making book of discussion posts

[marshwiggle]

I'd have to fire up my old Compaq, but, yeah.

M.

P.S., Oh, and there are external hard drive readers for both 5" and 3" discs. I have one of each of those, too.

As in the words of Darth Vader, "Most impressive!"

How about 8 inch floppies (from about a decade before 5 1/4)? (We had those when I was in grad school.)

[polly_mer]

There were many things that I think were very important/meaningful no matter what age (like being an academic and dealing with holiday travel, aging parents, difficult co-workers, etc). 

Current discussion with people who can help now is more valuable than preserving everything.  If we're too slow, then you can check on reddit for several other higher ed discussion boards with years and years of those topics.

Books also exist on all those topics, even for academics. 

We don't need to hoard everything.

[lightning]

There is also the 'Dear Forums ...': column on the CHE site, which has archived some of the discussions. I'm not sure how much longer they will keep those pages up.

[mamselle]

Read the thread topic blearily through half-open eyes and took the "of" for "on."

That would be interesting.

M.

[Parasaurolophus]

One way around privacy concerns and copyright issues would be to present the bulk of the insights from a god's-eye-view, divorced from usernames (and with slight editing for detail which might out someone on their own). At that point, though, you end up with something closer to Karen Kelsky's book and lose out on some of the fun of a document that grew out of an actual community. You could leaven it with stuff for which you've obtained permission from the members involved, of course, and that would look a lot like the article about the CHE Fora upthread.

Shrug.

I think it's a worthwhile endeavour! But it would be a decent spot of work to make it half-decent.

[polly_mer]

I think it's a worthwhile endeavour! But it would be a decent spot of work to make it half-decent.

It would be a huge amount of work and would be competing with so many other adequate existing books and extended websites with articles that still have discussion.

If The Future wants to write the book, then go ahead, but this seems more like a fantasy of how book writing and publishing works than identifying an unfilled niche to help academics or seeing a best-selling entertainment opportunity.

[The Future]

Ah, the floppy disk.  I came across some a month or so ago and went on the Amazon site to look for an adapter or external device - yes, these are available.  I guess archivists and forensic people would use these.  I was unaware of the Reddit site for academics.  I think the way I came upon the CHE Forum was by reading an article and there was a link to the Forum by it.  Other newspapers (and some still do - like USA Today) have a discussion post section for each article.  Anyway, it is nice to hear everyone's thoughts on the preservation/non-preservation of the posts.  I recall that there was a tv news piece on there being a cultural historical void because of the disappearance of online content.  Yes, if anyone did want to create a book from the Forum posts (fiction or non-fiction) or even use it as a study for a character in a movie or novel, I'm sure there would be ways.  I was just wondering what others thought on the very intimate broad snapshot that the Forum gave to the profession as well as the very helpful advice - no matter how dated.  My intention in posting this was to have a conversation about the topic - and it does seem like there are varied views on it.  Again, thanks for engaging in my first discussion post.