Preliminaries for a Primer

Imagine a primer, grammar or glossary that documents this evolving vocabulary, written collectively and kept in progress over time.

It seems as though there are certain key terms that are apt to arise again and again in our collective discussions.

What these terms probably all have in common is that they are contested.

A wiki seems like a good site for the dialectical refinement of the definition of certain words that we are probably going to be saying a lot together.

Words like: community, public, history, space, local, landscape, archive, curation, use, nature, ecology, commons.

As a preliminary gesture I have flagged with those little red question marks all of the words in the text on the splash page that seem to me to be words of this kind.

Any reflections on these words, what valence they have for you, texts which you feel illuminate them, the names of books or films or artistic projects you have found useful, etc., would I expect be useful for all of us.

And I encourage other people who are interested to flag such words when they arise, using the nomenclature of double square brackets PrimerX double square brackets, where X = the word in question.

Explanatory note 9/10/2009 by Nonsite web admin: The protocol for inserting a link to a page "to be developed" indicated by David above works as folows. Let's say you want a page called "Addendum to Primer Page" to be created, aren't ready to create it yourself, but want to flag it as something other users might want to create. You would create a link like the following, to an as-yet-nonexistent page:

Addendum to Primer Page

You create this link in your text by typing [[Addendum to Primer Page]]. Clicking on it will take users who have accounts (anonymous users not being allowed to post) to a page-creation interface for a new workbook page with that title. Once the page is created, the system will automatically update the link to point to the newly created page.