I regret that no articles were transmitted on Tuesday. I'm afraid that
my computer has been subject to some hardware problems lately which have
required me to completely re-format my disk drives and re-build the system
during the past week. If things get quiet again, you can assume that it
is for a similar reason, and you need not inquire as to the cause. I will
attempt to deal with backlogged articles, of which there are only a few at
this point, over the course of the next few days.
I wanted to let you know that I have continued to experiment with creating
WWW index files for the NATIVE-L list relative to certain subjects and have
just completed one on the subject of the Human Genome Diversity Project
which most of you will recall was a subject of some debate during the month
of October. I would like to invite everyone to take a look at that index,
as well as those on the "Navajo-Hopi land dispute" and the human rights
and environmental issues involved in the Ogoni protests against the Nigerian
military government. There is also an index on Wounded Knee, which is now
in development. I am hoping that such indices would be useful as background
reading in the event that we do decide to create new forums to investigate
some particular subject (like the HGDP or the Navajo/Hopi situation) in more
depth (possibly by means of the Web, rather than using mailing lists).
In order to view these new indices, point your Web browser at the URL:
http://www.fdl.cc.mn.us/natnet/refs.html
(The Ogoni index is presently under the "Africa" heading, but I may move
it under "issue-oriented references" later.)
While looking at these indices to NATIVE-L articles, I'd like you to be
thinking whether you might like to and be able to help create additional
index files, which is not very difficult if you have good facility with
a text editor and a bit of patience. I can provide an initial index
file, which is in the kind of state that you'll see at present in the
case of the "Navajo-Hopi" index, which is the result of running a little
program I whipped up recently that scans the NATIVE-L article files for
articles containing selected keywords. It's just a matter of looking at
each article via the Web and modifying the HTML source file to either
delete the entry if the article isn't really relevant to the subject, or
maybe to add a date or to change the subject line to be more descriptive
of the actual content of an article, to make it easier for someone later
looking for articles on some particular aspect of a given subject to
find relevant information.
As one of my New Year's resolutions, I'm going to do what I can to
spend my own time devoted to NativeNet in areas which require some of
the skills which I feel I can best bring to the task, including those
things that require some programming or doing other technical tasks,
and to try to get as much help as possible from the subscriber community
to free more of my time and energy. I know that some of you have offered
to help in the past and I haven't done as much as I should have to follow
up (largely because it has been difficult to think of things that people
can do independently that wouldn't require even more energy on my part
coordinating and supervising the activity than just doing it myself).
I hope that there are still people out there who are willing to help.
As I indicated in my New Year's message, I would like to move more in
the direction of using the Web as a communications vehicle to supple-
ment what we've been doing via the mailing lists - so I see volunteer
opportunities offering the chance to learn more about some of the behind-
the-scenes aspects of setting up and maintaining Web resources, which
might be useful to you.
I also want to mention here that I don't intend to "disenfranchise"
anyone in moving toward the Web for new kinds of special-purpose forums
(I got one note today expressing some concern along these lines). I'll
have more to say on this subject fairly soon, I hope.
Thanks in advance to anyone who has some time and energy to help with
this index-creation project (by the way, I also want to add general-
purpose search facilities to the archives, so you don't need to depend
on pre-fabricated indices - but the effort that a person can put into
doing such indexing can in many cases make your task as a researcher
easier, I think, saving you the work of discarding lots of "false
positives" during your search). If you would like to volunteer, or just
ask questions about what's involved - or if you have any comments or
suggestions about the already-created indices, please feel free to get
in touch.
Thanks again.
Gary
--
Gary S. Trujillo gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us
Somerville, Massachusetts {wjh12,bu.edu,spdcc,cdp}!gnosys!gst