When I made a translation of the Apocalypse of Samuel of Kalamoun, I was missing a couple of pages of F. Nau’s introduction, and was therefore unable to give a version of that. I have now added in the extra material.
Tag: Information access
Holy PG PDF with bookmarks, Batman!!!
This evening I found a copy of a PDF of volume 56 (works of Chrysostom, vol. 6) of Migne’s Patrologia Graeca edition on my desktop. I paged down a bit, and looked at the table of contents.
Then it occurred to me; shouldn’t the PDF have bookmarks? Rather than forcing me to guess, each time, just which PDF page is “column 514” (or whatever), so that I can inspect the particular work that I really had in mind?
It’s the sort of idea that instantly runs away with you, isn’t it? To do one PDF would take a bit of time; but to do several, never mind all, would be impossible for one man.
Yet it could be crowd-sourced. The end result would be a bunch of PDF’s which were useful to everyone.
Of course you need Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro, to edit the PDF files. That cuts down the contributors.
I’m not going to do it. But it’s very tempting!
Augustine and Secundinus the Manichaean – works now online in English
Mark Vermes published translations of the Letter of Secundinus the Manichaean to Augustine and Augustine’s reply Against Secundinus, as part of his thesis in 1997. The first item was then republished in Sam Lieu and Iain Gardner’s book on Manichaean texts in 2004; the second remains unpublished.
Dr Vermes has very kindly made it possible for both items to appear here.
https://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/augustine-against-secundinus-the-manichaean-in-english/
I would like to thank Dr Sam Lieu very much for his help: he kindly obtained the permission necessary from Cambridge University Press for the Letter to be included.
The items remain the copyright of CUP and Dr Vermes respectively, which is why I have not included them in my collection of public domain material here. If you would like to support the commissioning of more public domain material, there is a CDROM of the Fathers and Additional Fathers collection available from here. All funds from sales go to pay for translating things, and sales have been a little low lately, so I hope no-one will mind my mentioning it!
UPDATE: I was wondering where else I might usefully announce the availability of new material in translation online. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Online sources and the classroom
Jona Lendering has written a thoughtful article here on the problem on online websites and the classroom. As the author of the respectable Livius.org site, he isn’t theorising, and his words need to be listened to.
If students cannot check the information – if they cannot know how the facts* have been established and which explanatory model is used – students must avoid a website. That’s the first basic lesson.
This means that in the present situation, students must just avoid the internet and check their library. Books are a far better source of reliable information.
Note that I would prefer to use the word “statements” here, for the website probably is not giving facts.
Now Jona is right. You can use the web to gather lists of possible sources, as a first stab (only a first stab) at a reading list. But it is entirely possible that the selection of sources presented online is itself misleading. Manipulation of the reader by omission of reliable sources and inclusion of unreliable sources is, sadly, becoming commonplace.
Nor is this all.
There used to be a time, not so long ago, that the universities “sent out” information, which society “received”. This is the “sender-receiver model”. The internet now offers society a possibility to talk back: the “debate model”.
Look at the Wikipedia, where activists can change articles to make them suit their own agendas. Or, if activists create a lot of noise, they can silence the voice of reasonable scholars.
I have experienced this myself, and I know others have had the same experience. Yet Wikipedia is the first result in most Google searches.
He then goes on to a rather political question, where Jona perhaps does not make his point as clearly as he might. But the point is a critical one. So let me paraphrase.
A government minister in his country has referred in a non-condemning way to Intelligent Design.[1] Scientists have attacked her. Non-scientists have defended her. But anyone doing a web search will only find the non-scientific stuff. Why? Because the scientific publications are all behind paywalls! So … anyone who looks into this will only get one side; and it happens to be the non-scientist side.
And worse yet, because only one side is heard:
You get the impression that she is the victim of a smear campaign by unthinking scientists.
Silencing one side, while the other occupies 100% of the public perception is an incredibly powerful a weapon to manufacture opinion. It has been used for this purpose by the political left in our society since around 1980, as a way to advance and normalise crazy causes, with great success. It is now being used to promote freakshow causes like “gay marriage”, and opposition — and everyone was opposed to this as recently as two years ago — is hardly heard. It’s a very, very powerful way to control what people think.
So it is not a trivial matter to observe that, for practical purposes, a situation has been created where bad information is the only kind available. Not at all.
The second basic lesson about online information is that, as long as there is no free access, bad information drives out good.
And to some fields of research, the damage is already done.
I hope that this verdict is overly negative. But it is hard for those of us who remember a world before the internet to imagine how the generation thinks, that does not remember a time before Wikipedia. Perhaps Jona is right here too.
Jona sums up:
To sum up: at this moment there is no good reason why students should use the internet. Let’s face it: the internet has failed.
As a tool for classroom learning, it most certainly has, although not for popularisation.
Paywalls are one of the reasons why.
- [1]I have no opinion myself on Intelligent Design, since I don’t know anything about it, although I do know some of the politics around it.↩
Dishonesty at the BBC – as usual
Over the last year or two I have noticed some curious reporting on the BBC website and Ceefax. Whenever there are violent attacks on Christians around the world, the story is often titled “Clashes between Christians and <whoever>”. It’s usually Moslem attacks on Christians, of course.
They did it again on Wednesday.
At least 16 people have been wounded after Muslims attacked a church and Christian homes in a village near the Egyptian capital, Cairo, officials say.
And how was it titled? Yup:
Coptic-Muslim clashes erupt in Egypt
The article tries to create a false equivalence to back this up. We are solemnly told that, four days earlier, some Moslem was complaining a Copt burned his shirt while ironing, and a punch-up ensued, in which firebombs were traded to and fro and a Moslem died. But the BBC didn’t report that. And even the BBC can’t conceal the one-sidedness of the “clashes”.
Last October, a suicide attack on a church in Alexandria killed 24 people.
Police in Dahshur early on [the previous] Wednesday fired teargas to stop a Muslim mob from setting fire to a church, but the rioters instead torched several Christian properties and three police cars, officials said.
Ten policemen were among the 16 injured, according to the authorities.
The office of the local Coptic archbishop of Giza said the entire Christian population of Dahshur had now fled, according to the Associated Press.
Doubtless the BBC would head that last detail “Moslems and Christians flee violence.”
I prefer honest information, myself.
BBKL site now pay-only
The Biographisch-Bibliographisches KirchenLexicon site is no more. Or, what comes to the same thing, has vanished behind a paywall.
It was free from 1996 until this year. From 2011 they asked for voluntary donations to fund the work, with little response. So now they have imposed a pay wall.
It’s not very clear why they suddenly need to monetise the site. It looks rather as if the decision was a commercial one. Bautz.de seems to be a publisher, with all that this implies.
But … there goes one of the very few worthwhile internet sites in the German language. Oh well.
Website for Sidonius Apollinaris
The last Roman of Gaul, Sidonius Apollinaris, has a new website dedicated to him! It doesn’t come up in a Google search, strangely, but is here:
Contents include an excellent bibliography, and there are also links to some of the items.
From my diary
I spent some time today reading the online French translations[1] of the poems of Sidonius Apollinaris. I was very struck by the way that the poet appeals repeatedly to the works of the early empire, to Horace and Sallust and Varro and Tacitus. I saw no mention of any later writers, indeed.
This evening I found myself wondering whether the Loeb edition and translation, Sidonius. Poems and letters, tr. W. B. Anderson, Harvard, 1936, was actually out of copyright in the USA. (Anderson died in 1959, I learn, so his work won’t come out of copyright in the European Union until 2029, by which time most of us will doubtless be dead). I suspect that it is. Copyright at that period was for 28 years, and could be renewed for a further 28 years. But I found no evidence that it had been renewed.
The situation is complicated, for works between 1923 and 1964, by the “copyright restoration” for foreign works that followed the US signing of the Berne convention in 1994. A fascinating paper by Peter B. Hirtle[2] discusses this subject, and makes the following, startling statements:
It has long been assumed that most of the works published from 1923 to 1964 in the US are currently in the public domain. Both non-profit and commercial digital libraries have dreamed of making this material available. Most programs have recognized as well that the restoration of US copyright in foreign works in 1996 has made it impossible for them to offer to the public the full text of most foreign works. What has been overlooked up to now is the difficulty that copyright restoration has created for anyone trying to determine if a work published in the United States is still protected by copyright. …
This paper has demonstrated that it is almost impossible to determine with certainty whether a work published from 1923 through 1963 in the US is in the public domain because of copyright restoration of foreign works.
What idiots our politicians are! What knaves the publishing lobbyists must be, to cause so much nuisance for so little gain for anyone, including themselves!
All the same, I tentatively conclude, after reading Hirtle’s paper carefully, that Anderson’s translation of the poems of Sidonius Apollinaris is indeed now in the public domain in the USA.
I have also been reading a paper discussing whether Sidonius actually criticises Majorian, in carmen 5, the Panegyric for Majorian.[3]. There is a long section in the panegyric in which a polemic against Majorian is placed in the mouth of Pelagia, wife of the deceased Aetius. Perhaps this does reflect the nervousness of the Gallo-Roman supporters of the unfortunate emperor Avitus towards the military newcomer Majorian. Desperate times, suspicion everywhere, harsh punishments for speaking the wrong thing, supporting the wrong candidate for the throne, while the empire fell apart … such times make men adopt whatever shifts they can.
Does it matter now? Well, only inasmuch as parallels might be drawn for later history. The assassination of Majorian in 461 by his own prime minister, the sinister Ricimer, made the fate of Gaul — to become France — certain. The western empire itself had only fifteen more years to live. And Majorian himself lives now only in the portrait drawn of him by Sidonius, partly in the panegyric, but more in the letters.
Yet … Majorian does indeed live in that portrait. He failed to save the Roman state. Probably no-one could have done so at that stage.
Yet, because of the words of Sidonius, we, fifteen centuries later, are discussing him.
UPDATE (20/7/2012): I find that vol. 1 of the Loeb, which includes all the poems, is in fact online at Archive.org, here.
- [1]At remacle.org.↩
- [2]Peter B. Hirtle, Copyright Renewal, Copyright Restoration, and the Difficulty of Determining Copyright Status, D-Lib Magazine 14.7/8, 2008. Online here.↩
- [3]Philip Rousseau, Sidonius and Majorian: The Censure in “Carmen” V, Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, Bd. 49, H. 2 (2nd Qtr., 2000), pp. 251-257. JSTOR url: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4436579 ↩
UK government promoting open access to research it funds?
The UK government has done something or other, according to The Register. But it’s not as clear as one might like:
Universities will be provided with funding to ensure that their academics’ research papers are made more widely available, the government has said.
The government broadly backed recommendations contained in a report by the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings in its policy aimed at supporting ‘open access’ to research.
The seven UK Research Councils will provide universities that establish ‘publication funds’ with grants in order that the organisations can pay publishers an ‘article processing charge’ (APC) to publish their work.
Erm, this sounds complicated. Why not simply require that government-funded work is open access? No open access, no funds?
“Where APCs are paid to publishers, the government would expect to see unrestricted access and use of the subject content …”
… Under the policy wholly or partially publically funded peer reviewed research papers will be required to be published in journals that comply with its open access policy and detail information such as how the “underlying research materials such as data, samples or models can be accessed”.
Wow. Complicated. And:
Willetts said that the government was happy to enable publishers to put embargoes that restrict access to content in certain circumstances. He said publishers should be able to protect the value of their work where their funding is not mainly reliant on APCs but that length embargo periods may not be justified in the public interest.
“Embargo periods allowed by funding bodies for publishers should be short where publishers have chosen not to take up the preferred option of their receiving an Article Processing Charge,” Willetts said.
Um, “embargo periods”?
It sounds very complicated, and expensive for the tax payer.
Let’s hope that underneath all this verbiage is a clear simple commitment that the tax payer should not pay for material which the tax payer cannot access.
UPDATE: It seems that I am not alone in being sceptical about this announcement. Bishop Hill comments:
All scientific research funded by the UK taxpayer is to become open source, according to an article in the Guardian. It seems that academics will be required to pay the fees to make their papers freely available.
Since few journals will solely publish papers by UK academics, this presumably means that the scientific publishers will retain the library subscriptions which are the bedrock of their profits, while gaining a massive windfall in the shape of open access fees for much of their content.
A good day to be a scientific publisher I think.
I suspect so. The Guardian article contains some sensible words by Stevan Harnad:
“The Finch committee’s recommendations look superficially as if they are supporting open access, but in reality they are strongly biased in favour of the interests of the publishing industry over the interests of UK research,” he said.
“Instead of recommending that the UK build on its historic lead in providing cost-free green open access, the committee has recommended spending a great deal of extra money — scarce research money — to pay publishers for “gold open access publishing. If the Finch committee recommendations are heeded, as David Willetts now proposes, the UK will lose both its global lead in open access and a great deal of public money — and worldwide open access will be set back at least a decade,” he said.
The phrase that springs to mind is “crony capitalism”, where the government is in the pocket of the vested interests. Yet this is OUR money being spent!
Tellingly the Register says:
The UK Publishers’ Association welcomed the plans.
Dumbarton Oaks Syriac resources now online
An interesting email:
I write to announce the publication of a new online resource at Dumbarton Oaks aimed at the community of Syriac studies. We have assembled numerous freely available, digitized texts — most notably tried-and-true scholarly instrumenta — and organized them into an annotated bibliography that covers several categories (lexica, grammars, histories of Syriac literature, etc.). We have pitched the site at Syriac students who may not know that they need these resources yet, but will be glad to see them all in one place when they do!
This new resource can be found at
http://www.doaks.org/research/byzantine/resources/syriac
You can read more about our goals on the Introduction page. We hope that this site will be of value to the Syriac community, especially those who do not have access to print copies of these (often rare) resources. We will continue to refine and enlarge these pages, and add new ones as well. Of course, we welcome helpful suggestions, comments, and corrections from the scholarly community.
As a caveat, we understand that some of the Google Books links may be useless to those outside of the US because of Google’s decisions regarding copyright law in various countries. Where available, we have tried to link resources on other reputable sites that do not have international restrictions (such as archive.org). We will continue to try to move our links to such sites in the future.