Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 785.
            Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
                   Hosted by King's Digital Lab
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2020-04-20 22:50:27+00:00
        From: Tim Smithers 
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.784: on using academia.edu

Dear Gabriel,

In reply to Francois you wrote

   "...  we should only ever use Open Standards and formats,
    not proprietary ones."

Yes, but I'd gently suggest it's not as simple as that.

We should continue to try different things, as and when they
become available, wherever they come from.  When these prove
widely usable and useful, but are proprietary, we should ask
for, or push for, them to be made an Open Standard, like what
happened to PDF, for example.

The frontier between proprietary and open is porous.  We
should not, I think, treat them as antagonistic realms.
Especially since some good things do arrive first as
proprietary products, PDF being one of them.

What should drive how we do what we do is what makes it the
best way of doing it.  This is what I tell PhD students.
(Then you need to help them learn what it takes to judge well
what makes some way of doing something the best.  It's seldom
a simple judgement.)

Best regards,

Tim


> On 20 Apr 2020, at 09:18, Humanist  wrote:
>
>                  Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 784.
>            Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
>                   Hosted by King's Digital Lab
>                       www.dhhumanist.org
>                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
>        Date: 2020-04-19 10:24:57+00:00
>        From: Gabriel Egan 
>        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.780: on using academia.edu
>
> Francois Lachance writes:
>
>> I recently fell victim to the disappearance of
>> browser support (plug-in) for Shockwave. (A
>> page BTW not captured by the Wayback Machine)
>
> This is why we should only ever use Open Standards
> and formats, not proprietary ones. It is possible to
> preserve the means to make sense of obsolete proprietary
> formats such as Shockwave by emulating the hardware
> and/or software platforms needed to support them. There's
> a wonderful project at the University of Freiburg on
> 'Emulation as a Service', as they call it, that addresses
> this. They already can provide support for software and
> data that rely upon environments such as Apple OS 7
> and earlier or IBM's OS/2.
>
> I consider such endeavours to be a kind of cleaning up
> after we've made a mess of things rather that having
> a place within our responsible planning for the longevity
> of our digital cultural artefacts. The United Kingdom's
> main state funder of Arts and Humanities research, the
> Arts and Humanities Research Council, rightly insists
> on Open everything (Open Standards, Open Data, Open
> Access, Open Source) in all the projects it funds
> unless a really strong case can be made for doing
> otherwise.
>
> Regards
>
> Gabriel Egan



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