I fully recognize some of the key issues that Peter has outlined here.
My responses:
I like a wiki as a clearing house of DM projects more than a blog. The
spam sounds like more an issue of how the wiki is set up than the
technology itself. I have no problem either combining or cross listing
with the DC wiki and community as there is (and should be!) a good deal
of cross over.
To encourage participation in the wiki: 1) grad students and interested
undergrads could be given internships at our own institutions with the
purpose of writing articles for the wiki. Thus, I, as member of the
community, would have a summer intern (for credit) and have this student
use and write up projects for the wiki and submit them. This gives the
student some refereed publications, and also seeds things for the
future.....getting a student involved so that the next generation of
Digital Medievalists is growing and coming of age in direct relationship
with this community 2) grows the Wiki as a clearing house for DM
projects.
I agree that the bylaws can/should be changed so that the board is not
locked into a single technology. But I think that the issue is not
really the technology, but the humans.
I'd be disappointed to see the journal move to a hosting site. I'm not
sure of what advantages there are and I can see a number of
disadvantages. But then I have strong opinions about what we can do in
electronic academic publishing and what we are doing.
Recognizing that in an organization like ours where we charge no
membership fees also means that we have no money to pay someone to
undertake tasks such as coding webpages etc and so on, this means of
necessity depending on the generosity of someone to do it. And again
this is an opportunity to cultivate the next generation of digital
medievalists rather than sticking James or Dan with it. Our success
depends on our personal involvement, and how we can plug our students
into involvement, and I for one have really not been aware of how to do
that beyond being a board member. As a once and future editor of an
online journal in the field and chair, I need to know some specifics and
where to put student energy to help out both organizations.
I think there are other and better solutions to the problems outlined.
--
Larry Swain
theswain@operamail.com
On Wed, May 21, 2014, at 08:45 AM, Kalvesmaki, Joel wrote:
> My research in late antiquity falls between the worlds of classical and
> medieval scholarship. So when I first began to consider which Wiki to
> contribute to, DM or the Digital Classicist (wiki.digitalclassicist.org),
> I opted for the latter because it had garnered the most contributions and
> was at the time the most active. But I wondered at the time why
> medievalists and classicists really needed separate wikis anyway, since
> the material that was populating the pages applied to any field studying
> pre-modernity. Material surfaces in both spheres of exploration that
> could benefit any other. Thus, the "classicist" in "Digital Classicist"
> is not restricted to pre-2nd c. material; their wiki already has quite a
> lot of medieval and Byzantine content on it.
>
> So instead of altering the bylaws, why not simply have DM endorse either
> the DC wiki or a comparable one? Follow the road of collaboration?
>
> Best wishes,
>
> jk
> --
> Joel Kalvesmaki
> Editor in Byzantine Studies
> Dumbarton Oaks
> 1703 32nd St. NW
> Washington, DC 20007
> (202) 339-6435
>
> ________________________________________
> From: dm-l [dm-l-bounces@uleth.ca] on behalf of Stokes, Peter
> [peter.stokes@kcl.ac.uk]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2014 8:05 AM
> To: dm-l@uleth.ca
> Subject: [SPAM - Header] - [dm-l] Proposed Changes to DM - Email found in
> subject
>
> Dear all,
>
> I apologise for the length of this e-mail, but I write regarding a series
> of fairly fundamental changes to the DM infrastructure that we have been
> planning for some time now. Given the scale of these changes, we on the
> DM Board think it is important to explain these in some detail and
> request feedback from the Community before we go ahead with them. They
> will also require a change of the Byelaws, and so again we need input
> from the Community for this.
>
> Unfortunately the existing infrastructure has proven unmanageable. The
> wiki and mailing-list have both been subject to large-scale spam attacks,
> such that the wiki now contains many many thousands of articles, only 70
> or so of which are genuine. The wiki has also had almost no activity
> beyond that of the Board, and so it has not been doing the job that we
> had hoped. Furthermore the website itself, which we have been hosting and
> coding ourselves (with substantial help from James Cummings and Dan
> O’Donnell) is also proving increasingly difficult to manage: it depends
> on the generosity of James and Dan to host and administer, even adding
> new pages is not trivial, and it has needed a dramatic overhaul for some
> time but to do this requires much more time and effort than we have been
> able to manage. For all of these reasons, we propose the following:
>
> 1. Moving the static website from the existing infrastructure (Cocoon +
> TEI + custom XSLT) to a standard CMS (currently Wordpress).
> 2. Closing down the wiki entirely and replacing it with a blog.
> 3. For the moment we are leaving the Journal in place, but we are very
> likely to move it to a dedicated open journal hosting of some sort. We
> have been discussing this in some detail with Revues.org but are not yet
> committed to this.
>
> As most of you have realised, we have already set up a Wordpress version
> of the site at
http://digitalmedievalist.wordpress.com/, and this is
> already proving to overcome the problems listed above. The proposal is
> therefore to make this the DM site and close down the old one, except
> perhaps for the Journal.
>
> However, the current Byelaws require that DM maintains a wiki (see
>
http://digitalmedievalist.wordpress.com/about/byelaws/#wiki). The Board
> is therefore not free to close the existing wiki without first changing
> the Byelaws. Even if we chose to keep the wiki, however, the Board feels
> that the Byelaws should not lock us into using any single technology, and
> so they should be changed even if we keep the existing infrastructure.
> The details of the proposed changes to the Byelaws will be posted shortly
> as a separate e-mail and on the new website, but in essence we propose
> simply to replace the term 'wiki' with 'information resources' and to
> adapt the containing sentences accordingly.
>
> We would be grateful for any feedback about any aspect of this,
> preferably by e-mail to the list for general discussion, or alternatively
> to board@digitalmedievalist.org or any members of the Board directly. The
> next Board meeting is 4pm GMT+1 on Monday 2 June, at which point any
> comments will be discussed, and any changes in the Byelaws will be
> presented to the membership for vote shortly after that (as specified in
> §9 of the Byelaws:
>
http://digitalmedievalist.wordpress.com/about/byelaws/#amendments).
>
> Thank you, and we look forward to receiving your comments.
>
> Peter Stokes (on behalf of the Executive Board)
>
> --
> Dr Peter Stokes
> Senior Lecturer
> Department of Digital Humanities
> King's College London
> Room 218, 2nd Floor
> 26-29 Drury Lane
> London, WC2B 5RL
> Tel: +44 (0)20 7848 2813
> peter.stokes@kcl.ac.uk
>
>
> Digital Medievalist --
http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/
> Journal:
http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/
> Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org
> News:
http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/
> Wiki:
http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/
> Twitter:
http://twitter.com/digitalmedieval
> Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=49320313760
> Discussion list: dm-l@uleth.ca
> Change list options:
http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l
>
> Digital Medievalist --
http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/
> Journal:
http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/
> Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org
> News:
http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/
> Wiki:
http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/
> Twitter:
http://twitter.com/digitalmedieval
> Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=49320313760
> Discussion list: dm-l@uleth.ca
> Change list options:
http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l
--
http://www.fastmail.fm - Same, same, but different...
