archives in HTML & other ramblings

Greetings All,

I suppose I could be timid about this and once again let the prospect of an
easy to access, searchable, HTML archive of the Tuning List fade into the
mist. But I'm not gonna do that !:-)

Instead I'm going to talk a little about the matter of putting the archives
in an easy to use format, this list itself, & a few related subjects.
This is the first time I've felt the need to post anything even remotely
heated. Hopefully the last. I'm quite nervous about sending this out, but
waht the heck. Needs to be said.

> Personally, I don't have a big problem with the *content* of those postings
> ending up somewhere, but there are issues to ponder before you simply plop
> them on a web site somewhere. It isn't too much to ask, I think, to
> consider and respect the wishes of the people that contributed to the Mills
> tuning list in these matters.

Jonathan, you make it sound like I'm planning to violate some kind of sacred
oath or something. This isn't a fraternity or a cult or anything, is it ?
I thought it was meant to be an open forum for the discussion & promotion of
microtonality. Otherwise all the useful info would only be in $50+ books
that no one is going to buy off-hand (if they can afford it) & isnt easy to
get hold off. And then where would we be ?

Speaking of $50+ books & such : has anyone considered the prospect of making
your books, dissertations, etc. available over the interent for a lower
price (i.e. shareware), so that a greater no. of people can benefit ? 3
cheers for Monzo & Patrick O-L. They didn't have to make it available for
free.

When I first mentioned it, I asked if it was o.k. No one said anything.
One person did email me privately to say it would be a good thing.
Yes, I suppose I should have asked more clearly, but if Jonathan caught my
line in the later post, he or someone else could have cought the original
post where I shouted " I FOUND THE ARCHIVES !!!" & said :

"If it's o.k, I'm gonna have the entire archive up on the web, searchable,
and also downloadable in reasonably sized zipped files."

And notice, it was me, the broke, struggling musician idiot sitting in his
room in Goa, India who took the time & trouble to track the archives down,
when no help was forthcoming from any quarter, simply because I recognized
the importance of the archives. And this is not the first time I or anyone
else asked where to find the archives.

It just seems so damned idiotic to not allow the older messages to be made
available on the web, since this is a public forum, and the archives are
ALREADY public !

> However, it would seem that any one objection should be considered reason
> enough to NOT publish them publicly.
If you mean that if even one person objects to their posts being made
public, I emphatically disagree. This is a *public* forum. As a matter of
principle it should be wrong for anyone to prevent these archives being
made easily accessible.

And they already are public & accessible to anyone who wants them.
If someone has no desire for their postings to be public, they should *not*
be on a public forum. The current incarnation of the list IS on the WWW.

At http://www.onelist.com/archive/tuning

> Since all subscribers to the Mills list initially received an email
> indicating that the list was archived, it should not be problematic to post
> the archives to a new web site. However, once the archives are posted, it
> would be a good gesture to offer all contributors the opportunity to remove
> any of their own postings. Any other kinds of editing or revisions of the
> texts would be too much work, but the opportunity to retract an item should
> be reserved for every writer.

Retractions ? Yes.
Corrections ? Yes.

Deletions ? No. No. No.
Alterations ? No. No. No.

Given the threaded nature of a *discussion* list, such an exercise would be
counterproductive in the extreme & contrary to the spririt of an open (&
open minded) public discussion list. Even the littlest contribution to any
topic under discussion, no matter how erroneous/misinformed, is integral to
the whole. And what would be accomplish by such deletions ? Other than
displaying a certain lack of integrity...

You might as well delete/throw away the entire archives, why not stop
archiving altogether, just because you may change your mind about something
you said at a later date, or suddenly don't feel like sharing your
knowledge.

Take a look at the situation with newsgroups : Go to
http://www.deja.com Every belch uttered on countless newsgroups is recorded
for posterity. Digests starting from Dec 1998 are currently archived &
searchable on the web automatically in HTML at
http://www.onelist.com/archive/tuning , which makes objections to making
earlier posts even easier to use start to take on a funny smell...

However, to get back to the issue brought up by Daniel, I do have a
solution. Nothing radical, just the same as is done in most forms of
journalism, though a discussion list is not a journal/publication in the
conventional sense.

I can set up pages for errata & retractions.

The Errata page would enable anyone to post a correction to something they
read in the archives, wich could even mean a message only a week old. I can
set this up as a bulletin board.

Retractions, well, this could also be done as a bulletin board, so any
author of any message in the archives can post an appropriate message.

The title/subject of each errata/retraction posting can be the date & digest
number of the tuning digest in question. if it is for an older message from
1994, before there were digests, simply put the date of the message. The
first line of the post itself can state the actual subject matter in one
line.

And I'm curious, these things have been there since 1994. Any number of
people have been downloading & reading them over the past 6 years.
Also, a number of messages from 1995 have been on an HTML archive on, I
think, a server in Finland. And in all this time, no one has had a problem
with them being available to anyone & everyone as it should be. Why the fuss
now ? All I am offering to do is make them easily accessible, more useful, &
of greater benefit to microtonalists of every level, everywhere.

Sincerely,
Drew

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Drew,

First, don't get me wrong: I love a free flow of information. All I've
asked is that you consider a couple of issues.

>Jonathan, you make it sound like I'm planning to violate some kind of sacred
>oath or something. This isn't a fraternity or a cult or anything, is it ?
>I thought it was meant to be an open forum for the discussion & promotion of
>microtonality.

No, not a cult, but there are important differences between a mailing list
one subscribes to, especially a non-commercial one, and an entity on the
www. The Mills list was certainly 'open', but to those that subscribed.

>When I first mentioned it, I asked if it was o.k. No one said anything.
>One person did email me privately to say it would be a good thing.

Somehow I must have missed your original posting, as I would have sent
similar ideas to you.

>Yes, I suppose I should have asked more clearly, but if Jonathan caught my
>line in the later post, he or someone else could have cought the original
>post where I shouted " I FOUND THE ARCHIVES !!!" & said :

Well, it could have been that I've been accessing the archives ever since
the list moved, and it didn't seem like a big deal to find them. But I'm
GLAD you found them.

>It just seems so damned idiotic to not allow the older messages to be made
>available on the web, since this is a public forum, and the archives are
>ALREADY public !

Um, what do you mean by public? They are accessable, but only when you send
a request - they are not browsable. When I posted to the list I had a
pretty good idea where the intended reading audience was, and wrote
accordingly. But, as Dan Wolf pointed out, I really doubt that anyone would
object to the content of their postings being more easily accessed, me
included.

>And they already are public & accessible to anyone who wants them.

Yes, but they are on servers, searchable by human interaction, and NOT
sitting on a web page somewhere, easy fodder for spiders and spambots to
pull out even more lists of millions of email addresses. Please note: this
is my only emphatic point.

>If someone has no desire for their postings to be public, they should *not*
>be on a public forum. The current incarnation of the list IS on the WWW.

Yes, and look what someone has done with a little perl (or some other) script:

13. Re: analog synths & microtuning
From: "Drew Skyfyre" <drew_skyfyre@xxxxx.xxx>

They've carefully culled out the email addresses. I don't know how long
you've been online, but the longer you are at one email address, and the
more often it shows up on the net, the more dung drops into your inbox.
THAT is my only request: in return for all the great(?) information you are
able to access from the couple of years of the tuning list at Mills, it
doesn't seem too much to ask that you afford the same courtesy and
protection of the list members by scrubbing the addresses. This is exactly
what Onelist does when it makes the archives truly PUBLIC (as opposed to
the subscribable list). It really doesn't seem too much to ask, and it's a
task any good webmaster can accomplish.

And as one last bit, if no one has mentioned it, there are gaps in the
Mills archives (and always will be) due to their servers going down a
couple of times and old messages being lost. Still *plenty* of info there.
I pity the person who wades through some of the screaming fits... :)

Regards,
Jon
`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`
Jonathan M. Szanto : Corporeal Meadows - Harry Partch, online.
jszanto@adnc.com : http://www.corporeal.com/
`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`

Drew Skyfyre wrote,

>And I'm curious, these things have been there since 1994. Any number of
>people have been downloading & reading them over the past 6 years.
>Also, a number of messages from 1995 have been on an HTML archive on, I
>think, a server in Finland. And in all this time, no one has had a problem
>with them being available to anyone & everyone as it should be. Why the
fuss
>now ? All I am offering to do is make them easily accessible, more useful,
&
>of greater benefit to microtonalists of every level, everywhere.

Yes, hundreds of messages from the early years, plus all of 1999, have been
archived on the web for all to see and no one complained. You go Drew! Fill
that hole! Sure, this discussion group has contained many errors of fact and
decorum, but that's the nature of the beast. Seeing opinions clash, one can
learn so much more (about tuning, not to mention sociology) than seeing some
kind of scrubbed-down one-sided interpretation of "veracity."

Drew Skyfyre wrote:

> This isn't a fraternity or a cult or anything, is it ?

You mean it's not???

--
* D a v i d B e a r d s l e y
* xouoxno@virtulink.com
*
* J u x t a p o s i t i o n N e t R a d i o
*
*
* http://www.virtulink.com/immp/lookhere.htm

> I am absolutely firm about this: Unless I have the right to withdraw any of
> my postings, I do not want my contributions to the Mills archives to be
> transfered to any other site.
Very well. If a big cheese insists, the little ones will have to go along.

My solution :

I'll post everything I can get my hands on. And when & if I receive a
request from a particular author for a particular post to be deleted, I will
do so within 48 hours, failing any natural disasters, or whatever.

> As wonderfull as some individual
> postings may be, there is a huge amount of items with rotten orthography,
> ill-formulated expressions, errors of fact, and (yes, even here) intemperate
> outbursts.

Which is precisely the point I made.

But anyhow, since you insist, we'll do it your way. And, I will add another
page in addition to the Errata & Retractions, and call it Deletions, giving
the date, subject digest no. & author.

And o.k., I'll take out all the email addresses. That's your only objection,
Jon ?

Any more objections ?

BTW, looks like I may be able to get *every* post ever made to the list.

- Drew

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>I am absolutely firm about this: Unless I have the right to withdraw any of
>my postings, I do not want my contributions to the Mills archives to be
>transfered to any other site. I have already had the experience of having my
>postings misrepresented in external citations, and I wish to limit the
>potential for further misrepresentation as much as possible. While many
>people who cite the list do seek permission from individual authors to
>include citations, this is a far from universal practice. I would hope that
>the wishes of the author would be respected in this matter; if this is not
>the case, then I have no choice but to simply stop posting.

Daniel, for almost a year now, your posts have been put on the web without
any such agreement. And what's the big difference between an html archive
and an ftp archive (the Mills list from Sept. '95 is available via ftp), or
a listserv archive (from which all of the Mills list is available)?

Drew, it wouldn't be hard to set up a web page to which only subscribers
had access. Not that this makes any sense, but it wouldn't be unkind of
you to pacify these guys.

Also, since ftp is okay I'd be happy to put the entire list on my anonymous
ftp server. Is there a way to get the Mills server to send the entire
archives at once?

-Carl

I agree with Jon Szanto that any messages to the Tuning List
that go on a WWW archive should have the email addresses of
the subscriber scrubbed out, such as:

johndoe@xxxxxxxxx.xxx

And I also agree with Daniel Wolf that anyone who sent
a post in to a Mills Tuning Digest should have the right
to rescind anything before it goes fully public.

And I agree completely with Drew Skyfyre that the old
Mills Digests, at least the authorized parts, should be
made easily available and searchable on a web archive.

I'd like to continue to provide links in the archived
Digests to my Tuning Dictionary, on both the Mills and
Onelist Archives - I think this would be a tremendous aid
to newbies. (How can I provide links in the current
Onelist Archives? - is that a question for Mark Nowitzky?)

I included the email addresses in the 10 or so
Digests that I archived on my site about a year ago.
If anyone who has a message there wants their address
or a posting removed, email me privately and let me know.

-monz

Joseph L. Monzo Philadelphia monz@juno.com
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/monzo/homepage.html
|"...I had broken thru the lattice barrier..."|
| - Erv Wilson |
--------------------------------------------------

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> Drew, it wouldn't be hard to set up a web page to which only subscribers
> had access. Not that this makes any sense, but it wouldn't be unkind of
> you to pacify these guys.
>
Nyet ! The purpose of my effort is to make it (more) open to the entire
planet. Frankly if everyone could afford to buy (or easily have access to)
about 5 decent texts on the subject, and sufficient recorded examples, maybe
about 50 CDs, then the archives wouldn't matter except for their
considerable worth as historical documents. Yeah, go ahead, laugh.

The point is NOT the accuracy of any information in them. Even the best of
us have goofed, made embarrasing gaffes, Ph.D.s and all & didn't always know
the things you do now. This is about community & discussion & human beings.

So, now I've agreed to allow deletions, in the manner I stated in my earlier
mail. And, I'll delete email addresses.

I have no objections to deleting email addresses, as pointless as I still
believe such an effort to be. In addition to the points I made, many here
have web sites with their email address in plain view. Anyway, all I was
hoping for was that you would be gracious enough to help make my work a wee
bit easier.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not asking anything in return, I'm always more than
willing to help out anyone in anyway I can, despite my very limited
resources, & I am immensely grateful for help I have recieved from many
subscribers. My only interest is in promoting microtonality.

Hey, thank u to all who've emailed me re. this !

> Also, since ftp is okay I'd be happy to put the entire list on my anonymous
> ftp server. Is there a way to get the Mills server to send the entire
> archives at once?

From a recent post of mine :

To : <listproc@eartha.mills.edu>

To retrieve multiple digests send a command like :

"get tuning digest.500"

repeated one after the other like :

"get tuning digest.500"
"get tuning digest.501"
"get tuning digest.502"

as many as you like.

Free your mind & the rest will follow.

- Drew

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