Category: Information access

Faulhaber on Roman mss of the catenas of the prophets

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The translator for the Origen homilies is really doing an excellent job.  He ‘s been looking into the issue of why the excerpts from catenas printed by Baehrens in the GCS are shorter than those printed by Migne (reprinting the Delarue edition).

Translating some of the latter reveals that they contain material evidently not by Origen; indeed disagreeing with the Origen material that they quote.  Baehrens gives a reference to Faulhaber, Die Propheten-Catenen nach rom. Hss. (= Bibl.  Stud. 4, 2.3 [1899]) , which is actually online at Google books (for US readers).  Biblische Studien IV is here.

Faulhaber lists the 233 fragments by Origen on Ezekiel on pp. 153-5, and states that these are taken partly from the Homilies, and partly from Origen’s scholia on Ezechiel.  He also notes (p.154) that the material in Migne is often plainly from the Homilies, but needs further study.  It seems that Delarue had a catena manuscript rather different to the others.

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Dishonest academic journals and the Elsevier scandal

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Nick Nicholas’ blog also drew my attention to a scandal; a major academic publisher, Elsevier, running “fake” academic journals, which were in fact funded by a pharmaceutical company.  How bad this may be, well, I can’t tell.

Librarians — who pay for journal access, remember — are reacting strongly to this threat to the integrity of the journal system, and quite rightly too.  After all, if you can’t trust the publishers to act as gatekeepers — to keep out the rubbish and the advertising-pretending-to-be-research, your scientific research is screwed.  Terms like “corruption” have been used, and quite properly.

Such scandals undermine the reputation of the journal system.  In truth I think this is a minor hiccup.  Too many people have too much invested in the existing system for it all to go to hell very easily.

But Nick looks at the long-term trend, and how this incident may influence it (paragraphing mine).

The world is upside down, and will only get more so. If it’s not googleable, it doesn’t exist.

That’s calling much of the scholarly publishing market into question, and the medical payola scandal at Elsevier calls into question the remainder. Just found out about this today, and I’m still in shock.

Journal publishers don’t disseminate as broadly as a PDF on a website + google, and no-one cares about long-term availability anymore (not even the publishers, shirking away from paper).

Scholarly publishers’ key selling point now is their imprimatur, and once you piss that away through payola, you don’t recoup the loss of authority by blaming a rogue Australian subbranch, with staff who’ve since left your employ.

The future is… what?  Well, we don’t know.  But it won’t be paper-based journals, that’s for sure.

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An new hero takes on the ancient astronomical works

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve just discovered http://www.wilbourhall.org/index.html.  This site deals with Mathematics, and Mathematical Astronomy in the works of ancient writers.  It does so by getting hold of whatever texts exist and fixing the errors in the Google scans and so forth.  If you want the complete works of Hero of Alexandria, they’re here.  Archimedes, Ptolemy… likewise.  Arabic writers?  They too.  The author, Joe Leichter, writes:

I hope to make available public domain materials that are essential for the study of ancient and early modern mathematics and mathematical astronomy. Google, for example, has done some things to achieve this through its books.google.com project. However, like most other efforts at digitally copying non digital materials, “mistakes were made”. For example, Google currently has several (all incomplete) versions of Teubner’s’s edition of Euclid available for download. Most of these unfortunately contain page after page that are illegible, missing, out of order or otherwise unusable.

The man is a hero.  Ancient scientific works are a horrendously neglected part of the ancient world, because they require skills and interest in both the humanities and the sciences.  Still more neglected are the Byzantine writers on this subject.

All this from a blog that I had not seen before, opuculuk by Nick Nicholas, reporting on a search that he did on the works of Chioniades.  (Nick works for the TLG, and was working on their lemmatizer, when he started to come across chunks of untranslated Arabic in the scientific works of Chioniades.  Mr. C., a 12th century writer, had been taking lessons from some Persian, so had got a whole load of jargon for his pains!)

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Origen translation: the catena issue

Posted on by Roger Pearse

All of the Latin of homily 1 on Ezechiel is now translated into English, and pretty much finalised.  But an issue has arisen.  Extracts of Origen’s original Greek exist in the medieval Greek commentaries, comprised as they are of chains (catenas) of extracts from the fathers.  These are printed where relevant at the bottom of Baehrens’ edition in the Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller edition.  But we have discovered that the extracts printed in the older Patrologia Graeca edition are fuller.  What do we do?

Do we just translate what Baehrens printed, presuming that he rejected the rest as inauthentic; or do we use the longer text?  We need to find out what Baehrens thought he was doing, if he tells us.

One thing that would help would be to consult the full text of the catena.  But of course this is very difficult.  Catenas do exist in print, but in general we just don’t have proper accessible editions of the major catenas.  This is a barrier, not merely to patristics, but also to biblical studies.

To edit one of these sprawling monsters must be difficult; but why don’t people have a go?

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Irving Woodworth Raymond and Orosius

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The first English translation of Orosius was made by I.W.Raymond and published in 1936.  It’s probably still in copyright in the USA, unfortunately, which keeps it off the web.  A later translation exists in the Fathers of the Church series.

Someone wrote to me about Orosius today.  Apparently he is the first writer to mention the term “Asia minor”.  This led me to look again at the copyright.

When did Raymond die? (he was born in 1898, according to COPAC)  A google search led me to an obituary in the St. Petersburg Times, August 11, 1964:

NEW YORK — Dr Irving Woodworth Raymond, 65, professor of history at Brooklyn college here, died Monday at his home in York Harbor, Maine.

Isn’t Google books wonderful?  I remarked yesterday how the British Library, in putting newspapers online, made sure to charge for access; Google gives it to us for free, and we all benefit.

Sadly it looks as if his work won’t come out of copyright in the EU (life+70 years) until 2034, by which time I will be dead myself, I suspect.  In countries with life+50 years, that reduces to 2014.  And I can’t tell you when it comes out of copyright in the US, as I don’t understand the current situation; publication + 95 years, i.e. 2031?

What a mess this copyright law is!  Who benefits from keeping this offline?

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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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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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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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