20.004 birthday message: wrong metaphor; an interesting project

                Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 20, No. 4.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
  www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/cch/research/publications/humanist.html
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

   [1] From: "Amsler, Robert" <Robert.Amsler_at_hq.doe.gov> (4)
         Subject: RE: 20.001 Happy 19th Birthday to Humanist

   [2] From: Andrew Brook <abrook_at_ccs.carleton.ca> (22)
         Subject: Re: 20.001 Happy 19th Birthday to Humanist

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Tue, 09 May 2006 06:41:02 +0100
         From: "Amsler, Robert" <Robert.Amsler_at_hq.doe.gov>
         Subject: RE: 20.001 Happy 19th Birthday to Humanist

You really don't want to use the term "event-horizon"....

In physics the event horizon is the boundary around a black hole past
which no light escapes back into the real world.
Approaching the event horizon is to be approaching a black hole beyond
which everything would disappear from the visible universe.

--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Tue, 09 May 2006 06:42:14 +0100
         From: Andrew Brook <abrook_at_ccs.carleton.ca>
         Subject: Re: 20.001 Happy 19th Birthday to Humanist

Hello Willard,

19 years! Remarkable. That goes right back to the beginning of my use
of email. It would never have happened without you.

Which suggests an interesting little project and one that you are the
best person alive to do, a meta-study, as it were: how the technology
and social practices of *discussing* humanities computing have
evolved. In the same way as the community can hardly even remember
the operating systems of the early 80s, let alone use them (causing,
as we know, all sorts of problems with old datafiles), we are on the
cusp of forgetting how we used to use the internet to discuss things
like humanities computing and how the ways we use it now evolved.

Just a thought -- I'm not the one who'd have to do the work.

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Brook
Chancellor's Professor of Philosophy
Director, Institute of Cognitive Science
Member, Canadian Psychoanalytic Society
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