Tag: Patristics

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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Time for something less strenuous

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A lot of what I do demands a fair bit of concentration.  When I get home at the weekend, I don’t always find myself able to concentrate that much.  This is one reason why my additions to the Early Fathers collection developed; scanning and proofing texts does not require a lot of concentration, and can be quite soothing.

Like most of us, I have books and articles in photocopy form sitting around.  Since I acquired the Fujitsu Scansnap S300, these have looked increasingly inconvenient.

And I hate “inconvenient.”

Well, it’s not that hard to stick one of these books-in-a-pile-of-photocopies through the Scansnap S300.  I’ve just scanned one, which I will need sometime but not now.  It created a PDF.  I then opened the PDF in Abbyy Finereader 9, and ran the text recognition on it.  Then I saved it again, as a searchable PDF.  The latter isn’t as good quality as the first PDF, for some mysterious reason, so I’ll keep both. 

So… I now have a pile of paper to throw away.  If I ever need the book in that form, I can just print off the PDF.

Books that I use all the time are a different matter.  Books that I read through with a glass of something by my side are a different matter.  But books I never look at, and which I retain a copy of because of some idea I may one day work on?  I think not.

I doubt I am alone in this.  All over the world, students must be doing the same with textbooks.

 

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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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More progress on translating Origen’s Homilies on Ezekiel

Posted on by Roger Pearse

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.

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Origen on Ezekiel – thinking about bible versions

Posted on by Roger Pearse

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?

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Pricing John the Lydian, De Mensibus

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I got hold of the 1898 text of John the Lydian and did some calculations.  There seem to be about 7 words per line, about 26 lines per page, and 177 pages of text.  That comes out at 32,214 words, which is probably a fair-ish estimate of how long the text is.

If I were to pay someone 10 cents a word to translate it, that would be $3,222.  I don’t have any such sum to spare, so I won’t do so.  But it’s interesting.  To a corporation such sums are almost petty cash. 

Ah, if I were a rich man…!

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Origen on Ezekiel update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

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…

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Why do we write accents on our ancient Greek?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The most obvious omission to strike the eye [in his book] is the disappearance of accents.  We are indebted to D. F. Hudson’s Teach Yourself New Testament Greek for pioneering this revolution.  The accentual tradition is so deeply rooted in the minds of classical scholars and of reputable publishers that the sight of a naked unaccented text seems almost indecent.  Yet from the point of view of academic integrity, the case against their use is overwhelming.  The oldest literary texts regularly using accents of any sort date from the first century B.C.  The early uncial manuscripts of the New Testament had no accents at all.  The accentual system now in use dates only from the ninth century A.D. 

It is not suggested that the modern editor should slavishly copy first-century practices.  By all means let us use every possible device that will make the text easier and pleasanter to read; but the accentual system is emphatically not such a device.  Accurate accentuation is in fact difficult.  Most good scholars will admit that they sometimes have to look their accents up.  To learn them properly consumes a great deal of time and effort with no corresponding reward in the understanding of the language.  When ingrained prejudice has been overcome, the clear unaccented text becomes very pleasant to the eye. 

In Hellenistic Greek the value of accents is confined to the distinguishing of pairs of words otherwise the same.  In this whole book it means only four groups of words; EI) and EI=); the indefinite and interrogative pronouns; parts of the article and the relative pronoun; and parts of the present and future indicative active of liquid verbs.  I have adopted the practice of retaining the circumflex in MENW=, -EI=S, -EI=, -OU=SIN and in EI=); of always using a grave accent for the relatives (\H, (\O, O(\I, and A(\I, and an acute for the first syllable of the interrogative pronoun (TI/S, TI/NA, etc.).  These forms are then at once self-explanatory, and the complications of enclitics are avoided.  All other accents have been omitted.

I should dearly love to take the reform one stage further, by the omission of the useless smooth breathing.  Judging by the criterion of antiquity, breathings have no right to inclusion.   Judged by the criterion of utility, ) should be used as an indication of elision or crasis, and nothing else, and the rough breathing would then stand out clearly as the equivalent of h.  The fear that examinees might be penalised for the omission of the smooth breathing has alone deterred me from trying to effect this reform.  I should like to know if other examiners would support this proposal. — J. W. Wenham, Elements of New Testament Greek, pp. vii-viii.

As someone fairly new to Greek, I don’t quite know how to look at this.  If the accents really are largely useless, why have them?  But is it as simple as this?

At the moment I’m working on software to automatically look up Greek words.  In the inscription we were looking at yesterday, the words mostly are found in the dictionaries, including Ares; but not “Aphrodite”.  I don’t really believe that the goddess isn’t in the dictionary.  Rather, I suspect, that some faulty accentuation means that X\ is not equalling X, or the like.  Most bits of code that I have seen for use with ancient Greek involve reams of code to try to overcome this sort of thing; all more or less inept.

Perhaps when I am searching for a word, I should first strip off all its accents, and all smooth breathings except one at the end of a word — e.g. A)LL) would become ALL) — and search using that?  Would I get a load of spurious matches?

And why do we have this complicated thing, if it is such a burden?  Is perhaps the accentuation thing just a bit of snobbery?  A way to keep the hoi polloi out?  No doubt there is snobbery around, as in all things to do with men and their deeds.  But is that all there is?  Or is there more to it than this?

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Syriac Eusebius restarts

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Deep joy!  Someone who translates from Syriac has written to me and asked if I want any work done.  I’ve pointed him at Syriac fragment 10 of the Quaestiones evangelicae of Eusebius. 

I was rather despairing of ever getting this completed.  There’s only 12 fragments, and 1-6 and 12 are all done.  But… more people are interested in Syriac than capable in it, it seems.

So it’s all getting rather busy!  The Greek is approaching completion, I now have another chance of getting the remaining 5 chunks of Syriac done.  Someone is working on Origen, and of course my own hands are busy with Agapius and the Greek translator.

Is there something about summer?  Do all the academics come out to play at the end of May, with time on their hands for a couple of months?

Maybe I should look for someone who knows Coptic as well, and see if I can get the Eusebius fragments in Coptic done!

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Diogenes limitations

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve been looking at Peter Heslin’s Diogenes tool, which is really quite extraordinary.  It does things that I do not need, but frankly it’s  a marvel, particularly when you realise that he worked out so much of the content himself.

One limitation seems to be that the parsing information for a word does not indicate whether it is a noun, a verb, a participle, or whatever.  It does tell  you whether it is singular or plural, masculine or feminine etc; but not whether it is a noun or an adjective.  This is a singular omission, and, for a newcomer, a somewhat frustrating one.

Does anyone have any ideas how this information might be calculated?

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