Jumping over the Information Gates
Purpose: This document was originally written as a service to members of the Midwest Philosophy of Education Society. The author thought of giving this page an independent status "outside" the official MPES web site for two reasons: First, in keeping with a self-imposed policy to not publish articles by MPES members directly on the MPES site, but merely to link to them. Secondly, since the advice given here is of the generic type that can be used by just about anyone interested in publishing text documents on the world wide web (www), such as, articles or books, he thought of giving this article a "stand alone" status that anyone surfing the web may be able to react to. What is provided here is some useful information on how to get published on the Internet especially written to address the needs of university-based students and faculty, or more broadly writers and scholars. Contents
Some General Comments regarding Web Publishing: Anyone with the ability to connect to the Internet is free to publish just about anything which the country in which he or she resides considers "legal." Once published, such publications stay on the Internet for anyone to see on a round the clock basis (unless you decide to withdraw or change your publication). In other words, the individual author has complete control over his or her publications, including when and what to publish, while simultaneously reaching usually a much wider audience. Please see below regarding tips on how to "notify" different search engines about your newly published electronic documents. There are several articles on electronic publishing on the Internet which writers may wish to consult. All you have to do is ask one of the search engines, such as, AltaVista, to search for such phrases as "publishing on the world wide web." Ironically such articles seem to "speak for themselves" by virtue merely of the fact that they are themselves... "electronic." Some of the advantages of electronic publishing on the web may include immediate access to readers, interactive feedback, publishing of "politically unpopular" articles, reaching specialized audiences, covering a wider "geographic" area, almost totally cost-free publications for those scholars with access to their university servers, authors controlling the quality of their publications themselves, and "democratizing" scholarly discourse. For an analysis of such issues, you may wish to see a brief proposal on "electronic publishing" written by the webmaster..Contents
Note: For our purposes here, the terms World Wide Web (WWW) and Internet will be used interchangeably to refer to the same thing.
1. University Accounts: If you don't already have one, get an e-mail account from your university. The name used for your e-mail account is usually also the same name used for your "directory" (or "folder") on the university's server. A "server" is usually a computer used to store electronic information intended for use primarily over a computer network, such as, the Internet. You can save your electronic documents inside your folder on the university's server, including your Internet home page, and any articles or other work that you may wish to publish on the Internet. If you are not affiliated with a university, the same applies to you, except you may have to pay for space on a commercial server, which is usually provided by your commercial "Internet Service Provider" or ISP (=commercial companies that connect people to the Internet, such as, America on Line).Contents
2. Free Space on Your University's Server: Almost all universities that I know allow both their students and faculty some free space on their servers. Find out from your institution whether such space is available to you, how much, and how to utilize it. Limitations on how to utilize such space are usually very few. They may include rules against using such space for commercial purposes (i.e., advertising something for sale); or, less frequently, for purposes that are totally unrelated to academic life. Universities also tend to frown upon web pages that are unabashedly "offensive" to others (such as, making explicitly racist remarks about another group). The ability to publish gratis on your university's server provides a wonderful opportunity to students and professors to publish a variety of items, from personal "academic" homepages listing their publications, teaching or research interests, and the like; to course syllabi, articles or books they wrote, or other funded or unfunded projects they may be involved with. In the interest of constantly updating my understanding of university-related web publishing information, it would be appreciated if you could please notify me regarding anything new that you may "discover" in the process of setting up your "web publishing" account at your college or university.Contents
3. Where to go: Usually, the place to ask for an e-mail account on campus is the main computer lab. You may also wish to find out who your university's webmaster is, and ask him or her how to set up your Internet homepage. Some universities have an elaborate procedure on how to do this, including "initializing" your web files every time you save or change them on the server.Contents
4. Home Page: Once you have a folder or directory on your university's server (=similar to the directory provided by commercial ISPs), create a homepage using any number of web publishing "engines," such as, Netscape's Composer or America on Line's AOLPress. They can both be downloaded from the Internet to your computer for free! Just click on their corresponding names, in the previous to last sentence, and choose the right software to download (depending on your Windows platform). I use both of them, as each seems to complement the other! For example, Netscape allows the creation of more elaborate tables, and has access to all of the fonts installed on your computer; while AOLPress allows you to see the HTML code "behind" the document, which allows those who possess HTML skills greater flexibility in editing their documents. There are many other minor points which are best left for you to learn, as they vary depending on your "platform," computer equipment, and the like. In any event, thanks to these web document creation "engines," creating a document for publication on the web is almost as simple as working with your word processor.Contents
5. Creating a Web Document for Publication on the Internet:
How to Start: Open both your web publishing engine and wordprocessor on your windows computer screen. Copy the article you wish to publish from your wordprocessor (Corel Wordperfect, Microsoft Word, etc.), and paste it on your web editor (AOLPress, Netscape Composer, etc.). You can copy a document inside your wordprocessor for pasting on your web editor by first highlighting your document with your mouse, then finding the "edit" drop down menu inside your wordprocessor screen, and selecting "copy." You can then paste your document on your web editor by first clicking on the web editor on your desktop so it becomes the active screen, then clicking "paste" in your web editor's "edit" drop down menu. That's it! Voila, you now have a document ready for publishing on the Internet. You may now wish to embellish your document with internal and external links, graphics, different letter fonts, and the like, but your document is publishable as-is even without any such embellishments. Contents
Embellishments: After you paste your document from your word processor, onto your web editor (or, alternatively, just wrote it using your web editor), you may have to create spaces among paragraphs, and other cosmetic changes. Unless your particular web editor understands fully the codes used by your wordprocessor, in which case it will automatically "transform" your text document into a web document with exactly the same format, you may have to manually make some cosmetic changes to your document as it appears on your web editor. You may wish to acquire a wordprocessor that can change documents between strictly text, and web-design, such as, Corel WordPerfect 8, which can "save" documents in either wpd (WordPerfect) format, or as an HTML (=web) document. In other words, you can load an article that you wrote, and re-save it with a different name as a "HTML" document. In that case, you do not have to format the paragraphs in your document , since Corel WordPerfect 8 already did so when you saved it in HTML format. Moreover, Corel WP8 also creates internal links for all of your references or endnotes. Unfortunately, it does so only "one way," from the text to the footnote, which means you may have to create a link from the reference or endnote back to the text to make it easier for the reader to return to the text. Although it is not necessary that you do so, if you do, readers can easily "navigate" through your document, jumping from the text to its references, and back, with only a click of their mouse! Thus documents published on the web make reading such documents to a certain extent much easier, in the sense of being easier to locate text and references, than the traditional paper-based article. Finally, unless your web editor has a spell checking tool, use your wordprocessor's spell checking feature, and make all corrections first on your word processor, before you copy and paste your document on your web editor, This way you may save yourself valuable time manually finding all the little typographical errors that spell checking "engines" do much faster. The way I put spell checking engines to work for me when making additions to my text document is either by making such additions (or other changes) inside my wordprocessor, as suggested above; or by making additions to my document even while inside my web editor (which may not have a spell checking tool), but then by highlighting my added paragraphs, copying them to my wordprocessor, using spell checking to correct errors, and then copying these paragraphs back to my web editor. Incidentally, such spell checking engines are very good at catching little typographical errors that result from writing as fast as the ideas may come to your head, which means you can write as fast as you like, without having to constantly correct your typogrophical errors, since you know that afterwards your spell checking engine with some "supervision" of the corrective process by you will almost automatically "re-arrange" all these scrambled letters inside carelessly-typed words back to their orthographically correct order. Contents
Adding navigational "internal links:" You may wish to add additional "internal" links between the end of each paragraph, or section or chapter, and the Table of Contents. This page that you are reading now may serve as an example of this technique. A Table of Contents with internal links to sections or chapters in your paper is very useful. Given the fact that articles or books "on line" require usually several screens of text for the reader to see them all, the reader may find it difficult to "navigate" within the text simply by scrolling up or down the computer screen with his or her mouse. On the other hand, if he or she has a point of departure, such as, the Table of Contents, from which he or she can "explore" the article, and to which he or she can return almost from anywhere in the text, then he or she may be able to avoid having to scroll the screen and look for something "line by line," or scrolling again until he or she arrives to the beginning of the document again. Scrolling may be particularly difficult for elderly persons whose control of the mouse may not be as easy as those with tighter muscle control, esp. since the "scroll bar" is usually a narrow little strip on the side of the computer screen that is sometimes difficult to locate. This is why creating internal links that automatically take the reader to all of the major parts in your article may also help such readers to navigate through your article.Contents
Table of Contents: Finally, by including a Table of Contents you offer the reader not only links to all of the major topics (as explained, above), but also a topic by topic synopsis that some readers may find very useful, or decide to read your article precisely because a certain topic in your article caught their attention when they first visited the web page where you "stored" the article. This page serves as an example of the type of Table of Contents described here. To see an additional example of the type of Table of Contents that was just described, with internal links to major topics or chapters in the article, you may wish to see this article published by the webmaster.Contents
More on links: Internal links (=links that connect one part of your article to another within the same article) are very easy to create with any of the web publishing engines, such as, the two just mentioned earlier. I prefer using AOLpress to accomplish this particular task, but that may be because I am more used to using AOLpress, than Composer (which shows you that you should always take such suggestions with a grain of salt, as they may partly reflect a certain "bias" that the person making the suggestion may inadvertently hold due, usually, to what he or she has been accustomed to working with). Of course as is the case with everything else that you begin spending time with, your web publishing skills gradually improve as you work more with web publishing, including learning how to create links to other web documents (=easy), e-mail links (=piece of ... logic), inserting graphics (=relatively easy), or creating bulletin boards, drop down tables, counting counters, or interactive input forms (of modest difficulty to anyone who decides to spend some time finding the right place in the web to learn how to do all of these techniques).Contents
Backgrounds and Graphics: I would recommend that until you learn more about how to add "fancy" background colors, use the white background that almost all web publishing engines make easily available (white emulates "real" paper background, and makes it easier for the readers to read your text). Stay away from including too many graphics in your document, as they may distract from its content (esp. regarding scholarly articles that require some concentration). Furthermore, the fewer graphics you have, the easier it will be to publish your document on the web, since you will be required to "send" fewer additional items to your server to make all these graphics work. If you have no graphics, then so much the better from the point of view of how difficult it might be to publish your document "correctly:" you only have to send your document to the server, and nothing else (assuming you have no input forms).Contents
Size of Letters: Finally, just use plain common sense in publishing your articles, doing what seems right to you, or, more importantly, your readers, than what everyone else with web documents may be doing. For instance, I noticed that many of the "links" in most of the "professionally built" web pages are written in tiny little characters, which may make it very difficult for people with "poor" eyesight to see. Although perhaps more aesthetically appealing when written with such little characters, because more links can be added on a single screen without the reader having to "scroll" down to see them all, I would prefer that I make the characters big enough for easy reading, than care too much about "aesthetics." After all, once a page is typed, it is typed, and therefore generally "neat" whether written with tiny or large letters. Need I add that scholars or others who may read you web documents may be more interested in their content, than their "appearance?" To get an idea on how others "embellish" their scholarly work with links or graphics, you may wish to consult any number of papers already published on the Internet by searching for a particular "research" topic, and then reading the actual articles. Regarding the possible advantages of using white background, see, for example, this paper published by the webmaster.Contents
6. Sending your Document to the Internet: Once you have created your web document, you must now "send it" to the Internet, which ironically is no further than... the server where it will be saved (in your case probably right on your campus, on the server of your university). To send it to the server, from which others around the world retrieve it for viewing with their browsers, you must have a "file transfer" software (FTP) that will "transfer" your file from your local computer to the server. There are some free FTP software packages available on the Internet, which you can "download" to your computer; or you can utilize the FTP that is usually provided by your ISP. Your computer must also have an internal or external modem to transfer files from one computer to another, as most computers on sale today already do. Finally, after you "transfer" your document inside your private directory on the university's server (or on your commercial ISP's server, as the case may be), you may have to "initialize" your files before you can see them "live" on the Internet, depending on the policy of the network administrator at your institution. Your institution may have more information on whether it is necessary to initialize your files, and if so, how.Contents
7. Notifying Search Engines: After you "sent" your document to your server, and can see it on the web, you must notify some of the search engines so they will include it in their databases for people who may be interested in the topic your article is about. Start by visiting "submit it,"a place where you can notify several search engines at once free of charge! Afterwards, just visit search engines that you find on the Internet one by one, and "submit" your article (usually by visiting their corresponding "Add URL" or "Add Page" links); or visit places similar to submit it that you may find on the web (as I did, but did not feel the need to visit at the time) that will send your URL (=Internet address of your article) simultaneously to several search engines. Please note that after submitting your article to such search engines, then your article may be "picked up" by any number of scholarly centers that direct their readers to visit quality articles on the Internet. As a result, your article may be chosen by such centers in their list of "recommended readings," which may explain why suddenly there is a flurry of readers reading your web document. For example, as a result of a foundations of education research center picking up one of my web documents in its list of "highly recommended" readings, I noticed that the number of readers "visiting" my article almost doubled within a certain period of time, and continues to grow! Notice I said "visit," based on the number of visits kept by the counter that I built at the bottom of the article, as you could in yours, but which, nevertheless, says nothing of whether or how well the article was actually read! In any event, one can only surmise that since readers of your web documents self-select the articles they wish to read based on their interests (for example, by searching for a topic that your article covers), they are more likely to read your document, than to ignore it. After all, if they were not at all interested, why did they bother to look for it, in the first place? Other articles may be picked up by "virtual cultural centers" (=web sites on specific ethnic, educational or cultural issues) that may also send readers your way (see for instance this ethnic studies center that picked up two of my articles). Web sites on the Internet that establish a link to your web documents usually notify you via e-mail, although there may also be some that don't. You could probably find out where you may be listed by searching for your article by title, your name, and other identifying characteristics.Contents
Last Tip: Start the process of publishing one of your articles on the web by formatting it in its simplest form; you can return to embellish or organize it better as you learn more about web publishing. Contents
Copyright Notice: All rights reserved. You may reproduce this document in part or in whole only on the assumption that proper credit will be given to its copyright owner/author 11/8/1998. Revised 4/16/1999.
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