Category: Information access

More on the Homilies of Origen

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Comments on my post asking how to get an English translation of the Homilies of Origen were enthusiastic.  So I think we will conduct a little experiment with this one, and see if we can get somewhere. 

Today I have written to an academic/publishing person I know, and asked if they can find us a translator.  They have the contacts, and I am reasonably optimistic.  I’ve suggested a price of 3-4 p (UK = about 5-7 cents US) per word of Latin — because English and French translations already exist as a guide, reducing the labour — but negotiable (well, you have to be realistic).  I’d specify a condition that the first bit is done as a sample, and nothing is owed unless the sample is satisfactory.

I have also suggested no-one is committed beyond one homily at a time, neither the translator nor ourselves.  That reduces the size of financial risk and commitment down to something trivial.  We can always stop at any point, in other words; homilies we translate are an advance on nothing; those we don’t get to, well, we’re no worse off than now.  Of course I hope to do the lot!

Money comes from me in the first instance.  A couple of commenters stated their willingness to donate — much appreciated.  What I suggest is that we donate for a homily, and get our name on the bottom as “translation made possible by a grant from xxx” (or whatever wording you like).  A condition of the project is that everything becomes public domain. 

That’s all the project mechanics that I can think of; now, where to start?

I suggest the homilies on Genesis, unless anyone has a better idea? 

There are 16 homilies on Genesis.  A French edition in the Sources Chretiennes series exists, critical text and translation.  (And I have a copy!) 

Some numbers: the first homily, on creation, is 52 pages (i.e. 26 pages of Latin), about 8 words a line, 30 lines a page, i.e. 240 words a page, = 6,240 words, or about $400.  That’s a  big price, for a big homily; indeed the biggest of those on Genesis, which don’t otherwise run to more than around 20-30 pages (i.e. 10-15 pages of Latin, or about $200 each).  But I can stand that, as the price of the experiment.

Let’s see whether we can get a translator.

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What to do about offline Origen?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The homilies of Origen are all offline.  This is because the 19th century translators of the Ante-Nicene Christian Library (repackaged as the Ante-Nicene Fathers later) were selling their translations by subscription, and couldn’t get enough subscribers to translate these works.  Of 574 homilies, only 186 have survived, mostly in Latin translations by either Rufinus or Jerome.

Quite a few have been translated in various series during the 20th century.  But under our accursed copyright laws, these remain offline and inaccessible to ordinary mortals.

From time to time, I wonder what to do about this.  What can be done, I wonder?

I suppose that I could commission someone to make a translation.  But this would be costly, and also wasteful.  I hate the idea of spending my hard-earned to produce a translation of Origen’s homilies, when so many ancient texts remain untranslated.

I’ve toyed with the idea of getting someone who knows Latin to take a modern critical edition of the Latin text, and whatever translations exist in English, and produce a copyright-free version that way.  It’s always quicker and easier to translate something when someone else has done the heavy lifting and produced a first version.  I wouldn’t care whether the result was of publishable quality, so long as it was fairly true to the original.  But… who would I ask?  I could make such a thing myself fairly easily if laboriously, if I had time, but I don’t.

If I were a billionaire, of course, I would just buy the companies that own the existing versions, give the texts away, and then sell on the companies.  But I am not.

Are there any other alternatives?  It is deeply frustrating.  What can be done?

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LXX text marked up with part of speech, etc

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I was hunting around the web for a morphologised Septuagint text — one with the word, the part of speech (noun, verb, etc) and other details, plus the headword or lemma.  I remember doing this search a few years ago, so I know it exists.  This time I was less lucky.  In general there seemed to be less data available online, not more.

I can’t imagine the labour involved in taking each word of the Greek Old Testament, working out all these details, and creating a text file of it all.  It seems enormous to me.  But… to do it, and then let it just disappear, as if unimportant?  That seems even less believable, if anything.  Whatever is going on?

Somewhere there is a great database of morphologised French.  I can find webpages that refer to it; but the download site is gone.  This was state-funded; yet it too has gone.

Why does this happen?

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Works of Origen extant in Greek

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In the introduction to the CUA translation of Origen’s Homilies on Jeremiah, it states that only the following works  of Origen have survived in Greek: several sections of the Commentary on John; several sections of the Commentary on Matthew; Contra Celsum; On Prayer; Exhortation to Martyrdom; Dialogue with Heracleides; 20 homilies on Jeremiah; the homily on 1 Kings (1 Samuel) 28 (the Witch of Endor); plus a bunch of fragments from places like the Philocalia.  The remainder survive only in translation, mostly in Latin.

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Latin translation of John Lydus

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I was looking at the edition of John the Lydian, here.  I had not realised that the Bonn Scriptores Historiae Byzantinae editions came with Latin translations at the bottom of the page.  This makes things much easier for those of us whose Latin is much better than our Greek. 

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Manuscript digitization in the Wall Street Journal

Posted on by Roger Pearse

From the WSJ, some excerpts of a fascinating article by Alexandra Alter.  Note the reference to the manuscript of Michael the Syrian coming online!

One of the most ambitious digital preservation projects is being led, fittingly, by a Benedictine monk. Father Columba Stewart, executive director of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library at St. John’s Abbey and University in Minnesota, cites his monastic order’s long tradition of copying texts to ensure their survival as inspiration.

His mission: digitizing some 30,000 endangered manuscripts within the Eastern Christian traditions, a canon that includes liturgical texts, Biblical commentaries and historical accounts in half a dozen languages, including Arabic, Coptic and Syriac, the written form of Aramaic. Rev. Stewart has expanded the library’s work to 23 sites, including collections in Syria, Lebanon and Turkey, up from two in 2003. He has overseen the digital preservation of some 16,500 manuscripts, some of which date to the 10th and 11th centuries. Some works photographed by the monastery have since turned up on the black market or eBay, he says.

Among the treasures that Rev. Stewart has digitally captured: a unique Syriac manuscript of a 12th-century account of the Crusades, written by Syrian Christian patriarch Michael the Great. The text, a composite of historical accounts and fables, was last studied in the 1890s by a French scholar who made an incomplete handwritten copy. Western scholars have never studied the complete original, which was locked in a church vault in Aleppo, Syria. Rev. Stewart and his crew persuaded church leaders to let them photograph it last summer. A reproduction will be published this summer, and a digital version will be available through the library’s Web site.

In February, Rev. Stewart traveled to Assyrian and Chaldean Christian communities in Kurdish villages in northern Iraq, where he hopes to soon begin work on collections in ancient monastic libraries. “You have these ancient Christian communities, there since the beginning of Christianity, which are evaporating,” he says He’s now seeking access to manuscript collections in Iran and Georgia.

With his black monk’s habit, trimmed gray beard and deferential manner, Rev. Stewart has been able to make inroads into closed communities that are often suspicious of Western scholars and fiercely protective of their texts. Armed with 23-megapixel cameras and scanning cradles, he sets up imaging labs on site in monasteries and churches, and trains local people to scan the manuscripts.

…

For now, curators and conservationists say capturing endangered manuscripts should be a top priority. 

“This could be our only chance,” says Daniel Wallace, executive director of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, the Texas-based center that is attempting to digitally photograph 2.6 million pages of Greek New Testament manuscripts scattered in monasteries and libraries around the world. The group has discovered 75 New Testament manuscripts, many with unique commentaries, that were unknown to scholars. Mr. Wallace says one of the rare, 10th century manuscripts they photographed was in a private collection and was later sold, page by page, for $1,000 a piece. Others are simply disintegrating, eaten away by rats and worms, or rotting.

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The Antiquary’s shoebox

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Bill Thayer has transcribed a bunch of out-of-copyright scholarly articles and created a subsite called the Antiquary’s Shoebox to hold them.  This sort of stuff is normally only on JSTOR, so very valuable to we helots whose duty in life is to pay for the latter, without getting access to it.

Excellent stuff.  Bill summarises the content of each article in a line or two, indicating why we care.  This aspect of the site is very well done indeed, and very useful; indeed here it is superior to JSTOR.

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Coptic Museum Library — restoration of mss in progress

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This lengthy article in Al-Ahram records that a team of conservators are working over the manuscripts in the Coptic Museum in Cairo.  This collection contains not merely Coptic texts but also Arabic Christian manuscripts.  Thanks to Andie Byrnes at Egyptology News for this one.

The interest in the collection is welcome.  But… how can we access the mss?  How can we get reproductions?  There still seems to be no way to contact them using the internet, which is astonishing.  Especially when there is a website here.

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Carry your library in your pocket

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Let’s face it, we all have too many scholarly books.  We can’t work without them, and we end up with piles of books, often read only once, and piles of photocopies.  When we’re on the road, we can’t access them.  And who has not realised, with a sinking feeling, that some most interesting observation is in that pile of data somewhere, but that we cannot quite recall where?

The answer is to convert our books into PDF files.  Easy to say, I know.  But technology has come on, and what would once have taken forever no longer does.

This afternoon I took three books, each of 200+ pages, and made PDF’s of them all.  It took about half an hour each.  How did I do it?

First, you need a modern scanner.  The old ones groaned slowly as they scanned each page.  The modern ones can do a scan in 5 seconds.  I was using a Plustek OpticBook 3600, and even that is not bang-up-to-date.  It’s far faster than my old one, tho.  I controlled it from Abbyy Finereader 8, but really any bit of software would do.  I set the scanner to scan grey-scale, at 300 dpi (quite enough to be readable), and adjusted the page-size down from A4 to whatever the book size was, by trial and error.  I scanned an opening at a time, without splitting the pages.  I set the software to scan multiple pages, so that I didn’t have to hit a key each time (I really didn’t want to hit Ctrl-K 300+ times today!), and I set the interval that the software waits between scans to 5 seconds.  And then I went for it. 

The result was a bunch of images of the twin pages.  These I saved as a PDF.  I then passed them through Finereader 9 (which has excellent OCR) to create a PDF with page images and text hidden under the images (because the text won’t be perfectly recognised by the software anyway).  This means that the PDF is now searchable, and that I scan search a directory of files for keywords. 

I didn’t proof any of the OCR, tho — no time.  The idea is not to upload digital text, but merely to allow me a better chance of finding things.

I used Finereader, but probably other software would be better.  I noted that the PDF sizes varied alarmingly between 200Mb and 20Mb!  So I think Adobe Acrobat would be good for this, from what I have heard.

The end result is that I have three searchable PDF’s which I can stick on a key-drive (flash drive), slip into my pocket and look at anywhere.  I can look at them at lunchtime at work, for instance.

Unscrupulous people might be tempted to borrow books from the library, scan those, and save themselves the purchase price.  Of course I can’t advocate that you break the law in this way; still less exchange them online, as I hear some people do.  But we need to be able to manage our own libraries this way, I think.  Paper books have their uses, but scholarly books need this feature, as do their users.  We need a change in approach from copyright holders to make it possible.

I admit that my sympathy for the copyright industry is not as high as it might be, since their sympathy for those who use their products seems non-existent.  Why else do we have laws that criminalise anyone who makes a personal copy of an out-of-print and unavailable book?  Why do we have laws that create copyright for a century, but print-runs of 200, other than to create a dog-in-the-manger?  Why else do they campaign to increase the scope and reach of copyright, year upon year, while making it impossible for scholars to access out-of-print and obscure texts and even 1937 obscure theses? (a sore point, this last one, as regular readers will know).  But really we need better law, and we need better products from textbook manufacturers. 

In the mean time, I hope these notes will help people convert their libraries into a usable form.  The key thing to remember is that we are not trying to produce something perfect; just something usable, and produce it quickly.

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More fun with a thesis

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve already blogged on how Boston College library demand that I get permission from a religious order before they will supply me with a copy for research purposes of a 1937 thesis written by a nun. 

The nun belonged to the Sisters of Mercy, and the library have sent me a link to their website.  So I duly wrote and asked permission.  I got back an email saying that they had no record of any such nun.  The library have sent me a PDF of the first couple of pages of the thesis, which says that she was a member of that order.  So I have forwarded it to the order.

What a pathetic paper-chase!  All over the supposed copyright status of a long forgotten thesis.  It highlights that our copyright laws are now actively working against the interests of scholarship.

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