Re: Illustrating Guidelines

At 03:49 PM 5/9/01 -0700, William Loughborough wrote:
>It might bring us "closer" without actually doing anything about it. Our 
>prejudices in this regard are very deep-seated. The notion of text being 
>the "royalty of repurposing content" is probably too ingrained to shake any 
>time soon.

William, I live in rural Virginia, and originally came from Ohio and
Pennsylvania, so I am quite accustomed to railing against deep-seated
prejudices. (Tho I do lose patience sometimes and have to step back and
take a breath or two!)

>Essentially all of our interactions in the working group are unillustrated, 
>like this email and every teleconference [so far as I know there are no 
>deaf participants or relay-operators/ASL-interpreters]. There is also 
>little (almost no!) illustration used at f2f meetings - almost certainly 
>none that cannot be reduced to spoken language, hence text.

This is a detriment to communicating our output. We are limiting our
audience to those who are facile with text ... but our true audience goes
beyond such definitions.

>Since none of us really knows how to do this (in part because we've never 
>*needed* it) it will be hard to "require". It's our own version of "why do 
>we need an elevator, I've never seen anybody in a wheelchair on the second 
>floor". Or as someone asked from the floor of a plenary session at WWW6 on 
>internationalization: "why don't they just all learn English?"

Sigh! I remember the gleam in some folks eyes a few years back when there
was hope that English would be pervasive - then translators were developed,
and more folks came online wanting it their way ....

>AP:: "I'm not sure if MP3 would be more usable"
>
>WL: As compression algorithms become more widespread, their use for audio 
>on Websites will become routine and the ~10:1 file size reduction (compared 
>to .wav files) will make it likely that true multi-media possibilities will 
>be readily available. This will go even further with VR (virtual reality) 
>because if you've ever tried to learn basket-weaving, string games, or 
>spinning fiber into yarn by reading a book about them you know how some 
>things become "lost arts".

There are times when I'm grateful for being a "girl" ... I learned a lot of
the needle arts from my mother who learned them from her mother. Knitting,
I learned from my mother's oldest sister, tho my mother later learned to
knit much better. I am sad that I could not learn the art of tatting from
my mother because she learned to do it badly and I couldn't learn from
books.   
I am delighted that my nephew who is homeschooled and doing nicely
academically, works with his father and his uncles, to learn the various
trades in the family in addition to the academics ... 

>AP:: "...my librarian colleague, is always on the look out for web sites..."
>
>WL: She will probably have to develop them on her own - as have we all. We 
>forget how much in its infancy all this is. In this WG we are attempting to 
>"bend the twig" just right so the tree will grow "just so". I hope you 
>experience some closure with the effort to get decently illustrated 
>materials, but you'd better be prepared for a really long battle in that 
>regard.

I have suggested to her that we record her voice reading to the children,
because she's good at it when her allergies don't render her useless (which
is why she's looking for sites that read to the kids) ... but we really do
have a full day at school -- I leave at the clock time, but Rose often
stays past supper time! 

Probably need to suggest to publishers that their books would sell better
if kids could hear them online and decide they want to own  them ... (who me?)

			Anne




Anne Pemberton
apembert@erols.com

http://www.erols.com/stevepem
http://www.geocities.com/apembert45

Received on Wednesday, 9 May 2001 20:33:05 UTC