Hello all,
1) Introductions?
Our list is now at 214 members, which seems a decent number. When we first began, it seemed like a waste of bandwidth to ask everybody to introduce themselves. Now that we are a community and the new membership rate has slowed down, I was wondering whether we should suggest that new members introduce themselves to the list on the sign up page. Suggestions or comments? We probably get one new member every ten days (there is also some churning and attrition).
2) Project descriptions? I was also wondering if we couldn't also use the wiki to allow members to write small project descriptions. As some of you will know from our original description of the (forthcoming) journal, we will be publishing refereed project reports. This will be a forum that will allow you write descriptions of work you have been up to and get institutional credit for it (i.e. in terms of refereed publications). The journal is an excellent forum for publishing distinctive research on aspects of your project, and especially work that might be difficult (due to its technical nature perhaps) to publish elsewhere: before xsl was really commonly supported (in 1998), for example, I wrote a technical note describing how Multidoc Stylesheets could be used to transform SGML to HTML (a method I still use, horrors!). Ultimately I gave it to the engineers at Citec, since I couldn't really find anywhere to publish it. That might have been something for a journal like DM. Not everything that is interesting about a project is necessarily significant enough to be refereed, however--and it is not clear that we are well served by restricting publication solely to "refereeable" publications. As a community of practice, the Digital Medievalist Project is dedicated to informal sharing of information about practice as well. If I'm working on a project and am using MSWord to XML conversion, for example, it might be convenient to search for other projects that are using similar processes. Or if I'm working on an edition of an Old English or Middle Dutch text, I might like to know who else is working with similar languages so I can avoid reinventing the wheel. It seems to me that the Wiki might be an excellent place for publishing such information or keeping track of others in my field. It is searchable, tied to an RSS server http://sql.uleth.ca/dmorgwiki/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&feed=rss, and freely editable. We could easily use it as a simple forum for publicising what we are working on in a way that allows people to discover us in unexpected ways. What do people think? We could easily set up a "Projects" table of contents page to which you could add a link to a separate wiki entry on your project. We could established recommended guidelines for what we'd like to see in a basic project report (though there wouldn't really any mechanism for enforcing this). The most important thing from our, perspective, however would be that it would allow us to let everybody else in the community know what we are up to. Any suggestions or comments? I thought before making up a "project" wiki page, I'd throw the idea out to see if there were any better suggestions (I think our idea of a wiki-based best practice primer is going to need a more firm editorial hand than I'd originally thought, for example). If there aren't, we'll make it a real invitation by the end of the week.
-dan