DTStudy: A Proposal - part 2

Subject: RE: DTStudy: A Proposal - part 2
From: Jeri
Date: 28 May 02 - 08:51 PM

It's not the number of posts that causes a thread to be hard to load, it's the amount of text. Does this cause a problem for you?

Subject: RE: DTStudy: A Proposal - part 2
From: GUEST
Date: 28 May 02 - 08:37 PM

McGrath,

it is the usual custom to start a 2nd thread after 100 posts, due to the technicalities of Netscape / WebTV etc.

For some reason, you decided to start a new thread after 78 posts.

Why? I'm sure you meant well, but???

Oh yes, and as you refeuse to respond to guests (except when you do) I'm called Ian

Subject: RE: DTStudy: A Proposal - part 2
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 28 May 02 - 08:23 PM

The fact that someone is on a connection that can't cope with long downloads in no way means that they might not have a great deal of relevant expertise, and have information about the provenance of songs that could be invaluable.

As for irrelevances, clearly these wouldn't belong in the edited notes page for a song (or whatever form it takes), that is going to be the part of the exercise that could demands considerable self-discipline.

But when it comes to a thread that is trying to gather the material which can later be edited, it's diffeent I'd suggest. It seems to me that excluding irrelevances is not going to be practical, and could even be less than desirable.

I suppose it would be possible to imagine some system in which people would volunteer to set up DTStudy threads, and have songs allocated to them - but I can't see that working. However when it came to editing the material something of that sort might be needed.

Subject: RE: DTStudy: A Proposal - part 2
From: GUEST
Date: 28 May 02 - 07:55 PM

Agreed Malcolm,

The comments on Irish 'pounds' vs. Euros seemed a little (totally) spurious too...

Subject: RE: DTStudy: A Proposal - part 2
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 28 May 02 - 07:43 PM

Let's hope that it's done carefully. To be honest, I'm not sure that anybody who can't load a thread 78 messages long will be likely to be able to help much with this (given the source material that will have to be examined), but we'll see. The first "freelance" go at the format is Alice's DTStudy: Spancil Hill, which we might want to keep track of to see how it goes. My personal feeling is that she has already quoted indiscriminately from old threads (do we really need comments like I promise just to write the words of the song and cut out all the crap in future, and More in a couple of days. 'Till then, Slán.? They really don't seem relevant to the song.

This kind of irrelevant verbiage will have to be edited out at some point in any case, and it might be better not to include it in the first place, so as to save inflicting unnecessary work on somebody else in the future. What we need is a careful digest of the raw material, attributed and dated but without the attendant chat.

Subject: RE: DTStudy: A Proposal - part 2
From: lamarca
Date: 28 May 02 - 06:32 PM

This is great! One of my longtime gripes about the DT has been the lack of (or incorrect) attribution for a given set of lyrics. Since the DT started as Dick Greenhaus', Susan Friedman's and Dennis Cook's (and perhaps others') personal lyric collections that they had on computer disc, they didn't always bother to say where that particular set of words came from - it was, after all, his or her personal word book.

Once these entries started being used as a public resource, however, the need for accuracy in transcription and references for the recorded or written source for the material became essential, and their lack a major flaw in the DT.

Going in and correcting mistakes and mondegreens, or even just labelling an entry as "transcribed from Martin Carthy, Crown of Horn" or "words from memory, learned circa 1967" will help future singers and scholars determine how accurate any given entry is. A discography of recorded variants of a song would be nice; a lot of this work has been done by the JHU site. But ultimately, each individual DT entry should have a source listed for that particular set of words, and who actually entered them.

This is a massive effort which couldn't be done by Dick, Susan and Max on their own - I'm glad it's turning into a community project!

Subject: RE: DTStudy: A Proposal - part 2
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 28 May 02 - 04:39 PM

Subject: DTStudy: A Proposal - part 2
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 28 May 02 - 04:36 PM

This thread was getting a bit long, which causes loading difficulties for some people.