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Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>
CovingtonInnovations.com>Responding to David Odden's remarks... > Web-publication can have the effect of rendering papers invisible to those > in developing countries. It is fortunate that you have high-speed web access > (not to mention a computer), something that many of my colleagues in Africa > cannot take for granted. But it also works the other way. Web publications are available to anyone in the world who has one thing -- an Internet connection. Print publications are "invisible" to anyone who doesn't receive that particular publication, including not only people in Third World countries, but also scholars at smaller institutions, people outside a particular scholar's personal mailing list, or what have you. Remember how "invisible" Chomsky's _Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory_ was during the first 20 years of its influence? > Additionally, printed articles are "platform > independent", whereas the hassles that face even us in North American > universities in trying to deal with postscript, PDF, Latex, and whatever, > can be enormous. The simple problem of fonts and the Mac/PC divide is > evidence to me that current web technology and practice is not satisfactory > as a sole mode of publishing. Given how file formats and other computer > specifications change quickly, one should expect an article web-published in > 2001 to be un-openable in 2101. Some "web publishing" is done in file formats that are not well chosen *now*, such as proprietary word processor files. Web publishing should always be done in file formats that are *designed* to be universally readable, such as HTML, PDF, or PostScript, rather than formats that were designed for some other, more transitory, purpose. LaTeX source code is not meant to be published. Microsoft Word files are not meant to be published. Both of those file formats exist for encoding input to programs that produce output in more portable form. Having said that -- I do not think any of the file formats that are designed for web publishing, and are reasonably well established, are ever going to go away. It is simply too easy to preserve upward compatibility, and there's too much practical need to do so. As an analogy: If you have FORTRAN programs written for the IBM 7090 in 1958 (as many scientists do), you can run them in Microsoft Fortran (an obscure product, but it has its following) under Windows 2000 today. A much more serious concern that I have about web publication is its volatility. Once something is in print, it's in libraries and won't go away. Web sites get taken down or (worse) their content gets altered.Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
ucalgary.ca>David Odden's point is well taken about the comparative inaccessibility of web-based publications to scholars in developing countries. However, I hope his understandable dismay at the variety of platforms and mutually incompatible applications will be somewhat allayed by the following. Fonts can be 'embedded' in a PDF or PostScript file by printing to a file instead of a printer, and choosing the option to embed all non-standard fonts. PDF files can be read using Adobe Acrobat Reader, which can be used on virtually any platform (Mac, Windows, Unix, Latex, etc.) and which is available for free at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html. PDF files can be created using Adobe Acrobat (for font inclusion, Distiller seems most useful), or for free by submitting a PostScript file to PS2PDF.com at http://www.ps2pdf.com/convert/index.htm. However annoying the sometimes dubious 'advances' in software may be, one thing manufacturers do strive for is backwards compatibility. Scholars are fortunately not alone in needing long-term access to documents, so perhaps it isn't too much to hope that backwards compatibility will be maintained for at least the next 100 years. But how easy is it to consult academic sources from 1910 even now, at universities that don't have extensive and long-standing library collections? Since digital files take up so little space and can be transmitted electronically, it is possible that someday every linguist will have access to every linguistics book and article ever published. To achieve that, as David points out, we'll have to retain control of our intellectual 'property'. My sense is that the value of intellectual property has increased, now that it is perceived (wrongly, to some extent) to be as easily transferrable as other types of property. If so, this has implications both for us and for our language consultants. We should probably be studying North American land treaties from a couple of centuries ago... I'll bet some of our language consultants could teach us a thing or two about the importance of maintaining property rights. -Martha _________________________________________________________ Dr. Martha McGinnis, Assistant Professor Linguistics Department, SS 820 University of Calgary 2500 University Dr. NW, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4 CANADA phone: (403) 220-6119, fax: (403) 282-3880 http://www.ucalgary.ca/~mcginnis/ _________________________________________________________Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
vsnl.net>Subject: Re: 12.1462, Disc: New: Ethics of Web-based vs Paper Publications RE Lev Michael's post on the ethics of different modes of publication: Linguist 12.1462 & David Odden's point of view on the subject: In India even the printed material is so difficult to get. How does one explain that? Jawahar Lal Nehru University, New Delhi did not have Noam Chomsky's 'Syntactic Structures' in it's library until few years back. It did not have the standard Syntax text books, what to talk of many other very common Linguistics books. The same is the story in most Indian Universities. Hence the students have to depend on the Individual Collection of Professors or of some 'lucky students' who manage to have them. One can decide to have a standard format for Web Publishing which should not change so frequently. Sharbani Banerji sharbeMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue