Home page
Traduction française
Close this window

Taking stock of twenty years online

The website "Lire les femmes écrivains et les littératures africaines" (AFLIT) is celebrating its 20th year online in 2016. Nothing better than the development of this site, from vanguard to quasi obsolescence, tells the rapid technological evolution of the World Wide Web. Even for those who spent half of their existence without a computer, the multifaceted offshoots of digital technology are now dominating their lives [1] and, let alone emails and mobile phones, it is hard to remember life before the digital age. Similarly, the context in which this site was created at the University of Western Australia is slowly fading.

According to Emma Hawkes, "The first computer [was] brought to West Australia in 1962 when the West Australian Regional Computing Centre (WARCC) was established with a single IBM 1620" [2]. For the ensuing thirty years, expensive and cumbersome computers remained the domain of a few experts and an unknown number of "aspiring computer-geeks" [3] ahead of their time. Stemming from the ranks of the latter, the University Computer Club was created in 1974, two years before the University of Western Australia established its first Department of Computer Science under the direction of Prof. Jeff Rohl [4]. The Seventies saw a significant expansion of the field of computing but, on the whole, computers remained the preserve of a few individuals until the end of the decade when the personal computer took flight, soon reaching all and sundry in the course of the 1980s [5].

By the early Nineties, a large number of academics had been seduced by the new technology's versatility, convenience and relevance to their work. In most offices, old typewriters had been replaced by brand new computers, in spite of the resistance of a few diehards who kept their Mac at arms length, such as the Faculty professor who used its screen as a pin-board. Word processing offered new exciting possibilities, including writing texts which could now be effortlessly typed, corrected, formatted and endlessly revised. Yet an even more fascinating novelty was around the corner: the email and its promise of cheap, easy and instantaneous communication with people around the world. As Prof. Tim Unwin recounts:

When I first got 'online' at UWA in early 1993 (we didn't use that term then), email had been around for some years but was still the preserve of a minority of academics. For me, email was a quantum leap forward: all of a sudden, it was possible to overcome the tyranny of distance and communicate with colleagues in the northern hemisphere in real time. In Australia, email took off seriously over the following couple of years, although it is worth remembering that even until the late 1990s there were academic staff in Australia, the UK and (especially) France who simply didn't believe in the use of email.
In UWA, we worked from the outset with Eudora, which was a remarkably user-friendly and functional programme on the Apple Mac, but if you wanted to connect from a modem at home, you worked in the unix environment (with either 'elm' or 'pine' mail) through a dial-up modem. The world-wide web was, in the early 90s, still very much in its infancy – the majority of my colleagues in the humanities disciplines hadn't come across it – and it was only from about 1996-97 (by which time I had left UWA) that academic departments started to build their own web pages, using html coding manually and often uploading the pages through unix. The pre-WWW days, though, offered plenty of resources: even through unix, it was possible to 'chat' in real time with another user, to send files, or to connect to libraries and databases around the world. One of the resources that we used most of all in French studies was the ARTFL database in Chicago. I used ARTFL with undergraduates at UWA to do word frequency counts on texts like Madame Bovary.
However, it was email itself which brought the first, and arguably the most lasting change to our working lives. In November 1993, mindful of the fact that a number of colleagues around Australia were now contactable by email, I set up Ozfrench – a discussion and announcement forum for French studies in Australia and New Zealand – with the help of UWA Computing Services. It started with fewer than 30 members, but after 18 months or so it was nearing 100. At the same time, numerous other email lists were springing up. LINGUIST (still going strong to this day) had also been started at UWA in the early 90s, but moved with its original owner to the US after only a year or so. BALZAC-L, based in Montreal, was the first discussion list to serve the French studies community internationally. In 1995, when I arrived in Liverpool, I set up FRANCOFIL, the original remit of which was to serve French studies in the global anglophone community. Over two decades later it has become a dominant force in the field, serving both the anglophone and francophone communities worldwide. BALZAC-L died a death, but alongside FRANCOFIL, there is another major player, H-FRANCE (admittedly more angled towards history).
Email and online facilities have now become such a central part of our lives that it is easy to imagine they have always been with us, and to forget what life was like before their arrival. I was very aware, in the early years of email usage, that once colleagues had become comfortable with the medium they would often inadvertently exaggerate how long they had been using it. In those early days, though, there was also a lot of resistance. 'Why do I need email when I can use the fax machine?' was a common objection. History, of course, has swept the fax machine aside, and since history is always written by the victorious, it is easy to overlook the fact that there was a period of rival technologies. [6].

Tim's exploration of the practicalities of the new technology had a long lasting impact on his students and colleagues. My eagerness to explore what Internet had to offer, when I gained a Post Doctoral Fellowship to research African Literature in the Department of French Studies, stemmed in no small measure from his influence. The slowness of information gathering via snail mail that had been one of the major impediments to my previous research in African literature was also a strong incentive to look closely at the upcoming new technology. Email was now available, including in Africa – even if it was only to a few colleagues [7] – with all its promise to speed things up. Tossing ideas, tracking down a colleague anywhere in the world, locating a book, verifying a quote or finding a place to stay during a research leave were only one email message away. So too, getting articles and materials pertaining to one's research. But while the discovery of email was a defining moment for Tim it was my first acquaintance with the World Wide Web that would change my life. Still limited in the early 1990s, material available on the web was increasing at a phenomenal pace and it exploded in the second half of the decade. The Gopher protocol was on the wane, progressively replaced by an all-conquering World Wide Web. In 1995, a survey of Australian Universities' Campus-Wide Information Service testifies to that shift at UWA, where "A project due to commence in the next couple of weeks will address development of a web-based UWA CWIS" [8]. An email sent to me on 29 January 2016 by Dr Toby Burrows summarises the outcome of this project as far as our University was concerned:

The early history of the Web at UWA is pretty poorly documented, from what I can see – though there may be some material in the UWA Archives.
Roger Clarke wrote an account of the early Australian Web at: https://www.rogerclarke.com/II/OzWH.html.
The UWA response [to the 1995 survey of Australian universities' official Web sites] reveals that we had just set up a project to transfer the UWA Campus Wide Information System (CWIS) from a Gopher server to a Web server. The Gopher CWIS was being managed centrally by University Computing Services. Before that (i.e., from late 1993 to early 1995), the situation was more fragmented. There were definitely some UWA Web servers in 1994, but I don't know how many or who was running them. I assume that, like most universities, the first Web sites were individual and local initiatives.
The University Computer Club says its first Web server was installed in 1994: https://www.ucc.asn.au/aboutucc/timeline.ucc.
My colleague Mark Huppert and I (based in the Scholars' Centre) set up the first UWA Library pages in the second half of 1994, on a Web server run by the Student Guild – probably via the UCC. I also had a staff member in the Scholars' Centre called James Tauber, who worked on developing Web pages and CWIS content. The UWA Web CWIS was based in the Scholars' Centre from mid-1995 to the end of 1996 (though the Web server must have been hosted in UCS).
The Library didn't have its own Web server until some time in 1996, I think, when the Library catalogue became accessible on the Web and we added some Library information pages to it. Mark Huppert was our initial Web master [9].

The Arts Faculty's web server was installed by Meg Travers in 1995. She had recently returned from studying at La Trobe University where she had done some web pages for the Music School, convinced as she was that the web was going to be the way in which students would find information about university courses in the near future. In an email dated 1st February 2016 she wrote:

My recollection is that I did a page for each School based on what they had in the then-current university handbook, and then hoped to find others in each school who would take over the reins of growing the content for their area – something that you did!
Alan Dench did a lot of work on material for Linguistics, however before him John Kinder from Italian Studies did a lot of work on their material including being the first user of streaming audio on our server. He was particularly interested in the possibilities of streaming multimedia online and went on to head up the multimedia lab in the Faculty: clearly he saw things would develop in online education!
Other schools were certainly keen, but didn't have someone who published their material, so I would do that as they provided it. The most active schools I think would have been History, Classics and Ancient History and English, then much later Architecture became keen as well. I always thought it a shame that the Music school weren't more enthusiastic (particularly about multimedia developments) at the time.
The earliest snapshot on the Internet Archive is from 1997 but I'm absolutely certain our server was running well before then. If you're interested in the technical detail, the first web server for the Arts faculty (and all the schools) was a Macintosh IIcx running MacHTTP and an FTP daemon. We were also a beta tester for Real Audio's server for the Macintosh and had that running as well. I think the machine might have had as much as 4mb of ram and a 160mb hard drive.[10].

At the end of 1995, when I decided to create a few web pages dedicated to African women authors and their novels, a structure was thus in place and I was soon on my way to meet Meg Travers, the first Webmistress of the Faculty.

To: [email protected]
From: [email protected] (Jean-Marie Volet)
Subject: New Home page
Date: 11/12/1995

Hi Meg,
Alan Dodds told me that you were the faculty's "Home page" specialist. I would like to create a home page for our AFRICAN LITERATURE PROJECT and I need your assistance and expertise. Is it possible to talk about it? Thanks. Regards.
jmv

The blissful discovery Web design, HTML, and the prospect of enhancing my research had me completely enthralled. The future looked bright but there was a hitch: as mentioned above, Meg was looking in each school for volunteers "who would take over the reins of growing the content for their area". The presence of the French Department on the server limited itself to a French flag, and I was quick to realise that in order to put a Web page related to African literature on the Faculty's server, I would have to link it to the School and its skeletal website. Thus a steep learning curve, endless consultation with colleagues and a painstaking process of trial and error that led me to design a raft of basic home pages for the School of European Languages and the four Disciplines it comprised. A few days after my initial email to Meg, I was back on her doorstep:

To: [email protected]
From: [email protected] (Jean-Marie Volet)
Subject: Re: New Home page
Date: 15/12/1995

Hi Meg,
I'm making good progress with the School of European Languages' home page and would appreciate it if you could pop in on Monday to see what I have done so far. I've got a problem with linking my documents together. French accents are alright now.
Thanks for your help.
Cheers.
jmv

A few days before Christmas, hyperlinks were all working, page contents had been proofread by colleagues and Meg Travers was happy to put the lot on the Web. No direct access to the server had been given to me to upload material as, in spite of my week-long training on the job, I definitely remained a fledgling Web designer whose lack of knowledge was as great as his enthusiasm. All the same, step one was complete and the door opened to the next stage, i.e., designing a number of pages related to African women writers. The University was closed for the end-of-year celebrations, but the Mac shared by the Volet family being conveniently available, I couldn't resist drafting a few pages, drawing a few sketches, imagining what a Website on African literature could be [11], how it should look, how the few African authors I knew could participate in its development, how it could abolish the tyranny of distance, not only for Australian academics, but also for African authors relegated to the fringe of the literary Establishment by virtue of their gender, geographical isolation and belittling of their talent. I remember little about Christmas Eve 1995 except that the Internet and the Web had become an all-consuming passion.

AFLIT was born and the rest is history, as the saying goes. But is it? The site is still on the web 20 years on. It rose to great heights from its humble beginnings and opened the door to the creation of the Academic Journal "Mots Pluriels", a truly collaborative venture between colleagues from Africa and the rest of the world. It has been a great literary resource that followed the rise of African women writers and advocated for their recognition in academia. But at the same time, it became increasingly archaic as it was designed as – and remains to this day – a resource that does not allow unmediated readers' contributions. In a new era dominated by the social media and interconnectivity, a website preventing readers direct input has but little future except in bearing witness to the passing of time and the endless metamorphosis of people's expectations. As Joanna Pineda wrote on her blog in 2013: "The most popular websites in the world are ones where users provide all the content" [12]. Notwithstanding Facebook and innumerable other networks, Wikipedia provides a good illustration of Pineda's comments. It is not the degree of excellence of the entries that makes the site appealing, but the mass of information available and the fact that any reader can change this or that, expand on a theory, add a detail, correct a date or a typo. The information provided by Wikipedia about literary authors is constantly fluctuating according to readers' contributions: a good thing in many ways, but also an ongoing remodelling of the pages that flattens time and keeps readers in an ephemeral and yet, paradoxically, perpetual present. Deprived of this all-encompassing reader's input, the entries and documents included in AFLIT are thus taking the slow and unforgiving path to obsolescence from the day they are added to the site. It does not mean that the information provided is no longer of interest. It just means the data is frozen in discrete layers of time for as long it has not been updated. And many pages are not. Rather they are archived when they lose their initial purpose. Like the successive snapshots kept in Web archives, this mosaic of pages lying dormant tells us what we were, not so long ago, rather than what we are hic and nunc. If they do not evince the felicity of interactivity, all these documents, in their form and content, provide a string of landmarks in African women's writing and its evolution in the digital age.

This being said, some pages have been lost along the way, alas. For example, I would have loved to be able to find one of the early drafts I designed on Christmas Eve 1995, but I could not. With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to know what should have been preserved, but successive versions of the website, copied on disks over the years, have been lost to a mountain of floppies that were discarded as bigger and better storage facilities became available. Fortunately, a snapshot of the site on the Internet Archive WayBackMachine, dated October 10, 1997, gives a fair idea of the form and content of the earlier versions [13]. Furthermore many hundreds captures of the site taken over the following twenty years provide a fascinating overview of its evolution.

With the new millennium came increased opportunities to set up personal homepages. The few African women authors who took advantage of this evolution were, no doubt, elated at this unfettered access to web-design. They could give free rein to their artistic sensibility and literary pursuit. Nevertheless, setting up a home page on the web remained out of reach for many in the early part of the decade. Blogging was in its infancy and would only take-off at the beginning of the 21st century. According to Rebecca Blood, "In 1998, there were just a handful of sites of the type that are now identified as weblogs (so named by Jorn Barger, in December 1997)" [14], but by the middle of the following decade, blogging was in full swing and blogs too many to be counted. Free and easy to maintain, they soon provided an ideal alternative to previous web pages for people keen to share gossip, interests, frustrations, personal likes, or compelling snapshots with like-minded individuals living both next door and around the globe [*]. Their success was tremendous, countless literary blogs saw the light of day, including many proposed by African women writers; soon enough, the shared volume of information circulating in the blogosphere began to challenge the supremacy of traditional media channels in the collection and dissemination of information.

But like its antecedents, the blog did not put an end to new ideas and developments. "Social Media" moved to the forefront of people's interest and, in recent years, new names such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook have been dominating the field. For example, the social-networking website Facebook – that was launched in 2004 by a Harvard student – leads the pack and reached an extravagant number of users ten years on: i.e., in 2014, it numbered "1.23 billion monthly users, or about one-sixth of the world's population [who] have made 201.6 billion 'friend' connections and clicked the 'like button' 3.4 trillion times" [15]. Given that Africa counted almost 125 million subscribers on 15 November 2015 [16], one can confidently assume that such a large figure includes a fair proportion of the continent's authors, men and women alike. Now, the future of African women's writing may well be in the hands of readers keen to share their passion with innumerable 'friends'.

What will be left ultimately of AFLIT and of today's web pages, social media and billions of Internet connections? If anything, probably very little in the very long term. But one can cast one's mind on times closer to us: 10, 100 or even 1000 years down the line is not that far, and it is not unreasonable to imagine that a few people will then, like some of us today, find pleasure in "mining the archives" in order to uncover vanishing or lost socio-cultural environments, preoccupations and ways of life. What will be of interest to future generations, we do not know, but in documenting the convergence of a formidable new technology and a no less formidable expansion of women's writing in Africa at the turn of the second millennium, AFLIT bears witness to important phenomena. It is only a whisper in cyberspace, but one that testifies to a rapid technological and cultural evolution that drives change in our times, one that may or may not remain audible in years to come. Only time will tell.

Notes

[1] In her interesting article: "Imposture sur le web: Je partage donc j'e-suis !" Choisir, Revue culturelle, no 674, février 2016, pp.19-21, Annick Chevillot highlights, for example, the semantic alteration of the notion of sharing in recent time and before the digital age.

[2] University Computer Club History Project https://www.ucc.asn.au/aboutucc/histmain.ucc. [Sighted 31 January 2016].

[3] ibid.

[4] ibid.

[5] The Volet's family, for example, was equipped with a brand new Mac 512K in 1986 (thanks to the generosity of a grandfather keen to offer something educational to his grandchildren).

[6] Tim Unwin. Personal communication. 27 January 2016.

[7] Following an inquiry launched on the list "[email protected]" in 1995, I received the following message (in French; my translation):
From: "Dr. Adejunmobi M.A, French, 1007132"
Organization: University of Botswana
To: [email protected]
Date: Fri, September 8, 1995 12:55:26 GMT + 2
Subject: Electronic addresses in Africa
Priority: Normal

Hello,
My name is Moradewun Adejunmobi, I am a Tutor at the University of Botswana, in southern Africa. With regard to electronic addresses for Departments of foreign languages, you must know that most universities (apart from those of South Africa) do not have electronic mail, or if the do have it, it is not developed enough for you to contact individual lecturers in this way. Should you want postal addresses in Ghana or Nigeria, I could provide them. For South African universities, I could search the electronic addresses if no one else has already sent them. I have been absent from the university for several weeks, thus my belated answer to your request. If I can assist you, please contact me at the electronic address mentioned above.
Moradewun Adejunmobi
Department of French
Private Bag 0022, Gaborone,
Botswana

[8] https://archive.caul.edu.au/surveys/cwis.htm. [Sighted 31 January 2016].

[9] Toby Burrows. Personal communication. 29 January 2016.

[10] Meg Travers. Personal communication. 01 Februry 2016.

[11] It is worth noting that my colleague Peter Limb – who was a librarian at UWA at the time and has been devoted to things African throughout his life – had his "A-Z of African studies" transferred to the web in 1996. However, Peter tells me in an email dated 27 January 2016: "I had created it some months previously I think on email or Word and there will probably be a list serve record of that; I even had it printed in the AFSAAP review -- I might even have a copy of it somewhere".

[12] https://www.matrixgroup.net/thematrixfiles/blog/what-does-it-mean-to-have-an-interactive-website/#sthash.ftb7m6Q1.dpuf. [Sighted 31 January 2016].

[13] https://web.archive.org/web/19971010093408/https://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/AFLIT/FEMEChome.html [Sighted 6 February 2016].

[14] Rebecca Blood. "Weblogs: A History and Perspective", Rebecca's Pocket. 07 September 2000/18 September 2013. [https://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html] [Sighted 31 January 2016].

[15] Monique Ross, Facebook turns 10: the world's largest social network in numbersABC News. 4 February 2014. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-02-04/facebook-turns-10:-the-social-network-in-numbers/5237128. [Sighted 5 February 2016].

[16] https://www.internetworldstats.com/stats1.htm.

[*] Thus journalist Cédric Kalonji's advice on how to become a renowned blogger, rfi radio, 2010: "This week, I would like to mention three practical tips that will help one to become a blogger of good standing.
The first thing is to welcome newcomers on one's website, answering them directly when they post a comment. Knowing that the author of the blog is in attendance tends to reassure visitors. It is good practice to rectify one's error when the community detects mistakes in one of the proposed notes. Correcting one's own entries according to visitors' remarks is a mark of respect and attentiveness.
Second tip: do not retreat into your own little world and talk about others. Do not hesitate to put links to other blogs dealing, for example, with similar themes. Making friends among bloggers is also boosting visibility.
Third tip: Put comments on others' blogs. Here, it is not the case of just publishing a quick assertion, but to participate in debates. When one reads a quality comment on a blog, one wants to know more about the person who published it. This is a good source of visits."
Atelier des médias, rfi, Emission 121-4, 26 mars 2010. https://atelier.rfi.fr/profiles/blogs/emission-1214-les-blogs [Sighted April 7, 2016]. [My translation]. [Note added Avril 7, 2016].