for "forms" or spontaneous user commentary,
the results to be available in a response database.
o A needs inventory of projects yet to be done, such as
picking up where Alex left off by indexing less probable sources..

Best regards--

Heyward Ehrlich
English Dept.
Rutgers University (Newark)
ehrlich@andromeda.rutgers.edu