Tag: Information access

A marvellous collection of photographs – Following Hadrian, by Carole Raddato

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Over the last couple of months, I have become aware of another individual who, quietly, and without any fanfare, is making a real difference to ancient history online.  Her name is Carole Raddato, and she writes the Following Hadrian blog.

What she is doing is travelling all over the Roman Empire, and photographing its material remains.  The results appear on Flickr here.

She’s going into museums, and photographing exhibits, and placing them online.  In quantity:  there are over 14,000 photographs in that Flickr collection.  And at very high quality: far, far better than anything we see in published literature.

I became aware of her work, while working on the Mithras site.  Again and again I found that a striking, clear, good quality image would be … by Carole Raddato.  It might be in Wikimedia Commons (a site that takes a pretty casual attitude to copyrights of others); more usually on her own Flickr feed.

Again and again I would look for some artefact in some museum and then find … Miss Raddato had visited that museum and made a collection of photographs, all now freely online.

The path she is following – that of the Emperor Hadrian in his travels about the empire – is taking her to the major sites and repositories of the ancient and modern world.  The result is this marvellous collection of material.

A lot of people put holiday photos online.  They are of variable quality.  But I don’t know of anybody else who is undertaking such a herculean task, and doing so in a way that is of permanent value.

We are all in your debt, Madam.  May your camera flash never grow dim!

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Copyright and critical editions – a French court says the text is not copyright

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Today I learned via  of a fascinating court case in France, here, (in French).  The question is whether editing a critical text of an ancient author creates a copyright.

The dispute is between two companies, Droz and Garnier.  Garnier placed online the text (without apparatus or commentary) of certain medieval texts, using the text published by Droz.  Droz sued.

The court ruled:

Therefore it appears that the company Libraire Droz has not provided proof that the raw texts used by the society Classiques GN are protected by copyright.  Thus its cases, which are solely based on infringement, must be rejected.

It is worth reading the page, even as translated into English in the Google Translate version, because the points made are interesting and generally relevant.  A work is protected if it is fixed in form (i.e. an idea is not protected) and it is original in character, reflecting the personality of its author.  But the court stated:

However, it should be noted that the law of intellectual property is not meant to include all intellectual or scientific work, but only that based on a creative contribution which arise

This indicates the direction of the court’s thinking.  They are plainly familiar with the fact that one critical edition may differ only slightly from another, and argue that the process of textual criticism, since Lachmann, is largely mechanical.  Specifically copyright does not apply to someone doing a lot of tedious work; only to creative work.

This demonstrates enormous common sense on the part of the court.  Nobody, nobody, when the copyright laws were invented, imagined that stuff like a critical edition of an ancient text was involved.  They were thinking of novels, belles-lettres, poetry, composed by modern figures and sold for money.  They were quite right.

The practical effect, if we say that the raw text of an ancient author, as given in a critical edition, is the copyright of the editor, is to make the text of that ancient author into the property of this or that modern publishing house.   That, frankly, is ridiculous.

Of course the plaintiffs are appealing.  The case has considerable importance.  But I hope that we will get a clear ruling on this.

The commentary in a critical edition may reasonably be copyright.  The apparatus, largely compiled by mechanical methods, seems doubtful to me.  But the raw text … surely the whole point of the edition is NOT to create an original work, but rather to give us Homer, or Origen, or Martial, or Juvenal?

Let’s think of a modern example.  I do not believe that someone should acquire a copyright over my work, enough to allow him to bar access to others, simply because they did some work on my spelling, or fixed some errors from a corrupted hard disk file!  That would be the modern equivalent.  It’s palpably fraudulent.  So why should it be different, simply because the author lived long ago?

Let us raise a glass to the common sense of the French court, and hope that the higher courts are not pressured or bribed by publishing interests.

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Digitising ancient texts – the future that did not happen

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This morning I saw the following announcement:

We’re really proud to announce that EpiDoc XML versions of all 99 volumes of the monumental Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (CSEL) are now being added to the Open Greek and Latin Project‘s GitHub repository!

What it means, for non-techno junkies, is that someone has scanned the 99 volumes of the CSEL, turned them into text, encoded that within the XML format, and uploaded them to a standard open-access repository.  The point of the XML is to preserve the footnotes and other weird formatting.  It will take some kind of viewer to make this useful.

In a way this is good news.  Only half the CSEL has been online, in page images scanned by Google and Archive.org and others.

And yet … haven’t we been here before?

How is this different, in many ways, to what I was doing back in 1998?  I was taking printed Latin texts (by Tertullian), and creating an electronic text.  Mine was in HTML, rather than XML.  I didn’t always bother with apparatus – but then, there was only one of me doing it.

But essentially … isn’t this the same activity?

I was inspired by Harry Plantinga of the CCEL.  Even earlier than me – was it in 1995? – he had got Logos to digitise the 38 volumes of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, footnotes and all, and posted them online in text files.

Back then, we knew that the future was bright.  We knew that in ten years time, there would be a sea of texts online.

So what happened?  Because, unless I miss my calculation, it’s now sixteen years later.  And we’re only now getting something like this done, in much the same way as a solitary individual – myself – was doing it all those years ago.

The classical texts have mainly been the work of Bill Thayer at Lacus Curtius.  He’s been hacking away all these years.  Why isn’t his work long superceded?

The patristic texts have mainly been me.  Again, why hasn’t my site been overtaken by massive digitisation efforts?

What’s changed in the interval?  Yes, Google Books has scanned trillions of page images.  That has been great.  Microsoft started to do the same and then abandoned it.  Not so great.  Archive.org has flown the flag in its place, in a much lower budget way – well done, but not what we anticipated.  Publishers have, on the whole, been mainly concerned to ensure that Google Books would only educate Americans and people not living in Europe.  And nobody has cared.

In many ways the world is a far different place than it was in 1998, 16 years ago.  And yet, as we learn today, most of the ambitions of people like myself, like Harry, like Bill, and indeed others who have laboured in the same fields[1], have not been fulfilled.

Which is a bit sobering, really.

We are getting, gradually, the mass digitisations of manuscripts.  But … I was doing this back in 2000.  Undoubtedly I was ahead of my time, and I gave up after doing a handful.  But … with all the technical advances, surely in fourteen years we should be further down the line?

In other ways we are losing ground.  James Tauber created the electronic Greek New Testament in the MorphGNT text file, lemmatized and ready for processing by anybody.  The German bible society threatened litigation, on the basis that the Greek New Testament belongs to THEM, and not to some funny blokes named Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and offline it went.  Nothing replaced it.  Nobody cared.

What I take from this is that we really must not simply assume that stuff will come online any time soon.  It isn’t happening.  There are any number of initiatives, and all these are welcome.  We’re in a much better place, in some ways.  And yet … compared to the progress of technology, the content has hardly moved forward.

Will the classical internet ever truly come to be?  Or the patristic internet?  In our life-times?

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  1. [1]A list would be invidious – I’m just pulling a couple of names here, without disrespect to others.↩

Where have all the photos (of archaeology) gone? Gone to recycle bins, every one.

Posted on by Roger Pearse
Amphitheatre, Leptis Magna.
Amphitheatre, Leptis Magna.

There’s no getting away from it: the Roman city of Leptis Magna in Libya is gorgeous.  It’s situated by the sea, the surrounding area is very underdeveloped, thanks to Gaddafi’s tyranny, and it gives you such a great idea of what a Roman city looked like.  I’ve been twice, and would gladly go again.  Even the approach to the amphitheatre (left) is like something out of a movie.

This thought was prompted by looking through some photographs of the city online.  At the moment there is no package tourism to Libya.  Nor will there be, until some kind of government arises once more.

Meanwhile, we do have photographs.  Everyone who did go made copious photographs, and a lot of them appear online.  Which is rather fortunate, really.

A couple of days ago I was searching vainly for photographs of Graeco-Roman objects from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.  I found one site which presented as many photos of the Egyptian objects as it could find, with the note that photography was “no longer allowed” in the museum.  That particular policy seems very short-sighted now, considering the attempts to loot the museum during the revolution.  But at least some are online.

What I was looking for was the Mithraic monuments.  For some time now I’ve been collecting photographs of all sorts of Mithraic monuments for the Mithras site, to create a reference.  Even now I can tell that some interesting photos were once online, and no longer are.  But once offline, they are gone.

Sites like Archive.org, which retain copies of sites, often omit photographs from the pages that they archive.  Other sites misguidedly block archiving, which is sad when they then vanish in their turn.

We really do need a proper archive of photos uploaded to the web.  It is a shame to lose what has been made and has been uploaded, when we need not.  All that is required is will, disk-space, and some copyright-friendly location.

Archaeologists are particularly in need of a photographic archive.  Their trade is one of physical monuments.  You might think these are permanent enough, yet it seems remarkably hard even to locate them sometimes.  I have been unable to discover the whereabouts of the finds from the Carnarvon / Caernarfon mithraeum, since the closure of the museum.  Photographs would be invaluable… but of course I can’t make them if I can’t find the objects.  Again and again in Vermaseren’s Corpus Inscriptionum et Monumentum Religionis Mithriacae I find statements that such and such an altar is “lost”.  And, let’s face it … archaeologists are notoriously bad at publishing excavation reports.

While working on the Egyptian monuments in the CIMRM, I noticed that at least two photographs included in it seem to be reproduced (without credit) from earlier publications.  I don’t disapprove – on the contrary, such a catalogue of monuments might validly do just this.   I have often gone to older publications myself and found photographs of items, where the item is included in CIMRM but no photo is given.  But it shows that getting hold of images of monuments has long been a bottleneck.  All the same, I bet some tourist photos of them exist, uncatalogued and forgotten.

There’s a lot of room for improvement.  But it might start by taking rather more seriously the issue of archiving photographs that have been taken, that do exist, and could be of use.

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The decay of digital media

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This evening I was looking through some PDF’s of a Mithras reference volume, which a correspondent very kindly scanned for me some time back.   I keep a copy on my travelling laptop, and so when I am working away from home, I can work on the site in the evenings in the hotel.  I was, in fact, looking for information on the Nesce Mithraeum, in Latium; and, rather to my surprise, that page was missing.

So I decided to go through the PDF (which I received in parts of a few pages) and check whether any other pages were missing.  A few were, but I can obtain photocopies from a library and patch the PDF’s.

But I came to the end of the directory, and double-clicked on a file and … it wouldn’t open.  Adobe informed me that it was corrupt.

This was a surprise.  I knew the file must have been OK once.  All the files in that directory were emailed to me, and I certainly opened them all at least once, and often many more times.  How could it be corrupt?

Now I carry around with me a back-up of my hard disk, on external hard disk.  It’s kept up to date every weekend.  So I went to that and tried to open the same file.  And … it wouldn’t open.

Somehow the file that I had downloaded to my PC at home had become corrupt, at some point in the past.

In this case there was a happy ending.  I never got around to deleting the email(s) that sent me this book, and so I could just download the piece again.  And, sure enough, that was fine.

But that PDF file has never been anywhere except on my hard disk.  How could it have become corrupt, without any other intervention?

More seriously … I have gigabytes of PDFs of books.  How many of these, I wonder, have silently rotted?

Nor am I the only one.

Today I accessed a website discussing an obscure technical subject.  The article was less than a year old, but the links to samples and bitmaps no longer worked.

It’s not so long ago that I found that the zip files on the Electronic Journal of Mithraic Studies website – which seems pretty much abandoned – no longer unzip.  Somehow, at some point, in their state of neglect, they have rotted.  But how?

We need a way to check the integrity of our collections of electronic books.  There is no manner of use in having them, if they are not there when we need them.

I don’t know how it might be done; but done it needs to be.

Gentlemen … check your files!

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Finding archaeology online about Mithras

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m extremely busy at the moment adding material to the Mithras site.  At the moment this is driven by a list of Mithraeums discovered since 1960.  I am attempting to research each of these online, grab some text, some images, and create a page for it.  This is, inevitably, a very time-consuming business.

Several things have struck me while doing this.

It’s often really hard to work out what is the formal publication of an excavation.  You can search the web as much as you like; you will only find the printed sources most commonly referred to.  In the case of an obscure site, you may not find this, and will have to be content with webpages.

It’s very hard to get even a site plan of the excavation.

It’s very hard to get a list of “finds”, never mind a list of minor finds which may be of critical importance.

It’s also very difficult to physically obtain publications, in many cases.  The Vulci Mithraeum (il Mitreo di Vulci, for the benefit of the search engines, since nearly everything is in Italian) seems to be documented in an exhibition catalogue published by a certain Dr. Anna M. Moretti Sgubini.  The exhibition was ephemeral, and no copies of it are present in any Anglophone country.  I am considering writing to the author, on the off-chance that she has a PDF of her own work.  More and more people do, these days, but it’s not satisfactory.

I have also found that material placed online, in the “Electronic Journal of Mithraic Studies”, in zip files, has gradually become corrupt over the last 10 years and will not open any more.  Being in zip format, it isn’t archived anywhere.

All of this seems remarkably unsatisfactory.  Archaeology is considered a scientific discipline; yet these are fundamental problems.

Of course it may be that the problem is with me.  Perhaps all the archaeologists are “in the know”.  Some may read this and say, “What? You mean you didn’t know that it’s all at www.xyz.edu?  Haw haw!”  Well, if so, I don’t know.  Nor has such a resource come my way.

So I suspect that archaeologists need to consider how they use the web.  Indexes, catalogues, ways to find data — these are what the web is for.

There’s room for improvement here, chaps!

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Help! How can I get hold of this?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Time for a public appeal!  I’m trying to get hold of an exhibition catalogue, for an exhibition held at the town hall in Viterbo on 21 June 1997-10th January 1998, title: Il Mitreo di Vulci : Montalto di Castro, Palazzo del Comune, 21 giugno 1997-10 gennaio 1998, which is 43 p. and was written by a certain A.M. Sgubini Moretti (although the name may not be obvious, I think).

Copies exist in various Italian libraries: in Florence, in what might be Rome, and so on – a Google search on the title will bring up some OPACs.

But how on earth can I get hold of a copy?  And especially the colour illustrations?

Suggestions, however off the wall, very welcome!

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Italian items online!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I spend a very busy morning attempting to locate the publication of the Mithraeum in Vulci, in Etruria.  My search was rewarded, after around 3 hours persistence, by discovering that it was online!  It was certainly impossible to buy, probably because it seems to have been an exhibition catalogue.

The site that made this possible is new to me, and seems to be an official “Italian digital internet” site:

http://www.internetculturale.it/opencms/opencms/it/main/esplora/index.html?tipo=collezione

I searched on “mitreo” and there it was.

I’m not entirely clear what the remit of the site is.  But nevertheless, it seems to contain some very hard to find material!

UPDATE: Oh good grief … the PDF contains … only the cover and its reverse.  No content whatever!  Drat.

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Ancient Christian Writers volumes online at Archive.org

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A correspondant tells me of a website which lists the volumes of the ACW series, and, better, has links to some which are online at Archive.org!  The link is here.

Ah, those were the days, before century-long copyrights!!

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Getty your hand out of my wallet – some way to go on open access, I fear

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Getty Museum laudably makes some images available online.  Some of these (but not all) may be freely used for personal purposes online.  Most of the images on their site are NOT usable by anyone else, and they want money if we want to use any of them for scholarly purposes.

This simple statement is the outcome of some correspondence, which is worth detailing since I found the statements on their website confusing.

The Getty holds a statuette of Mithras riding a horse.  I’d give you a photo of this – they have one here – except that I can’t.  They want $15 if I let you see it.  Don’t worry, it’s not very special.  It’s probably not even Mithras.  But rather annoying that I can’t just post a picture here.  The object is not on display either, or I’d ask someone to go and take a photo.

But it gets more interesting.  Originally I gave the wrong link, to another item.  I got back:

We could agree to your request, but there would be a scholar rate fee of $15.00 to provide an image file and permission to publish the image on your site.  …

If you do decide to order the image and obtain permission to publish it, here is a link to the Museum’s rights & reproductions information page:

http://www.getty.edu/legal/image_request/index.html

Links to our order forms are at the bottom of the information page.  You would need to complete the form entitled Terms of Use for Electronic Media or Television/Film/Video.  Please note that even if there was an image on our website, we would ask you to complete this image and permission request form, and there would be a $15.00 fee.

Their “information page” was rather uninformative about permissions, which is why I had to write and ask.  But of course if they have to do some work to make an image, then the $15 fee is reasonable.  I fear, however, that making the image for them is something they would charge for again.

Once I gave them the right link, the answer was the same – $15 please.

I am a poor scholar.  They are a very rich institution.   It’s a bit rubbish for them to try to charge scholars for this.

What I’m doing is making a catalogue of all Mithraic monuments and items.  Why is it in the interest of the Getty to obstruct scholars doing this?

Basically you can’t use their images in any way.  Which is rather silly.

Still at least they have put an image of the item online.  And they are starting to make some of their images available for use by the great unwashed. I would guess that some people at the Getty understand that open access is the way.  But others haven’t got the message.

No doubt they will see that it makes no sense – and just irritates – to demand fees that nobody will pay to use images that nearly nobody cares about.

I would suggest that they do what the Walters have done, and allow ordinary people to use the images (suitably attributed) so long as money isn’t involved.  Nobody won from trying to stiff me for money.

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