Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 429.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2003 07:19:29 +0000
From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
Subject: promotion and archiving: self and others
Willard & Patrick
It with interested attention that I noticed the thread on self-archiving
take its turn towards questions of longeivity.
I just want to test some assumptions:
Did the site recommended as a model refer to itself as a "self-archive"?
If so, how in what context? If not, by whom and in what context?
I don't think that either of you are arguing for the in/out of archive
marker to be a value of what gets retained. There are items of value that
never make it into an archive, correct?
It struck me, after thinking about this for a while, letting the thinking
machine churn through some other cycles, that "self-archive" may be a
cross between "personal archive" and "self-promotion". (As an aside, I
came to this conclusion after disentangling a rather long standing
conflation of "terms of endearment" and "rules of engagement" in the
teamwork covenant of an organization which the team signed under the
rubric "terms of engagement".)
Could the making available through networked distribution of
material be considered as:
an invitation to peek into a not so secret garden and depending
on the various permissions to take a clipping or too?
I've chosen the garden metaphor careful. For me, gardens are libraries and
they are laboratories. In a diachronic view of a garden it is its storage
capacity that makes it akin to a library. And subscribers to Humanist are
well capable of choosing what ever implement is at hand to work out the
analogy between garden as laboratory and the synchronic view.
If gardens offer multiple temporalities, so too do materials made
available through networked distribution. What I want to stress here is
that just because something is an archive, personal, public or self, does
not mean that it will be consulted (read, viewed, heard, sensed). It does
not mean that there will be a record of any consultations.
For the record, knowing that this little set of material may come to
occupy a place in a little growing archive (should moderator and
software and connectivity be willing) means that I as author understand it
is sharable. Indeed I intend to be so if but for a short time in the
turning of the seasons. Yes the garden path stretches to the centre where
upon a pedastal stands a sundial inscribed within its circular edge words
chasing words: compost grows archive grows compost.
Could we not call such offerings, for I believe we are re-inventing and
preserving the beauteous economy of the gift in intellectual and technical
matters, could we not call them these offerings "growing archives"?
I found a seedling in some compost and I hope transplanted to a bed in
which it will flourish.
>From the snows of Canada, forcing bulbs to provide sense and bloom indoors
while the winter offers another view of the garden.
--
Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large,
knows no "no exit" in a hypertext
every cul-de-sac is an invitation to turn
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/miles/five.htm
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