Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
In Petermann’s Latin translation of the Armenian version of Eusebius’ Chronicle one finds reference to “Cato Porkius”. Somehow I had always thought of him as a well-built man…
Porkius is just Porcius — we would say Marcus Porcius Cato–, and it indicates the hard-sound that ‘c’ had in antiquity. In medieval times the ‘c’ sound would alternate with ‘t’; so we find manuscripts of Tertullian’s De patientia where it reads De patiencia, which gives our own word ‘patience’.
I’ve always felt that the BL readers needed a voice in its running, and didn’t get one. So I was delighted today to discover that a British Library Readers Group was set up in January. This followed the announcement that the government was considering chopping 7% off the £100m budget.
The British Library Readers Group is made up of academics, students, journalists, independent scholars, researchers and writers who are readers at the British Library. We have come together to meet one another and to represent readers to the administration and trustees of the British Library.
Our aim is to seek constructive solutions to issues that have an impact upon our working lives in the library.
Please publicise it in mailing lists. No organisation should be allowed to operate without considering the wishes of those who use it.
Today I discovered that there is a body in the UK called the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. The point of it is somewhat unclear, but it looks as if it might have some input to government policy on how the UK library service is run.
Two things have bothered me for some time about this. Firstly the cost of interlibrary loans is now so great that a reading list of 20 items costs around $180. Of course this means that you can’t pursue a course of study, at that price. Secondly, as databases of journals like JSTOR become the usual way to consult the academic literature, and as outsiders have no access to these, it’s getting more difficult for non-professionals to compete.
What to do? Well, I’ve found that John Dolan is ‘head of library policy’ and written to him. I’ve also written to David Dawson, ‘Senior policy adviser Digital Futures’ and pointed out the problem that the British Library won’t digitise its medieval manuscripts, or let anyone else do so.
It will be interesting to see what response comes back. Someone must be interested in these issues besides me.
Postscript: to his credit David Dawson got back to me very quickly with the following epistle:
The British Library is very active in digitising its collections, but these are obviously huge in scale and scope. I visited your site, and can understand your desire to see the relevant manuscripts digitised.
The BL have a set of standards for the way in which they digitise documents, to ensure that this is done once, and at high quality. I cannot comment on the figures that they gave you, but the BL is following best practice in digitisation.
They are in the process of making large numbers of resources available online – recent projects include millions of pages of newspapers, substantial holdings from the Sound Archive and the Microsoft digitisation project is under way.
http://www.bl.uk/news/2005/pressrelease20051104.html
‘Best practice in digitisation’… or gold-plated? Nothing online, tho, and no prospect of it. This is rather disappointing.
Postscript (21st May): John Dolan has written back to me, and it sounds as if he is indeed in the processing of looking at some of these issues. I will write more on this when I have read his reply.
Don’t you hate it when the postman brings a whole pile of things that you’ve been waiting to work on, all on the same day? Well that happened to me this morning, just as I was about to go off and get an Armenian grammar.
The first item is a printout of a microfilm of a Syriac text of Marutha of Maiperkat, On the Council of Nicaea, which I mentioned a while back. Marutha lived in the 5th century and persuaded the Persian king to allow the Christians of that kingdom to hold a General Council, at which they ratified the Nicene Creed. This particular copy consists of a modern 14-page handwritten booklet, presented to the American Oriental Society by a certain A.H.Wright. Half of it is Syriac text, in Nestorian characters; the rest a handwritten English translation. No published translation is known.
“Aha!” I hear you cry, “He’s going to transcribe the English and upload it.” Indeed I am. But I’m having trouble with about a dozen words. Would anyone like to see if they can do better? If you look in http://www.tertullian.org/00temp, you will see a file transcription.txt, and also a monster 128Mb marutha_eng.pdf. It’s so large because I scanned the English at 600 dpi greyscale.
Contributions gratefully accepted!
I have this evening discovered two volumes of the Berlin Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller series containing critical texts of works by Eusebius at Google books. A search for “eusebius werke” brought up vol. 2.2 (HE VI-X, Martyrs of Palestine, Rufinus HE X-XI); vol 3 (Onomasticon). I’m not sure what the proper URL’s are, since I’m using a backdoor to access them: anyone?
Postscript: See the comments for links. But I have now tried entering “griechischen christlichen schriftsteller” (without the quotes in Google books). This gets me one link, here, which seems to display no content, and links to three “Other editions” in ‘snippet view’. Can anyone in the US see any of the content for any of these four?
As a lad, I used to wargame ancients using the Wargames Research Group rules; indeed a metal 1/72 scale Seleucid army still resides in the loft of my house somewhere. This week I came across an old-fashioned hobby shop, which is a rare thing indeed these days. On the shelves were wargaming figures, in plastic, 1/72 scale for a vast range of ancient armies. These were all by Hat Industrie, whose list is here with photographs. Persians, Carthaginians, Late Romans, all in sets of 20-50 figures — I would have killed for these as a boy!
Postscript, 21st May: I went back today and found the shop gone, as if it had never been.
Aucher’s 1818 editio princeps is in two volumes, corresponding to the two books of the Chronicle. Cambridge University Library have got back to me with some prices. For a photocopy of the 400 pages of vol. 1 they want ca. $160; for both vols ca. $300. “Bi-tonal scans as PDF files” are $420 and $790 (!).
Nor are CUL just being greedy compared to other libraries, and indeed they are one of the more reasonable ones. Most UK libraries see such requests only as opportunities for profit for what the market will bear; although, of course, those who run those libraries tend to make special arrangements for themselves, at a very special price, as I found out happens at the British Library.
Again, we owe such gratitude to Google Books for freeing us all from this dungeon of high charges and inaccessibility.
So it’s decision time. Clearly I won’t buy PDF’s from them — I can make them myself for nothing from the photocopies. Nor can I afford both volumes. But I might buy a copy of vol.1. It really would be nice to have access to this, when arguments about names arise. I shall look at Thomson’s grammar of Classical Armenian this weekend and decide then.
There is supposed to be a new edition of the Armenian text of Eusebius’ Chronicle, to appear in the Berlin GCS series. Richard Burgess communicated this information to the LT-ANTIQ list a year or two back. If so, this would alter matters again, as a printed Classical Armenian (=’Grabar’) text could be scanned. I am told that the support for Grabar in Abbyy Finereader 8.0 Pro (which I have) is very good, thereby avoiding the need to get Aucher retyped. Perhaps the right choice is to defer dealing with the Armenian, and to proceed with the Latin and German.
I am beginning to wonder whether I have been too ambitious in attempting to work with the Armenian text of Eusebius Chronicle. It seems remarkably difficult just to obtain the raw materials. The English Grammar by R.M.Thomson is out of print and unobtainable second hand for less than $100; my attempts to borrow it from the library have gone nowhere.
There is no critical text. My attempts to obtain a photocopy of Aucher’s 1818 text, requested in March, have vanished into a black hole. This will involve $200 when or if it is possible and yet more delay.
Then it will be necessary to get it typed up. My only quote for this at 7 euros per page for 400 pages amounts to $4,000 – an impossible sum. An attempt to locate people in Armenia who would do it got no reply.
Then it would be necessary to get the text morphologised, because none of us known Armenian. This at least seems possible, as J.J.Weitenberg will help me.
Then it will be necessary to split up the text into sections, to align with the Latin and German. This will be very lengthy, given that I don’t know Armenian.
And after all that, will anyone use it? Or will they just use the Latin and German?
I must admit that I am being tempted to just abandon the Armenian angle. I’m about half-way through lining up the columns of Latin and German.
I had an email from Dominique Gonnet at the Sources Chretiennes, asking if I had a copy of the OCR program Anagnostis. I’d never heard of it, but this turns out to be an OCR utility for Greek which can handle Ancient Greek!
Of course I want one! But I was quickly put off, by the unbelievable price-tag of 585 euros for the ‘pro’ version — almost £400 or $800. A ‘standard’ version exists for 78 euros, but this doesn’t do ancient Greek, so is useless to us all. I don’t really think that I can justify spending such a very large sum. I wonder if anyone else has seen or used this product? If so, how well did it work? A trial download is available: but I have not tried this, and I have seen a post suggesting that it doesn’t let you try the OCR!
I’ve also written to the company suggesting that they do an ‘ancient Greek’-only version for our market, for 78 euros. You might like to do the same, if you think that you’d buy such a product.