Author: Roger Pearse

Google to digitize every book in the world

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A story this morning in the New York Times: that Google is placing adverts in print media all around the world, large and small, trying to find the owners of copyrights, as part of its agreement with publishers to handle in-copyright material.

As part of the class-action settlement, Google will pay $125 million to create a system under which customers will be charged for reading a copyrighted book, with the copyright holder and Google both taking percentages; copyright holders will also receive a flat fee for the initial scanning, and can opt out of the whole system if they wish.

But first they must be found. Since the copyright holders can be anywhere and not necessarily online — given how many books are old or out of print — it became obvious that what was needed was a huge push in that relic of the pre-Internet age: print. …

The almost comically sweeping attempt to reach the world’s entire literate population is a reflection of the ambitions of the Google Book Search project, in which the company hopes to digitize every book — famous or not, in any language, published anywhere on earth — found in the world’s libraries.

I had wondered whether Google was pushing forward with Google Books, now that Microsoft has pulled out of Live Books, but it seems so.  Very good news.  And this, remember, is for books that are in copyright.

Thanks to Slash.dot for the tip.

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More NT manuscripts from CSNTM

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A couple of blog posts on recent activity from Dan Wallace and his team.  This will be a busy year:

In January 2009, we sent a team to Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Australia; and Auckland, New Zealand. We are right now gearing up for the rest of 2009. On the docket are Athens, Andros, Kozani, and Meteora, Greece; Muenster and Munich, Germany; Bucharest, Romania; Milan, Italy; Patmos, Greece; and Tbilisi, Georgia. We are also hoping to go to Cairo and St. Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt.

We are extremely grateful to these monasteries and museums, universities and public libraries, for allowing us to shoot their manuscripts and preserve them digitally for generations to come. In 2008 alone, we discovered more than a dozen manuscripts—about equal to what the rest of the world has discovered in the last six years. Among the manuscripts photographed are two papyri, both from the third century, a purple codex from the sixth century, and scores of later manuscripts, some of which are far more significant than their medieval date would suggest.

Meanwhile the team are onsite in Athens:

On February 23rd, a team led by Dr. Wallace left Dallas for Athens, Greece. They are staying at the Greek Bible Institute in the suburb of Pikermi, approximately an hour’s travel time from the Benaki Museum where they are photographing MSS. Despite the distance, the Center was able to save financial resources by staying at the Institute. So far the Center has identified seven manuscripts that were previously unknown to scholars! That’s equal to what typically turn up in two years’ time worldwide, and it brings the number to nineteen that the Center has discovered in this season of expeditions. Remarkably, one out of five MSS that CSNTM photographs is a new discovery.

Times are hard for many of us, but perhaps we should find a way to donate to these supremely worthwhile activities.  Remember that today we learned of the destruction of manuscripts at Koln?  CSNTM are doing something to save vulnerable texts, and make them accessible to us all.

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Science and Christianity and myths about the two

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The well-known quotation from St. Augustine on science and unwise Christians appears at Quodlibeta.

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Koln archive building falls into large hole in ground

Posted on by Roger Pearse

According to the report on the English pages of Der Spiegel, the 1971 building collapsed.  Work on the tube line running under the front wall may be responsible.  Loads of documents may be lost, some dating back to 922 AD.  It’s unclear whether any medieval manuscripts will have gone west.  More here (in German), which links to a PDF showing pages of a 9/10th century gospel manuscript on p.20 of the PDF.

I bet that they didn’t allow anyone to photograph them first.  In most disasters, the fire brigade are called in to saturate the building with water, just in case any documents escaped.  That usually finishes them off!

UPDATE:  The Cologne Archive is currently asking for volunteers in the area to help with the disaster recovery.  If you are interested in helping out, please see the archive website: http://www.koelner-stadtarchiv.de/index.html

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The future of online research

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An important article here in Digital Humanities from Greg Crane of Perseus, looking at where we are and where we go with collections like Archive.org and Perseus.  It includes discussion of experiments with OCR’ing Ancient Greek, and an image of the Venetus A manuscript of Homer.

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Holy desktop, Batman!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

From the ever excellent Way of the Fathers I learn of a company selling a set of Windows/Mac OSX icons, depicting the Fathers.  It’s only $5, so might be a fun item.

What happened to the Ephraim icon?  Is that a beard completely covering his face?

Some of the lettering on the Ephraim icon ought to be in Syriac, really.  If anyone buys this product, perhaps they’d like to contribute a review?

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Bar Hebraeus, Chronicon Ecclesiasticum vol. 1 now online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Thanks to Stephen C. Carlson, I learned a few days ago that volume 1 of Bar Hebraeus Chronicon Ecclesiasticum was online in PDF form at Google Books here.  Unfortunately this 1872 book is  kept behind their “US-only” firewall, although it is out of copyright everywhere in the world. 

I’ve placed an ILL for volume 2, which I will scan if it arrives and place online at Archive.org. 

In preparation for this, I’ve also put the volume 1 PDF on Archive.org where non-US viewers can see it.  It’s here.  I suggest US viewers use the Google books link, which is faster.

The work itself consists of short entries on figures in the Syriac church from the beginning down to the author’s own time.  A parallel Latin translation is provided.  The first volume is the important people in the West Syriac church; the second is their opposite numbers in the East Syriac church.  I don’t know what volume 3 is, tho!

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Internet Archive blog

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There is a blog for the Internet Archive (archive.org).  It’s here, and I’ve added it as a link.

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Three Israeli bible mss available for download

Posted on by Roger Pearse

At Paleojudaica I learned of this message from Elhanan Adler:

The National Library of Israel, David and Fela Shapell Family Digitization Project, is pleased to announce the digitization of three of the Library’s most important Bible manuscripts… The manuscripts are presented in the DjVu format which provides high quality, magnifiable images compressed into relatively small files for easy downloading. In order to view DjVu images it is necessary to download and install (once) a special free viewer program.

This is a red letter day.  A major library has made manuscripts available in a downloadable, easy-to-use format.  Well done, boys!  That is what we want to see.

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Hippolytus, Apostolic tradition now online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Tom Schmidt writes that he has completed digitizing the English translation of this obscure work, which he has made public domain!  Excellent news all round.  I sympathise with his experiences of doing it, tho, really I do!

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