For a year or so the
Invisible Adjunct weblog has provided a forum for academics to (mostly) discuss issues relating to campus politics and working conditions in academia. Last March the anonymous author decided to leave the profession and
sign off from her weblog. The only problem is that over time a real community has gathered around that weblog, and those people clearly want to continue talking - as the 200-odd comments on the sign-off post attest.
I figured some of them would rather switch boats than go down with the sinking ship, so I created an
Invisible Adjunct channel on the Internet Topic Exchange to aggregate relevant posts from members of the community. Much to my pleasure the channel has been put to good use by interested parties: about a hundred posts have appeared on the channel so far.
But another threat is looming on the horizon -
the IA is planning to take down the site a week from now. This means all the content will vanish. The site hasn't been indexed by the
Internet Archive since June of last year. (Ironically,
the last post that shows on the Wayback machine is precisely about the loss of archives!) And the IA hasn't allowed mirroring.
Of course many participants wish to preserve the memory, but it is unclear who's calling the shots at this point. Who wrote the site? Granted, the IA wrote all the front page material by herself, hundreds of posts. But there are also thousands of comments in there that have been contributed by readers. A commenter raises the issue in those terms:
I believe the comments form the bulk of the site overall (correct me if I'm wrong), and that much of the value comes from the conversations that took place under IA's supervision. In some sense she's not the "author" of the site, but rather the caretaker of an online community.
I have no idea what's going to happen to that content, but I guess the moral here is "use caution before you invest significantly in a site that you don't control". A lot of commenters might now find themselves wishing they had commented on their own site so that their words wouldn't go down with the rest.
1. Dorothea Salo on June 2, 2004 8:50 AM writes...
A number of site participants have downloaded the content to private hard drives. Another number (which may or may not fully coincide with the first number) is discussing mirroring possibilities privately with IA.
But, damn it, it's her call. Commenters or no, SHE is the one who put her life out there. SHE is the one trying to build a new life. The anonymity she worked hard to maintain has already been compromised, and I just can't see how any commenter can demand that she compromise it further.
I suppose one "solution" would be to put the comments up publicly, sans the posts. Oh, but that wouldn't hit nearly such a peak of excellence, would it? No, of course it wouldn't. So much for the comments being the value of the site, say I.
I also can't say that I think the whiff of snideness toward IA in this post is going to help those of us gently urging her to allow mirroring. Truly wish you'd kept your fingers off the keyboard on this one, Mr. Paquet.
Permalink to Comment2. Francois Lachance on June 2, 2004 9:11 AM writes...
Dorothy's point about IA's role can be expanded. In a sense the blog owner is also a publisher (there is some vetting of comments that occurs). In a print world example, contributors to magazine may retain rights to their contributions but they do not usually have rights to the whole issue or the entire run of the magazine.
Anyone republishing the whole of the blog should consider the moral rights (yes, it's a term from international copyright law) of the comment contributors who may not wish their comments to appear in another context. And therefore you can see why IA might not want mirroring.
And there are the issues of licensing and the possible need to port to other interface software to access the database records. And what if the porting leaves behind, for whatever reasons, some of the comments (or entries).
The best solution in this case might be to try and get the folks who run the Way Back Machine at Internet Archive http://www.archive.org to schedule a spider to capture the material for archival purposes before the next two weeks have flown by. That would be like the equivalent of a library preserving a run of a periodical in its collections. AND it would allow IA to both preserve authorial anonymity and move on to living life extramuros. IF the material cannot be archived, link rot is perhaps an appropriate signature on a long running blog about the inadequacies of institutional support for those that the academy apprehends only in their transitional status.
Permalink to Comment3. Seb on June 2, 2004 9:22 AM writes...
Dorothea: I'm sorry if my post came across as snide or insensitive - it wasn't my intent to make the IA look bad or to downplay her central role. Yes, the site has indeed been hers all along, and whether the community expected or hopes that the site will stay up in one way or another can only indirectly affect the outcome.
I wanted to highlight the quandary of what happens to user-contributed content, because it is bound to happen again in many instances all over the place. (See e.g. the discussion of copyright traps at http://communitywiki.org/CopyrightTrap)
The anonymity angle obviously complicates matters, and I haven't followed this closely enough to give an educated opinion.
Of course the readers' comments could be published in stand-alone fashion, and obviously with the context ripped out they wouldn't make as much sense. But I'm guessing this is probably the best way out. (Putting the comments in a wiki might even allow the community to regenerate the context without using the original author's words.)
François: Mirroring is mirroring, whether done by the Archive or by another party. I'm guessing the Archive's spiders are barred from crawling the IA's site precisely to prevent mirroring.
Permalink to Comment4. Francois Lachance on June 2, 2004 10:41 AM writes...
Yes mirroring is mirroring
But an archive is not a mirror
Witness the sophistication of the commentators at the IA blog.
Archives can be housed off online or off the WWW and accessible for research purposes. The librarians and archivists have much experience with this in dealing with many forms of information. And of course copyright regimes differ from country to country.
Just as some years ago bazaar was contrasted to cathedral, we may expect that "the record" will be contrasted with "the conversation" -- fetishization of the discourse or discoursing on the fetish ....
In architecture and urban planning, similar issues arise about the preservation of the past, control of a a site and community response.
Perhaps an alternative analogy to pursue in examining this question of the assembly and dispersion of discursive bits is the struggles over patents on genetically modified crops.
Permalink to Comment5. Shelley on June 2, 2004 11:18 AM writes...
One of the most graceful acts I've seen in weblogging is when IA quit. I loved the fact that she just left, she didn't try to profit from her popularity online, and she left with such elegance and style.
I didn't care for the fact that a separate discussion forum was set up in her name, to carry on the same conversation. A better approach would have been to set it up under the topics involved, which seems to be graduate school, horrors or whatever.
Now, I see this clamor for keeping the pages up regardless of her option and her choice, because people think they've written such beauty in her comments that it must be preserved.
The beauty of IA's act was as much in the ephemeral nature of the existence of her pages as anything else.
People mirroring the pages, downloading the archives, setting up forums -- not letting her go! Those crying for their lost comments have taken a graceful act and made it into a circus.
Permalink to Comment6. Francois Lachance on June 8, 2004 12:01 PM writes...
IA has provided an update...
UPDATE (June 4):
I have received many requests to keep the blog up, or at least to allow mirroring. I haven't yet decided what to do.
In any case, the site should eventually be archived at the Internet Archive. I requested a crawl over two months ago and I know the Alexa crawler has since visited my site. The results do not yet turn up, but apparently this can take several months.
Permalink to Comment7. PipeTobacco on June 23, 2004 12:35 PM writes...
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PipeTobacco
Permalink to Commenthttp://frumpyprofessor.blogspot.com