Month: November 2008

Archimedes Palimpsest data set

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The following press release reached me on the CLASSICS-L list:

Ten years ago today, a private American collector purchased the Archimedes Palimpsest. Since that time he has guided and funded the project to conserve, image, and study the manuscript. After ten years of work, involving the expertise and goodwill of an extraordinary number of people working around the world, the Archimedes Palimpsest Project has released its data. It is a historic dataset, revealing new texts from the ancient world. It is an integrated product, weaving registered images in many wavebands of light with XML transcriptions of the Archimedes and Hyperides texts that are spatially mapped to those images. It has pushed boundaries for the imaging of documents, and relied almost exclusively on current international standards. We hope that this dataset will be a persistent digital resource for the decades to come. We also hope it will be helpful as an example for others who are conducting similar work. It published under a Creative Commons 3.0 attribution license, to ensure ease of access and the potential for widespread use. A complete facsimile of the revealed palimpsested texts is available on Googlebooks as ³The Archimedes Palimpsest². It is hoped that this is the first of many uses to which the data will be put.

For information on the Archimedes Palimpsest Project, please visit:

www.archimedespalimpsest.org

For the dataset, please visit:

www.archimedespalimpsest.net

Now I approve really strongly of this.  Consider how many projects exist to create a locked-in architecture, a prestige website, but NOT to make the data — transcription data in this case, in XML — available to the online community.  I recently posted about the St. Gall project — and how, worthwhile as it is, they hadn’t made the manuscripts available as PDF’s, but had chosen a proprietary and very slow browser which obstructed access.

It reminded me of the Oxford manuscripts site, which had a slow and clunky browser.  But since it was all in JPG’s, I wrapped a perl script around them when I needed to use images of one manuscript as part of a translation project.  The images remained on their site; I just devised a better access method.  That script still gets a lot of links; and I offered it back to the Oxford site if they wanted it.  Everyone benefitted from the open technology.

The Archimedes announcement is a contrast to some of the recent projects.  Archimedes are not even supplying a browser.  They’re making the raw data available, and let he that wants devise whatever presentation layer he wants.  Marvellous!  I do hope that some seriously creative solutions are devised, to leverage this data set and produce something that no conventional delivery would ever have thought of.

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Some nice pictures of Theodoret’s Cyrrhus

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I happened across this article on the Iconoclasm blog, where there are some nice pictures of the ruins of the Acropolis and theatre, and a couple of quotes from Theodoret on the errors of paganism.  Curiously the author puts ‘errors’ in quotes; without realising that amounts to endorsement of the prostitution and paganism that Theodoret is attacking!  But still nice photos, and nice to hear a bit of Theodoret.  Wonder where the English quotes come from; as far as I know the Curatio has never been translated. Looks like a good blog too!

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Digitising the manuscripts of St. Gall

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Benedictine abbey of St. Gall in Switzerland is one of the places where manuscripts travelled down the centuries.  Founded in the Dark Ages, it’s collection crops up in many a discussion of ancient texts.  Quintillian was found here by Poggio, for instance.  There is still a very substantial collection there in the possession of the Roman Catholic church, although the abbey was expropriated in 1805.

I was delighted to learn today from Evangelical Textual Criticism that St. Gall are digitising their collection and placing it online.  Of course ETC are mainly interested in biblical mss; but the rest of us will be interested in the other mss!  The website is here.  Currently there are 144 mss online.

An article in the NY Times says that they have recently received a grant of $1m from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to scan the 355 mss in their collection which were written before 1000 AD.  This tells us that the Swiss intend to digitise all 7,000 medieval mss in that country — wonderful news indeed, and one that must benefit scholars greatly.  Full marks to the Foundation for funding it.  That works out at around $3,000 per manuscript; quite a bit, but getting much closer than the British Library ever has to the real cost to doing the work.

All credit is due to Ernst Tremp, the library director.  It seems that he thought up the project after seeing widespread flooding in Dresden in 2002 which damaged many artworks.  It is great to see a library director who grasps what should be obvious; that manuscripts must be photographed and must be made accessible or they WILL be lost in the mischances of the years.

The site has an English interface.  I had a browse by author to see what’s in there, which gave a short list, and then by title to see the rest.  Most of the stuff is 9th century, it seems.  There’s a 9th century ‘Hegesippus’ (Latin Josephus’ Wars); an copy of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae from ca. 900; a bunch of biblical commentaries by Jerome of the same date; Lucan, Pharsalia, 11th c.; Martianus Capella; Orosius; Prudentius; a 9th century astronomical/computistical text; a bunch of composite manuscripts; several volumes of fragmenta rescripta or reused palimpsest parchment pages from late antique books.

Nothing of great interest to me, so far; but still very useful indeed to have available.  My only query: why don’t they make the mss into PDF’s, like Google do?  These itsy-bitsy one-page-at-a-time custom interfaces are a pain to work with.

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