Month: June 2009

British Library still doesn’t get it

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The BBC has a belated but fawning story today, Just click for a century of news:

The British Library has put two million digitised pages from 19th century newspapers online, taking research out of its dusty reading rooms into people’s homes.

The pay-as-you-go service brings a century of history alive from Jack the Ripper to WC Grace. (etc)

Ah.  So, “just click”, eh?  What use is this to most of us?  Access for the privileged only, it seems.  Can you imagine any of us paying for this? 

But there is more, and worse, at the British Library site, where the new government “Digital Britain” report is discussed.

Digitising content

Dame Lynne said: “I welcome the fact that Lord Carter specifically referenced the British Library’s Nineteenth British Century Newspapers digitisation programme as an example of how new business models can enable national institutions to work with commercial partners and funding bodies to make millions of pages of historic content available online to researchers and the public. We are sitting on a goldmine of content which should be considered integral to the UK’s digital strategy. To support Digital Britain we need to deliver a critical mass of digitised content – sustained public investment, along with the innovative business models cited in Lord Carter’s report, will enable us to achieve this.”

I’ll bet she does.   Who else would endorse the idea of selling access, but the man who has just proposed taxing internet access? 

The reference to access for  “the public” is tacked on, as an afterthought.  The British Library, indeed, doesn’t exist to serve the public — in the opinion of all too many of its staff.  The vision of universal access to information and education is debased into a vision of more income for themselves.

There needs to be a culture change at the British Library.  The people who see the collection purely as a windfall to be exploited for their own budgetary gain need to be eased out.   An open-source public service attitude needs to replace it.  And it will.

It’s easy to get depressed by how out of touch the management of the British Library is.  Yet the pressure for open access grows stronger all the time.  The very idea of charging for this will seem absurd or disgusting in 10 years time.  Every year a flood of new staff will enter the British Library, carrying their iPhones with their built-in digital cameras and their WiFi-enabled devices of various sorts; and will try not to laugh at the policies they find.  These people will bring about the revolution.

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Origen, Homily 1 on Ezekiel now translated

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The first sermon in Origen’s Homilies on Ezekiel is pretty long.  But the whole thing has now been translated, at least in draft.  This is very good news, and means that we’re making real progress.  Most of the other sermons are much shorter.

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Fresh Cyril of Alexandria

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Ben at Dunhelm Road has the following very interesting note:

There’s a new translation of Cyril of Alexandria’s Festal Letters 1-12, by Philip R. Amidon, S.J., in The Fathers of the Church series (Vol. 118). See here.  This look at his pastoral side will be interesting.

This piggy-backs on works on his commentaries on the 12 Prophets (3 volumes: FOTC 115, 116, & tbd) and also a recent publication of his Commentary on Isaiah, all of which were done by Robert C. Hill.

There is also a proposed re-translation of Cyril’s majesterial commentary on John–it runs some 1300 pages if I remember correctly–as part of the Ancient Christian Texts series by IVP.

I’m thinking about proposing to do some translation for a post doc here at Durham since we’re staying longer, so it’s good to see other work being done on him.

The IVP series is interesting, since it includes Origen’s Homilies on Numbers which I had in mind to do.  Here’s their list of proposed translations:

  • Commentaries on Romans and 1-2 Corinthians by Ambrosiaster, translated and edited by Gerald L. Bray
  • Commentaries on Galatians-Philemon by Ambrosiaster, translated and edited by Gerald L. Bray
  • Incomplete Commentary on Matthew (Opus imperfectum), Vol. 1, translated by James Kellerman; edited by Thomas C. Oden
  • Incomplete Commentary on Matthew (Opus imperfectum), Vol. 2, translated by James Kellerman;l edited by Thomas C. Oden
  • Homilies on Numbers by Origen, translated by Thomas P. Scheck; edited by Christopher A. Hall
  • Commentary on Jeremiah by Jerome, translated by Michael Graves; edited by Christopher A. Hall
  • Commentaries on the Pauline Epistles by John of Damascus and Theodore of Mopsuestia, translated by James R. Blankenship and Charles David Gregory; edited by Michael Glerup
  • Commentary on John, 2 vols, by Cyril of Alexandria, translated by David Russel Maxwell; edited by Joel C. Elowsky
  • Commentaries on the Prophets by Ephrem the Syrian, translated by Marco Conti; edited by Thomas Buchan
  • Commentary on Isaiah by Eusebius of Caesarea, translated by Jonathan Armstrong; edited by Joel C. Elowsky
  • Commentaries on Genesis by Severian of Gabala and Bede the Venerable, translated by Robert C. Hill and Carmen Hardin; edited by Michael Glerup
  • Commentary on the Gospel of John by Theodore of Mopsuestia, translated by Marco Conti; edited by Joel C. Elowsky
  • Greek Commentaries on Revelation by Oecumenius of Isauria and Andrew of Caesarea, translated by William C. Weinrich; edited by Thomas C. Oden
  • Latin Commentaries on Revelation by Victorinus, Apringius, Caesarius, and Bede, translated and edited by William C. Weinrich

Good though these look… if they aren’t online, how will most of us ever access them?

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British Library to mass-digitize its manuscripts?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Tiny snippets, these, but here I found a report on a conference in February, which included the chance remark:

Will this community thrive? Ronald Milne of the British Library told me he was amazed at how web-active the papyrologist community is. Incidentally, Juan Garcés presented this work excitingly within the context of a recent decision by the British Library to mass-digitise its entire collection of pre-1600 manuscripts.

Meanwhile here is a conference due to happen in July 2009.  Among the papers to be delivered is:

Juan Garcés, Codex Sinaiticus and the mass-digitisation of Greek manuscripts at the British Library.

Hum.  If the British Library is really to digitise all of its manuscripts, that could only be a good thing; indeed a very good thing.  But the devil is in the detail.  I will see if I can find out more about this.  Who is Juan Garces, I wonder?  A search reveals this:

Juan Garcés is Project Manager of the Greek Manuscripts Digitisation Projects at the British Library, where he is currently managing both the Codex Sinaiticus Project (http://www.codexsinaiticus.org) and the Greek Manuscripts Digitisation Project. After studying theology in Giessen and Marburg, Germany, he received a doctorate in Biblical Studies from the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, in 2003.

He has since gained experience in the field of Digital Humanities as analyst, consultant, and adviser on digitally-based research projects, particular in the field of Greek texts. Before coming to the British Library, he was employed at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London, which recently awarded him an MA in Digital Humanities. He is one of the founding members of the Digital Classicist (http://www.digitalclassicist.org/), the organiser of the Open Source Critical Editions workshop, and co-author of the forthcoming article ‘Open Source Critical Editions: a Rationale’ (in: Text Editing, Print, and the Digital World, eds. Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland, Ashgate Press, 2009).

Frankly this sounds pretty good.   A man with a background in Open Source, and digitisation.

My only worry … the BL has a history of creating digital items which it then sells access to, instead of making available to the general public.  It would be a tragedy if such a potentially useful project was prostituted in that way.

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Reference to Mithras in the Commentary of Servius?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A strange Jewish anti-Christian site here has the following claim:

Plutarch (Pompey, 24, 7) and Servilius (Georgics, 4, 127) say Pompey imported Mithraism into Rome after defeating the Cilician pirates around 70 BCEE.

This is starting to circulate around the web, and caught my eye.  We all know the Plutarch reference, and it says only that the Cilician pirates worshipped Mithras (which may be a mistake anyway).  But the “Servilius” reference is new to me.  This, I presume, is Servius, the 4th century commentator on Vergil?

The commentary of Servius on the Georgics is online at Google books here.   The comment on the Georgics 4, 127 is on p.354 of the PDF, p.329 online. So, what does it say?

127. CORYCIVM Vidisse SENEM Cilica: Corycos enim civitas est Ciliciae, in qua antrum illud famosum est, paene ab omnibus celebratum. et per transitum tangit historiam memoratam a Suetonio. Pompeius enim victis piratis Cilicibus partim ibidem in Graecia, partim in Calabria agros dedit: unde Lucanus <I 346> an melius fient piratae, magne, coloni? male autem quidam ‘Corycium’ proprium esse adserunt nomen, cum sit appellativum eius, qui more Corycio hortos excoluit: quod etiam Plinii testimonio conprobatur. Vidisse Senem ordo est ‘memini vidisse’. dicimus autem et ‘memini videre’: Terentius memini videre, quo aequior sum Pamphilo, si se illam in somnis. Relicti deserti atque contempti; quis enim agrum non sperneret nulli rei aptum, non vitibus aut frumentis vel pascuis? et aliter: ‘Corycium’ autem Cilicia, a monte et civitate Cïliciae Coryco. alii Corycium non natione, sed peritia, quod haec gens studiose hortos colat. et sic dictum est, ut Arcades ambo.

No mention of Mithras.  But this states that Pompey settled the Cilician pirates, partly in Greece and partly in Calabria. 

I wonder what Servius’ source was?

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Time for something less strenuous

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A lot of what I do demands a fair bit of concentration.  When I get home at the weekend, I don’t always find myself able to concentrate that much.  This is one reason why my additions to the Early Fathers collection developed; scanning and proofing texts does not require a lot of concentration, and can be quite soothing.

Like most of us, I have books and articles in photocopy form sitting around.  Since I acquired the Fujitsu Scansnap S300, these have looked increasingly inconvenient.

And I hate “inconvenient.”

Well, it’s not that hard to stick one of these books-in-a-pile-of-photocopies through the Scansnap S300.  I’ve just scanned one, which I will need sometime but not now.  It created a PDF.  I then opened the PDF in Abbyy Finereader 9, and ran the text recognition on it.  Then I saved it again, as a searchable PDF.  The latter isn’t as good quality as the first PDF, for some mysterious reason, so I’ll keep both. 

So… I now have a pile of paper to throw away.  If I ever need the book in that form, I can just print off the PDF.

Books that I use all the time are a different matter.  Books that I read through with a glass of something by my side are a different matter.  But books I never look at, and which I retain a copy of because of some idea I may one day work on?  I think not.

I doubt I am alone in this.  All over the world, students must be doing the same with textbooks.

 

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Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies (GRBS) goes open access

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Editors of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies (GRBS) [ISSN 0017-3916] have issued the following announcement:

Volume 49 (2009) will be the last volume of GRBS printed on paper. Beginning with volume 50, issues will be published quarterly on-line on the GRBS website, on terms of free access. We undertake this transformation in the hope of affording our authors a wider readership; out of concern for the financial state of our libraries; and in the belief that the dissemination of knowledge should be free.

The current process of submission and peer-review of papers will continue unchanged. The on-line format will be identical with our pages as now printed, and so articles will continue to be cited by volume, year, and page numbers.

Our hope is that both authors and readers will judge this new medium to be to their advantage, and that such open access will be of benefit to continuing scholarship on Greece.

– The editors

The editors are to be congratulated for grasping the nettle.  But they are doing the right thing, and in the emphasis on wider access and scholarly quality are taking precisely the right approach. 

For the world is changing, and older methods of knowledge dissemination must change too.  Today I received an email from the French National Library, inviting me to take part in a survey and stating that they were rethinking all their services for the supply of reproductions.  Here too, we can hear the wind of change.

As the poet wrote (read the words aloud, as with all verse):

Say not the struggle naught availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke conceal’d,
Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in the main.

And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward, look, the land is bright!

— “Say Not The Struggle Naught Availeth” by Arthur Hugh Clough

Thanks to C.E. Jones at Ancient World Online for the tip.

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Unicode Greek font and vowel length

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I didn’t realise that doing Ancient Greek on computers was still a problem, but I found out otherwise today.  We all remember a myriad of incompatible fonts, and partial support for obscure characters; and like most people I imagined that Unicode had taken our problems away.  Hah!

Unicode character 0304 is the “combining macron”.  What that means, to you and I, is the horizontal line above a long vowel.  Character 0306 is the “combining breve” – the little bow above a short vowel.  The “combining” bit means that if you stick one after an “A” in a wordprocessor, the display will stick it above the preceding letter.  Both symbols are required to display dictionary material correctly, of course.  Poetry needs this stuff.

Today I find that neither character is supported in quite a range of fonts.  Palatino Linotype, found on every PC, doesn’t support either.  Ms Arial Unicode supports both, but of course most people don’t have it (or has that changed?).  The links I give above give you lists of supporting fonts, mostly conspicuous for not being present on most PC’s.

This is a bit silly.  Come on, chaps, I thought this was sorted out years ago.

I wonder if I can remember where I met a Microsoft font chap, and suggest to him that Palatino be extended to include these?

An interesting list of fonts tested by the TLG people is here.

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