Skip Navigation
Remote View
technology @hexbear.net
RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them] @hexbear.net

Let's talk about "A People's Calendar" and its events

So I know some of you have been following along with this little project of ours, and the other day I was chatting with a comrade over lunch about it, and it led me to some interesting questions.

I noticed as I was looking at events in the calendar more closely that there were some typos in the event body / description. I also noticed some Tags that seemed improper to me. Things tagged as Marxism, for example, without any reference to a Marxist or Marxism in the event information.

I'm sure a lot of you have heard of Project Gutenberg before. However, have you heard of their Distributed Proofreaders project? This project aims to distribute the effort of proofreading OCR data so that it can eventually be added to a epub file.

Since there are well over 1000 events inside the calendar data, I got to wondering if there couldn't be a way we could replicate the process of distributing the task of auditing the events.

That's what I want this thread to be about. I'm wondering what could be the best way to allow people to proofread and submit changes to events, and eventually submit their own events, to the aPC data.

My first thought was finding a way to take the JSON file and convert each entry into a new type of data structure that can be easily edited by a human. I could convert all the events into YAML files, for example, allowing each event to be edited and have its changes logged in a git repository.

People would be able to submit pull requests with changes to the events so that they can be reviewed and eventually reincorporated back into the data. I would love for this work to eventually make it's way back into the main project, so I was going to create an issue on the main projects github page, and maybe link back to this thread.

Either way, what are your thoughts on this? I feel like having a collaborative process of both adding, maintaining, and proofreading these events could be a fun way to both learn about working-class history, but also engage with it. For example, I was surprised to find out, after having just learned about this event today, that the Green Corn Rebellion isn't in the events.

Eventually, once we feel like the events have been sufficiently audited and updated, we could create a tool that allows someone to pick a series of Tags, and generate a ICS file on the fly with just events from those tags. That's a future project for sure, one that would take more time to implement. It would benefit from having this distributed process of event maintenance.

Here is what an event would look like in YAML format: 

 yaml
    
id: 755a01ca-6642-4f4f-88c4-55c50453478c
title: Cuban Revolution (1959)
slugTitle: cuban-revolution-1959
otd: On this day in 1959, U.S.-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista fled the country following the victory of Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement at the Battle of Santa Clara, marking the successful conclusion of the Cuban Revolution.
description: |-
  On this day in 1959, U.S.-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista fled the country following the victory of Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement (M-26-7) at the Battle of Santa Clara, marking the successful conclusion of the Cuban Revolution.

  The 26th of July Movement takes its name from the date of with a failed attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953, however, the movement bearing this name was not formally organized until the attackers were released from prison in 1955. Public resistance continued sporadically until November 1956, when 80 members of the M-26-7 returned from exile.

  Soon after landing on the island, a separate revolutionary group, the "Directorio Revoluncionari Estudiantil" (DRE), unsuccessfully attempted an attack on the Presidential Palace in Havana.

  Throughout 1957, armed resistance from groups such as the DRE and M-26-7 would escalate. After a failed offensive by the government against rebels in the summer of 1958, the rebels launched a major counter-offensive.

  On December 28th, 1958, after a fraudulent election in favor of Batista, revolutionary forces reached the city of Santa Clara. Seizing equipment from an armored train intended to transport government reinforcements, the rebels quickly captured the city, prompting Batista to panic and flee to the Dominican Republic with a personal fortune of more than $300 million.

  In the following days, revolutionary forces entered Havana with no resistance, and Castro established a provisional government. The 26th of July Movement later reformed along Marxist—Leninist lines, becoming the Communist Party of Cuba in October 1965.

  Batista later settled in fascist Spain, dying there in 1973 at the age of 72.
imgAltText: Leaders of the Cuban Revolution march at the head of a victory parade in Havana, 1959. Fidel Castro (far left), Che Guevara (center) [military-history.org]
NSFW: false
imgSrc: Events/cubanRevolution.jpg
date: 1959-01-01
links:
- https://www.britannica.com/event/Cuban-Revolution/The-rise-of-Castro-and-the-outbreak-of-revolution
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Santa_Clara
- https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/fi/cuba/index.htm
tags:
- Marxism
day: 1
month: 1
2 comments