[INDOLOGY] mea culpa and Dominik's contribution

Herman Tull hermantull at gmail.com
Fri Apr 5 17:21:35 UTC 2019


As do I (wish to contribute).

Herman Tull


On Fri, Apr 5, 2019 at 6:19 PM Krishnaprasad G via INDOLOGY <
indology at list.indology.info> wrote:

> Dear Dominik Wujastyk
> I second the opinions about bearing the expenses.
> KP
>
> On Fri 5 Apr, 2019, 9:40 PM Camillo Formigatti via INDOLOGY, <
> indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
>
>> Dear Dominik,
>>
>>
>>
>> Still, I’d be happy to help with the expenses too.
>>
>>
>>
>> Best wishes,
>>
>>
>>
>> Camillo
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk at gmail.com>
>> *Sent:* 05 April 2019 15:50
>> *To:* Madhav Deshpande <mmdesh at umich.edu>
>> *Cc:* Jonathan Silk <kauzeya at gmail.com>; Indology <
>> indology at list.indology.info>
>> *Subject:* Re: [INDOLOGY] mea culpa and Dominik's contribution
>>
>>
>>
>> Dear Madhav and Jonathan, it's kind of you to offer, and I imagine many
>> other people would be equally willing to contribute if I put a big Patreon
>> button on the website.  Over the years and with the help of various
>> committees membersI have thought about different business models for the
>> list. I don't know if you remember, but at one time I tried to run a little
>> Amazon bookshop on the website, with curated indological titles.  I would
>> have got a fraction of a cent for each Amazon sale through that channel.
>> But it didn't meet a real need and wasn't used.  At another time I had some
>> website pages at indology.info that listed publishers.  Charging for
>> that would have been a more obvious way of getting some income, but I never
>> wanted the entanglement with billing, correspondence, tax, etc.  So that
>> was always a free service to publishers and eventually I decided just not
>> to do it.  Another obvious model would be to bring the forum into H-Asia,
>> and we nearly did that, some years back.  However, H-Asia imposes some
>> limits on what a member-list can do, including having to pay to post job
>> advertisements, and we didn't want those kinds of stricture.  Another model
>> would be to use a university-hosted Mailman installation.  After all,
>> INDOLOGY enjoyed the generous and free support of the U. of Liverpool for
>> many years when it first started.  But I have moved around different
>> institutions in my career, and my experience has been that universities
>> have short memories where digital support is concerned.  You set something
>> up, and then five years later you get sharp emails from the service admins
>> saying that they are going to pull the plug.  UCL was very bad when I left,
>> deleting my files without notice.  Vienna has been better, that way.  I
>> think I was traumatized by the whole BlackBox affair in the mid-90s, when
>> the U. of Washington summarily deleted all the marvellous indological
>> materials that had been made public for years by Tom Ridgeway[*
>> <http://list.indology.info/pipermail/indology_list.indology.info/1997-July/008892.html>].
>> Since then, I've never really trusted university computing departments to
>> have a long view.  University libraries are institutionally concerned with
>> long-term preservation, but libraries curate static data, not functioning
>> services.
>>
>>
>>
>> So I arrived at the counter-intuitive position that running the website
>> and Mailman as a private individual was likely to provide a more stable and
>> long-lasting environment than working with a university.   It is also the
>> path of least resistance to just keep the service afloat and not to bother
>> myself or others with all the complications of collecting money.  This
>> takes the least number of brain cycles for me, and leaves me most free to
>> actually do the things I love, including indology.  I'm now a bit sorry I
>> mentioned it publicly, but I was writing hastily and in a spirit of full
>> disclosure.
>>
>>
>>
>> Something that I failed to mention in my response about how the committee
>> works is that we have a weekly rota.  I think everyone knows this, but
>> members of the committee take weekly turns being on duty.  So at any one
>> time, only one of the committee members deals with correspondence or other
>> tasks (but we all vote on issues and applications all the time).
>>
>>
>>
>> Thanks again!
>>
>> Dominik
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, 5 Apr 2019 at 07:14, Madhav Deshpande via INDOLOGY <
>> indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
>>
>> Dear Dominik,
>>
>>
>>
>>      My reaction is similar to Jonathan's.  I would be willing to
>> contribute toward the cost of maintaining the Indology list.  Please
>> consider setting up a way for us to share the cost.  With best wishes,
>>
>>
>> Madhav M. Deshpande
>>
>> Professor Emeritus
>>
>> Sanskrit and Linguistics
>>
>> University of Michigan
>>
>> [Residence: Campbell, California]
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Apr 5, 2019 at 12:51 AM Jonathan Silk via INDOLOGY <
>> indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
>>
>> Dear Dominik
>>
>> I am perhaps not the only member who felt more than a twinge of guilt in
>> reading that you have been paying for storage out of your pocket. While I
>> agree that simply repeating previous posts is a very bad idea (I would have
>> said for reasons of legibility and page space, not storage cost), I would
>> be more than delighted to contribute to the costs of funding Indology, and
>> I am sure I am not the only one. Perhaps there is a way (sorry, I know this
>> is more work for someone!) to make a page where I can make a donation?
>> Paypal? Or--I'm blushing here--such a page already exists but I don't know
>> about it?
>>
>>
>>
>> Jonathan
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> J. Silk
>> Leiden University
>>
>> Leiden University Institute for Area Studies, LIAS
>>
>> Matthias de Vrieshof 3, Room 0.05b
>>
>> 2311 BZ Leiden
>>
>> The Netherlands
>>
>>
>>
>> copies of my publications may be found at
>>
>> https://leidenuniv.academia.edu/JASilk
>>
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>


-- 
Herman Tull
Princeton, NJ


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