Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, freedom of speech, information access, and more
Douglas Galbi has been working on the text of Ibn Abi Usaibia, and has come out with some interesting metrics on how the author sees the authority of various people mentioned in it. Galen of Pergamon dominates among Greek figures in History of Physicians. References to Galen measure 0.55 on an authority index in which [...]
The Roman medical writer Galen (d. 199 AD) refers to Jewish or Christian ideas in six places in his works. Some of the works of Galen involved no longer exist in Greek, and the Arabic translation has to be used. In some cases the Arabic translation also has perished — although we know from Hunayn [...]
I have finally completed the transcription of the 1954 English translation by Lothar Kopf of Ibn Abi Usaibia, History of Physicians. It may be found here. I have divided the file into three sections, chapters 1-5, 6-10 and 11-15 respectively. I have also written an introduction. All this material is public domain — use it [...]
A day of misery. I hate footnotes. Particularly those which are positioned in some other place than the foot of each page of text. If the notes were just a little less useful, and the work that I am scanning was accessible in any other way, then I probably wouldn’t bother. UPDATE: 259 footnotes so far. [...]
A busy day working over the html files for Ibn Abi Usaibia. 25 of the 26 are now done. 26 contains the footnotes on the first 100 pages, added by someone else. I need to consider how to present these. I also need to join the first 25 files together and do some global changes. [...]
I’m still working on Ibn Abi Usaibia. Yesterday I started going through the .htm files exported from Abbyy Finereader, to rejoin paragraphs and add in page numbers. I’ve so far found two pages which are out of order in the manuscript — the numerals at the bottom in pencil were clearly added after the pages [...]
The typescript of Ibn Abi Usaibia reached me in the form of digital photos of the pages. These were evidently taken under fluorescent light, since the images are huge, green, and weirdly coloured. They’re so large, in fact, that they are hard to manipulate. But I needed something a bit more normal. So I was [...]
I’ve got 26 .htm files now, which contain the output from the OCR process. My task now is to go through each, rejoin separated lines, make sure that paragraphs appear at the right places, and add page numbers. I’ve done the first two — some 60 pages. It will be slow.
Well, maybe I don’t. But I’m still OCR’ing the annotations to Ibn Abi Usaibia — page 32 of the 62. Those annotations mention translations of various Arabic works. And, you guessed it, they were translated into German. In fact they were translated into German yonks ago. Back in the 19th century, to be specific. Just [...]
I’ve completed the OCR of a dozen pages of the notes. It is becoming clear to me that the notes are not by the translator, Lothar Kopf. There has always been rather a mystery about the history of the typescript manuscript of the translation. It was completed in 1956 by Lothar Kopf, as it says [...]