FYIFrance e - newsletter ISSN 1071 - 5916 * | FYIFrance is a monthly electronic newsletter, published since | 1992 as a small - scale, personal, experiment, in the creation | of large - scale "information overload", by Jack Kessler. Any | material written by me which appears in FYIFrance may be / \ copied and used by anyone for any good purpose, so long as, ----- a) they give me credit and show my e - mail address, and b) // \\ it isn't going to make them money: if it is going to make --------- them money, they must get my permission in advance, and // \\ share some of the money which they get with me. The use of material written by others requires their permission. FYIFrance is available in a gopher format, at infolib.berkeley.edu 72, and in various online archives (the easiest to use is the PACS-L archive reached via telnet to a.cni.org, login brsuser). Suggestions, reactions, comments, criticisms, praise, and poison - pen letters all will be gratefully received at kessler@well.sf.ca.us. Apre`s... le de'luge This gopher server, and the FYIFrance e - newsletter itself, both began as exercises in producing "information overload". Both have succeeded, wildly. The gopher has been too easy and too inexpensive to install, on a very small laptop and using a very available public network account. The e - newsletter has proven to be too easy to write and assemble and publish -- in a global distribution which, including e - conferences, now reaches 10,000 readers in 65 countries. This "e - publishing" takes me, once a month, about 3 minutes of computer button - pushing. I've done it from university mainframe terminals, from rural French post offices, and -- importantly, I think -- from beneath the apricot tree in my front yard at home. I don't know whether this immense publishing capacity -- increasingly provided by information networking now to the average, "general public", user -- will prove to have been a good or a bad thing. A 19th century English futurist once predicted that London would be 15 feet deep in horse manure by the year 1950: I don't want to follow his example in prognosticating. I am discouraged, somewhat, by the continued presence on the networks of rigid mindsets inherited from an earlier information age. A reviewer of the Minitel protests the tendency of the fee - based networks to create, "...the sensation of the money which races faster than the phrase. For it charges by the minute, that is to say by the number of signs which pass through it, imposing -- like a journalist or an American writer -- a style fashioned (solely) of conciseness in expression and of rapidity in execution." (Jean - Louis Perrier, "Maxitel", in _Le Monde_, January 22, 1994, p. VIII). The publishers of an "electronic book", the text of which arrives on two little plastic diskettes, apologize for the lack of, "...the fine binding materials, the high - grade, acid - free paper, the smell of ink, the heft of a large scholarly tome...". (From the printed brochure accompanying Richard A. Lanham's _The Electronic Word_, U.of Chicago Press, 1993, ISBN 0 - 226 - 46884 - 4.)(This is a hypertext "book", contained on diskettes which are packaged -- tongue - in - cheek, I hope -- in a plastic case designed to resemble and even to open like one of the printed, Gutenberg - like books further along on the shelf.) There are rigid hierarchies, archaic indexing conventions, cataloging gaps, and general organizational problems, throughout the information networks; most of which are the result of the mindless adoption of old formulas to the new technologies. The tyrannies of the linear text -- and of the social and cultural forces which produced and controlled it -- live on, on the nets. My own greatest encouragement, though, comes from the networks' "information overload" capacities. That an average citizen, anywhere, might be able -- easily and inexpensively -- to fit mass global distribution of anything which she wishes to publish into the course of an average busy working day, to me is an outstanding marvel of the late 20th century, and I think may become a central distinguishing characteristic of the 21st. There may be evil aspects of this: mass headaches and eyestrain, at least, will be problems. But the fact that networked information seems rapidly to be coming within reach of average citizens -- and to be growing out of the reach of those who would control it -- appeals to some democratic, perhaps anarchistic, notions which I hold dear. Best Intentions The intention here is to develop the gopher, further, as an experiment in intermediate technology translating. I am convinced that mono - lingual information networking will not "scale up" in a multi - lingual world. "The customer is king", and if the customer speaks only Urdu, so must the system ... or some other system will. I intend to experiment as much as I can here, then, with the human language translation capacities currently available to average computer users. For any given text, French and English equivalents will be attempted here (other languages maybe later) in the following formats, indicated by the following filname extensions: asc -- "American" ascii without diacriticals asa -- "American" ascii with diacriticals ase -- "extended" ascii asd -- "American" ascii with line endings supplied asb -- "American" ascii with diacriticals and with line endings supplied asf -- "extended" ascii with line endings supplied la1 -- ISO Latin 1 mechanical translation by translation software programs MIME - encoding SGML HTML various compression formats other? The hope is to take advantage of the international "reach" of FYIFrance's readership, to test not so much the theoretical possibility of various approaches to translation but the current state of acceptability of those approaches: ie. even if a thing can be done in theory, will a user in Haute Savoie or Nebraska actually do it? Thanks, But Not Blame Sincere thanks are due to many friends on both sides of the Atlantic for inspiration, encouragement, and nagging, in this effort. Franc,ois Bar of UC Berkeley and Jacques Faule of the DLL in Paris are primary among these. Also in France are Michel Melot, Herve' Le Crosnier, Claire Panijel and Ghislaine Chartron of URFIST, Marie - Dominique Nicolas, and numerous other friends: all of them displaying a typically - French openness to new ideas. In the US, much inspiration has been supplied by Steve Cisler, Clifford Lynch, John Ober, and Michael Buckland, and at the WELL everyone -- staff and subscribers -- has been helpful, particularly Maurice Weitman and Matisse Enzer, each in his own special way. I owe more than I ever can describe to my wife and sons, at least for never accepting entirely that computers can do anything useful. And thanks to a certain old Chinese professor, who impressed upon me the fact that different people can say equally - profound things in very different ways. Jack Kessler kessler@well.sf.ca.us .