Announcing a new partership
Now Papersesh is free for all!
After quite some time of silence, we at Papersesh took an important decision.
Before getting into the big news, anticipated by the subtitle, we sincerely apologize for the service discontinuity that occured in the past few months: we trusted the wrong people into realeasing Papersesh to all Egyptology students around the world, but now we found an easy way to do it and we're ready to tell you the whole story.
Among the years, we tried to establish partnerships with several Universities worldwide, contacting eminent professors in the most prestigious Egyptlogy departments, without receiving any consistent answer. For a long time, we spent our own money and energy to keep the website alive as the subscriptions never had been enough to cover the expenses.
In the past autumn, with all our disappointment, we simply realised that it would be quite impossible to establish a partnership as externals in the academic ecosystem. Meanwhile, time has passed mercilessly and we all had jobs and, in general, other priorities. So we came to the decision: give all Papersesh feature for free. We just had to find a University willing to host Papersesh, which has an architecture so simple and resourceless that could easily run on a toaster.
Our first-on-the-list was obviously the University of Pisa (Italy), alma mater of one of us, city of residence of the other Papersesh father and, most importantly, the first University where the Egyptology studies entered in an aula, exactly 200 academic years ago, thanks to the professor Ippolito Rossellini. We managed to get involved with prof. Massimiliano Grava, at the time responsible for communication in the Civiltà e Forme del Sapere department (humanistic studies department where Egyptology belong in the University of Pisa) and the prof. Gianluca Miniaci, Egyptology associate. At the presence of Dario Besseghini, IT infrastructure manager for several humanistic departments, we had a promising meeting last autumn where the University seemed glad to host our work for it to be free for all students. From there, we could testify a series of behaviours that brought in the light the lack of professionality of all the people involved: long story short, they scheduled the operations for late January, then postponed in April (knowing that we were about to discontinue the service) and then June, and know they simply stopped replying, even if they are reading our emails, "ghosting" us if you prefer.
As it could be totally legitimate to lose intersest in a project, such lack of communication and/or incapacity to schedule a very simple task really got us deeply disappointed: for the record, Papersesh request was to get a subdomain, an isolated web space and a database, all thing that could be easily set up in half an hour, coffee break included.
It's at this point of the story that we decide to contact Eigenlab, a students' collective based in the Polo Fibonacci - which serves the University Departments of Math, Physics and IT - which has his own IT infrastructure.
As paradoxical as it can be, the collective was glad to host a humanistic resource beaing available for free for all the students and, within a single week from our first conversation, a sandbox was active, and we immediately made all the needed edits to release this new Papersesh version.
Now, everyone will be able to enjoy our thesaurus among 43 resources and we really hope this platform will be a helping hand for all Egyptology students and researchers, both linguists and archeologists.
And we deeply thank the Eigenlab collective to make it possible, taking action to remedy the University's shortcomings.
