Measuring accessibility

is it possible to quantify the increased accessibility of (eg) fweet.org vs mchugh's book of annotations to finnegans wake?

if you have mch's book beside your keyboard, and the fweet link already in your browser's bookmarks bar, for many sorts of query the book will still be more convenient, requiring no typing and no search codes.

but fweet gives you joyce's original text along with mch's annotations, so you don't have to juggle a second volume for that, and once you feel comfortable with fweet, you'll probably usually go with it even just for that advantage.

but then there's the many additional search features that fweet offers, like searches for motifs or languages, that, in mchugh, would require painstaking page by page search.

so, assuming you're doing general fw research, fweet is easily a thousand times more useful.

and even if you have a personal reference library with all the other books that have collected fw annotations, fweet will offer a much better longterm approach to accessing these.

but most people have none of these books, and don't even live near a library or bookstore that carries even one of them.

so 'accessibility' without fweet means interlibrary loans or mail orders, vs free one-click access, which is surely many thousands of times more efficient.

but fweet as yet offers no images, no videos, and almost no offsite links.

if a hypothetical competitor to fweet troubled to track down all the possibly useful images and links, and included them in its search results, this could save many steps and might conservatively be called a hundred times more accessible.

and there's not yet anything like a fweet for joyce's other works.

ulysses will be an especially huge challenge, being analysed on dozens of websites and in hundreds of books.

so a systematic attempt to sort out and link all the online resources for ulysses, so that the path from the text to any online resource is at most a few clicks, promises a comparable improvement in accessibility.

and this is what i believe i offer in the pJoyce collection:
https://github.com/TimFinnegan/pJoyce

one-page html editions of all joyce's published works offer paragraph-specific links to annotations pages where all known resources relevant to each paragraph are being collected.

each annotations page includes a feedback form for immediate addition of resources or correction of errors.

and everything is free.

Lucia Joyce on film

"Lucia interrupted her training with Jean Borlin to dance in various shows with Les Six de rythme et couleur, and in 1927 they all interrupted their performance schedules to participate in the filming of a new movie by Jean Renoir. [30min] La Petite marchande d'allumettes was based on Hans Christian Andersen's story. In the match girl's delirium, at the point of death, she imagines a world of satisfied desire, which in the movie is represented by the animation of a toystore window. Hutton and Vanel's troupe were to create the dance of the toy soldiers, and Lucia and Kitten Neel were to have a small duet. “Lucia and Kitten became charming automatons and comics,” Hélène Vanel said. She used one particular moment during the rehearsal schedule when the girls came into the music hall at the Empire Theatre to focus her insight into the meaning of dance to Lucia. The hall where they practiced was extraordinarily large, so that it was often hard to restrain the girls' “illimitable desire to leap and to run." [cite]

this was 2 years before her probable schizophrenia started [wiki]




36Mb gif version:

?random Dalcroze illustration:

biography assistant

searching-by-date is still very primitive

but if you pick a year
and do a google search
there's probably a wikipedia page of highlights from that year
and various similar lists

(the farther back in time you go
of course
the less there'll be)

if you're lucky
fans of the year you chose
may already have collated the best web resources about that year
...if you can find their collations

how the world looked
who did what when
(especially
obviously
the celebrities of the day)

what consumers consumed
relevant publications
databases
maps

with more resources being added all the time
with none collated at first


now
pick a place

can you recreate how that place
would have looked during that year?

as a sim in SecondLife
even?

which real people spent time
near that place
during that year

how many of their real home addresses
and biographical basics
can be filled in
using just web resources?


so
now
pick a person

you may know nothing about them

except that they must have been
somewhere
around that place and time

maybe
name gender birthyear deathyear


but all human lives
to some degree
share a universal shape

a paper-doll version
of infancy childhood adolescence adulthood

and the more we know of
any real other lives
around that time and place

the better we can guess the likeliest details
of diet customs religious beliefs tools clothes language sports
toys books music movies


the categories of data
that the quantified-self movement has started from
are comparatively narrow:

exact details of places
consumption
activities
socializing

so even if you track every movement and every purchase
almost all that data will be boring

and zeroing in on the important bits may be hard

repetitive patterns can be automatically summarized
along with trivial anomalies

while the more significant anomalies
can be presented in semi-natural language

so that at some point this starts to look
like a robotic novel of your life

that can be tailored toward
the classic 'paperdoll' version


your online activity can be collated similarly

and crossmatched against your known associates

of course
almost nothing like this will be available before 1990

maybe published letters
journalists' flamewars
rarely scanned photos


for detailed human interactions

we'll rely on fiction for models

fleshing out our paperdolls

with the most perfect universal
paperdolls
in ulysses

Emoji timeline jpeg

Emoji timeline, human history

0

 

1700

 

1800

 


1900

 


1950
 

 2000

 

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