Job postings

[George Fowler]

Greetings!

I've been following the job postings thread recently; the upshot seems to
be that many people think the information is useful for the SEELangs
audience, while some (Gary being the most forceful and outspoken) think
it's a waste of bandwidth.

The issue, of course, is that mailing lists like SEELangs force-feed all
mailings to the entire subscription list, even those which may be of
interest to a small percentage of the subscribers. Job postings are not the
only potentially controversial material, of course; if someone posts a
technical linguistic question or remark, this is likely of interest to a
good percentage of the linguists, but a much lower percentage of the
non-linguist subscribers (who are a pronounced majority).

In this case particularly, a really appropriate solution might be to post
such job announcements to the AATSEEL www page at:

<http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~aatseel/>

There is a category for job listings there, and there are even some job
listings, the last posted on June 15, 1996; the job page is at:

<http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~aatseel/jobs/job-index.html>

This page is maintained by Devin Browne, who has been posting these job
listings to SEELangs as well. Clearly, he could post them in either place
(although there has been the complication that the AATSEEL www page has
migrated from one computer to another over the summer, with some
disruptions in access and services; but it should be stable again very
shortly, if it is not already--I'm sure this has interfered with his www
postings over the summer).

The question is, do most of us (= SEELangs subscribers) who are interested
in job information have equivalent access to www matching email
convenience? I do, but perhaps not all.

I personally think that information of value to a selected minority of
SEELangs subscribers ought to be posted on an "on-demand" basis, i.e., to
the www page. However, I don't mind getting this sort of thing by email
either. Still, we should be thinking about reorienting our expectations
toward the built-in selectivity of www dissemination instead of listserv
broadcasting, if not today, then in a year or so.

I might mention that the AATSEEL www page has some very good stuff posted;
the major problem is the lack of volunteers who are willing to get their
hands dirty and look after categories of information. The people in charge
are George Mitrevski (mitrege at mail.auburn.edu) and Sibelan Forrester
(sforres1 at swarthmore.edu); either would be happy to welcome additional
contributors to the AATSEEL www effort. (George is going to be traveling a
lot this year, so Sibelan will probably have most hands-on responsibility.)
If nobody is willing to go to the trouble to identify, organize, and post
information, it isn't going to appear there by magic!


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George Fowler                [Email]    gfowler at indiana.edu
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