How documents here are prepared

Most documents in the Memex go up as they were made. Programs, handouts, papers, and letters are scanned or saved to PDF and posted whole. Some needed work first. When a posted file differs from its source in a way a reader should know, its link carries one of the five tags below. A tap on a tag opens this page.

The five tags

• Restored

  The file arrived damaged and was repaired. Its pages are the original pages. Where a part could not be recovered, a close substitute stands in, such as a standard typeface for a lost one.

• Reconstructed

  The document was rebuilt from a draft, a reprint, or a saved web page, because the original survives in no usable form. The words follow the source. The layout is new.

• Masked

  Something was removed to protect privacy or another owner’s rights. Masked spots appear as gray boxes, black bars, or bracketed notes such as “[email removed].” Search holds the same notes.

• Excerpted

  Only part of the source is posted: selected pages, or the final build of each animated slide. What is posted is unchanged.

• Corrected

  A transcript’s obvious misspellings were fixed, and gaps in the recording are marked in brackets, such as “[inaudible].” Names that could not be verified stay as transcribed.

What masking removes and keeps

Removed: individual email addresses, personal phone and fax numbers, home addresses, health details about third parties, and images owned by others. Students’ names in class materials are removed by default.

Kept: office addresses, institutional letterhead and its numbers, role and listserv addresses, public handles, Gordon Mitchell’s current university address and office numbers, and the names of students who appeared in public events.

Changes that carry no tag

These changes carry no tag: routine conversion from Word or RTF to PDF, compression of large scans, pages turned upright, straight quotation marks made curly, and several related files joined into one. Documents Mitchell made himself go up as he made them, small errors included.

Published work

A published article or chapter is posted where the publisher allows it or where Mitchell has chosen to post it. Otherwise its card links the publisher’s page. Other authors’ copyrighted articles are cited and linked. Older works go up once they are in the public domain in the United States.

To report an error or ask about a document, write to gordonm@pitt.edu.