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Lane Hall read a terrific selection of the Water Wars history at Woodlawn Pattern as part of the United We Read series. The visual component, particularly the textual visual component was very compelling and the edited prose collection hung together with remarkable 'fluidity'. Lane also displayed some hand made book artifacts. We need to find a way to incorporate more of the visual material into the wiki!

Craig

You, Sir, are a bumble-brained pedantic puffball and shall not dictate the framework of my rigorous responses to your addled and feeble exegesis. Your scholarship on Carrick is false from the start, and history will surely slap you senseless.

Dr. Jay Lane

Re: Updates and New Pages by Lane HallLane Hall, 22 Mar 2010 13:27

That would be great. I have made an extensive outline now and I am going to be working on this a lot. I now view it as my niche on this project, and I envision expanding the text considerably within the framework of the Notes. If you want to add new Annotations or edit the Annotations that are there, or add sub-sub-categories, as in Corrections to the Annotations, or Clarifications to the Corrected Annotations, I would say have at it ad infinitum. The only thing I would ask is within the existing Notes to let the text stand as I am in the process of developing that thread. Of course feel free to write new Notes to other parts of the poem, or to hang as many Annotations off my notes-in-progress as you would like. The more the merrier. Does that sound like a fair and reasonable request?

I agree it is tough to contribute during the semester. My own thoughts on why others are reluctant to participate tend to skew toward the time pressure. I think perhaps some people are afraid of learning the wiki syntax and others don't want to feel committed to a large-seeming project while dissertations etc are coming due.

I looked at the wiki entries you listed for page design reference. I'm still debating. Do we really want this to look like wikipedia? Perhaps it makes sense for the reasons you mention, but wikipedia is just so ugly. To me it's an icky user interface. It also seems more paratextual. There isn't really any expectation that there will be a strong relationship between Page A and the word linked that takes me to Page B. You make 3 clicks in wikipedia and you have got something that has probably nothing at all to do with place you started, so it doesn't seem like the world of WW1 is bordered or cohesive in the same way our project is pretending to be. Hmm. I can't quite say why I resist. Gimme some more time to think about it.

Re: Stagnant Waters? by CraigMedveckyCraigMedvecky, 09 Mar 2010 14:21

Hello water warriors.

First off, I have to apologize for going AWOL on this space for several weeks now. My prelim reading is catching up with me and I've been death-bed ill for the last couple weeks, which squashed all productivity.

On the bright side, my prelim reading on digital pedagogy has gotten me thinking more and more about this site. Besides the original trio of founders I don't think we've had any other contributions, have we? I had an online chat with MMC about his participation and he hasn't jumped in due to time constraints (which I think we can all understand) and also some hesitancy to contribute due to the complex storyline that's evolving and worrying about getting something wrong.

Random thoughts:

1) I'm wondering if it would be useful to have an encyclopedia-type entry that encompasses the water wars as a whole; for example, the first three paragraphs of the WWII entry on wikipedia. This would at least put a superstructure in place that would outline the major factions, major events and dates and provide tons of jumping off points for other narratives.

2) I'm also wondering if the MacMannus Encyclopedia and Directory shouldn't be dismantled with each entry having its own page. This would bring it in more in line with the "wiki" structure; for example, Wikipedia doesn't have a page for all its entries! By creating separate pages for each entry, this might provide more points of entry for other contributors. The Hales Domes Exhibits maybe too? (and yes, I realize these are mostly if not entirely my contributions!)

3) I'd love to see different kinds of media on the site.

I guess what I'm throwing out there is whether the structure of the site should be more wiki-like, using Wikipedia's framing of major conflicts as our guide:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_war

Note how the dates, locations, belligerents, commanders, etc. are all listed and linked from the columns.

Thoughts?

Stagnant Waters? by Trent HergenraderTrent Hergenrader, 28 Feb 2010 18:51

Craig, I like this very much and look forward to contributing to it!

So I am continuing to unravel my exegesis of Dingman's Pond after an inspiring read of Pale Fire. I have as you will see roped a few of you in as critics, of course only to attribute ideas to you and them lampoon those very ideas. It seems like a fun direction to take a commentary on commentary which devolves into a lot of in-fighting by various myopic experts, and so in fairness I have re-architected the page to allow an infinitely regressable system of layered notes — the significane of which is that you can make footnotes to my footnotes and thus argue in character with me within the visible text of the page. Now you will see that numberic marks become alphabetic marks as Notes digress to Annotations but there is certainly no limit. The key here is you use a manual super-script mark and not the actual footnote command when iterating your entries.

^^mark^^ will yieldmark

I'm also using liberal anchor tags:
[[# anchor]]
so that we can link within the page as it lengthens.

Ficto-criticism by CraigMedveckyCraigMedvecky, 27 Feb 2010 15:46

Hey,

You may have noticed that when formatting text Wikidot does not support Tabs or consecutive spaces to make new paragraphs or in-line separation when laying out poetic lines. Here's a low tech work around which simply turns periods white and allows you to place white space (or whatever the background color is) where you need it. Simply add or subtract periods as desired.

[[span style="color:white"]]. . . . .[[/span]]

Craig

Code Notes by CraigMedveckyCraigMedvecky, 27 Feb 2010 15:30

I'm Matt Trease, a poet and PhD student in Modern Studies at the university of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. My writing tends toward appropriation and other conceptual strategies. I'm currently working on a manuscript of conceptual poems that function as an encyclopedia of organic appropriative forms as well as a dissertation that might double as a 'pataphysical history of hypertext (check out the dissertation blog @ http://mtrease.wordpress.com ).

Re: Introduce yourself by mjtreasemjtrease, 16 Feb 2010 23:06

Nice job! Did you read in character with a lab coat or camo bandana a la Patti Hearst in the SLA days?

From Lane: "I delivered a 12 min excerpted performance/reading at The Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute yesterday, and it went well. I wasn't sure how cohesive the narrative would be (sampled and reorganized from this wiki) and was happy to find that people really enjoyed it. I'll reprise it at the next Woodland Pattern reading."

I delivered a 12 min excerpted performance/reading at The Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute yesterday, and it went well. I wasn't sure how cohesive the narrative would be (sampled and reorganized from this wiki) and was happy to find that people really enjoyed it. I'll reprise it at the next Woodland Pattern reading.

Waterwars Reading at SAIC by Lane HallLane Hall, 14 Feb 2010 14:50

I like the idea of introducing a villain. We have a lot of information about the shape of the resistance but not too much about what they were resisting. Your move to point to those Klan interviews (which make a nice connection between the lyric language "colorist" and "anti-colotist" and historical narrative of white power) really seems to point to a ready source of villainy. I picked the Charles S. Alexander book The Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest and drew on it for some historical ideas there.

Re: Newlands Reclamation by CraigMedveckyCraigMedvecky, 13 Feb 2010 16:12

Nice! I will check out the code under the hood. Thanks so much.

I think they were trying to make it easy for novices to have reasonably robust sites that wont crash or break so they took an object oriented approach. I sort of like it.

How do you like that?

If you just have two columns you don't need a table at all the div tags float:left and :right will take care of it. But the key is the percentage widths and paddings all need to add up to 100 (because percentage based) (and percentage based much more stable across different computers) or you will get weird formatting anomalies.

Craig, can you give me a hand with this? I'm having trouble formatting the table correctly so the content is fixed in one column while the image is fixed in the other.

Laws and things of import = bold
people = italic
significant places = not sure… either?

The maps are great. I have a series of water power station pix to post. Any code-thoughts regarding a picture gallery? (thumbnails? links from words?)

Re: Updates and New Pages by Lane HallLane Hall, 24 Jan 2010 02:47

I like the archivist/historians touch here. It is useful to see these campaigns take shape! I've been doing some reading about "water witches" which might find form soon.

Newlands Reclamation by Lane HallLane Hall, 24 Jan 2010 02:44
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