"Are Daedalus and Commonspace Dead?"
Conversations
This e-mail message was originally posted by John Francis Ronan and is now copied in its original form from the acw-l archives.
robert delius royar wrote:
> With Netscape Open-Source available for tinkering, it seems the folks at
> Univ. of Florida's humanities computing program could probably whip
> something up as a graduate project--what say, ronan?
indeed. as some of you may remember, my first real contribution to this list was a flamewar over the utter uselessness of proprietary systems like Daedalus. no need to rehash that contentious argument, but one thread that comes up again and again, in various disguises, is support and usage. open source: not a software, a philosophy.
for those of you who weren't here for C&W98, we at UF use a Unix based system. I won't bore you with the details (my hard drive is bigger than yours, my ...) but in my classroom all student writing takes three froms: html, email, MOO. all use freeware. peer reviews are done with html annotations to html documents. html-ity.....
tinkering, eh? wait to you see the stuff we are developing for CW99. How about a database that stores and indexes all the information about our new Comics Special Collection. Each writer, artsist, inker, letterer, colorist, publisher, and story title for each comic will be indexed. But what good will that do, you ask? well, how about a browser that will let you search the indexs, generate dynamic html with thumbnails of the images next to the indexical info (cgi-ity) and allow a reader to pull up a digital scan of any given page, then split the screen with another image, or resize with a window for critical material on the specific comic, writer, or artist. but wait, there's more. this amazing product will also alllow anotations and glosses, so that the reader can pull up what her peers wrote, his teacher wrote, or what a published source has to say about the syntagmatic layering of narrative and visual tropes. hard to write about comics as literature without access to materials beyond the course texts. so that is what I am tinkering with, Robert.
but that is just my project, borrowing on work bradley dilger is doing on VeryTextual, another project that will be presented at CW99. as far as teaching tools, we use freeware everyday, in every way. of course our hardware was donated (thanks Big Blue) and we have incredible technical support (2 fulltime techs) and the support of the dean's office. for me, the bottom line is the bottom line: if the software costs money, I ain't interested. most of the functions of the 2 main proprietary packages seem to be available in finer netscape products, as well as customizations/alterations produced by people like Daniel Anderson and Fred Kemp. InterDev is one tool you can use, but there are other (cheap or free, see the wonderful world of Linux) tools out there that can perform some of the same functions. or something.
I hesitated to respond to this thread, especially after seeing some of the really cool things CommonSpace can do (even though Traci never sent me the free copy I won :) but I still believe what I said 2 years ago: why put our students in proprietary straightjackets when the whole world is moving to TCP/IP ?
ronan
vol. 4 Iss. 1 Fall 1999