Glen, With a thread of any complexity it all, it becomes very tedious and tricky. However, you are right that just a few conventions observed by email writers could make it a lot easier. Let's say you began every one of your messages with"<date, time> BEGIN GLEN" (just above the header) and ended it with END GLEN. A simple word macro could strip out all the quotations and we would be left with the bare messages. Larding would be forbidden. Now, I think a sort could reorder the messages in order of occurrence.
Note the premise, tho. We would have to get correspondents to start their message with those little bits of text. I don't think even I would do it. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ -----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of ?glen? Sent: Friday, October 28, 2016 12:35 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] THREAD BENDING ALERT: Was "Is Bezos a Bozo?" IS NOW"Reading Email exchanges chronologically" Let's think about what you're asking for a minute. There are very few on the list who care to spend the energy to participate at all. such lurkers undoubtedly have valuable opinions. But there's some hurdle of effort (or unwillingness) that prevents them from expressing those opinions. Of the people who _do_ participate, very few of them can find the energy to delete all the extra characters, even those added automatically by the mailing list software (at the bottom of each post). I can't even explain how easy it is to delete that before responding. That nobody does it is absolutely flabbergasting, to me. But there it is. So, when you ask whether it's really that hard, it spawns the questions: Is it really that hard to trim/edit one's replies? ... to use the threading feature of one's email client? ... to ignore threads or particular posters? ... to standardize things across email clients (e.g. the quotation prefix and "quote" line, plain text vs. html, character encodings)? The answers to all these questions is "No" it's not hard at all. These are all problems that have been solved multiple times in other contexts. But it is work (as distinct from play). And work usually requires incentive. What's the incentive? On 10/27/2016 10:29 AM, Nick Thompson wrote: > Is the problem THIS hard? It would seem to me that the first step would be > to simply reorder the email messages eliminating any previous email messages > automatically included in each subsequent message. Once the messages were in > the right order and the inclusions of previous messages were eliminated, I > could write macro’s to get rid of the headers. By inclusions I don’t mean > places where somebody intentionally pulled out a passage from somebody’s > message to comment on. (I believe you call that quotation.) I mean the > routine inclusion of prior messages as a part of the reply process. -- ␦glen? ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
