Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 297.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2025-01-01 09:36:34+00:00
        From: Miran Hladnik <hladnikmiran@gmail.com>
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 38.291: Solstitial greetings

I wanted to inform Maurizio Lana by private mail that I quoted his
Humanist Discussion Group message on the Slovlit forum
(https://mailman.ijs.si/pipermail/slovlit/2024/008521.html). However,
as we both oppose private discussion on public issues I translated my
message from Slovene into English  and adapted it for posting here:

"A few days ago, on the Humanist Discussion Group (the forum has been
running almost since 1987), the Roman digital humanist Maurizio Lana
described  a new strong tendency for dialogue on the topics in a
discussion group which are not of private character, to move into
private correspondence. He himself, on the contrary, is convinced that
"we must keep pushing, and continuing, in the direction of the
'genuine conversation'", that we must maintain an open, that is public
dialogue (https://dhhumanist.org/volume/38/293/); [...] I am on the
same wavelength with Maurizio.

Recently, something similar but even more radical happened twice on
Slovlit, which I have managed since 1999 (in 2024, 1644 subscribers
received 282 mailings with a total of 918 messages): there was an
order to delete a single message from the forum archive at
https://mailman.ijs.si/pipermail/slovlit/ , in one case for a
6-year-old post. I could not comply with the requests for several
reasons: because I do not have access to the archive, because I cannot
bother the admin with a request, because he has been hosting Slovlit
for free and out of pure goodwill on an institute server for more than
25 years, [...] because I find the changing of the archive
unacceptable, because I prioritize the public interest over the
private, and because this leads nowhere other than to the closure of
the forum. Apart from the described occasional requests to delete this
or that photo from other public collections, I can conclude that we
are witnessing a kind of privatization of things that not long ago had
an unquestionable public status.

How to ensure that public forum communication survives? When writing,
it is necessary to be aware that, unlike Facebook, which has the
memory of a goldfish, posts on a professional bulletin board are
automatically archived, that browsers index them and that we can
search for them even after several decades. Even if posts are deleted
(e.g. due to a fatal mail server failure), they can be searched in the
global Internet archive. We should avoid information that has the
character of other people's personal data [...]. We should make sure
that the editor, if we write to him to his personal address, will not
be in doubt whether it is a message for a forum post. And for god's
sake, let's not lock our data and views in the ghetto of friendly
relationships, but in the name of open knowledge, offer them for
discussion and assessment by professional circles." -- miran


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