http://luckysoap.com/statements/handmadeweb.html

text with some annotations: https://drive.google.com/file/d/12EzZ-mchyb43BTCoBU59HHV-Dedfr0TV/view?usp=sharing

the trAce publication that was lost on the link : https://hub.xpub.nl/bootleglibrary/book/999

- Short summary of the text

This talk/text is Carpenter's spell upon the webuser/webmakers to EVOKE HANDMADE WEB. She casts this spell by redefining web as a medium from her own experience and perspective.

She explains web as a medium has unique properties of archiving, publishing and customisation. Drifting through years of changes of web, the design and handmade properties keep getting lost in earlier versions. This is her suggestion at calling them back. She doesn't necessarily draw a strict line, but instead she makes us remember there was a way, and it is still out there for us to use. Opposite to Jo Freeman stating "this is the only way" she offers options to raise awareness rather than imposing her way of thinking.

She critizes social web platforms or web-builders as a de-personalized version of previously colorful ("bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction") nature of the web. As Doriane mentioned previously in class, hand-making-building-writing anything(online/offline) creates space for learning and even if it is a slower process it is still valuable and fulfilling.
She creates a cookbook of body-presence breathed back into web design.

She mentions appropriation and the links between physical and virtual (body, print) which are also topics addressed by (cyber)witches projects, which is why we use the word "spell" to refer to this text. It also has a magical structure → "i evoke the term 'handmade web' in order to..." as if she's calling an entity or a spirit of the web.

- 1 Agreement - why?

"I shall put off updating my website templates until out-of-date design is no longer cool."

because it is a statement, standing for one's own beliefs rather than complying with trends and social movements - she does that a lot in the text, stating strong opinions about old web aesthetics, not using pre-made tools, etc.

"— the handmade web pages contained in this online archive continue to exist in the medium within which they were created."

I agree with this statement because it also refers to web itself as an archival space and then she continues on to say: "That said, the frames through which we view them continue to change." Which is a fair follow-up which I also agree with.

- 1 Disagreement/doubts - why?

Part about physical body

I want it to dig deeper into the metaphor, the examples she gives are interesting but seem like they could be more developed or questioned. Some projects go in this direction like cyberwitches, to reunite body and virtual. It was written in 2015, the cyberpunk and dystopian tech future stories were there, even in the 1990s actually so why not address the subject more???

"These are not artifacts of a dead web but rather, signposts on a map of a living web pointing to a web as it once was, a web in progress, a web in the making."

We disagree that there is always something at the end of the signpost. We believe and see all the time that when you look back at a 'dead' web page it might very well be completely dead. There are ways to reach to those websites, however if the link is not working, there is nothing on the map.

Could it be that she was talking about how a link no longer working is a sign of something being outdated and a gravestone itself is a sign of life?

- Key insight(s)

• handmade web flourished in 1990s
  → they're coming back with neocities, html for people (https://htmlforpeople.com/), lots of people writing blog posts about creating your own website
• female writing about the web > ongoing discussions about the lack of women in tech and webdev
• correlation between print and web diy culture
  "when people got to the end they stopped reading because that's the way books work"
• on obsolescence and proprietary software: "The QuarkExpress file is stored on a 44 MB SyQuest cartridge which I still own, but the contents of which I can no longer access. The handmade website, on the other hand, is still online and it still works."
• I think the way she talks about the handmade web, also ruminates about a present and a future what is actually handmade on the web. Code by hand is mightier than the machine. There are countless glitches only a person can achieve through hours of mistakes and a false understanding of language. Maybe it's the translation error() that creates a profound visual that captures the spirit. And something without it cannot be interesting or profound.

- Lingering doubts/thoughts

• she raises very important and interesting topics but not deep enough
• we understand that this is the transcription of a talk she gave, but we wish she would have extended it in the written form to give more input/insight/details about some points (like social media, website builders, etc.)
• I agree with kiara's disagreement and I think Carpenter misses some points. Where she mentions social media, I felt like she misses some point.
  She goes on to say that social networks online has drifted the user and the puter. When people get accustomed to a non-personalisable page that acts as a social platform rather than a page about YOURSELF or YOUR INTEREST, there is a lack of customized poetics that create a diverse web. Instead we get stuck in a pile of same pages with different id information.

- How do you connect this text with what you have been discussing so far in the SI?

OWN YOUR WEB PRESENCE -- be aware of the tools you use, the communities you're a part of, what you show (display) and how (position) I think this is exactly Doriane is aiming for and I find it a great summary.

- Select 1 or 2 words for the Alphabet Soup - write their definition

DEAD WEB & LIVING WEB (in the text Carpenter mentions dead web doesn't die.)

"These are not artifacts of a dead web but rather, signposts on a map of a living web pointing to a web as it once was, a web in progress, a web in the making."

• dry def The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts, due to a coordinated and intentional effort, the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation to control the population and minimize organic human activity.
• [in our own words] Dead web is first of all referring to a conspiracy theory stating that the web is in the hands of bots and AIs to control the human activity. It also refers to the death of Internet as an infrastructure, due to lack of resources (electricity, datacenters, whatever) or some other external cause.
  The living web is the place of journalism, blogs, social media...an non-stop updating web that is being altered every second. (5)
  Dead/living web refers to the the birth and death of webpages, which may imply death by 'domain parking pages, timeouts, blank pages, outdated TLS cipher errors'(2), or birth by publishing a new page online and launching it into the World Wide Web.
  
• xpub def The dead web could be a 404, a dead link, a bad redirection. As long as the thing you were aiming for isn't there, we can state it as part of the dead web. Because if there is no way to retrieve this information (wayback machine, ubuweb,...) then it is forever lost.
  Living web, might be living from the moment the idea for it is born OR it could be that the publishing of it.
  If it's not born yet is it still alive?
• Found in: Handmade Web by JR Carpenter: http://luckysoap.com/statements/handmadeweb.html
• Related refs:
  (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
  (2) https://notebook.wesleyac.com/how-websites-die/
  (3) https://www.digimarkkinointi.fi/en/blogi/webpage-life-cycle-how-long-do-your-webpages-live/
  (4) https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2015/05/12/internet-congestionne-d-ici-a-2023-pas-si-vite_4631574_4408996.html (not very interesting in the end)
  → small sum up of the article: academics fear the end of Internet because of the increasing demand and traffic as well as the uses requiring more and more electricity, but experts say it won't happen that soon because we are totally capable of handling those increases and managing the networks and data traffics.
  (5) https://alistapart.com/article/writeliving/

ETHNOPOETICS

• dry def - Ethnopoetics is a method of recording text versions of oral poetry or narrative performances (i.e. verbal lore) that uses poetic lines, verses, and stanzas (instead of prose paragraphs) to capture the formal, poetic performance elements which would otherwise be lost in the written texts. The goal of any ethnopoetic text is to show how the techniques of unique oral performers enhance the aesthetic value of their performances within their specific cultural contexts.
  - In linguistics, folkloristics and anthropology, a method of analyzing linguistic structures in oral literature. In poetry, ethnopoetics refers to non-Western, non-canonical poetries, often those coming from ancient and autochthonous cultures.
• [in our own words] Ethnopoetics refers to an oral performance using the traditional characteristics of written poetry (verses, stanzas,...) to enhance the aesthetic value of the text in its cultural context. It often implies non-Western, non-canonical poetries.
• xpub def Ethnopoetics is a crafty, subjective, minority practice that doesn't rely on big tech/companies to exist. It is strongly tied to the web 1.0 aesthetics, because this era of the web was dedicated to this kind of approach along with avant-garde and outsider arts. Most probably it is questioning and destroying this particular capitalistic culture. (define the def more, detail the meaning of the adjectives)
• Found in: Handmade Web by JR Carpenter
• Related refs:
  (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnopoetics
  (2) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/ethnopoetics
  (3) https://poets.org/text/brief-guide-ethnopoetics

- Prepare one question you would like to ask the other groups (based on thoughts sparked by the text)

What are some examples of HANDMADE WEB you have encountered and found inspiring/crazy/worth-a-share? Let's put them here:

• https://www.windows93.net/
• https://www.code-poetry.com/home
• https://wwp.ungual.digital/
• https://goblin-heart.net/sadgrl/
• https://girl-moss.neocities.org/
• https://antoinettelove.com/
• https://www.victorianweb.org/
• https://raphaelbottura.com/
• http://youpron.love/
• https://makefrontendshitagain.party/

• https://www.idi.moe/experiments/synth.html
• https://yazo.ink/
• https://minimal-css.tiddlyhost.com/
• http://harmonyzone.org/
• https://x6ud.github.io/pose-search/#/
• https://web.archive.org/web/20230131204250id_/https://sub-q.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/fiction/20191001_Porpentine/softrumor.html
• https://fanfarefanfare.nl/2183-broken-channels-2024-building-maintenance
• https://compositor.bham.ac.uk/
• http://onelongscream.com/
• https://sketchywebsite.net/
• http://www.therestartpage.com/
• https://jyoon10.github.io/risd/measurementsofspaceandtime/
• https://www.fatgirl.fatlibarchive.org/
• https://www.pobzeznik.net/
• http://possiblebitmaps.com/
• https://simplifier.neocities.org/
• http://davidliebermann.de/
• https://brutal.chat/lobby
• http://wolftonechambers.com/
• https://coolguy.website/
• https://www.cameronsworld.net/

Make a wiki page of screenshots??? collaborative pseudo-web-ring