I'm on this list since september '95, but never ventured to come out from
the dark.
I do mostly dichromated gum, with incursions in carbon, cyanotype...all with
moderate success. I'm a free-lance computers consultant, and I don't have
_so_ much time left for photography. However, I enjoy it very much...
I came out from lurking because of the proposed alt.book.
I agree with Luis Nadeau in that one more book does no harm, quite the
contrary. I have several of his books, but that don't stop me from also
having Scopick's, "The makers of light" and many others. Each one of them
has contributed some new idea. I also agree with him that it is _plenty_ of
work.
(BTW, Luis, just what are those new techniques that 99.8 of us haven't even
heard of? Sounds fascinating. It's a secret? I've heard somewhere that
instead of potassium dichromate some clever guys are actually using silver
salts! My silver spoons get darker with time, now that I think of it...;-)
Also, Judy Seigel's arguments cannot be easily dismissed:
a.- Each of the contributors is to write an article 'ex nihilo', ignoring
the wealth of material existent in the archives? But that is self-defeating,
in a sense.
b.- Ok, so we use the archives. But who is going to make the selection?
Aside from the huge amount of work involved, most of the
ideas/techniques/approaches proposed by some contributor to any one process
have been dismissed at some other time by some _other_ contributor! Makes
interesting reading, certainly, but how do you filter all this to make a
_book_? And yes, as Judy says, how do you do this _and_ avoid inflicting
deep wounds to everybody concerned?
On the other hand, if the replaceable pages format is adopted as someone
suggested, less filtering would be necessary: _all_ of the approaches to a
given process could be distributed, and each one of us would keep only those
that make sense to him. Less bloodshed this way, but utter confusion for
beginners. Well, "tant pis pour les beginn=E8res", let them start with=
another
book! _This_ one could become a classic, emboding the marvelous and
frightening anarchy implicit in the Net! Something in the vein of "Rayuela"
by Julio Cortazar, only more up to date...
Yes, I would buy this book, if it ever came out, even knowing beforehand all
the trading off involved.
Hovewer, in the meantime, I have a computer-oriented approach to cope with
the information coming from the list. What I do is the following:
0.- Delete personal messages, flames and other futile and irrelevant
material (Excuse me please, futile and irrelevant to _me_ :-) This is a
rather subjective step, which I'm tempted to skip, sometimes!
1.- The message is preprocessed with a filter that takes out the header,
leaving only the remittent, the subject, date and time, and the text.
2.- The message is appended to previous ones on the same thread, making a
file per thread. This could be changed, of course, perhaps having families
of threads, but it would involve additional human labor.
3.- The files that have changed are re-indexed. To this end, I use a public
domain free-text database manager (there exist several).
4.- The same database manager allows me to search words, phrases, logical
combinations of these, and so on.
5.- Once a year or so (I am not doing this, yet) the message files, together
with the index file and the database manager could be written to a CD-ROM.
This would be a terrible pilfering of resources: from September '95 up to
today, all the messages, without any filtering, take up less than 4.5
million characters. Perhaps the rate will be 6 or 7 million characters a
year. A CD-ROM has a capacity of 600 Million chars. Oh, well, they come
cheap these days...
The first step is the only one to involve some work and judgment (_this_ is
why I'm tempted to skip it), but it's only a few messages each day. If only
I could identify automatically the flames, the personal communications,
the...Perhaps if I mix in some text recognition techniques and some
Artificial Intelligence? Yeah, it could work...
Anyway, if somebody out there is interested in this approach, I'm more than
willing to share experiences. Perhaps it would be possible to distribute a
pre-cooked, working system to those interested.
And sorry to have been a bore for all of you that are _not_ in computers! I
agree that a book has something that a CD-ROM
Tom Sobota
Colombia 40, 5E
28016 Madrid
Spain.
Phone +34(1)3592319
Email canencia2@mad.servicom.es