Re: Newsletter & Call for Papers WebSci'18

As I have pointed out many times, lack of LaTeX support for math makes HTML
publishing for scientific papers a non-starter, and people who do not
believe this is a problem must either not publish much or not publish
papers with math. Right now cutting-edge is Tex2Html that hasn’t really
been updated in 10 years. MathML is trying to force a dead XML paradigm and
has little browser support. So I basically consider it a solvable problem
that requires real work, but until I see real work I consider Sarven’s
posts to basically be pointless spam and borderline trolling.

Since I have no desire to see spam in my inbox, I will unsubscribe from
this mailing list quite shortly likely.

On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 11:37 AM Sarven Capadisli <info@csarven.ca> wrote:

> Hi Hugh, and everyone.
>
> This is a great query, which I'd like to address:
>
> On 2018-02-21 11:25, Hugh Glaser wrote:
> > I am not sure what a public response of this sort to the CFP achieves
> (rather than a private message to the CFP poster), other than an attempt to
> publicly shame, which doesn't seem appropriate on the Semantic Web mailing
> list.
>
> The real target of these messages is not you, me, or even the seniors,
> professors, directors, conference organisers, programme committees, and
> so on.
>
> This is for the *next generation* of researchers and developers who are
> following along or will hopefully read this up one day. They are the
> ones who will be the change. We are only setting the stage for them to
> follow through.
>
> Of course I do hope that these ideas and the problems we are dealing
> with resonate with more people. Hence, a plea for the "seniors" to
> permit their "junior" colleagues to push forward. To grow their team
> with a different set of ideals and awareness! Many already have for a
> long time, and many are making that shift.
>
> Neither do I actually expect these conferences/journals that have kept
> their approach for so long to change overnight. As long as researchers
> are constrained in how they communicate their knowledge, and how that
> knowledge can be disseminated, no amount of activism here or elsewhere
> will change that.
>
> The purpose of these threads is purely about creating awareness and
> building a mental infrastructure.
>
> One by-product of all these conversations is the archival and
> documentation of the state of affairs. The mere existence of this thread
> shows that we are talking about this stuff, some of us are still
> concerned about it, some of us are making our little contributions to
> improve things.
>
> I'm thankful for this community and the feedback that I've received. It
> has indeed help me immensely - in more ways than I can express here - to
> mature my ideas and join them with the others, as well as the support to
> continue to pursue my principles. The evolution of these mailing list
> threads serve as documentation and evaluation. It is not unique to this
> mailing list; it has been going on over countless mailing lists over
> several decades. If the ideas at their core are not sound, that would've
> been clear by now.
>
> And regarding the repetitiveness of my responses to CfPs over the years.
> This is true. I like to keep these issues in peoples' consciousness. I'm
> troubled by the typical one-way communication that these announcements
> are made and their effects on the community. There tends to be little
> discussion about community practices regarding conferences, and the real
> decisions tend to made by a small circle of people that are content to
> maintain the status-quo. I'd like to continually remind people to get
> involved with influencing these processes wherever they can; to keep it
> on the radar, and remind people that these processes can be questioned.
>
> > Yes, Sarven, you are a valued member of the Semantic Web community, and
> so we are all interested in what you are doing, and this is the list you
> should be using to share it (that is genuine - there is no irony or sarcasm
> intended).
>
> Thank you. Indeed, scholarly communication *is* precisely what I'm
> working on. Critiquing assumptions and norms conferences in the
> [Semantic] Web domain is me sharing my ideas and their evolution with
> the list. They have matured, and they've had some impact - however
> small. I am more than happy to take the technical aspects up a notch.
>
> As others have pointed out, we can't separate technology from its social
> implications. The Web is inherently social, as are academic processes,
> and this mailing list is no exception! Voicing these ideas and prompting
> others to do so is as important (if not more so) than developing tooling
> and standards.
>
> Thanks once more to all who have continued this discussion with their
> various perspectives. These are all steps forward.
>
> -Sarven
> http://csarven.ca/#i
>
>