Roger,
Thanks for taking the problem at face value. I agree with the thread idea. No problem. I have been in at least one very interesting correspondence where one of the most creative participants insisted in changing the thread with each new message. Such people will need to be severely disciplined. It would be nice to pull the name, date and time out of the header and throw everything else away. Sometimes the formatting isn't as consistent as one would like it to be. Distinguishing body content of replies from the things they are replies to might be accomplished by deleting everything between two >'s, and also the >'s themselves. Something would have to be done about the practice of larding . i.e., interspersing one's responses amongst other people's messages in reply, or quoting, ie, interspersing pieces of the message one is replying to in one's reply. I find these practices really helpful, but they undermine everything above. I toyed with, and tried out with one small group of people, having each writer designate the parts of the body that they would want preserved with some symbol plus their name. NST==> for instance..<== NST. The Macro would preserve everything within the symbols, even if it included some foreign embedded text, thus preserving the larding and the quoting. I couldn't get people to do it, however. I even kept forgetting myself. There is something spontaneous about email that resists any discipline. A decade ago, I was pretty good at writing Word Macros to do this sort of thing. Word has down graded it's macro writing abilities recently, and/or, I have become stupider. Has anybody else out there fooled with word macros? Thanks, again, Roger. Nick From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow Sent: Saturday, January 19, 2013 2:51 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Preserving email correspondence So, the thread exists in the archives at redfish, or where ever, and will continue to exist there for quite a while. The first tool is one which given a mailing list archive and a thread "subject" extracts the messages posted on the "subject". The second tool would take the raw messages in the thread and arrange them as a tree of replies to the original posting. Both of these are part of every existing program that displays mailing list archives by threads. The third tool is one that identifies quoted material and replaces it with a reference to the original text or to the previous level of quotation. This is where it gets hairy, but for any section that's marked as quoted there either will be a successful identification of the source or there won't. At this point you can view the thread as a sequence or tree of original contributions with all quoted material represented as ellipses, which may render the original contributions unintelligible, but that's Nick's problem. -- rec -- On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 1:14 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]> wrote: I don't think I ever said, "why cant we just...". Did I? I had forgotten about "noodles". I can't even remember how it worked. Or where it is. N -----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Saturday, January 19, 2013 12:23 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] Preserving email correspondence All - In defense of Nick, I appreciate how he could come to "why cant we just...". As a systems developer with a little experience around natural language processing, I agree with Doug and Owen that it is a naive question with only extremely complex answers. I understand why Nick asks these questions and value the naivete that he is willing to expose to us. I also appreciate Marcus' point. I've been on both ends of the system development question around documentation and helping others understand what I've done or trying to understand what others have done. I'm often eclipsed by highly efficient and capable (usually) young programmers who are (naturally) impatient with the rest of us for asking them to explain what the've done. I'm also often frustrated by others who want me to walk them through every detail of something that is "obvious" to me, despite realizing it wasn't obvious to me until I'd gone through the steps of creating it. Their ignorance is often no greater than mine was when I started, and asking them to essentially re-develop the same algorithm or code is possibly the only way they will come to my level of understanding. I can guide them through the shortcuts, but ultimately there is hard work for them to do. As I remember it, Nick tried to coin a Wiki based conversational forum I think he called "Noodles" a number of years ago. I don't remember the details, I do remember being compelled by his conception of it. I do remember trying to participate with him (and maybe a couple of others?) in using it, following the conventions. I guess I could probably dig it out of the archives, thanks to Owen, et al. who have made sure we even *have* archives. Lacking brevity as usual, - Steve ============================================================ 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
============================================================ 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
