The Grice Club

Welcome

The Grice Club

The club for all those whose members have no (other) club.

Is Grice the greatest philosopher that ever lived?

Search This Blog

Friday, February 26, 2010

Book Project for The Grice Club?

By Roger Bishop Jones for The Grice Club

I don't know whether its been mentioned here yet, but
Speranza and I are collaborating on a small book project.
.
Information about this can be found at Speranza's web page
which I put up at: http://jls.rbjones.com
.
It called "A Conversation between Carnap and Grice - as it
might have been". I think JLS would prefer something less
stodgy, but I insist on having Carnap and Grice in the title
so that it comes up on searches for them in the Amazon
catalogue.
.
From the JLS web page you can also access something which I
called "The Grice Companion" and is just a rather pathetic
attempt on my part to edit into some kind of organisation
the content of the several dozen messages which Speranza
sent me in the 24 hours after I suggested that we
collaborate on the Carnap/Grice companion.
.
Anyway, here I am watching this endless trail of
entertaining Griceities streaming out from the Grice club
and landing up in completely disorganised archives, and
wondering whether there is any way to get the material
edited into readable book-like things. (I'm just obsessed
with book writing at the moment)
.
Of course, I could set too and do that myself, but then I
wouldn't have any time to do philosophy, and my idea of
philosophy consists in spending my time mostly thinking, and
then somehow or other finding some way of getting some of
that stuff onto paper (or out there somehow)..
.
What I would like to do is contribute some ideas about how
contributors to the Grice Club might collaborate in a way
which follows up on the philosophical conversation with
something more structured and readable than a blog archive.
.
So here a first question. Are any of you interested???
.
The idea in the first instance is that "The Grice Companion"
or something like it, become a collaborative project of "The
Grice Club".
(perhaps it should be "Squintessential Grice").
.
Now, supposing that some of us were interested.
The next question is how to go about it, and one of the first
aspects of that which I would address is what technology we
use for it.
.
The two PDFs on Speranza's site are made from LaTeX source,
which produces nice results but is not so easy to work with.
This means that all the editing is down to me. Not cool.
.
There is good technology out there to support collaborative
projects of this sort, and fully worked totally transparent
complete projects out there to see.
.
One important piece of software for collaborative
development is a source code repository which keeps all the
history of the source and allows all the collaborators
shared access to the material they are working on.
One such system is "svn" or "Subversion".
This is particularly interesting because this piece of
software has a 300 page manual published by O'Reilly and the
book itself is a collaborative project now hosted at Google
code.
.
You can see the Subversion Manual at the subversion web site
which is here
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/
.
The collaborative project which wrote the book is now hosted
at google code here:
http://code.google.com/p/svnbook/
.
So the idea is here, of trying out collaborative
philosophical writing by coupling a Blog (The Grice Club)
with a google.code hosted book-writing project.
.
Of course it will be a disaster, but it might be fun.
.
Anyone interested?
.
Roger Jones

2 comments:

  1. I AM!
    Will brief right now, since most of the things you mention I'll have to study one by one. And it WILL be cool.

    ---

    I suggest it will be a collaborative project. The important thing is author. So that if it becomes published it will be, in strict alphabetic order:

    R. B. Jones, and J. Kennedy and L. J. Kramer, and J. L. Speranza, and ...,
    "The Grice Companion" -- Pages from the Proceedings of the Grice Club. Published by The Grice Club.

    --- Etc.

    ---

    So the idea is that to have selected blog posts turned not so much onto longer essays, but having proper authorship credited. We can play with the Grice Club like that for a year or so and I can submit more specific invitations to people I know may like to contribute with mini-essays which would then be open to our comments.

    This blog system allows for "click here to edit", "click there to turn this into a book", so I can try that in a year or so, and see what we can edit out of this.

    ----

    Meanwhile I can create another blog! I was thinking of an updatable reference service -- selected, of course.

    ----

    The idea of little entries or mini-essays by different collaborators sounds _very_ nice. The thing could have "A Dictionary of Grice" appended to it. This is something I would find of some appeal too: to have little entries for things which do look like Griceanisms.

    I hope others will contribute and guide me, because the way I am, if anything gets published it will be catalogued by amazon under:

    Humour
    Foreign Language

    and we don't want _that_, necessarily (or something).

    Cheers, and thanks for your interest, Roger.

    JL

    ReplyDelete
  2. Only just noticed your response.
    I should take the technology side with a pinch of salt, I will probably have to be a midwife on the technology side. The main thing is for you to start
    thinking about something more structured, and then
    we can negotiate about technoology until we get something which will work.
    I don't think the Blogger "publish" tab is going to do you any good, so there will be real work in editing to be done.

    RBJ

    ReplyDelete