Laurence Hart started a thread about how people got into content management which has been picked up quite a bit. It is always interesting to see how people got to what they do now. Most of them have a fair amount of randomness, content management being one of those new fields that people might not know is interesting.
Mine started way back in around 1986 when I started as a fairly accidental part time job working on the New Langwill Index, a historical encyclopaedia of wind instrument makers. We had a shiny new IBM XT with a hard drive, a copy of Ventura publisher, running under GEM, WordStar, and a first edition Apple Laserwriter, in an office at the back of an antique shop.
The tools were not ideal for the job it turned out. This type of book consists of a lot of short entries, and some longer ones, with a lot of linking between entries, and a lot of indexes, by place, type and so on; I dont have my copy to hand but I think about a third of the book was indexes. I wrote a fair amount of code to try to content manage it, as well as for working on markup and indexes, aside from learning to proof read, and learning to program PostScript.
The problems stuck with me: the basic content management issue of managing updates and the implications of them as entries were merged or split as William Waterhouse did more research. There were endless issues about place names, as during the period covered eastern europe changed between Germanic names and local ones, Breslau and Wrocław or merged like Buda and Pest, and borders moved around, and all of the shifts had to be reflected in the indexing. And it was all very much hypertext, with complex linkages of dynasty and business and references and sources.
Over the next few years, through and after University, I kept this interest, the idea that there needed to be better ways and tools of working on this kind of problem. I discovered SGML in the early 1990s – my copy of Goldfarb is sitting in the office, and I have n assortment of early 1990s books about hypertext. I nearly started a business around SGML then too, but ended up accidentally going in other directions, via financial reporting applications, and did not get back into content management until much later.
The other accidental discovery which lingered in my memory was the world of musical instrument making, which was an interesting mixture of craft and small scale manufacturing, like many industries in nineteenth century Europe. Much of it was in Bohemia, and other areas of central Europe, across too Switzerland. Communism and war destroyed most of this, moving to mass production. But these craft methods, mass customization, and particularly the ways of training people in skills that have deep artistic and technical needs is very relevant to the knowledge economy. Last year Richard Sennetts excellent book The Craftsman finally related coding on Linux to this tradition, in a compelling book that I recommend anyone who manages coders or has an interest in history reads.
Tagged: #cmsorigins history craft