Hi, Roger and Stephen,

It's early Labor Day morning here in US of AmLand, and you've got my 
attention, I've a comment or two and maybe a question or two.

Roger, sounds like Abiword's Da Thing, and Yes, the 
notebooks-machines-pub/priv-countries "splits" will be part of the sleuthy 
fascination that'll be got by archivists.

And, Stephen, doesn't it begin to seem obvious that "printing out's" the 
Best Thing To Do for those who feel they are (or surely will be) Rich and 
Famous?  You correctly note the lovely palpability of the longer-enduring 
hi-quality paper-ed version of emails.  Before knowing a thing about 
computers (that would date to 6 months ago), I'd say to my son, "But what I 
want is a machine that simultaneously prints out for me AS I'M TYPING, and 
stores in memory, appears onscreen, etc."  He, understandably, thought it a 
full-fledged waste of computer, and I thought his thought was 
un-understanding the process writers go through.  Any ideas on this, either 
of you?

And, Roger, agreed to the web-browse history memory as adjunct to search for 
an author's brain.  And I'm glad you touched, as well, the larger rubric for 
that issue, the notion of whether a searcher can better know an author 
through a "use of orange peel" hunt.  I'd like to hear your, Stephen's or 
anyone else's surmisings on your final thought that the more information you 
have of an author, the less you know of her/him.  I've certainly discovered 
through emailings that no matter how much you may actually know of a person, 
one email message may be so entirely misunderstood that it effectively blows 
aside prior knowings.  I've also found that similar misapprehendings yielded 
deep understandings a la some kind of happy accident, a kind of wacky 
soul-insight.  I spend no time reading about computers or related musings, 
but I do wish you could tell anything you know about the relative merits and 
cursings of emailing, letter-writing, phone-callings, and face-to-faces. 
I'll jumpstart an example:  How more revealing of an author mite a stack of 
slowly-stagecoached letters to her lover be than an avalanche of daily 
emailings over the same time period.

Judy


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Roger Day" <[log in to unmask]>

Sent: Monday, September 05, 2005


Under Abiword[1], it's under Tools>Document History and
Tools>Revision. It keeps a full list of changes, each change being a
different colour, and you can revert to any previous state.

All my Word knowledge, and the processor, went with my ex-wife. I'm
pretty sure that Word has got something similar. It's probably buried
somewhere in the unuser interface. Indeed, I remember a UK govt dept
being embarrassed because someone had the sense to look at previous
revisions of a Word document.

So turning revision history on would be a boon to future
techno-archaeologists. It comes slightly unstuck if, like me,
revisions are split across notebooks, A4 pads of paper, separate, but
similar, word processor documents and HTML files across different
machines in different archives across several countries, some in the
public view, some in private. But that's going to be part of the fun,
right?

I don't think techno-amnesia is correct. I think you're increasing the
work done by archivists, extending them in ways they wouldn't even
guess.

Roger

[1] I use Abiword because it's free, because it provides the best HTML
export I could find and I can use it from the command line, embedding
it in my build scripts for my website.

On 9/5/05, Stephen Vincent <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Thanks for this. Where is the "revision" control on Word. Or is there 
> really
> such??
> "Born digital" and staying as such is a recipe for techno amnesia -
> particularly with the technology constantly changing - platforms, 
> software -
> much of it a cross between a software designer's and hardware engineer's 
> wet
> dream combined with corporate profiteers who love obsolescence along with 
> an
> insistence that we have to buy the new new soft/hard ware.    Much of 
> which
> we do not need. (Well,  I do like the capacity to combine images, words 
> and
> sound - so I am a bit of a hypocrite!)
>
> But, ff you want to leave a trail, archivists tell me, print stuff out on 
> 20
> pound acid free paper. That will survive. And students of your work will
> have the thrill of touching real material - indeed paper that was touched 
> by
> you.
>
> Having worked with the archives of poets (journals, letters, and
> manuscripts) I have (not always) found it a real high.
>
> Stephen V
>
>
>
> > Until revision control becomes embedded in normal usage - Word has it
> > but you have to switch it on - certainly a large number of iterations
> > wil be lost. Revision controls means you can revert back to the last
> > time you  changed a document. In gaming this is called "check-pointing
> > the state", although there are more sophisticated variants of this. I
> > can bore you to tears on this topic as my job is taken up with
> > revision control, ensuring that the texts of the company are kept safe
> > and the revisions maintained. I look forward to the day when revison
> > control gets embedded in the operating system.
> >
> > The hard drive rarely loses it's data. It's quite difficult to lose
> > your data completely even though you delete a file. To completely
> > erase data requires an effort not many people outside corporations and
> > govts are willing to expend. Ditto for trying to retreive data which
> > has been "deleted".
> >
> > What they don't mention is encryption, which will become popular I
> > think. So you find the data but you can't understand it as the keys
> > have been lost. Or the other reason why companies delete emails: the
> > threat of being sued or any legal proceedings being disrupted if your
> > emails escape into the wild. Sometimes, you don't want that intimate
> > conversation to be recorded.
> >
> > I think that the pursuit of an author will shift to archaeology. I
> > predict that buying (or stealing) the PC(s) or hard-drives that have
> > been used by the "rich and famous", or even moderately established,
> > will become popular.
> >
> > Don't forget the web browsing history as well. That's always
> > somewhere, and will also "reveal" something about the author and their
> > work.  Under current legislation, the ISP will carry logs, probably
> > forever, but do you think the archaeologists of the future will be
> > able to retrieve these logs? Maybe, maybe not. IRC, AIM, ICQ, Skipe,
> > Voice over IP: all these are potential sources of data. So much
> > information and so little time to gather it.
> >
> > But as Jonson discovered, finding out what an author does with his or
> > hers orange peel is actually quite difficult, and the hunt maybe not
> > that rewarding. Or I could invoke a form of Heisenberg's law by saying
> > that the more information that you have about an author, the less you
> > know him or her.
> >
> > Roger
> >
> > On 9/4/05, Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >> Anyone here save their emails for those future eager biographers? Not 
> >> sure
> >> that I'd like anyone looking at mine -
> >>
> >> Best
> >>
> >> A
> >>
> >> Literary Letters, Lost in Cyberspace
> >> E-Mail This
> >> Printer-Friendly
> >> By RACHEL DONADIO
> >> Published: September 4, 2005
> >>
> >> Back in the 20th century, when publishers had three-martini lunches and
> >> young women fresh out of Bryn Mawr became secretaries, not editors, it 
> >> was
> >> often lamented that the telephone might put an end to literary 
> >> biography. In
> >> lieu of letters, writers could just as easily gab on the phone, leaving 
> >> no
> >> trace.
> >>
> >> Today, a new challenge awaits literary biographers and cultural 
> >> historians:
> >> e-mail. The problem isn't that writers and their editors are 
> >> corresponding
> >> less, it's that they're corresponding infinitely more -- but not always
> >> saving their e-mail messages.
> >>
> >> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/books/review/04DONADIO.html?pagewanted=all
> >>
> >> Alison Croggon
> >>
> >> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> >> Editor, Masthead:  http://masthead.net.au
> >> Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
> >>
> >
>


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