[WebCultures] The Digital Manifesto Archive

Rudolf Ammann ammann at gmail.com
Mon Sep 1 12:44:03 CEST 2014


On Thu, Aug 28, 2014, Matt Applegate wrote:

> If anyone has a manifesto they want archived, send it my way for
> consideration!

Hi Matt -- The Digital Manifesto Archive looks like a great idea!

You might want to add Josh Quittner's 'Birth of the Way New
Journalism' (1995), which doesn't claim to be a manifesto, but it's
often discussed as such:

<http://web.archive.org/web/19981206095223/http://www.hotwired.com/i-agent/95/29/waynew/waynew.html>

Feel free to ignore the following, but in case you want some feedback
on technical aspects of your Archive:

* The recital of the full metadata is of course good archival policy,
but its positioning above the text is a strong impediment to (human)
readability: readers have to scroll through a whole barrage of data
before they get to the actual piece. This barrage includes three text
instances of the title, and often a fourth, graphically rendered
instance of the same title, which, in terms of readability, seems
muddled. Couldn't you get the metadata out of the human reader's way
by either placing it in the sidebar or underneath the text?

* The re-formatting of every manifesto in nothing but break tags is
very reductive, and researchers might want to use a richer version of
a piece even once the current source has disappeared (in Quittner's
'Way New Journalism' mentioned above, for instance, the 'cool'
background and the magazine aesthetics of the layout are very much
part of the message, and they are stripped away at the peril of losing
some of that message). I wonder if you couldn't make sure every one of
your manifestos is captured by the Internet Archive, and then provide
a link to this fuller capture?

Best,

Rudolf

-----
Rudolf Ammann PhD
Designer at Large
UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

<http://tawawa.org>




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