The first 5 chapters of homily 1 are now translated and in my hands, together with catena fragments, and the first 2 chapters are pretty much finished. I’ve paid the translator for the latter, which is nice as well; it feels like we’re underway.
Category: Information access
Islamic Manuscripts conference, Cambridge
This via BYZANS-L:
…registration is now open for The Fifth Islamic Manuscript Conference, Cambridge 24-26 July 2009.
http://www.islamicmanuscript.org/Conferences.html
The Islamic Manuscript Association is pleased to announce that the Fifth Islamic Manuscript Conference will be held at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge, UK from 24-26 July 2009. It will be hosted by the Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation and the Centre of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge. We invite you to register online at http://www.islamicmanuscript.org/conferences/ConferenceRegistrationForm1.html<http://exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.islamicmanuscript.org/conferences/ConferenceRegistrationForm1.html>
In 2009, the Conference will specifically address the issue of access to manuscripts. Improving access to manuscripts through digitisation and electronic ordering and delivery systems whilst ensuring their proper long-term preservation is fundamental to the successful future study of the Islamic heritage. Presently, technologies are available that have the potential to transform the way manuscripts are studied; however, the access these technologies can allow is counterbalanced by collection holders’ concerns regarding their legal rights and the financial sustainability of their organisations. During the Fifth Islamic Manuscript Conference these vital issues will be discussed by our invited speakers and selected paper presenters.
As in previous years, the Conference will be organised around the Association’s four main interest groups: cataloguing, conservation, digitisation, and publishing and research. The first day will also feature two special panels, a ‘Collections’ panel introducing less well-known collections from Africa, the Balkans, and Turkey, and a panel devoted to the conference theme of Access featuring invited experts who will discuss how such issues as security in libraries and online, financial considerations, and the understanding of international copyright law inform users’ experience of accessing materials for research.
Posters advertising the conference can be found at
http://www.islamicmanuscript.org/conferences/Posters.html The full schedule will also be available online shortly. We look forward to welcoming you to Cambridge in July.
A bit depressing, this one. They’ve grasped that digitisation is necessary, but are still seeing the images mainly as a revenue stream! I’ve written to the conference contact, expressing my concern. They ought to be trying to get the things on the web, freely accessible to all. They ought to be encouraging people to look at them, to read them, to comment on them and translate them. Instead they’re trying to find ways to keep them off the web, out of circulation (vain hope) and charge while doing so. Eating the seed corn of Islamic studies, in other words.
Origen on Ezekiel – thinking about bible versions
Four chapters of the immense sixteen-chapter first sermon on Ezekiel by Origen have now been translated, with copious footnotes; and I have the first draft here. The translator has also discovered that Migne prints fragments of the original Greek preserved in the catenas, and is using these as a control. It’s going to be very good.
One issue with any patristic work is whether to use an existing English bible translation for the biblical quotations, in order to avoid unnecessary unfamiliarity. At the moment we’re using the RSV, except where Origen departs from the normal text. We’re also trying to preserve a balance between undue literalness in translation and undue freedom.
But it occurs to me that non-academic readers might like a freer rendition, which is slightly less faithful to the word-by-word approach, and somewhat easier to read and understand. If so, one might use a different bible version for the quotes.
Which one would one use? Perhaps if a version of the Homilies was made, directed at a popular Catholic audience, we’d use… well, whatever version most Catholic use. I don’t know what that is.
On the other hand any book aimed at US Christians in general would have to use the NIV, I would have thought. I suppose one would need to get permission from someone to do so.
Is there any real reason not to target all three audiences; an academic version, a Catholic popular version, and a Christian popular version?
Origen on Ezekiel update
I’ve just had an email from the translator that a rough draft of all of homily 1 has been completed. This is a long homily, so is excellent news. I’ve not seen it yet, tho.
I have seen the draft of the first two chapters, and have commented on it. It’s an excellent translation, fairly literal but very readable.
One interesting issue that has arisen is where Jerome uses the Latin word tormentis to represent whatever Origen’s now lost Greek word was. Context is that God inflicts tormentis on sinners to drive them back to right living, and that fathers do the same to their sons. But all the dictionaries I can see render that as “tortures”! Origen then goes on to day that this rebuts the argument of the heretics, that God is cruel.
Do we render this as “torments” or “tortures”? It makes it read quite oddly, to do so. Yet… if that is what Origen wrote…
Cambridge University Library — no, the incunables are NOT going online
We all know what we want — we want library holdings on the web, where we can all see them. So I was rather delighted to see a news article yesterday that Cambridge University Library were going to put their collection of pre-1500 printed books on the web.
This would be quite a first — the obscurantism of UK libraries has to be experienced to be believed. The Andrew Mellon Foundation, who have done so much for the world in funding online initiatives, have granted them 300,000 GBP to do the job; not a huge sum, but probably enough. The BBC article here gives the impression that the incunables will go online.
But then a revealing aside:
Over the next five years the University library will produce detailed records for each item.
This made me look twice at the glowing claims, and look further. There’s no information on the library website at all, which is not good news. History Today magazine has an article here. This tells the real story:
Cambridge University announced, today, the beginning of a new project to catalogue, for the first time, the University Library’s celebrated collection of incunabula, pre-1501 printed books. The term incunabula literally means swaddling-clothes, or cradle, in Latin and was adopted to describe a book printed at an early date, in the first infancy of printing.
Very few records of the Library’s 4,650 treasures are currently in its online catalogue. Records will begin to be catalogued this autumn and, over the next five years, the University Library will produce detailed records for each item, which will be accessible through its Newton Universal Catalogue. …
Although the project does not involve a complete page-by-page digitisation of the Library’s incunabula, the Gutenberg Bible has been fully digitalised …
As if anyone has any use for yet another Gutenberg online.
So, the real intention is to have one or two staff members sit there for five years writing little card indexes (or whatever). Digitisation? Am I too cynical, to suppose that they’ll merely do a handful of books, as a sort of fig-leaf for what they really wanted to do?
Not that cataloguing is bad; but what we need, desperately need, is ACCESS TO THE BOOKS!!! Not more catalogues. Compiling a catalogue was the excuse used in the 19th century by Vatican libraries for denying scholars access to the library, and refusing them sight of what catalogue existed. I don’t know if that ever-so-complete catalogue ever appeared, indeed. But the obstruction of access was real enough.
Origen: Homilies on Ezekiel translation underway
The project to translate the homilies of Origen and put them online is underway. A scholar wrote to me over the weekend about this, and I have commissioned him to translate all of the Homilies on Ezekiel, which have never received an English translation at all. The Homilies on Numbers have never been translated into English either, but these are three times as long, and I only have the last volume of the SC edition.
The first 5 pages of the first homily have already been done as a sample, and been approved. We’re using the Sources Chrétiennes text as a basis (itself a reprint of the GCS text).
He also sent me a digest of what translations of the homilies already exist, which is very useful and I reproduce here. Any additions and corrections would be welcome!
One of the Numbers homilies is included in the “Classics of Western Spirituality” volume of Origen, and there is a compilation by Tollinton – Selections from the Commentaries and Homilies of Origen (SPCK, 1929); I’m not sure what it has in it.
ENGLISH
Genesis and Exodus (R. E. Heine – FotC, 1982)
Leviticus 1-16 (G. W. Barkley – FotC, 1990)
Joshua (B. J. Bruce, C. White – FotC, 2002)
Judges (E. D. Lauro – FotC, 2009)
Song of Songs (R. P. Lawson – ACW, 1988 / 1978)
Jeremiah + 1 Kings 28 (J. C. Smith – FotC, 1998)
Luke (J. T. Lienhard – FotC, 1996)
Selections from the Commentaries and Homilies… (R. B. Tollinton, 1929)
FRENCH
Genesis (L. Doutreleau – SC, 1976)
Exodus (H. de Lubac – SC, 1947)
Leviticus (M. Borret – SC, 1981)
Numbers (vol. 1: Doutreleau [et al.] – SC, 1996; vol. 2: Doutreleau – SC, 1999; vol. 3: Doutreleau – SC, 2001)
Joshua (A. Jaubert – SC, 2000; Jaubert – SC, 1960)
Judges (SC, 1993)
Samuel (SC, 1986)
Psalms 36-38 (SC, 1995)
Song of Songs (O. Rousseau – SC, 1966)
Jeremiah (SC, 1976-77)
Ezekiel (M. Borret – SC, 1989)
Luke (SC, 1962)
ITALIAN
Genesis and Exodus (G. Gentili, 1976)
Exodus (M. I. Danieli, 1981)
Psalms (74 Homilies on…: 1993)
Psalms 36-38 (E. Prinzivalli, 1991)
Song of Songs (M. Simonetti, 1998)
Isaiah (M. I. Danieli, 1996)
SPANISH
Exodus (1992)
GERMAN
Jeremiah [the ones preserved in Gk] (E. Schadel, 1980)
Jeremiah [10 homilies] (E. Klostermann, 1903)
Luke (H. J. Sieben, 1991-2)
Germans attack Google books
From The Register today:
Google’s ongoing effort to create a vast digital library is set to come under fire at the EU from countries who fear it will violate copyright and stymie competition.
German diplomats plan to raise the issues in Brussels today, EUobserver reports, with support from France, Austria and the Netherlands.
Google controversially began scanning and indexing books in the US in 2004, without copyright approval. In October last year it cut a deal with American authors and publishers to pay them a slice of the profits it makes matching text advertising to book searches. US authors who do not want their work scanned and published online have until September to opt out.
That deal is now the subject of a Department of Justice investigation on antitrust grounds, because it grants Google exclusive rights to republish “orphan” (out of copyright) books online. It will also allow Google to resell rights to other digital libraries.
Both intellectual and market power concerns are now exercising politicans and officials on this side of the Atlantic, who hope their action today will put Google’s book project on the agenda of regulators at the European Commission.
The German government also plans to offer its opinion to a New York court which is set to consider Google’s US books deal. “It is not about participating as a party in the legal dispute but making the court aware of certain legal aspects,” the country’s justice minister said.
An unnamed EU diplomat said Google’s plans “are not entirely in the interests of European authors” and that Google would have to “ask European copyright holders for permission first [before scanning their work]”.
For its part, Google maintains its line on copyright issues that it merely wants to make knowledge more widely available
Note the absence of any consideration of the interests of anyone but the publishing industry. Nor does it seem that the ordinary German, or Frenchmen, will be asked whether he wants to be prevented from reading this material.
The unelected eurocrats have the reputation of being corrupt. Here we see them, apparently in the pocket of big business, to try to ensure that people in the EU have to pay to see what is freely available in the USA.
Truly sickening.
More on “copyright” of the Greek New Testament
Still quite angry about the actions of the German Bible Society in claiming copyright of the work of the apostles. I’ve been looking around the web for comment.
The best comment I have seen is that the text can only be copyright if the scholars who produced it did their work badly. Their intention was NOT to create an “original creative work”!
If the German Bible Society believes that it is not issuing the work of the apostles, but of Mr. Aland — to the extent that it is an original, creative work — and that no-one else has the work of the apostles, then I would like to see them say so!
But the most interesting comment was by Stan Gundry of Zondervan, here.
I am not a copyright attorney myself, but I have had lengthy phone conversations with a lawyer who is credited with being the best in the USA. Here’s the deal, at least according to USA copyright law. Ancient texts such as those we are dealing with in the OT (Hebrew/Aramaic) and NT (Greek) are in the public domain and are not protected by copyright. In fact (and this is controversial), even the critical texts as reconstructed by textual critics cannot be protected by enforceable copyrights. The textual critical apparatus has a somewhat better claim to copyright, but to the extent that such an apparatus is a catalog of information, my sources tell me that any claim to an enforceable copyright is weakened. “Sweat equity” in the recreation of ancient texts is not sufficient to establish copyright. It takes sweat equity to create a phone book, but you cannot copyright a phone book. This is not something that the United Bible Society or the German Bible Society wants to hear or agrees to, this is what our lawyer consultants have told us.
Peter Kirk has two posts full of common sense on this also. Among other things he points out that the Germans have not actually issued take-down demands, and we shouldn’t act as if they have until they do.
Flame the German Bible Society
These greedy bastards are claiming that they own the text of Greek New Testament, and anyone who wants to use it must pay them. In the meantime they’re forcing MorphGNT and zhubert.com offline. So why not tell them politely but firmly what you think of their evil scheme? Make sure that they know that they are injuring thousands of people, in their greed? Email addresses are here
After all — the same claim would affect every classical text online.
Isn’t it typical that it’s a German business who tries to screw us all over? They contribute almost nothing to the web, yet here they are, trying to seize the work of others for their own profit?
MorphGNT busted by “copyright”
This is something that makes me rather cross. It seems that the MorphGNT project, run for years and years by Jim Tauber, has fallen foul of a sudden claim of copyright by the German Bible Society. This in turn has torpedoed the ReGreek site, which used MorphGNT.
For those who don’t know, MorphGNT is a text file, containing the “Morphologised Greek New Testament”. The file contains loads of rows like this:
010101 N- ----NSF- βίβλος βίβλος 010101 N- ----GSF- γενέσεως γένεσις 010101 N- ----GSM- Ἰησοῦ Ἰησοῦς ...
The first column is book/chapter/verse, the next one part of speech (all nouns here), the next specifies the tense, Nominative, Genitive, Singular, Feminine, Masculine, the fourth column the word that actually appears in the NT (in whatever form), and the fifth column is the headword or lemma — the dictionary form of the word.
There are updates on the Open Scriptures blog, linking to a discussion group where surrender seems to be the only option under consideration. They should, instead, seek legal advice.
I confess that I don’t understand how the German Bible Society have any claim or rights over this. How can they claim copyright over any of this? Are they claiming that the NT is *their* copyright? What is needed, I feel, is a good lawyer to tell them where to get off. I’ve submitted this story to slashdot.org. Anyone got any suggestions?
Thanks to Mark Goodacre for the tip.