Via AWOL I learn that French dissertations are starting to come online, at theses.fr.
Good news.
Tag: Information access
From my diary
Via AWOL I learn that an edition and translation of Bar Hebraeus’ scholia on the Old Testament is now available in PDF form online from the University of Chicago. The PDF is here (linked on that page under the red down-arrow next to the text “Terms of Use”.
In addition, an interesting volume, The Early Text of the New Testament, ed. Charles E. Hill and Michael J. Kruger, Oxford, has appeared and is discussed by Larry Hurtado here. It has wider interest than merely biblical scholars:
There are cogent discussions of wider issues, including in particular Harry Gamble, “The Book Trade in the Roman Empire” (pp. 23-36), and Kruger (a former PhD student), “Early Christian Attitudes toward the Reproduction of Texts” (pp. 63-80). …
Charles Hill (“‘In These Very Words’: Methods and Standards of Literary Brorowing in the Second Century,” pp. 261-81) provides a valuable study showing that pagan and Christian authors followed a different set of conventions in citing texts than used by copyists of texts. …
This volume (though expensive!) is now probably the most up to date analysis of earliest evidence about the state and transmission of NT writings in the second century CE. Given the limitations of our evidence, scholars are required to make the best inferences they can. This volume provides essential resources in doing so, and largely shows that we can with some confidence posit that the NT writings, essentially as we know them, were copied for both ecclesial and private reading.
Which is what we would tend to expect, surely, of any ancient literary text not belonging to the corpus of astrological handbooks or similarly fluid literature?
Michael Kruger adds a note here.
I’d very much like to read this volume: it seems likely to be relevant to classical and patristic scholars. It’s about $175, tho, which is a bit above my budget!
UPDATE: A corrrespondent writes to point out that I have confused two books in the above. I referred to The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research: Essays on the Status Quaestionis. Second Edition (eds M.W. Holmes & B.D. Ehrman; NTTSD 42; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2012), which appeared at a ridiculous price ($314). But the book that I was discussing was actually the Charles Hill volume! Many thanks for the correction. Friday night tiredness, I’m afraid, is responsible.
The Holmes volume, however, is also likely to be interesting, as may be seen from the list of chapters given by Peter Head here. But at $341 is way out of reach. However I suspect it will be quickly pirated in PDF form, unless students have become wealthy in the last few weeks!
Modern Coptic Christian materials online in PDF
It’s not very easy for non-specialists to find material by modern Coptic authors in Arabic. Yet it does exist, and much of it is even online.
In a series of comments, John Rostom has very kindly let us know about a bunch of links which are simply too useful to be left only as comments. Here is a digest.
Firstly, over 40 books by the late Pope Shenouda III are online in PDF form, in English translation. The URL is http://copticorthodoxy.com/BooksbyPope.aspx, and all the items are downloadable (with the exception of only 2 of the links, i.e. “The Spiritual Man.pdf” and “The Spiritual Means.pdf” which don’t work).
Second, the History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria is online in Arabic, compiled and edited by the late Bishop Samuel, Bishop of Shebeen el-Qanter (all published in 1999):
- Part 1: From Saint Mark the Apostle to Pope Yusab (52th Pope)
- Part 2: From Pope Khail II (53rd Pope) to Pope Mikhail II (68th Pope)
- Part 3: From Pope Macarius II (69th Pope) to Pope Cyril IV (112th Pope)
- Part 4: Pope Cyril Ibn Laklak III (75th Pope)
In addition is another book:
This is by the late Father Samuel Tawadros al-Syriani which appears to have been published much earlier (1st ed. 1977), with the 2nd edition being the one presented by the online bookshop (2nd ed. 2002) and revised by Bishop Mattaos, current Bishop and Abbot of Dair al-Sorian (Syrian Monastery). This book covers the History of the Patriarchs from Pope Peter VII (109th Pope) to Pope Cyril VI (116th Pope), thus a bit of an overlap with Bishop Samuel’s books. Why it is called “part 6” is not clear, but that title only applied to the 2nd edition.
Thirdly, the 4th volume (part) of Bishop Samuel’s edition of Abu’l Makarem’s History Of Churches & Monasteries – Part 4 is online here. Together with links by Dioscorus Boles, that gives links to the entire Arabic text. (Can anyone find a copy of the English text that exists somewhere?)
Thank you very much indeed, Mr Rostom – invaluable!
Progress on Paulys Realencyclopadie at German Wikisource
Via AWOL I learn that the project to digitise the old (but comprehensive) Realencyclopadie is going very well indeed. Ten thousand articles have now been completed. The press release is here, and using Google Translate, we get something like this:
For five years, there has been a project at Wikisource for Pauly’s Realencyclopädie of the study of classical antiquity (RE), with the aim to make the public domain articles from this available online in full text form. Although only a few volunteers are working on it, their constant work has recently reached an impressive milestone: with the article “Herod (King of Judaea)” they have transcribed 10,000 items.
The advantage of such a project is obvious. Many articles in the RE still offer the best starting point, and most of the details, for each topic. However, they are only accessible in public libraries, for hardly any private individuals can afford such an expensive Lexicon. It was published from 1893 to 1980 in Stuttgart by Metzler and is still sold by this company. The articles from the RE on the Internet are not only searchable by keyword, but available to everyone for free. Of course the RE project can only upload articles which are now in the public domain. These are usually those whose author died more than 70 years ago. And in the RE this applies to many authors already.
Among the most significant items that are already available on Wikisource, we may include the articles on the epic poet Hesiod, the tragedians Aeschylus, [13], and Euripides [4], the comic poet Eupolis [3] and Aristophanes [12], the scholar of the same name, [14] the philosopher Aristotle [18], the rhetoricians Anaximenes of Lampsacus [3], Annaeus [17] Seneca and Libanius, the Archbishop Eustathius [18], of Thessalonica, but also the products agriculture, Athenai [1a], signboards, Basilica, libraries, beekeeping, beer, soil science, embalming, epistolography, Hermes Trismegistus, didactic poems, mushrooms, roses, stringed instruments, navigation, suicide and Taurus.
Unlike other similar sites on the Internet, Wikisource lays great emphasis on the quality of the provided texts. Each text is proofread at least twice (the respective correction status is displayed on every page) and on the basis of scans of the original, which are checked each time and are stored on Wikimedia Commons. The RE project also uses the hyperlink feature of the world-wide web, by linking keywords to each other, and provides each item with identifiable reference and author abbreviations. One particular aspect of the project is that here the many authors of the RE are systematically collected and identified. The bio-bibliographic index of authors is now one of 1111 entries and is about 70% complete.
This is almost the only open-source initiative in the German language, and is highly praiseworthy. The RE is hardly known outside of specialists; but the combination of exhaustive references, online access, and Google Translate should increase its reach manyfold. Well done.
UPDATE: The RE at WikiSource is here.
From my diary
I have continued to proof the OCR output of Sabbadini’s Scoperte chapter 3, in Finereader 10. Note the version number! I have abandoned the disastrous Finereader 11 software, which has effectually prevented Theodoret on Romans coming online by erasing all the italics every time I try to export my work.
Chapter 3 is the chapter concerned with the rediscovery of Greek literature in the 15th century. It’s about 29 pages. When the OCR errors are corrected, I shall pass it through Google Translate, and see what we have.
One volume often referred to in the notes is the Epistolae of Ambrogio Traversari, the monk who was friends with the humanists and took part in their many endeavours to recover classical and patristic literature. His letters are a treasure trove of information about this process. How I wish this existed in English!
I have seen a physical copy of this work, published in an immense format in the 18th century by Mehus, in two volumes. It is physically exhausting to handle and read.
It seems that the book scanners at Archive.org and Google Books have found the same. For sadly it remains inaccessible, and off-line.
Machine translating unknown texts – the copiale manuscript
Via Dyspepsia Generation I find this story at Wired:
They Cracked This 250-Year-Old Code, and Found a Secret Society Inside
It was actually an accident that brought to light the symbolic “sight-restoring” ritual. The decoding effort started as a sort of game between two friends that eventually engulfed a team of experts in disciplines ranging from machine translation to intellectual history. Its significance goes far beyond the contents of a single cipher. Hidden within coded manuscripts like these is a secret history of how esoteric, often radical notions of science, politics, and religion spread underground. At least that’s what experts believe. The only way to know for sure is to break the codes.
In this case, as it happens, the cracking began in a restaurant in Germany.
The story has wide application:
On October 25, 2011,The New York Times published a story about the Copiale, focusing on Knight’s code-cracking techniques. A flood of media attention followed—along with hundreds of emails from people who claimed to have ancient ciphers of their own. In December, when I visited Knight, he had just received a picture from Yemen. Some Bedouins had found a stone with an unknown, squarish script. Perhaps Knight could tell them what it said?
Fascinating.
Sabbadini on the discovery of Greek and Latin codices in the 14-15th century
Anyone at all interested in manuscripts knows that the definitive account of the rediscovery of classical texts is that of R. Sabbadini, Le scoperte dei codici latini e greci ne’secoli 14 e 15 (1905).[1] But these volumes have always been hard to obtain; and worse, were in Italian, a language few of us speak with fluency. Those two problems always stopped me accessing the text.
This evening I was reading an article on Paul the Deacon when it referred to Sabbadini, and I suddenly noted the date of the latter’s publication: 1905. That means that it is out of copyright in the USA. That in turn meant that it ought to be in Google Books or Archive.org. A quick search later revealed copies of both volumes, as well as other works by Sabbadini.
Better was to follow. By opening the “Full Text” link in Google Chrome, I got a page with a button at the top inviting me to translate the page. I did so; and suddenly I have an English version of Sabbadini!
Alright, it’s definitely very mangled; but I can definitely get some good out of it, if not everything. The table of contents emerges, more or less:
-
The discoverers of Verona (first half of the 14th century)
-
The Florentine triad (second half of the 14th c.)
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The discoveries of Greek codices (15th c.)
-
Discoveries during the Council of Constance (1415-1417)
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Exploration in Italy (1420-30): the Florentine humanists; the humanists of the north.
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Exploration outside of Italy (1425-1430)
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Discoveries during the Council of Basle (1432-1440)
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Anonymous discoveries
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Later explorations (second half of the 15th century). The manuscripts discovered at Bobbio (1498)
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Counterfeit discoveries
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15th century collections and libraries.
That by itself gives you an idea of the process of the rediscovery of the classical heritage.
Try it. Open up Chrome, and start reading bits of Sabbadini. It works!
Some excerpts from Festus, De significatione verborum
I have been idly looking through the section of Festus for the letter ‘M’ — the first book preserved in the damaged manuscript. Here are a few extracts. Perhaps others will find these interesting also.
MINOR DELOS. This name is given to Puzzuoli, because at one time Delos was the greatest commercial centre in the whole world. It was then replaced by Puzzuoli, previously known in Greek as Δικαιαρχία. From this Lucilius has said: Inde Dicaearcheum populos, Delumque minorem (Whence the peoples of Dicaearchia and the little Delos).
MIRACULA. This word, which we apply today to things deserving of admiration, was only given by the ancients to hideous things. [1]
MISCELLIONES. Those who have no certain opinions, but are of varied and mixed judgements.
MIRACIDION. First adolescence.
MEDDIX is the title of a magistrate among the Oscans. Ennius says, Summus ibi capitur meddix, occiditur alter.[2]
MEDITRINALIA. This is the origin of this word. It was the custom among the Latin peoples that, on the day when one sampled the new wine for the first time, to say: Vetus novum vinum bibo, veteri novo morbo medeor.[3] From the same words is formed the name of the goddess Meditrina, whose celebrations were called Meditrinalia.
MEDITERREA. Sisenna considers this form as preferable to mediterranea.
MELO, alternative name for the Nile.
MEGALESIA. Games in honour of the Great Goddess.
I will look some more at this later on.
The scientist revolt against academic journal publishing
It seems that the scientists are getting fed up with the whole system of academic journal publishing. A correspondent writes, drawing my attention to a rather wonderful story from the Guardian, back in April. The story is long, and full of interesting detail.
Academic spring: how an angry maths blog sparked a scientific revolution
Alok Jha reports on how a Cambridge mathematician’s protest has led to demands for open access to scientific knowledge
It began with a frustrated blogpost by a distinguished mathematician. Tim Gowers and his colleagues had been grumbling among themselves for several years about the rising costs of academic journals.
They, like many other academics, were upset that the work produced by their peers, and funded largely by taxpayers, sat behind the paywalls of private publishing houses that charged UK universities hundreds of millions of pounds a year for the privilege of access.
There had been talk last year that a major scientific body might come out in public to highlight the problem and rally scientists to speak out against the publishing companies, but nothing was happening fast.
So, in January this year, Gowers wrote an article on his blog declaring that he would henceforth decline to submit to or review papers for any academic journal published by Elsevier, the largest publisher of scientific journals in the world.
He was not expecting what happened next. Thousands of people read the post and hundreds left supportive comments. Within a day, one of his readers had set up a website, The Cost of Knowledge, which allowed academics to register their protest against Elsevier.
The site now has almost 9,000 signatories, all of whom have committed themselves to refuse to either peer review, submit to or undertake editorial work for Elsevier journals. “I wasn’t expecting it to make such a splash,” says Gowers. “At first I was taken aback by how quickly this thing blew up.”
Gowers, a mathematician at Cambridge University and winner of the prestigious Fields Medal, had hit a nerve with academics who were increasingly fed up with the stranglehold that a few publishing companies have gained over the publication and distribution of the world’s scientific research.
The current publishing model for science is broken, argue an ever-increasing number of supporters of open access publishing, a model whereby all scientific research funded by taxpayers would be made available on the web for free.
Expensive paywalls not only waste university funds, they say, but slow down future scientific discovery and put up barriers for interested members of the public, politicians and patients’ groups who need access to primary research in order to exercise their democratic rights.
Stephen Curry, a structural biologist at Imperial College London, says that scientists need to come to a new arrangement with publishers fit for the online age and that “for a long time, we’ve been taken for a ride and it’s got ridiculous”.
…
Academic publishers charge UK universities about £200m a year to access scientific journals, almost a tenth of the £2.2bn distributed to them by the government, via the funding councils, for the basic running costs of university research.
Despite the recession, these charges helped academic publishers operate with profit margins of 35% or more , while getting their raw materials and the work of thousands of taxpayer- and charity-funded scientists free.
The big three publishing houses – Elsevier, Springer and Wiley – own most of the world’s more than 20,000 academic journals and account for about 42% of all journal articles published. And, even as library budgets over the past few years in the UK and North America have been flat or declining, journal prices have been rising by 5-7% a year or more.
A standalone subscription to one of Elsevier’s most expensive journals, Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, costs more than €18,000 (£15,000) a year. Most universities buy bundles of journals, however, so they can soon rack up bills of more than £1m each to access the journals their academics request.
…
It is easy for most research scientists to remain oblivious to the high cost of journal subscriptions, because they are not usually the ones having to negotiate with publishers, says Sir Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust.
As an active researcher, he had easy access to all the papers he wanted and only became aware of the costs involved, he says, when he arrived at the trust and tried to read a paper that had been produced as a result of a research grant from the charity, only to be faced with an article charge of £25. “Not surprisingly, I felt somewhat resentful about it,” he says.
This is excellent news. The emperor has no clothes; and the fact is now becoming public knowledge. And where the scientists lead, the humanities will follow.
Vintage worship tapes and other memories
Yesterday I encountered vintageworshiptapes.com, a site which is:
A project to preserve classic worship music from the golden era of Harvestime worship music.
- Awake, O Zion!
I should explain that in the late 70’s and early 80’s, there were a series of annual bible weeks held at showgrounds in the United Kingdom as part of the Restoration movement. Dales Week, which I twice went to, was in Harrogate. There was also Downs Week in the south of England. I think the New Frontiers week in Stafford is more or less the successor of these, although I could be wrong.
The worship was recorded, and cassette tapes could be purchased. I’m not sure if I ever actually bought any of the tapes, but I did buy the Songs of Victory songbook, which I still have somewhere.
The tapes themselves were played endlessly by people that I knew who were involved in the movement. I can hear some of those songs as I write, for they are embedded deep in my mind.
These tapes should be preserved. They are part of the musical history of the charismatic movement in the United Kingdom. Yet they never existed other than on cassette tape, and I imagine most of the copies have deteriorated by now.
The site owner has digitised what he has into MP3 format. The results are pretty clean and clear, but somehow less impressive than in my memory.
What is needed, of course, is a remaster based on the master tapes. But the Harvestime organisation has long since disbanded. I wonder where the master tapes are? I wonder who even knows about these things any more?
The site owner has been deterred from distributing the files because he is quite unable to determine who, if anyone, he needs to ask for permission to do so. At the time the idea of copyright in recordings of Christian worship was ridiculous — that much I remember myself — and the idea of licensing the use of new songs only appeared during the 80’s, as a response to the difficulties that congregations had in precisely this problem.
Yet these things should be online. There’s no money in this. But there are people out there who would like to hear these memories of their youth again.