Continuing the idea of forensic work on my own project archives, certainly old enough now to deserve an “ancient” subdomain though I aspire to a “gems” subdirectory too (a fella can dream):
From 1997 to 2000 I taught a first-year composition course based on Greil Marcus’s anthology Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island. The course was my first substantial foray into web publishing as a pedagogical strategy. You can read more about it here. I still think of this course as one of my boldest and most successful forays into what we would now call open education. It was Web 1.0, relied on the tilde folders on the Mary Washington College web server, and involved hand-coded HTML and software like Dreamweaver that, to be honest, I never really mastered. I had a partner-in-crime-and-creativity Bill Kemp, and together we pulled it off. usually with panache. In the process, we also co-created some great memories for ourselves and with our students.
When we published our students’ final papers to the Web, we included this statement, one that is breathtakingly naive in retrospect but was deeply and sincerely meant:
For as long as this College maintains a web site, your work will be out there with your name on it.
The whole idea was to do the very opposite of what David Wiley (whom I would not meet for another decade!) so aptly termed “disposable assignments.” In many respects, The Great VCU Bike Race Book (thank you, Jimmy Ghaphery!) was the spiritual descendant of Stranded–but that’s another blog post.
Now, of course, the Stranded site is gone. The College is gone too, and is now a University. And Bill Kemp is also gone, passing away in the late autumn of 2019.
The art of losing, as the poet wrote.
I thought, and still think, that Stranded, our first-year composition course, was a thing of rare beauty and intensity that elicited some dynamite writing out of our students. The web publication was also a thing of beauty, but that was down to Bill, who had a much keener interest in and talent for web design than I did at the time (or do now, I imagine). As I think about finding the original files to at least suggest what the site looked like, if not to resurrect it entirely, I recall that Bill made the beautiful home page for our course with a resource called “Moira’s Web Jewels.” There are still examples on Pinterest and elsewhere of what these “jewels” looked like. But Moira’s site is long gone, and doesn’t yield its treasures on the Internet Archive past a few fossilized impressions.
But I have a hunch I have saved these files somewhere, and that I might be able to piece something together, if only for my own satisfaction.
And in the meantime, I did find this benediction from Moira in an Internet Archive snapshot:
I’ve seen her name spelled Moira and Moyra. I don’t know which is correct.
I found great joy in the creation of Stranded, the course and the website and the conceptual framework. It deserves an archive. Perhaps once I step through the door into summer.
Archiving your web work is soul work, is a good mantra. I am thinking it’s one valid response to the staying on the My side of the web.
My subdomain includes the bones of sites I have reclaimed from elsewhere or ones I have migrated from elsewhere in my sprawl of domains http://bones.cogdogblog.com/ including a fraction of all the stuff I spawner in 14 years of web making at Maricopa.
I’m glad VCU created that Great Bike Race Archive, although the path of going through lists, to a library card, to a PDF version of a web page feels a wee bit dusty and un web-like. But something exceeds nothing. It’s a good thing that many of the parts of that site still live in Rampages, where the institution web zappers have not vacuumed yet, especially the Covering the Coverage (met a meta) that was our effort https://rampages.us/coveringthecoverage/
You likely know, but I hoisted an archive of the bike jersey front end, including the faculty reflections http://lab.cogdogblog.com/vcubrb/ I’m pretty proud of that site, and it’s all HTML so will never die.
The blog post in my head is about the craft of both those early sites like Stranded, where much was done by hand, and the handwork one needs to do to make these archives. That’s what makes it My, not relying on a service, or a database, or a platform, but the human touch in both assembling the archives. That’s what’s missing in what feels like soulless templating by 3rd party sites.
Keep on archiving! If that voice ever says “nobody cares” I can say it is wrong.
@Alan All of that was, and is, enormously helpful. So, Gardo thanks the CogDog. Again. (Liner note allusion alert.)
My idea for archiving the GVCUBRB was to use the Internet Archive’s “Archive-It” service. Something is a lot better than nothing, and I’m really happy for those PDFs in VCU’s scholarly repository. But I always wanted the web “book” to be a preserved website that could be encountered and experienced just the way it was when we called it a wrap at the end of the project. I had at least one or two conversations with a very friendly and helpful fellow named Jefferson (no, not that one) at the Archive-It offices and had actually gotten some price-and-service quotes when I was called to the Tower of London and beheaded. Like the Green Knight, I was able to pick up my head and walk away, but unlike the Green Knight, I was not enchanted–rather the opposite–in fact so downcast that I couldn’t even bear to think about the GVCUBRB in any focused way for years afterward. Even now it’s tough. But do-able.
Anyway, if Jimmy Ghaphery had not been so honorable as to say “I told you I’d do it, Gardner, so I am going to do it,” there’s just be scraps and your archive today. Jimmy told me to feel free to come in and supply anything that was missing or needed changing, but I never had the heart to do it. Still don’t, yet.
All of that said, I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever tried to do, and a model that could be widely emulated but, so far as I know, has not been. And as the true saying goes, I had an astonishingly talented and enthusiastic team to assign to the project. Just looking over the course we did makes me wonder how in the world we were able to pull it all off. Of course I know very well how we were able to pull it all off. I had a sympathetic and supportive Provost. I had interested and supportive collaborators among my fellow Vice Provosts. I had a budget. I knew some amazing people and was lucky to convince many of them to come along for the journey. Just the usual success story, the lightning that strikes just a few times during a lifetime.
I love the bones subdomain!
The gems subdirectory was inherited from Radio UserLand which was my original blog. It was the equivalent of the WordPress uploads folder.
It would be nice for Mo[iy]ra to see your benediction. If she’s still around, and this being the web, it’s not inconceivable that she will.
Now I know your secret: inherited gems. Well, it’s good to know, at last. 🙂
I readily admit that I wrote the post in part to see if the message in the bottle would float in Mo[iy]ra’s direction. Those connections do happen. One of them happened within the first few months of my start as a blogger–that first big dose of one of the drugs that keeps me coming back. (Love is the other drug I’m thinking of. Or maybe it’s all one.)
We still have quite a bit of the GVCUBRB stuff scattered about. I’ll hopefully get around to a long goodbye post for it in the near future. If you want the stuff on augmenting.me archived, let me know as that site may go away. I think the rampages stuff is safe and just about all that stuff still exists.
the old site
Alan’s index page.
A mostly functioning bike fortune page
Coming soon page
another coming soon page
an older summary page
@Tom This is great to know–thanks for the links. The main domain has dwindled and that’s how I kept going in.
Now my big question is how to preserve all this stuff outside of RamPages. I know about SiteSucker but I haven’t tried it for awhile. I imagine there are much better options out there, or perhaps it’s been improved, or perhaps I need to go to school on it. Or some combination.
Anyway, thanks a bunch. And yes, whatever is on augmenting me, please do archive that. Whether or not I ever get the chance to do stuff like this again, I think it’s fine stuff and needs to be kept for others to consider.
I encouraged our world language people do the manual submission to archive.org when they found something they felt was irreplaceable. With the browser plugin it’s pretty straight forward if a little slow. I don’t think it spiders the whole site but it’s a little start.
I last used site sucker with the ANTH101 vs1 site and it worked really well.
I did grab all the random stuff that’s not WP from augmenting.me. Somewhere on there is the old CTLE site as well.