collaboration: Email-->Wiki--->text

[Nick Thompson]

H’lo,

 

As many of you know I have long held the fantasy that groups of people (like us, for instance) can develop novel and interesting texts by holding long email correspondences, which  then get edited into texts, and re edited, and ultimately published.  Over the last years I have abstracted two collaborative publications out of such correspondences, so I know I works. 

 

But it would be a whole lot easier if there were a way of transferring email correspondences into a Word file so they could be read in historical order.  Google Groups helps a bit because it deletes some redundancy, but still, not all redundancy, and scraping a google groups thread into an an intelligible word file is still a terrific labor of love. 

 

I wonder if any of you out there have a trick for doing this.  Or a mail software that is more scrapable. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

http://www.cusf.org

 

 

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[Owen Densmore]

Typically this is managed by a group blog.  There are lots of instances of physicists, designers, programmers, political commentators, etc group blogs.

One issue is continuity.  Group blogs do tend to be articles rather than conversations but I think that can be managed.  Articles+Comments do have the continuity you want.

A List Apart (http://www.alistapart.com/) is famous for this sort of thing .. very considered design discussions.  They also publish (A Book Apart).  They are also "activists" having contributed to serious design and the CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) technology.

   -- Owen

On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 10:47 AM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

H’lo,

 

As many of you know I have long held the fantasy that groups of people (like us, for instance) can develop novel and interesting texts by holding long email correspondences, which  then get edited into texts, and re edited, and ultimately published.  Over the last years I have abstracted two collaborative publications out of such correspondences, so I know I works. 

 

But it would be a whole lot easier if there were a way of transferring email correspondences into a Word file so they could be read in historical order.  Google Groups helps a bit because it deletes some redundancy, but still, not all redundancy, and scraping a google groups thread into an an intelligible word file is still a terrific labor of love. 

 

I wonder if any of you out there have a trick for doing this.  Or a mail software that is more scrapable. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

http://www.cusf.org

 

 

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org