December 6, 1996-2003
§
Plans, Dreams, Schemes § The Website
§ About Account of
a Declaration §
Reading this Hypertext § This document supports Account of a Declaration, a service of the point.B Library.
December 6,
1996-2003§
Plans, Dreams, Schemes § The Website
§ About Account of
a Declaration §
Reading this Hypertext §
§
The Website § About Account of a
Declaration § Reading this Hypertext § My goal is to get these all on line for the Millennium. I suspect
that I will also re-publish other popular or important works from the era as I
study and discover. Note also, that many such items will doubtless be
incorporated into the works described above. I will be time to publish
on CD-ROM soon, perhaps as soon as Account of a Declaration, but
certainly in the case of Mr. Madison's Revolution. The works are
becoming too large to offer as downloads. I will try to develop a front-end
product for download, so that you may get a good feel for the product before
you buy, and ship you the CD-ROM when you register. I don't really want to be
in the business of packing and shipping, but it is not practical to download
files of more than 4-5 megabytes. CD-ROMs are very practical, and also save you
a lot of disk space. Business being what it is these days, I am also looking
into the possibility of promotional sales of Posters, books, and Videos related
to the material found on the LeftJustified Web. Again, I don't really want to
be in the packing & shipping business, but if such things increase the
interest in my products, and serve the needs of customers, then they are worth
doing.Beyond the
products described above, it is difficult to tell exactly what products will
follow. Suffice it to say that I am most interested in movements; the
abolition movement, woman's suffrage, the labor movements, civil rights
movements, anti-war movements. Most popular historical texts tend to focus on
war. War is sexy and sells very well, but wars are not usually about social
justice. Also, social justice is not usually sponsored by
government—rather government is driven by popular movements that demand
justice. We are about to enter another era of popular movement. We must learn
about the good and bad, about the successes and failures of popular movements,
in order to prepare for struggles to come. These stories are the focus of
LeftJustified.It
should soon be possible to purchase LeftJustified products via a Web interface,
using a Credit Card or Debit Card. I am almost ready to secure a merchant
account, so that I may process major credit cards. This will make it easier for
those of us who hesitate to write a check & lick a stamp. It should improve
turn-around time on registrations, as they will be conducted by e-mail. It
should also further reduce my overhead, in both man-hours and paper (stamps,
etc.) so that I may maintain the most reasonable prices possible.If you are reading this
modest essay more than a year after December of 1996, I only hope that I have
not been made a fool by my own ambitions.§
About Account of a Declaration
§ Reading this
Hypertext § Plans, Dreams, Schemes
§ Add to these activities the services provided by your
Public Library, and you have the model of LeftJustified. This site will become
a source of comprehensive information for the general public, on the subject of
history & historical figures. It is my desire that this will eventually
incorporate news and commentary one day. All of our works are and always will
be free to the public. If you support these activities, and you are able to
pay, then please buy products from us. Our prices are reasonable, our licensing
policies are liberal, the range of products ever growing, and we do it all with
a smile. The new
design of the Website is targeted toward several ends. First, it is designed
for integration, such that a client may enter at any point in the system and
then navigate & explore the entire system. This makes it possible, for
example, to appear at dozens of different index points on Yahoo®, relating
to topics within the content. Entry at any of these points will open up the
entire Website you the client because the standard navigation menus will point
upward to the Index & Feature areas. The Help item on the menus will
point first to information about that specific topic area and then to
information about the entire Website. As always, the immediate problem is
getting up enough content. So, back to work I go.§
Reading this Hypertext §Plans, Dreams, Schemes
§ The
Website § Here
the problem is still one of organization. We discard the bulky paper form of
one or more books for a more streamlined system of buttons. But tossing the
paper, we also discard a very well understood system of navigation. For books,
and our knowledge of how to use them, form an almost integral part of how we
map knowledge—how we read in order to learn. Hypertext sometimes abandons
all of these mechanisms. When it does, I am afraid that most people get lost in
the new "system," (even on the occasion when it actually is a system,)
and do not think it worth the trouble to find their way back. Many hypertext
systems are organized like the Encyclopedia, even when the content is not best
presented in this form. The encyclopedia is a useful mechanism for finding
general knowledge quickly. It is not a useful medium for in-depth exploration
of a distinct topic. What the encyclopedia lacks is narrative.
Narrative is a deeply familiar method for presenting knowledge. It is even
older than writing, extending back into the earliest development of oral
communication. Jefferson's Autobiography is in many ways an ideal vehicle for
this story. As a story, it is skeletal. Jefferson reports events in which he
participated, people with whom he interacted, and his general impressions of
the lot. He used occasional sarcasm and a helping of rhetorical figure, but his
writing is mostly constrained to the facts & stated in very clear
terms—assuming a reader who is already familiar with the larger
picture. This presents an opening for the historian. With such a vehicle, one
may fill in as much, or as little, detail as suits the audience. More
important: with hypertext, the reader may attend as much, or as little,
detail as suits her taste. I have
arranged this work around an excerpt from Jefferson's Autobiography,
incorporating as much detail and as many source documents as I could. In order
to reduce the problems of navigation, I have arranged the work on two layers.
The top layer, the account written by Jefferson, is glossed with some modest
commentary. Links to the second layer are found in Jefferson's text, and also
in the commentary. The second layer is made up of essays or notes explaining
the events alluded to in layer one, source documents (colonial Resolutions,
Parliamentary Acts and Bills) with some introduction and commentary, and
finally, biographical sketches of most of the people who appear in this story.
In effect, the work is a coherent story with supporting text and documentation,
rather than a large collection of fragments that the reader must sort through
for understanding. The
greatest advantage of computer-based media is the ease with which it can be
amended. This work will be refined over time. There are surely problems with
the writing and (shudder) factual errors that will need attention. There are
probably some holes in the story that need to be filled. I would be most
grateful for any comments, suggestions, or corrections that you might
provide.Please address comments to the Editor:
editor@leftjustified.org.
-ToKind§
Plans, Dreams, Schemes § The Website
§ About Account of
a Declaration § The
second layer contains supporting material, essays that explain events or actual
documents, referred to in the top layer. These second layer materials contain
many links to other related topics. None of those links lead back to the top
layer, so if you dig too deep it will be hard get back to where you jumped off.
The best way to navigate, to keep track of where you are in the story, is to
limit yourself to two jumps from the top layer. If you do this, you will
see all of the material before you reach the end of the hypertext. The two
jumps rule will help you learn just a little discipline in keeping track of
where you are. Later, you may find you can go deeper without losing your
place.If
you get lost you can return to the home page (the Introduction) at any time
by going to the top of the page you are on and clicking on Home
or Account of a Declaration. This will not take you back to where you
jumped off, but you will be able to page forward to where you were.
-ToKindCopyright ©1996-2003 by LeftJustified Publiks. All Rights reserved.