18.252 history of tools

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 252.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Fri, 01 Oct 2004 07:30:01 +0100
         From: lachance_at_origin.chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
         Subject: Re: 18.174 history of tools

Willard,

As you are ever intrigued by the implications of the metaphors we
use, I want to signal the one employed by Geoffrey Rockwell when he wrote:

> If there is general support for the idea of a wiki on text tool history we
> have a wiki running for TAPoR and would be happy to set up an open web on
> this subject. The problem with wikis is that you need to have a group of
> dedicated authors who write to them, otherwise they end up abandoned
> construction sites in plain view of the information highway.

I wonder if Humanist subscribers would care to muse upon the
possibilities of re-characterizing "abandoned construction sites" as
"ruins" -- in the Romantic sense, places for contemplation.

Geoffrey's take on the problem with wikis and the thread on modes of
delivering/reading papers leads me to ask about the value of the fragment
as a genre in Humanities Computing: what is sharable when and how?

--
Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance
A calendar is like a map. And just as maps have insets, calendars in the
21st century might have 'moments' expressed in flat local time fanning out
into "great circles" expressed in earth revolution time.