Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2002 09:21:34 +0100 From: Willard McCarty Subject: Report from Humanist As one would expect after 15 years of more or less stable existence, Humanist has not changed very much in the last year. For 2001-2 the total number of messages was down 132 from 2000-1, but in recent times Humanist was unusually prolific in that year. The number of members continues very slowly to grow -- at the time of writing, 1277. In the last year daily operations have become somewhat more demanding with the pronounced increase in bulk e-mailing/spamming -- upwards of 90% of mail received at the Virginia address for Humanist is junk. My usual procedure is now to log onto lists.village.virginia.edu, delete junk messages directly so that downloading of large attachments does not take up a significant chunk of my time. This in itself is not significant, but as a result of the flood of junk there's always a chance I will accidentally delete a genuine submission or, if it is sent to me directly, overlook it. Members continue to think that messages don't appear because I don't like them. Although it is true that I have told a couple of obnoxious posters to go away (Doctorow and Tripathi, who is back but in a very muted way), I still don't censor messages. No need. More significant still is Humanist's inability successfully to handle accented characters. The fault would appear to be in the perl scripts that process the messages on the Virginia machine. This is, as far as I can tell, under investigation, but progress is slow. Mea culpa -- my schedule is full too. I remain troubled by the fact that many of the very people we most need to be chewing the fat of humanities computing are apparently too busy, too much in demand elsewhere. As I've probably said before, I'd much prefer a Quaker meeting to any other kind of service, though with less silence than the former rightly has. I continue to get notes of appreciation from long-time lurkers, and I continue to enjoy the role I have with Humanist, but more of a conversation among many would make for a better world. Willard McCarty 10 July 2002 Dr Willard McCarty, Senior Lecturer, Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, U.K., +44 (0)20 7848-2784, ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/, willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk, w.mccarty@btinternet.com