harnad@mind.UUCP (Stevan Harnad) (07/30/87)
Mike Anderson 7L-63 <anderson@BOEING.COM> wrote (in e-mail, quoted with permission): > [I'm] intrigued by your goal of developing the potential of the net as > a medium for serious intellectual exchange... worthwhile to start > a new group dedicated to exploring that issue... by testing it as > you have been doing, not by discussing it... > lengthy quotes of responses, followed by repetition of earlier points > that seem not to have been understood or accepted, could be replaced by > the poster paraphrasing what he/she understood the respondent to have > said, and what the original poster actually intended... > I didn't vote in your poll, but if I had I would have voted to > continue the discussion. Thanks for your thoughts on Net discussion. I agree that there was a good deal of profligate and unreflective overquoting, but the mechanism of quoting and requoting is also one of the strengths of email and net-discussions, when used in a serious and selective way. (E.g., it helps maintain continuity for those who missed the prior iteration; but properly used it can be *much* more powerful than that.) The only sense in trying to launch the new kind of use of the Net that I have in mind in a new group would be if it had a guaranteed wide initial readership (as comp.ai does). Otherwise it would just be a small inbred palaver instead of the broad demonstration project it must be if it is to have any influence on the evolution of net communication. I'm continuing to think of ways, though. One possibility might be to hard-publish the four or five discussions I've already generated, but that would require permissions from all concerned and would entail lots of coordination problems. (I've saved all the files though.) Another would be to get bitnet or one of the other academic networks to put together a critical mass of scholarly readers who agree to participate for a while -- say four or five months, logging in daily or so to follow the discussions. *Then* I could promise to get quite a few different topics going in different disciplines. And if the quality of the participants is sufficiently high, I guarantee the entire experimental readership will become addicted for life (as I seem to have become). > for recruiting readers, one possibility that occurs to me is to post > in mod.ai or comp.ai notices of current discussions in the discussion > newsgroup. Also, if an introduction [to the topic under discussion] > were posted to appropriate newgroups, it might serve to recruit readers > to the discussion newsgroup. This approach might gradually lead to > a critical mass in the discussion newsgroup so it could serve as a > serious test of netmail as a forum for intellectual discussion. Good idea (although there's still the problem of getting the other scholarly disciplines on the Net in force in the first place). But now what do the Net gods and others interested in the Net's broader potential for scholarly communication in all the disciplines think? -- Stevan Harnad harnad@mind.princeton.edu (609)-921-7771
mcb@lll-tis.arpa (Michael C. Berch) (08/04/87)
In article <1069@mind.UUCP> harnad@mind.UUCP (Stevan Harnad) writes: > [With regard to use of Usenet for scholarly conferencing:] > ... > I'm continuing to think of ways, though. One possibility might be to > hard-publish the four or five discussions I've already generated, but that > would require permissions from all concerned and would entail lots of > coordination problems. (I've saved all the files though.) I have not been following the "Symbol Grounding" discussion which Mr. Harnad refers to, but would like to point out that Usenet articles that are posted without copyright notice are in the public domain (at least according to US law) and permission need not be secured from the authors for republication. It is certainly courteous to do so, particularly if the republication is for formal scholarly or commercial purposes, but as a strict matter of law it is unnecessary to do so. The exception, of course, would be articles that bore copyright notices; a number of these appeared during the initial controversy over redistribution of Stargate material, but essentially all have disappeared by now. Michael C. Berch ARPA: mcb@lll-tis.arpa UUCP: {ames,ihnp4,lll-crg,lll-lcc,mordor}!lll-tis!mcb