Thank you for even considering to lend a helping hand to this ongoing
project. At this point, I have a few ideas – some probably pretty
daft – about ways you might get involved with the development of
Fweet. I have outlined the major ones below, but if you have
other ideas about ways in which you could volunteer your help to
improve Fweet, please do not hesitate to contact me. Currently
I believe I am primarily looking for:
Proofreaders to read through the collection and check the
correctness and consistency of the elucidations. A proofreader would
read through a set of elucidations, either by location (e.g. a page
of Finnegans Wake at a time) or by subject matter (e.g. all
the quotations from Shakespeare, all the elucidations for a single
language, or even just the English language overtones and
syllabifications), and check them against the appropriate original
non-Joycean sources (i.e. not the scholarly articles that trace the
sources of Finnegans Wake, but the actual sources themselves,
be they a foreign language dictionary, an early 20th century book, a
volume of The Encyclopædia Britannica, the OED, a
translation of the Bible, &c.).
Readers to read books, chapters or articles about
Finnegans Wake – obviously other than those already
read into Fweet, as listed on the
bibliography page – and digest them
into elucidation format. This digestion process would involve
finding all potential elucidations and passing them through two
sieves, the first discarding all elucidations already present in
Fweet, the second discarding elucidations that need not make
it into Fweet, either because they do not convince you or
because they would not convince me (experience shows that
contributors get a hang of this within a couple of iterations).
Book Scanners to use a scanner to scan source books used by
Joyce into searchable PDF format. Many of the books used by Joyce
as sources for Finnegans Wake (see the "Books" brevity on the
search engine page for a tentative list)
are already in the public domain and I believe it will be a
worthwhile project to form an electronic library of as many of
those as possible, as a tool for Finnegans Wake researchers
(i.e. to extend the preliminary collection already available on the
sources page). Obviously, one would have
to obtain copies of these books in order to scan them, but most of
them are easily available from libraries or used book shops (I
myself have more than 80% of them).
Web Page Maintainers to take responsibility for one or more
pages of Fweet and update them on a regular basis. A good
examples of such a potential page is the
sources page (e.g. find better
versions of existing files and locate new ones).
These tasks do not necessarily require vast knowledge of Finnegans
Wake – much more important is a meticulous nature and the
willingness to persevere. These jobs could be done at any rate one
wishes, from a couple of hours a day to a couple of hours a month.
You can also just do a portion of a job, for example, scan just one
book or proofread just a few pages of Finnegans Wake. By
offering your help, you are in no way binding yourself; you can always
stop at any point, with or without any explanation. Basically, any help
would be most welcome.
If any of this appeals to you, please contact me via the "Comment on
Me!" page before starting any actual work, so as to coordinate the
efforts of independent volunteers and in order to ensure that your work
is useful and can be easily applied to Fweet.
Finally, despite all this highfalutin verbiage, please remember that I
am altogether quite a shy and accommodating collaborator and not at all
frightening, or at least I seem to have deluded myself into believing
so.