Volunteering Your Help

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 one 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 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).

• FW Scanners to use a scanner and an OCR application to scan the entire text of Finnegans Wake into an electronic text, which I will then use as the base for the FW text displayed alongside the elucidations. The current FW text has been borrowed from the Trent University Finnegans Web site, which holds the only electronic text available (that I know of). Unfortunately, that text is riddled with errors. I have already corrected more than a hundred myself (with the help of some contributors). I have reported all of these to the maintainer of that site, but sadly he has lost all ability to update the site, having left the university and forgotten his password, so it remains in its error-laden form. I have been correcting Fweet's copy, but I am sure there are more mistakes lurking around. Thus, if someone rescans and reocrs Finnegans Wake, I could compare Fweet's copy against it and correct most of the latent errors. This is, I believe, the most urgent of all the projects outlined on this page.

• 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. 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).

• Bibliographers to compile a secondary bibliography of all that has been written to date about Finnegans Wake (primarily books, articles, and portions of books). This is obviously a massive endeavour, worthy of someone extremely studious or extremely bored. This task has little to do with Fweet in its current format, but anyone willing to undertake it will find me very willing to contribute some of my website space and all of my programming and web design experience towards the technical maintenance of such a treasure.

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 just one chapter 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.

[Site Map] Last Update: Aug 17 2008