Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 347.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
www.princeton.edu/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
[1] From: Norman Gray <norman@astro.gla.ac.uk> (53)
Subject: Re: 17.342 serious blogging
[2] From: Virginia Knight <Virginia.Knight@bristol.ac.uk> (12)
Subject: Re: 17.342 serious blogging
[3] From: "Steven D. Krause" <skrause@emich.edu> (13)
Subject: Re: 17.342 serious blogging
[4] From: Patrick T Rourke <ptrourke@methymna.com> (17)
Subject: Re: serious blogging
[5] From: Matt Kirschenbaum <mk235@umail.umd.edu> (16)
Subject: Re: 17.342 serious blogging
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 07:55:36 +0000
From: Norman Gray <norman@astro.gla.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: 17.342 serious blogging
Greetings,
On Mon, 27 Oct 2003, Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard
McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>) wrote:
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 342.
>
> Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2003 06:45:18 +0000
> From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
> >
> [...]
> A lively, consequential example of Web publication for our students. I
> wonder, is this the first example of a primary Web publication reduced to
> print for commercial publication?
I don't think so. Earlier examples that spring to mind are:
The Cathedral & the Bazaar : Musings on Linux and Open Source by
an Accidental Revolutionary. by Eric S. Raymond, O'Reilly UK,
1-56592-724-9, 1999 <http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/>
The New Hacker's Dictionary. Edited by Eric Raymond 2nd Ed, The
MIT Press, 0-262-68069-6, 1991 <http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/>
C Programming FAQs : Frequently Asked Questions by Steve
Summit 3rd ed, Addison Wesley, 0-201-84519-9, 1995
<http://www.eskimo.com/%7Escs/C-faq/top.html>
C++ FAQs by Cline, Lomow, and Girou, Addison-Wesley, 1999, ISBN
0-201-30983-1 <http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/>
Computers and Typesetting, Volume B, TeX: the Program by Donald E. Knuth
2nd ed, Addison Wesley, 0-201-13437-3, 1980
CATB was long in circulation, and influential, before O'Reilly put it
on paper in 1999.
The New Hacker's Dictionary (which Willard has mentioned in Humanist
before) has probably been distributed through more protocols than most of us
have heard of. Its predecessors were the `Hacker's Dictionary' of
1983, and jargon.txt, which was circulating in the early 1970s.
The C and C++ FAQ books are the most unequivocally technical of these.
I _believe_ both are expansions of community-generated FAQs, which
someone has taken and put between hard covers (surely an interesting
process by itself).
`TeX the program' is just the source code of TeX, formatted in the way
Knuth intended, and put between covers. The source to this book is
therefore exactly the TeX source code, one version or other of which
has been circulating since the 70s.
Of course, though the two Raymond books are arguably more concerned with
society than strictly the technology, all of these are About Computers.
Perhaps Salam Pax's first is to have the first book that has taken this
route that is nothing to do with computing. And _that's_ a curious
remark as well, since it suggests that blogs, which everyone was terribly
excited about a year ago, have faded far enough into the technological
background, that a transcript of one person's blog can reasonably be
seen as other than a technology book.
All the best,
Norman
-- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Norman Gray http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/ Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK norman@astro.gla.ac.uk--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 07:56:03 +0000 From: Virginia Knight <Virginia.Knight@bristol.ac.uk> Subject: Re: 17.342 serious blogging
Salam Pax now writes fortnightly in the Guardian on alternate Wednesdays (next instalment 29th November). He does indeed write under a nom de plume (do we need a digital-age equivalent for this phrase?)
Virginia Knight ---------------------- Virginia Knight, Institute for Learning and Research Technology Tel: +44 (0)117 928 7154 Fax: +44 (0)117 928 7112 University of Bristol, 8-10 Berkeley Square, Bristol BS8 1HH Virginia.Knight@bristol.ac.uk Official homepage: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/aboutus/staff?search=cmvhk Personal homepage: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/~ggvhk/virginia.html ILRT homepage: http://www.ilrt.bristol.ac.uk
--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 07:56:20 +0000 From: "Steven D. Krause" <skrause@emich.edu> Subject: Re: 17.342 serious blogging
Willard--
You mention that this TLS article doesn't discuss in any way if "Salam Pax is a pseudonym." Does TLS article bring up the reality of Pax? I happen to think that Pax exists, but what I'm getting at is the nature of the interface is such that the convincing and "authentic" view of this first-hand account of the war in Iraq could have been written by an especially gifted teenager in Kansas, or some place/scenario like that.
Just curious...
--Steve
Steven D. Krause Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literature 614 G Pray-Harrold Hall * Eastern Michigan University Ypsilanti, MI 48197 * http://krause.emich.edu
--[4]------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 07:56:38 +0000 From: Patrick T Rourke <ptrourke@methymna.com> Subject: Re: serious blogging
Yes, Salam Pax is a pseudonym. NPR (National Public Radio, a US-government-supported - barely - but not government-controlled radio network, similar in conception to the PBS television network) had an interview with him some weeks ago. Perhaps the reviewer assumed that the pseudonym was too obvious to comment on.
Certainly the Jargon File/Hacker's Dictionary (which was originally a Usenet publication, not a web publication, but was nonetheless an electronic publication in concept and execution until reduced to print, and continues to be accessed mainly in electronic form - unless you are using "primary" to refer to an historical source-text) anticipated the Salam Pax weblog by a number of years.
Patrick Rourke
On Oct 27, 2003, at 1:52 AM, Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>) wrote:
>A lively, consequential example of Web publication for our students. I >wonder, is this the first example of a primary Web publication reduced to >print for commercial publication?
--[5]------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 07:56:58 +0000 From: Matt Kirschenbaum <mk235@umail.umd.edu> Subject: Re: 17.342 serious blogging
> A lively, consequential example of Web publication for our students. I > wonder, is this the first example of a primary Web publication reduced to > print for commercial publication?
I think there have (already) been quite a few examples of Web publications going to print, from mainstream to academic to underground: Salon, in fact, has a whole line of such publications: http://www.salon.com/plus/reads/index.html; the electronic journals Postmodern Culture and Bad Subjects have both published print compilations; and at the underground end of the spectrum, David Rees's Get Your War On cartoons. This may well, however, be the first example of a _blog_ to print publication, something I'm sure we're going to see a lot more of. Also only a matter of time until we see see blog-style novels, just as there were a handful of epistolary email novels a few years back. Matt
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum_____________________________ _______________________http://www.otal.umd.edu/~mgk/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Tue Oct 28 2003 - 03:20:09 EST