Comparative Grammar workshop

[Justin McBride]

> ...While some energetic soul may wish to undertake editing duties for an 
> on-paper publisher, we might also want to consider publishing the whole 
> thing electronically, either as a CD/DVD or on the web.  That way if 
> someone experiences a problem with deadlines, it won't hold everyone else 
> up.  It also simplifies preparing copy.  "Photo-ready copy" in the 
> publisher's sense would be out the window as would various publishers' 
> nonsensical (cost-cutting) ways of handling references, etc.  Just agree 
> on a font and margins and you're in business.  No waiting for years for 
> availability either.

An electronic format makes a lot of sense.  For starters, everyone who would 
be interested in the product is by now familiar enough with their computers 
that a such an approach would no longer seem either overly technical or 
juvenile. Electronic media documents are comparatively simple to create, 
edit, expand, modify, copy, and distribute.  Cheap, too.  Furthermore, a 
wide variety of language examples could be easily referenced as hyperlinks 
to elucidate this point or that--it would be like embedding the entire 
appendix in the chapters themselves, but still preserving both as individual 
entities within the document.  And if a paper document is required at some 
point further down the road, the content would already be there ready to 
take to the printers.  As Dr. Rankin says, the first step is to decide on a 
stylesheet and all the associated trappings.  For that, I'd recommend use of 
some sort of Unicode font (Arial Unicode really is pretty amazing), and a 
more or less standard orthography for presentation of language data from all 
corners of the Siouan family.  I would be very happy to volunteer for some 
of the editing no matter how it's done.  And I'd love to go to the workshop, 
too.  I think next summer would be best.

-jm