Category: Information access

The following press release reached me on the CLASSICS-L list:

Ten years ago today, a private American collector purchased the Archimedes Palimpsest. Since that time he has guided and funded the project to conserve, image, and study the manuscript. After ten years of work, involving the expertise and goodwill of an extraordinary number of people working around the world, the Archimedes Palimpsest Project has released its data. It is a historic dataset, revealing new texts from the ancient world. It is an integrated product, weaving registered images in many wavebands of light with XML transcriptions of the Archimedes and Hyperides texts that are spatially mapped to those images. It has pushed boundaries for the imaging of documents, and relied almost exclusively on current international standards. We hope that this dataset will be a persistent digital resource for the decades to come. We also hope it will be helpful as an example for others who are conducting similar work. It published under a Creative Commons 3.0 attribution license, to ensure ease of access and the potential for widespread use. A complete facsimile of the revealed palimpsested texts is available on Googlebooks as ³The Archimedes Palimpsest². It is hoped that this is the first of many uses to which the data will be put.

For information on the Archimedes Palimpsest Project, please visit:

www.archimedespalimpsest.org

For the dataset, please visit:

www.archimedespalimpsest.net

Now I approve really strongly of this.  Consider how many projects exist to create a locked-in architecture, a prestige website, but NOT to make the data — transcription data in this case, in XML — available to the online community.  I recently posted about the St. Gall project — and how, worthwhile as it is, they hadn’t made the manuscripts available as PDF’s, but had chosen a proprietary and very slow browser which obstructed access.

It reminded me of the Oxford manuscripts site, which had a slow and clunky browser.  But since it was all in JPG’s, I wrapped a perl script around them when I needed to use images of one manuscript as part of a translation project.  The images remained on their site; I just devised a better access method.  That script still gets a lot of links; and I offered it back to the Oxford site if they wanted it.  Everyone benefitted from the open technology.

The Archimedes announcement is a contrast to some of the recent projects.  Archimedes are not even supplying a browser.  They’re making the raw data available, and let he that wants devise whatever presentation layer he wants.  Marvellous!  I do hope that some seriously creative solutions are devised, to leverage this data set and produce something that no conventional delivery would ever have thought of.

I’ve created a little site on lulu called Books on Antiquity, where you can buy reprints of old out-of-copyright texts that I have scanned and uploaded.  So far I’ve only reprinted one book, Delagarde’s Coptic gospel catena, as an experiment.  But I expect to do more.

Adrian Murdoch commented on my last post (and gave the origin of the translation of Oratio XI).  But he drew my attention to the existence of French Budé translations of his works: vols. 1, 2 and 4 of Orations (i.e. Oration 1; Orations 2-10; and Oration 59); a selection to public men of his day.  There seems to be a  volume of moral Orations somewhere, according to Copac.

Quite a lot of people know French; certainly quite a few more than know enough Greek to take a volume of Libanius to bed for some relaxing reading.  I would imagine that most specialists would read the French first, and then delve into the Greek.  Of course if they are Germans, they may not know French either; English is the second language of choice, thanks to the USA and the Beatles.

This raises a question.  Why are we all mentally translating and retranslating these French translations into English?  Wouldn’t there be merit in drawing up rough translations of the translations into English, and stuffing them online?  It would make texts more widely accessible; with luck, it would provoke a proper English translation of the original.

I recognise that no academic could publish such a thing.  Indeed they really form part of ‘research notes.’  But we don’t need to publish them; just put them on the web.  Is there a downside?

I’ve just discovered a blog about ancient Antioch.  The current article is about a panegyric on Antioch by Libanius.

Libanius was a voluminous writer.  His letters and orations fill volumes.  Yet few have ever been translated into any modern language.  A few that were have made their way onto my collection of the Fathers.  A good selection now appears in the Loeb.  Yet… how little that is, and how little of all that little is online!

Pleasingly an English translation of the lengthy Oration 11 on Antioch is linked to from the page.  I wonder what its copyright status is?

I’ve scanned a text or two in my time.  There are some volumes, however, that inspire fear.

First among these are the volumes of the Oxford Movement “Library of the Fathers”.  The format of the volumes, with 600+ pages, copious marginalia and two columns of footnotes, means that any text from this series is an utter pain to scan.

There are 6 volumes of Gregory the Great’s “Moralia on Job” in this series.  I have never had the courage to even seek them out.  The memory of Cyril of Alexandria on John still lingers!

All credit, then, to a modern hero who for the last year or two has been steadily digitising this monster work.  I wondered tonight if he might have weakened and halted: but it seems not!  Find as far as he has got here:

http://www.lectionarycentral.com/GregoryMoraliaIndex.html

Why not send him an email of appreciation?  Such effort deserves all our thanks.