h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

So here's my notice of what I noticed.

Underguide is pretty funny if you like derivatives. I don't think it's a guide though, under, over or otherwise.

The Guide reminds me of a museum where there really are guides or docents who spend half their time keeping all the kids in line and where you aren't supposed to touch anything or press you nose against the glass.

Everybody's called a researcher which reminds me of somebody dressed in a button down collared shirt and blue jeans sitting in the middle of a mess with an impressive library from floor ceiling covered in cobwebs and a heap of papers on his desk he should have graded last week. I wonder if that's what people envision when they come to this part of the site?

It seems to me that they're maybe more like searchers rather than researchers. This is new ground or ought to be, not something you can read about in a brochure or see in a clever multimedia presentation, so why not just make it look that way too?

Searchers, Explorers, Scouts, Fur Trappers, Mountaineers, or whatever. All contributing not to a guide but a journal. William Clark would have never got anything published in THE GUIDE because he couldn't spell, but he and his colleague, Mr. Lewis, had plenty of JOURNALS.

So I suppose those would be my suggestions, just to get things off on the right foot or the wrong one if you prefer. Again, Underguide and the rest of the derivations are pretty good, but are they really what this is about?

Fur-trappers!

The name is important though. The reason I never approached AGG/GAG is that I could never remember the name.

You are right to ask the question about the suitability of the phrase 'the underguide' though. I'll be interested to see the comments of the other researchers. All the names are important. Someone suggested 'pitprops' for the supporters of the underguide, but it appears that is a British English term. I am still curious to know what the roofs of American mines are held up with.

a miner called Ben

Timbers, except they don't do that anymore. They just strip everything off so the roof's held up by air same as the sky, because of course then it is the sky.

I was going to crack a joke about American mines not always being held up by anything, but that would be mean.

If we started a whole new site to promote undiscovered and amateur writers, our options for a name would be more wide open. But as long as we're building it on h2g2, our project will be overshadowed by the Edited Guide.

You can introduce yourself as Larry Fortensky, but you'll always be known as Elizabeth Taylor's ex-husband.

Like Judo, we can take the momentum of people coming at us and use it to our advantage, by deciding how they will see us in relation to the Edited Guide. Calling it "The Underguide" sums up that relationship fairly quickly, plus sounds a little subversive like "underground" or "underdog."

I suppose it's not technically a guide, except maybe a guide to the unconscious?

The infrastructure of h2g2, allowing inexperienced writers to post stories easily, join discussions and track discussions easily, makes it worthwhile to keep this project here instead of trying to start a new site. If that makes the project "derivative," I can live with that.

Very well, I suggest then you make it simpler still, if no less derivative, by calling it the Unguide. And maybe, like unbirthdays, you can have more than one per year.

Subversion doesn't work especially well if you approach it from a position of weakness assumed voluntarily. The oppressors will most assuredly provide you with that position free of charge. That's why it's hardly ever the Underdog's Liberation Movement, but rather the People's Liberation Movement, and if we really want to stir up the hornets nest, the Democratic People's Liberation Movement, implying it is the rulers who lack legimacy.

I've been referring to it as the 'Undergrowth'.
Because, there are no tall trees without the stuff at ground level...
and while the Guide protrudes in a spiky way, reaching upwards,
the majority of material on the H2G2 site is 'unguidely' and clusters around the base.

Yet, without debris, fungi, ground covering flora, dead animals, fallen leaves, bits of bark and needles, there is no forest and no future.

That's as far as I am ready to carry the analogy and the metaphor. The simile I'm not touching, as I think I have a cold.

This isn't a political movement, Analiese, it is a visceral stirring to get the researchers and the PTB more involved in what really fills the servers around here: Unguidely stuff, the Undergrowth!

tonsil, you've got a good point there!

How people interpret different words is interesting - I doubt you'd ever find a name that suited everyone. I associate the guide with books and maps that get you around new places. My first image from 'researcher' is a labcoat bent over a microscope. But the second would be in the library going through books. No cobwebs, he'd be wearing gloves to protect the pages and there'd be a librarian standing over him looking disapproving and jangling her keys.

The guide in underguide works in two ways - its entries will be guides to life etc. And it will be a guide, like an index, to finding them. A guide through the undergrowth. 'Under' does imply lesser in some sense, but not weaker, the strength is in the grassroots not the blades afterall. Is lesser than the EG ok?

My views on this have been changing as Ive read the discussions that been generated recently. The EG combining the knowledge of numbers of researchers and kept up to date could be a powerful source of information. Although Douglas Adams said researchers could write about anything they did decide to call members of the site researchers (not members, reporters, writers...). Also the example I remember hearing him use was the man in a cafe writing up how good the doughnuts, (was it doughnuts? something like that) were. Whatever - it implied the practical and the immediate. Which is what the EG guidelines are about.

There could be UG entries just as powerful but many of them will, I think, be more a source of entertainment. Hopefully quality and thought provoking entertainment, but entertainment never the less. My Calvinist ancestors are telling me the practical always has higher value than the arty entertaining stuff. But there are a few Celts in there saying one day, maybe, it will be aknlowedged that stories and poetry are just as valuable a guide to life.

To come back to Analiese's question. - The EG can't exist without the undergrowth, the underguide is working in the material left behind by the EG, finding, indexing, showcasing its best stuff. So yes, that is, for me, what this is really about. And working within the set up of the existing site, whose main aim is a practical guide, I'd say yes, lesser than the EG is ok. If one day, when the UG is thriving, people start to feel 'Edited' and 'Under' are not the right classifications, then the names and whether the guide to l, u and e should be essentially practical could be reconsidered. DNA said the community would develop the guide.

Waz (I'm sorry this reads like an essay. - Its because I've had to revise it so many times as the Calvinists and Celts fought it out. I'm finding it difficult to reach a consistent opinion on the relative status of EG and UG.)

My personal hope is that the UG will be thought-provoking rather than entertaining, but then I divide my fiction bookshelves up into 'Comfortable' and 'Uncomfortable'.

I think that there is a major virtue in writing something which makes people think, if only for a moment, and this is what I hope that most of the entries in the UG will do. I agree, in all liklihood the UG will entertain rather than stimulate, but I live in hope.

Ben
*Whose Celtic ancestors were converted to Calvinism while her Anglo-Saxon ones turned the sod*

"thought-provoking rather than entertaining"

"entertain rather than stimulate"


I hope to Zarquon these aren't mutually exclusive...

... how about; entertaining has to be thought provoking and/or stimulating? The other stuff being merely mind numbing distraction (which has its place in life too)? Does entertaining have to be comfortable? I'd find a production of King Lear extremely uncomfortable but you have to class it as an entertainment. Don't you? I mean if you wanted to call it an exercise in torture I could go along with that but...

It looks as if the word 'entertaining' is another we have to be careful in using because of its interpretations.

"we have to be careful in using " - I mean in the sense of using it in intro's or guidelines to the UG.

Hey - I was just musing for my own - er - amusement. And I agree - I sincerely hope that entertaining and stimulating are NOT mutually exclusive.

Bloody hell - it IS a minefield, isn't it.

I think there is a place in the UG for entries whose sole purpose is to make us you laugh - I just hope that there is a high proportion of entries which make us think, too.

Ben
*tiptoeing off very, very carefully*

It's ironic (if not amusing or entertaining) that analiese is warning us on this thread "Don't mug yourselves," don't get too cozy with the Masters if you want to give power to the masses... while Madent has been suggesting in a different thread that we should write this project as an "Editorial Proposition" and submit it to the DNA Hub, see if they'll give us our own separate site.

Seriously, I don't think the political framework applies to our situation very closely. I hope we can make a people's movement, even a people's guide, by having an open and democratic volunteer group, even though we're seeking approval from the Italics to use front page space. If we wanted total freedom to post anything, then the House Rules would hold us down anyway. We'd have to start a separate site, or migrate to someplace like Wikipedia. It's worth sacrificing our autonomy in order to use the established infrastructure and promotional value of h2g2.

[I was just kidding about "Don't mug yourselves." That's not a quote from analiese, it's from a UK rapper who calls himself "The Streets" and who cracks me up.]

PS - analiese, I didn't mean it as an insult to you when I wrote "it's ironic (if not amusing or entertaining)..." I was just joking about the words that Waz and Ben were playing with earlier, "amusing" and "entertaining." Your comments here have been thought-provoking.

At the risk of being dragged, kicking and screaming, further into the minefield, I'd like to make just a few more comments that might or might not be relevant to the discussion.

What seems to have set off the cluster of explosions is my patently political response to Subcom. Deidzoeb, which, under the circumstances, I think was entirely justified. Subcom seemed to be suggesting a need to secede, in some fashion at least, from the Union. I think the term "underground" in its revolutionary context came up. So that's why I suggested we avoid the "under" part.

Then it was suggested that we needed the infrastructure, no use burning the town when all we should want to do is make a few minor changes to way the city council runs things. So I was okay with that too. Just call it the "Unguide".

Well, it seems "guide" means something other than what I envisioned so "Unguide" was a terrifying repudiation of the vision of Doug Adams. Except, from what I've read, the whole purpose of the exercise is to acknowledge that the site has become, for probably entirely practical reasons, just a little different from what Doug might have envisioned. That the discipline of THE GUIDE is maybe a little too stifling at times and an alternative would be, therefore, necessary and good.

Still, as was so sagely pointed out, if people perceive a need to label the distinction, they will at some point, probably calling the unguide something else entirely, maybe even WYSIWYG or Fire Flowers for the Advancement of CheezWhiz or who knows?

Again, I have no problem with that or associations of the underground with mine tunnels, rather than minefields, which are a whole nother thing.

So having taken a couple of laps around the barn with this thing in my own head, I'm wondering now why call it anything? Of course CAC doesn't quite get it for a newbee like me, but I'm probably just dense and once I figure out all the intricacies and cultural conventions here, it'll be much clearer than mud. But then I didn't start this discussion either.

I didn't know, for example, that one of the espoused goals was to get something on the frontpage. I thought there was already something on the frontpage, namely links to the Post. From there it gets a little confusing sometimes with the Euro date conventions and not exactly intuitive category structure, but, like I said, maybe in time it won't matter to me or anyone else. In time almost anything, however kludgy, seems like it ought to be obvious, ought to be the standard for confort levels worldwide.

Okay, so I guess my main question now is why bother? The Post is here already. Maybe it just needs a little sprucing up here and there and of course anything can benefit from promotion? Alternative Guide is also already here. It might sound a little kinky to some people but other than that it probably works okay as long as you can figure out how it relates to the Post and the rest of the THE GUIDE, which I'm now aware is THE EDITED GUIDE, sorry for that oversight.

And since I just got a plug at whatever this thing will finally be called without even the hint of editing, I think from a strictly practical viewpoint, this part of THE GUIDE is most definitely NOT EDITED, so maybe that's what you call it, THE NON-EDITED GUIDE. Although that's probably a misnomer too, since not everything not edited would necessarily end up being plugged in the NON-EDITED GUIDE.

So taking that even further in practical terms, as in calling it more or less what you're actually doing, it becomes the SELECTED NON-EDITED GUIDE. But then that opens up a whole new barrel of toxic waste, with people competing to have their unedited entries entered, and why wasn't mine? And so the long suffering volunteers have to come up with democratically defensible guidelines for why they're picking this one and not that one, and guess what we're back to then?

So again, why bother? What I've finally concluded after all this convoluted soulsearching is that what's really needed is just a little better presentation of the Alternative Guide within the structure of the Post if that's where you want to leave it. How that's accomplished is maybe the task we're really talking about here, but I can't really say I know for sure.

Ok, here's part of the deal, for me. Every now and then an entry shows up in Peer Review, and it's really good, but it's not what most people think of as 'Edited Guide' material. A little too personal, or too off-the-wall, or too opinionated, or not about the 'real world', or something.

The author, however, will sometimes say, 'hey, why shouldn't this sort of thing go into the Edited Guide?' Then they might or might not invoke the name of Douglas Adams, and 100-post threads ensue. Plenty of people will agree with them, and just as many will disagree. People will get surprisingly worked up about it.

I've seen entries like this referred to, picked by, and featured in <./>ThePost</.>, but the author still wants it to be 'Edited'. It's like this... I dunno, this holy grail or something. Why doesn't getting into The Post carry the same kudos, in people's eyes? I dunno. Maybe it does, for some. There's some really excellent writing (and art!) in The Post, and I've never walked away from it unsatisfied.

I think it's the whole process - you get scouted, you get subbed, (there are volunteer schemes set up for the purpose of dealing with your entry!), an Italic looks over your stuff, the title of your entry is featured right there on the front page, one click away, where nobody has to scroll down or anything! That feels really good to people! We're trying to set up a process for alternative entries that works as much like that as possible. Because of the nature of the beast, some of the details are different, but we want to get the same *feel*.

(This is all my take on it, and others may - and are certainly welcome to - diagree.)

If someone can think of a way to make it so that The Post means as much to writers as the Edited Guide, then the UnderGuide will not be necessary. I think of them as filling different niches, though. I don't know whether I can articulate just what those niches are - that's part of the task of defining our vision - but I believe that h2g2 is big enough for both - and the Edited Guide - to stretch out and fully express themselves.


Well, that's , and now I'm off to work on the new APR page! I'm glad you've jumped in, Analiese; I want for us to be able to answer with conviction the very questions you're asking.

Wow! Now I'm really confused, and it's probably just because I'm dense as previously noted, but first we're not edited but then we want to devise some non-edited editing process so it feels like the EDITED GUIDE.

So I've never had anything published in the EDITED GUIDE, but I know some people who have, in one case a close personal friend and ex-cousin-in-law if you can figure that out.

It seems to involve first submitting the proposal to Peer Review where people comment on it, offering helpful hints and caveats about violating the so-called GUIDE STYLE. Then after at least seven days of pondering and pontificating, revising and apologizing, some mysterious scout person comes around and "picks" it and after another 4000 years when you've forgotten you've even wrote it, it gets featured with a plug on the front page for a day or two. That, I think, is presumably what we're supposed to see as the "feel" we want?

Personally, I see nothing wrong with the present alternative unguidlines as published. In fact they're much clearer than the edited guidelines, ironically.

So what does that leave out. Peer Review of course, something that might currently be done after the fact, because if the piece you have plugged draws any comments, that would constitute about as peerful a review as anybody gets anyway. You're just not doing it before the fact of publication, which might or might not be a good thing.

Also, it leaves out something else, which in the context of fiction or poetry or speculative essays or whatever probably is pertinent. What about plugging a body of work? Or featuring an author and looking at their stuff in a larger context than one piece at a time?

Then Peer Review could start to deal with themes and the authors might expound on their agendas or overall style questions or other interesting stuff. Not everybody here is going to be a one trick pony, although many will be, and there's nothing wrong with that actually. One really good piece is probably all most people ever come up with anyways and it's sometimes better than a whole volume of mediocre pieces.

Like an anthology. What gets in there is allegedly the best from each contributing author, at least in the estimation of the editor, and their best might be just one or two things. Then, if for some reason you're really interested in their stuff, you can read more of it. Or you can just go on to the next author.

I like the idea of having a readily accessible archive of past issues too. I like that very much because in some respects it might fulfill the idea of a continuing anthology. Again, I think it's just a case of how you present it.

I think the presentation of the edited guide is as much a factor in the esteem in which it's held as the editorial process. If it had to stand on its contents alone, I think it would fall flat most of the time I'm sorry to say. You can usually find better stuff reading through the thesis collection at a university. That's because there Peer Review is taken a good deal more seriously I think and somebody's degree candidacy is on the line.

So, for whatever this is worth, I hope it might all be a little clearer to everybody else if not to me. I remain about as confused as I usually am, so don't expect much.

Analiese, why not drop over to Peer Reveiew, read some entries, leave some comments, and watch what happens there? I'd be curious what you think of the process with more first-hand experience of it.

For that matter, why not submit something there?



"I see nothing wrong with the present alternative unguidlines as published."

Which ones would those be? I'm not aware there's an 'offical' set. There are various collections of alternative entries around, and each one might or might not have their own set of guidelines. <./>AGGGAG</.> does; The Post is pretty flexible...



"first we're not edited but then we want to devise some non-edited editing process so it feels like the EDITED GUIDE."

Please remember, I'm just one person. I don't "represent" UG or EG or anything else in any official way. We're just people, tossing ideas around. Some of us have noticed that the Alternative Writing Workshop, as it exists, is kind of a dead-end for lots of entries. We've also noticed that there is a significant number of people around who are frustrated at the narrowness of the official writing guidelines. Those are just given facts. We're trying to address them. We wouldn't be here talking about this if everyone were happy with the status quo.



"It seems to involve first submitting the proposal to Peer Review where people comment on it, offering helpful hints and caveats about violating the so-called GUIDE STYLE."

I don't think that's what happens to most entries in Peer Review. A lot more conversations there are about content, in my experience. Some of the entries that bring up questions of style are very interesting, as they highlight the boundaries of what the Edited Guide accepts. It's entries like those that are the reason we're talking about the UnderGuide. Those entries are the minority, I think.



"You can usually find better stuff reading through the thesis collection at a university."

"Better" as in, "more likely to hold an average reader's attention and really get them interested in the subject"? I wonder. "Better", as in "more useful to read before travelling to Random Town, USA"? Who writes a thesis on what to do in Random Town, USA? I think there's some damn good stuff in the Edited Guide that you can't find anywhere else. I've learned a lot, from the 80 or so entries that I've sub-edited. Got me a job, once. I wouldn't have learned that stuff in the thesis collection at a University (partly because I wouldn't have been browsing there in the first place!)



I really like what you're saying about featuring bodies of people's work, and having good resources for finding "more by this author" and stuff like that. In fact, there's no reason we couldn't maintain links like that in any UnderGuide entry, since we wouldn't have to have the restriction against links to Unedited Entries that the Edited Guide has.

Whoever said anything about one-trick ponies? I don't think of any writer here that way, unless they just write one thing and then disappear, I guess. I find that there are writers for the Edited Guide whose work I like to follow. Among the regular contributors to Peer Review, I've come to know several really talented writers with distinctive styles. I definitely think of them in terms of a body of work.



"I think the presentation of the edited guide is as much a factor in the esteem in which it's held as the editorial process."

I'm intrigued. Can you say more about that?


GTB

I'm sorry, Mr. Bacchus. My impression of the edited guide is a little different from yours. Frankly, I don't understand why it's esteemed other than it's featured. It's the number one thing on the frontpage.

Right now I count maybe 80 people online. Are they all reading the edited guide? Who knows? There's no page view stats provided that I know of. So I guess it's a moot point until there are.

I find myself reading and commenting on far more conversations than edited guide entries because in the instances when I've searched for entries that interested me and read the groups that were returned in the results, I haven't been all that favorably impressed. This might be because I've concentrated on American history and indian stuff and it's probable there just aren't that many good edited guide entries on those subjects to begin with.

I've commented extensively on paulie's work concerning the Western Shoshone of course and I understand that entry has been picked so it should see the frontpages pretty soon, but her previous entry on Mount Rushmore doesn't seem to have garnered very much interest even though it was picked and published. Yet both have been pretty well researched pieces on issues that, for me at least, are pretty relevant and not necessarily in a narrow, indigenous rights context.

I think part of the problem is that once something gets into the edited guide people seem to treat it as if it were endorsed from on high and they don't say anything about it unless it's "two or three thumbs up". I don't see a lot of discussion about existing entries, but then maybe I'm not looking in the right places. When I have offered something in discussion of an edited entry, it seems to share the same fate as the entry. It's more or less ignored.

That's why putting up stuff on the frontpage two or three times a week seems to keep things going. Otherwise, many people would just drift away I think.

I know people say they're always reading the edited guide, much like they say they watch PBS or read great books, but I wonder if that's really the case in a lot of instances. What seems to matter here is novelty. Content seems a little bit secondary and is certainly eclectic by any standard. But if only six people are actually reading the guide and they're not necessarily the same six people all the time, well, that would be enough in this medium, especially if no page view stats are recorded.

If you truly want a more open version of the guide, then I guess there are a few models around for that, unless you want to reinvent the travois. So maybe it isn't as hard as we're making it?