9.485 the Web and Humanist

Humanist (mccarty@phoenix.Princeton.EDU)
Tue, 23 Jan 1996 19:03:01 -0500 (EST)

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 9, No. 485.
Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (Princeton/Rutgers)
Information at http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/

[1] From: Judi Moline <MOLINE@ENH.NIST.GOV> (6)
Subject: Re: 9.481 a webbed Humanist????

[2] From: "Roger B. Blumberg" <rog@cns.brown.edu> (53)
Subject: Re: new Humanist web page

[3] From: Andrew Burday <andy@dep.philo.mcgill.ca> (34)
Subject: Re: 9.476 Humanist Web page

[4] From: Stephen Clark <srlclark@liverpool.ac.uk> (5)
Subject: Re: 9.476 Humanist Web page

[All of the following have to do with Humanist's presence, current and
possible, on the Web.

Webbing Humanist. I was certainly not thinking of a Humanist that
would operate solely as an endless string of Web pages, rather was asking if
those who have used software to web (isn't English wonderful?) discussions
on forums such as this one would comment on the value of doing so.
(Perhaps you'll think MY English isn't so wonderful after reading that
last sentence.) I wonder if we really want to push Humanist in the
direction of a conversational archive.

Web resources. My thanks to those who have volunteered their URLs -- but,
understandably, not their time -- to construct and maintain a page of
pointers. Roger Blumberg points out, as Allen Renear did in CHum
recently, our tendency to club narrowly together; he suggests cogently
that the Humanist Web resources page could serve as a means of opening up
our field of vision. But how to go about getting such a page underway?

WM]

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 1996 08:19:08 -0400 (EDT)
From: Judi Moline <MOLINE@ENH.NIST.GOV>
Subject: Re: 9.481 a webbed Humanist????

I do not think you should do away with the listserv or even assume
that you will reach everyone with a web site. Although I am "fluent"
in "web-talk" I do not use it much. I prefer email and thus listservs.
Further, advanced as I am in computer skills, I do not have a machine
at home that gives efficient web access. I've been spoiled by web
access at work.that
Judi Moline

--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 1996 09:01:49 -0500 (EST)
From: "Roger B. Blumberg" <rog@cns.brown.edu>
Subject: Re: new Humanist web page

I've been a reader of Humanist for more than a decade -- I
remember first getting your messages on a (very) dumb terminal
running off a vax machine at Columbia -- but only since coming
to Brown have I gotten a sense of how "clubby" the Computing in
the Humanities community can become. I am actively involved in
the excellent CHUG group here, and am as charmed by the Cult of
SGML as anyone(!), but I think the focus of CH enthusiasts is
often too narrow. For one thing, it regularly fails to engage
many of the people (teachers mostly) who are actually creating
electronic text resources, rather than having meta-discussions
about what the ideology of the creators of electronic text
resources should be:)

If I understand the description of Humanist, available at the web
site, there are many issues about the group's focus that remain
open, and so it would be nice to provide an "Other Resources"
page to steer Humanist members, and others, in more than a
single (encoded) direction.

Roger B. Blumberg

MendelWeb (http://www.netspace.org/MendelWeb/)

Institute for Brain & Neural Systems
Box 1843 / Department of Physics
Brown University 02912
Roger_Blumberg@brown.edu

--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 1996 16:34:28 -0500 (EST)
From: Andrew Burday <andy@dep.philo.mcgill.ca>
Subject: Re: 9.476 Humanist Web page

I maintain a set of web pages on which I try to collect pointers to
resources in academic philosophy and related fields. I try to write them
so that they will work with as wide a variety of browsers as possible, so
as to make them maximally accessible, even to those who have only Unix or
VMS shell accounts on the Net. I do think that pages like mine have some
advantage over search engines, since they give some assurance that someone
with some knowledge of the field looked at the links and found them
useful. Search engines, as you know, simply look for keywords. However,
I have a whole page of links to various search engines, since I can't
possibly stay on top of all the philosophy-related material on the web.

I would love to volunteer to be the "Humanist webmaster", but there is no
way I can find the time.

If you think it would be helpful, you would be more than welcome to put a
link to my server on the Humanist home page. My server is at

http://www.philo.mcgill.ca/

Have a look and see what you think. It is philosophy-oriented, but would
(I hope) be of some interest to humanists in other fields. Perhaps
enough webmasters in other fields would point their pages out to you so
that you could make a useful page just by assembling links to their pages.

Best,

Andrew Burday

PS. Incidentally, Lycos et al will produce a lot of links to pages on my
server *which no longer exist*, which is another problem with search
engines. I have tried sending email to their maintainers, but that's
like emailing a black hole.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
andy@philo.mcgill.ca http://www.philo.mcgill.ca/
*********************************************************************
Found in a comment on the _Time_ magazine cybersmut debacle:
"The wired world is smart, savvy, and sophisticated, and Elmer-Dewitt
quickly found out that you can't write broad trend stories that make
sweeping generalities (at least, not about the Internet)."
Good to hear that about sweeping generalities...

--[4]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 1996 09:49:39 +0000 (GMT)
From: Stephen Clark <srlclark@liverpool.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: 9.476 Humanist Web page

Dear Willard - I'm certainly not offering to manage a Humanist webpage!
You might however be interested in the (basically) philosophy page
I do manage, which has other humanities links.
http://www.liv.ac.uk/~srlclark/philos.html

Stephen Clark
srlclark@liverpool.ac.uk