[okfn-discuss] A question of history

[Matthew Brett]

Hi Rufus, and list,

> Yup. Licensing is fairly easy. The original manuscript are pd and almost
> any amended edition is copyright the person who did the amendations. So
> the obvious thing to do would be put all this stuff out under an
> attribution license (or attribution-sharealike). One could also consider
> some deposit scheme where a text is only released after a set period
> which would address the fears of those academics who were concerned
> about having a head-start.

Sounds good.

> Yes. I think to simplify here we have the following requirements
>
> 1. Ability to store raw manuscript (and versions thereof)
> 2. Ability to compare this manuscript against other manuscript
> 3. Ability to annotate a munuscript

Well, yes.  The problem here is that this enterprise is the ordinary
stuff of this type of history, so there are several projects that are
well down the line.  In practice there is virtually never a raw raw
stage when you just have the document in text without any annotations,
and I believe it would not be very useful in that state.  The
annotations start very early in the process of creating the document.
An example is here:

http://wtfaculty.wtamu.edu/~bbrasington/panormia.html

In fact, funnily enough, Martin started off using tex for markup, many
year ago, thus freaking out his more technophobic colleagues, and
making things rather difficult for him too.  He then moved to MS Word
- which is the source of the pdfs you see above.

I suppose the obvious response is, that y'all wouldn't have started
from here if y'all were me, but, given the example above is fairly
typical of the state of a fairly large number of works-in-progress,
the practical question becomes, can anyone think of a way to go, from
these Word documents, with the huge amount of work that they contain,
that will make it easier in the long term to get to a good
well-thought out solution?

Thanks a lot,

Matthew