Bricolage
bricolage was a sort of trade e-zine for
writers and had a genuine readership for a while during the late mid-90's.
I edited and published it under the pseudonym "Trevor Lawrence".
At that time there were several academic, literary-based websites and quite a few e-zines but there was little website content aimed specifically at writers. So, I put together a set of web pages for writers.
By kind permission of the original authors I was able to include Crawford Kilian's online guide for writers and Dale Keiger's excellent article "What editors want" as well as lists of publishers' email addresses, the misc.writing newsgroup FAQ and other similar resources as well constructing my own lists of useful links and creating article content. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems more weblog than e-zine.
As editor, I used to receive email from authors
and from publishers on writing-related matters and would publish them in summary form as "blipverts" (after Max Headroom, it felt like that kind of activity).
bricolage trundled along quietly for a couple of years while the Net exploded around it. Within three years writers were being extremely well served by a plethora of writing-related website, the rationale underpinning bricolage was substantially weakened and it became largely irrelevant - however, it had served its purpose.
bricolage has undergone a limited revival. Some of the resouces still have value and as curator, I feel I have a responsibility to make them available if I can.
Curating resources
That might be a tad pretentious but when I collected these resources, the Internet was still a fairly small pond, inhabited mainly by techies and acadamics. There was a strong contributive ethic and much respect was shown by all (these were one's intellectual peers).
It was common practice when posing a question of the Net to first declare that one had read the FAQ & the references and had made a thorough but futile search. One would commit to summarising the responses and promise to post the summary back to the Net. Typically fifty or sixty replies would be received covering a variety of approaches and possible solutions, if not actually containing an answer. It proved to be an effective means of distilling and integrating distributed knowledge into a single, valuable resource.
The act of separating out the wheat from the chaff of internet resources adds value because we haven't yet managed to get machines to do it to our satisfaction and human effort is very expensive by comparison.
dog59@aol.com
Peter Steiner's 1993 New Yorker cartoon "On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Dog" makes an interesting point. On the Net, we're commonly faced with a variant of the Turing test: "Turing put forward the idea of an 'imitation game', in which a human being and a computer would be interrogated under conditions where the interrogator would not know which was which, the communication being entirely by textual messages. Turing argued that if the interrogator could not distinguish them by questioning, then it would be unreasonable not to call the computer intelligent." In 1993, communication via the Internet was mediated entirely by textual messages and five years later little had changed.
"dog59@aol" became a codeword for "be very careful when making assumptions about the user, it may be a dog for all you know". dog59 may also edit and publish an e-zine under a pseudonym, as we found out at a Labs offsite meeting.
I had been editing and publishing bricolage for about a year or so under the pseudonym "Trevor Lawrence". I wanted to be able to separate my corporate HP online identity from my personal online identity when using a connection which *I* had paid for (I took out an Internet subscription with the BBC Networking Club, email address: tlawrence@auntie.bbcnc.org.uk) As an HP employee, all my online posts had to include a standard disclaimer that the opinions were my own and not HP's. Postings made
and (more importantly) web pages/sites published under a personal online identity wouldn't be subject to this obligation.
During a coffee break at an HPLabs offsite meeting, Steve and I were in a corner nattering about bricolage. A nearby colleague from a different research group turned around in her seat and exclaimed astoundedly "*You're* Trevor Lawrence!?!" Apparently she had been reading bricolage almost since the first issue and had no idea that I was the editor/publisher.