Caveat Lector

Once upon a time there was a graduate student. No, there really was: a deluded and foolish graduate student with strange notions about academia, such as the unaccountable belief that academia was a just and fair place that did well by its disciples. No, I don’t know where these people pick that nonsense up. If I did, it would be a different world.

Anyway, one of the things this graduate student learned to do in graduate school was transcribe manuscripts and incunabula in a halfway-diplomatic fashion, because the institution she attended published microfilmed and computerized versions of same. In the course of a project she did for that institution, she had occasion to use one of those computerized texts to investigate questions of historical linguistics… and the penny dropped. My, this computerized-text business was useful. One can do concordances on the fly, do investigations that would take years if one had only the printed word to go by. Computers! Text! The possibilities are endless!

And then she crashed and burned. Because academia is a hellpit, at least in the humanities, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

So the ex-graduate student, after a few months’ temping and trying to work out for herself what the hell had just happened, landed a job at a local publishing-services bureau, a little place that did editing and typesetting and project management for scholarly presses. Because of her experience doing manuscript transcription, the management decided to throw her into the deep end of the SGML pool and see whether she sank or swam.

She swam. SGML relit all the endless possibilities of computerized text that she’d dimly sensed in graduate school. Elegance! OHCOs! TEI! MathML—okay, that wasn’t elegant, but you can’t win them all. (We shall speak not of ISO 12083, which had all the elegance of a bucket-seeking walrus.) She converted whole dictionaries with regular-expression-fu. She wrote DTDs. She slowly and fumblingly learned to write a few lines of Python. And she had a grand old time, and felt wonderful about what she was learning and doing, and healed some of the raw and painful wounds left by academia.

Two technologies burst upon the scene then: XML and ebooks. With her unerring gift for backing the wrong horse, the ex-graduate-student, now a conversion peasant, became (somehow; the “how” is a bit vague even in hindsight) a leading expert in ebook content standards and creation. This did her good when a neurotic ex-boss forced her to a parting of the ways with her workplace; she quickly landed another position with an ebook company. Alas, that was not to be either. A scant year later, she dropped a resignation on the appropriate desk and ran like a rabbit.

Right, she said to herself. This is ridiculous. Serendipity is all very well and I’m very grateful to it, but how about a little intentional progress here? So the ex-conversion-peasant ensconced herself as a data-entry drudge, pride never having been a besetting sin of hers, and did some thinking about what came next. She had, still, a love for computers and text, and an abiding belief that the combination of the two would be world-changing. She did not have a love for publishers, because they certainly didn’t share her love, for all they proclaimed aloud to be devoted to the written word.

And the rest? Is in the blog archives.