I bet with my net I will get those things yet.The Cat in the Hat by Dr Seuss
Linguists and New Testament scholars interested in Hellenistic Greek would no longer be ill-founded in having such a mentality. The Hellenistic Greek Linguistics Pages [HREF 2] now exist to serve this somewhat obscure academic pursuit. The pages have received over 5,000 hits in recent months and the associated mailing list, an important part of the whole forum, has nearly 50 subscribers. How the pages were created and how they are maintained is the subject of this paper. In the next section I outline briefly the history of the pages, how they came about and how various problems had to be dealt with. In subsequent sections I discuss the present state of the Web pages and how each of the various areas work.
Micheal Palmer, a member of the BDF revision committee put out a call to various linguistics and biblical Greek mailing lists on Internet for anyone doing work on Hellenistic Greek Linguistics to contact him. As one of the initial respondants, I offered to set up a mailing list to continue discussion and a couple of Web pages to provide general information about the project. Permission was sought from the BDF revision committee for this rather novel idea and on 25th October, 1994 I send a message to the entire mailing list (at this stage, Micheal and myself) announcing that things were underway. Within a couple of days, a number of other people who had responded to Micheal's query joined, giving us a grand total of 6 people.
At the time, the student machine tartarus that I had an account on didn't have a full blown Web server but it did have the gopher server GN [HREF 3] which could rather nicely dish out both http and gopher information from the one page. It could also serve up parts of a multi-part document (a mail folder, for example) and this proved a quick and dirty way of archiving the mailing list. I'd just save every message from the mailing list to a folder and the GN server would provide a menu of Subject: headings from which individual messages could be selected and read.
Towards the end of 1994, tartarus got a Web server, WN [HREF 4]. I was now able to write my Web documents in pure HTML and immediately went to work redesigning everything. Two members of the mailing list contributed bibliographies which I marked up and added to the pages. One of the bibliographies was in Microsoft's Rich Text Format (RTF) so I could convert that painlessly with rtftohtml [HREF 5]. The other was plain text, but a handful of creative search-and-replaces soon fixed that.
My intention was to have everything set up for 1st January 1995 when I would announce the pages to the wider Internet community. And so, on the first day of 1995, I wrote to a number of mailing lists and newsgroups dedicated to Greek or Linguistics announcing both the mailing list and the Web pages. I also wrote to the maintainers of a number of Web pages asking them to add links to my pages.
The number of mailing list subscribers tripled over the next couple of days but then I started receiving messages saying that my Web pages weren't working. I hadn't noticed this myself because they were working fine from my end.
Just before New Year, tartarus had been placed behind a firewall. It didn't take long before I realised that this was what the problem was. After all my efforts, all my advertising, no one could read my pages! Being the 1st January, the University was on holidays and there were no system administrators around to help. Fortunately, when they did come back a few days later, they immediately gave me an account on Styx, a computer outside the firewall, to put my pages on. I was quite pleased about this because Styx is aliased as the www machine at UWA and I now had the attractive but concise URL http://www.uwa.edu.au/HGrk. The only problem was: I'd given everyone a different URL. I still don't know how many potential readers I lost in this rather embarassing situation but it wasn't long before word got around (or links got made) and the pages started receiving a hundred hits per day.
The remainder of this paper discusses some of these.
Mailing lists have one major drawback, though. It is difficult for newcomers to catch the thread of the discussion and it is difficult to recall was has been said previously. Archiving the mailing list via the Web provides an excellent solution.
At present the greek-grammar mailing list is archived using Hypermail [HREF 7]. For a while I also tried MHonArc [HREF 8] which seemed to thread the messages more robustly but it started producing errors and dumping core, so I switched back to Hypermail.
Everytime I get a message on the mailing list, I save it to a folder and once every day I run a script that moves the folder over to the Web machine, Styx, and runs Hypermail.
Hypermail indexes the message by date, subject, author and thread. Threading messages is nice in theory but rarely works well in practice.
At present the traffic on the mailing list is low enough that I could classify each posting and save it to a different folder. This way, a different archive could exist for each of the major topics discussed. For the moment though, the problems of cross-classification are enough to put me off this idea. Something will probably need to be done in the near future, though as the number of messages approaches 500.
There were a number of reasons why the same couldn't be done for Hellenistic Greek Linguistics.
Although I myself use LaTeX, it was decided that the Rich-Text Format (RTF) would be the best standard for interchange, especially in a discipline with so many people using MS Word on a Mac. Another advantage of this is that an HTML version can be made available (thanks to rtftohtml [HREF 5]) for Web browsing as well as the RTF original for downloading and printing.
While the Paper Archives have proven to be one of the most frequently accessed areas of the Hellenistic Greek Linguistics Pages, the actual number of contributions have been disappointing. It has been clear from discussion on the mailing list that there are two main reasons for this:
Attempts have been made to overcome these problems by providing instructions on how to convert and send files and by suggesting copyright messages to include on the papers, but this has done little to improve the situation.
The last one requires the most creativity because it radically alters the very medium the course is in. It introduces aspects simply not possible on paper, whereas the others are more or less electronic equivalents of the original.
The SYNTHINAR will no doubt have a popular existence independently of the Hellenistic Greek Pages, but it is an important addition to the the latter as well.
The procedure was as follows:
In the near future I hope to configure rtftohtml to automatically substitute characters in Greek fonts with the corresponding IMG tags.
The database consists of three text files.
The main reason for three separate files was to avoid redundancy and make the adding of more information for a particular word much easier.
At present the database can be queried via forms for
Various Perl programs then construct an HTML page to return as the result of the query. In particular, these programs make use of the on-the-fly GreekGIF converter to display the Greek characters. In future versions, it will be possible for people to add information to the database. This will include definitions for each Greek word, thus building up a huge database of user-contributed lexical information.
In many ways only the first can be assessed. In the latter two, people can gain a lot or very little without, short of direct feedback, the provider knowing.
There are people on the mailing list who have never browsed the Web pages and a great many more people who've browsed the Web pages but will never join the mailing list. But this mix demonstrates a feature of the World Wide Web that is unlikely to be possible in any other medium: It is possible for a group of specialised scholars to communicate with each other about their work while at the same time educating the wider community about that work. The Web allows an academic forum to be both specialised and open at the same time. The Hellenistic Greek Linguistics pages are only just beginning to exploit the possibilities this opens up.
AusWeb95 The First Australian WorldWideWeb Conference