"who cares?"

Well, I care insofar as I said when/why I care -- while in other respects, sure, I don't care :) It's the same as how in some cases I feel like the spelling of "shanty" is the most useless thing to care about, while in other cases, attention to the spelling can open or preserve lines of thought.

If I'm trying to get at the history of this song (which may not be *the* project but it is *a* project), I don't want to get off course looking for Sicilian fishermen and Cape Verdean whalers and foreclose the likelihood that I would think to look for corn song material.

I care because to locate that corn song material helps to elucidate a bigger story about the chanty genre, piece by piece, which I don't think is well served by the frame of Sea Stuff.

Because I think Sea Stuff feeds an "algorithm" through which conventional ideas grow ever stronger as it is fed the same diet, obscuring other ideas. Google etc. run on algorithms that are affecting the shape of ideas people have, most obviously, but the Archive and scholarship are not immune to a similar process. As someone currently in classrooms, I see how dissemination of information is affecting the current generation's ideas in a different way, where the previous not knowing while being cognizant of what we don't know, which I think you speak to, Lighter, is being replaced with a greater confidence in believing they know something which is not true. So, I seek ways to buffer that from happening, and my way of doing that is by not being indifferent to topics that I think can benefit from informed speculation. If we don't speculate with good information, then foregone conclusions based on poor information -- by the majority of people who won't follow the "rule" of refraining from drawing conclusions that now overwhelm the ability of other ideas to be heard-- get the upper hand.

I'm admittedly a little nuts about this stuff because I've been disturbed by seeing more people enthralled by Artificial Intelligence. The thinking we are doing here is something that AI cannot do (yet!?) so I'm enthusiastic to do it no matter what comes of it, even if only for the sheer pleasure of it.