Classical Bookworm

Designer Bookbinders’ First International Competition

noreply@blogger.com (Sylvia) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:01:00 +0000

Designer Bookbinders is a British society of bookbinders and they just held their first international competition at the Bodleian Library. Entrants were asked to interpret the theme of water, a very relevant topic as fresh water is becoming increasingly scarce due to overuse, pollution, deforestation, and climate change.

A total of 117 books were exhibited, and you can see the prize-winning books here. My favourite is by George Kirkpatrick. It’s not watery-looking like most of the others but I think it best emphasizes the life-giving nature of water. The idea is that a drop of water lands on the arid-looking front cover, seeps through, and causes a sudden eruption of vegetative growth on the back, including a golden shoot which clasps the book together. Wonderful.

via @asteger

How to Move a Blog from Typepad to Blogger

noreply@blogger.com (Sylvia) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:52:00 +0000

When I decided to move my blog from Typepad to Blogger, I went in search of technical information on how to accomplish this. There is no standard format for blog data, and at present Blogger cannot import blogs from other platforms, so I needed to find out how to convert the Typepad format to the Blogger format. What I found was . . . bupkus. I couldn’t find a single page or post on this particular transformation. There was lots of information on migrating from Typepad to Wordpress but nothing on moving to Blogger.

So, armed with congenital stubbornness and everything ever written by Bach, I went through an exhausting process of trial and error. Every time I hit a roadblock I’d search the web for clues and come up with something else to try. Eventually I got the whole thing figured out and I vowed to post the details online in case anyone else wants to make the same move (and I hope they do because Blogger rocks!). It’s my little contribution to the geekosphere.

As it turns out, moving from Typepad to Blogger is not terribly complicated. As the saying goes, it’s easy when you know how. It really comes down to using the right applications at each step in the process. Using the wrong one will get you nowhere, as I found out several times. Here is what worked for me:

Export your blog from Typepad.
(Manage | Import/Export | Export)
This exports all of your posts, pages, and comments in Movable Type Import Format. This is a simple text file with UTF-8 encoding, which is standard but it shouldn’t be edited in just any text editor (see below). Details on the structure of the file can be found here (you may need this later on).

Upload your images to an image host with predictable file paths.
I opted to use PhotoBucket, though I’m not entirely happy with their file management (you can’t view or search by filename). However it does produce predictable file paths which means you can update the image links in your blog with a simple search and replace (see next step). Picasa, Blogger’s image host, generates random image file paths and so you’d have to update each image link by hand if you went that way. Note that after December 15, 2008, Typepad started using randomly generated file paths for images and so any images posted since then have to be updated manually. Boo for Typepad!

Edit your export file with Notepad++.
Editing the Typepad export file with Notepad, Wordpad, or Word will do something to the format that prevents it from being converted to Blogger format later. Notepad++ is free and has advanced search and replace features that are crucial for this sort of work. It also handles accented and other special characters (i.e. Unicode), which the others do not. For safety’s sake, save a version of the file at every stage in your editing. This can help with later troubleshooting. There are a number of things you will want to fix:

Image links. Use search and replace to bulk-update image links to your new image hosting location. Before last December 15th, the Typepad image file path was:

http://user.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/YYYY/MM/DD/image.jpg

Use CTRL-R to open advanced search and replace, check “Regular Expr” and “Wrap,” and uncheck “Selection.” Set up a search and replace following this model:

Search: user.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/200[0-9]/[01][0-9]/[0123][0-9]/
Replace: imagehost.com/user/album/
(follow image host’s file structure)

The numbers in brackets represent possible numbers (e.g. 0 or 1 for the first number in a month). Fill in the bolded parts as appropriate. If you’ve been with Typepad for a few years, you might also have images directly in the /uncategorized/ folder. Browse through your export file to make sure you’ve found all the possible locations of your images

Keywords. Keywords in Typepad will become “labels” in Blogger (as will Typepad categories). If you don’t want all your keywords to become labels, you’ll have to delete them. If you only have a few keywords, it is probably easier to remove them in Blogger by selecting all posts and using the “Label Actions” dropdown box.

If you are going to delete your keywords and think you may have instances of “KEYWORDS:” in your text you’ll have to search for them first and alter them in some way so they don’t get involved in the search and replace. Try searching for “KEYWORDS: ” (i.e. with a space after) or “>KEYWORDS:<” (i.e. a separate line in html text) to find these. If you really need to keep them as is you can temporarily append a distinctive set of characters (e.g. $$$) and then remove them afterwards with search and replace.

Here’s how to remove the keywords:

Search (“Regular Expr” & “Selection” unchecked, “Match case” & “Wrap” checked): KEYWORDS:CTRL-M
(Note: CTRL-M inserts an invisible line break character)
Replace: KEYWORDS:

This puts the keywords on the same line as the head tag, which is necessary for the following search:

Search (as before but “Regular Expr” checked): KEYWORDS:.*
Replace: KEYWORDS:CTRL-M

Extra line breaks. Until recently Typepad inserted line breaks between paragraphs (and some other tags) in the post HTML, which made editing it easier, but unfortunately Blogger renders these as real line breaks, which creates extra space between paragraphs and and the ends of posts. There can be several of these breaks in a row, so it takes multiple searches to get them all:

Search (“Regular Expr” off): >CTRL-M<
Replace: ><
Search: >CTRL-M CTRL-M<
Replace:><
Search: >CTRL-M CTRL-M CTRL-M<
Replace:><
…and so on until no more are found

Don’t actually put spaces between each CTRL-M—I just did that here so they would be legible. At the end of this process each post should be in one lump of HTML. It’s messy but that’s the way Blogger likes it.

Your comment signatures. All the comments you left on your own blog will be linked to your old blog’s URL or your Typekey/Typepad Connect profile. Use search and replace to fix these as follows:

Search (“Regular Expr” off):
URL: http://user.typepad.com/blog/CTRL-MDate:
Replace:
http://www.blogger.com/profile/########CTRL-MDate:

Be sure to try alternative versions of your old URLs with and without a final slash. Repeat for Typekey and Typepad Connect profiles if you ever used them. Find your exact Blogger profile URL from your Blogger Dashboard (View Profile).

Anything else you can think of. Now’s the time to make any fiddly changes to your blog content. It’s a lot easier to search through a single text file than to edit posts individually once they’re in Blogger.

Split up your edited export file, if necessary.
The blog conversion application you’ll be using can’t handle files over 1MB. If your edited file is larger than this, split it up at the end of a post, which is marked with 8 hyphens. Each file should have “TITLE:” at the beginning and 8 hyphens at the end.

Convert your edited export file(s). (Almost there!)
Use the Googlecode Blog Converter for Movable Type to Blogger. As long as your file isn’t too big and the format hasn’t been corrupted, it should work first try. If you get an error, try converting an earlier version of your edited file to see if you can narrow down where the problem happened. Make sure none of your search/replacing has interfered with the Movable Type format. I had one file conversion fail because of a single missing line break! This is why you should save your export file after every edit.

Import into Blogger.
If you haven’t set up a new blog in Blogger do so now. Under the Settings tab click “Import blog” and choose the xml file(s) you produced with the blog converter. Once you hit “Import” any number of things could happen. You’re supposed to see a screen with a sort of progress bar and messages about what is being imported. At the end you should get a message saying how many posts and comments were imported. More likely you will get an error message, or a hung progress page, or some half-loaded mystery page with nothing on it. Don’t despair. Go to Posting | Edit Posts and you may find your posts are there anyway. If not, wait a minute and refresh. If they’re really truly not there, try importing again. You may have to try three or four times, but it will work eventually.

That’s the end of the data migration! There are just a few more details to take care of in Blogger:

Theme: If you haven’t already, choose a theme for your blog. This will determine both the look and the layout of your blog. There are countless free themes available for download online—there’s no need to have a Blogger blog that looks like every other Blogger blog! Just beware that older themes may have to be modified to allow embedded comments (comments below the post). This is usually just a matter of inserting a line of code. Alternatively, under “Edit HTML” you can choose “Revert widget templates to default,” though this may reverse some of the customization of your theme. Always back up your theme before making any changes!

Sidebars: You’ll have to manually set up your sidebars, headers, and footers using Blogger’s Layout page. Though it’s a bit tedious to copy and paste your blogrolls, link lists, and other widgets, you’ll find that it’s much easier to edit and rearrange all of that content in Blogger than it was in Typepad.

One tricky point for book-bloggers is what to do about book lists since Blogger doesn’t have an automated book list gadget. One way around that is to use widgets from third party sources like Amazon, LibraryThing, or Shelfari. Or if you’re comfortable with a little HTML you can make your own with a blank HTML gadget. Once you have a template worked out then it’s just a matter of inserting the relevant book details. Here’s an example of simple code for a sidebar book list for someone with an Amazon associates account:

<ul>

<!—BOOK ONE -->
<li style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 15px; padding: 0; text-indent: 0;">
<a href=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ISBN/associatesID/>
<img src=http://images.amazon.com/images/P/ISBN.01._SCTHUMBZZZ_.jpg /
style="float: left; margin: 0px 10px 15px 0px;"/>
BOOK TITLE AUTHOR</a></li>


<li style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 15px; padding: 0; text-indent: 0;">
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ISBN/associatesID"/>
<img src=http://images.amazon.com/images/P/ISBN.01._SCTHUMBZZZ_.jpg /
style="float: left; margin: 0px 10px 15px 0px;"/>
BOOK TITLE AUTHOR</a></li>

<!—BOOK THREE --> …

</ul>

Simply update the parts in bold and you’re done. Be sure to use the 10-digit ISBN to access Amazon. They have yet to switch to ISBN-13 for their URLs.

Internal Links: By moving your blog, all your internal links will be broken. Every link in your blog to one of your blog pages will have to be updated. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to do this. Use search to find internal links in your Typepad export file (since it’s easy to work with), then find the new locations of both the post with the internal link and the post it is linking to, and update the link with the new address. It’s not fun but hopefully there won’t be too many of them.

Recent images: Images posted since December 15, 2008 will have some Typepad gobbledegook for an address, so you’ll have to update them with the new URL for the image at your image host (see above). Search your Typepad export file for “user.typepad.com/.a/” to find the locations of your image links.

Files: If you had uploaded any files to Typepad to share on your blog—music, home video, documents, etc.—you’ll have to find somewhere to host them because they can’t be uploaded to Blogger. I use the free web folder provided by my ISP. It’s not large but it’s large enough for my purposes.

Tell Google: Sign up for a Google Webmasters account and register your new blog so that Google will start indexing it right away. This will enable people to find your new blog via Google search.

Enjoy the wonders of Blogger!
That’s it, you’re done! You can now enjoy the speed, reliability, functionality, and versatility of Blogger. One of the greatest things about Blogger, which is particularly helpful when you are setting up your blog, is the ability to edit any element from the blog itself. If you are logged in to Google you’ll see tool icons below every element of your blog. Just click on one to edit the content of that section and it will be updated immediately without having to refresh the page. Brilliant.

Because I was making it up as I went along, I didn’t follow precisely these steps in exactly this order when I was migrating my blogs to Blogger. I ended up having to go back and edit some things after uploading to Blogger. In doing that I found that while Notepad++ is great for text files, it has trouble with large XML files (which is the format Blogger exports in). So if you want to bulk-edit an existing Blogger blog, try using firstobject XML Editor (foxe). It’s fast and simple, though the search and replace is very basic (no regular expressions or line break characters).

I should mention that I use Windows Live Writer to actually write my blog posts. I started using it after the last Typepad “upgrade” because their “improved” editor was practically unusable. I continue to use it because it is so slick and easy to use, and shows you exactly how your post will look as you’re typing it. It also has some nice image formatting options and helpful third-party plug-ins (including one that automatically posts a tweet when you publish). It’s free, and it’s just extremely good.

Finally, I’ve discovered a handy tool for backing up your entire blog, images and all. HTTrack is a free application that will download every page from a website and download all the images and other paraphernalia that goes with it. This might be a handy thing to do before deleting your old blog just to have a record of what was there in case you need to restore something at your new blog. You can never have enough backups, right?

I hope this doesn’t all sound too daunting. It’s not difficult if you go step-by-step. Try printing out this post (with Internet Explorer; Firefox doesn’t print well) and using it as a checklist. I took a whole lot of notes as I went along and that was very helpful in keeping things straight. It does take time but it is worth it to get away from the cost, limitations, and frustrations of Typepad. This is one case where you don’t get what you pay for! Blogger, despite being free, is a powerful blog host and will let you do just about anything you can imagine. I definitely encourage Typepad users to take a look at Blogger and consider making the switch. You won’t regret it!

“Reading the OED” by Ammon Shea

noreply@blogger.com (Sylvia) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 21:58:00 +0000

I’ve always considered myself something of a dictionary-lover. I have half a dozen English dictionaries, ranging in size from pocketbook to tombstone, all strategically located for specific applications. The smallest ones, both from the 50’s to capture older literary words, are next to my bed for novel-reading. A chunky little Concise Oxford from 1964 does duty in my lectory, and a Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate stands by my study desk. Finally, by my computer desk I have a Canadian Oxford and my big guns, the two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (all words used since 1700 plus Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, and the KJV).

As it turns out, my regard for and collection of dictionaries is minuscule compared to those of Ammon Shea. He has about a thousand dictionaries (and related books) stuffed in his New York apartment, and has actually read a number of his dictionaries, cover to cover. Dictionaries are simply the love of his life. Obviously, an obsession like that could only lead to one place: the Oxford English Dictionary. Sure enough, he spent a year reading the entire 20-volume OED, and has recounted his journey in Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages.

The book consists of one chapter for each letter of the English alphabet, with a short section of prose and a selection of his favourite words from that letter. Shea writes about the OED, his love of dictionaries, and the trials of reading the OED. It takes until G to find a quiet-enough place to read (basement of a college library), and he gets such regular headaches that he comes to regard them as pleasantly familiar reading companions. The headaches abate somewhat after he breaks down and gets glasses, but his task is no less gruelling thereafter. Fuelled by gallons of coffee, he reads for something like 10 hours a day. I don’t think I could read the most engaging novels for that length of time, let alone a dictionary. The best I’ve done is read the Bible for three hours a day one Lent. Pretty paltry compared to Shea’s year-long odyssey.

I must admit I was rather disappointed with the lexicon he collected for this book. For one thing, the only information you get about each word is a short definition. There is no etymology, unless he mentions it in his annotations, and apparently copyright concerns prevented him from including any text from the actual OED, including the literary references that are its hallmark. It seems pretty short-sighted of Oxford not to allow quotations from the OED in what is more or less a book-length advertisement for it. Have you ever heard of a book about another book without any quotations? That is what we have here, and it means that the reader doesn’t really get any of the OED experience. It’s an opportunity lost, I think.

My other disappointment with the word lists is that like A.J. Jacobs, who read the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Shea devotes altogether too much attention to the things that make teenage boys giggle. He has already co-authored a book on obscure naughty words, but apparently that wasn’t enough. Not a letter went by without references to various bodily functions, and drunkenness and raunch were much in evidence also. I could have done without it.

Overall the book is light and breezy (if New York misanthropy can be light and breezy) and a very quick read. In a way it is not really for the established dictionary enthusiast. There is almost no discussion of the kind of technical work that goes into a dictionary, or indeed on the specific content of the OED. He touches on the subject when he discusses “set,” the word with the longest entry in the OED, but that’s about it. This is not a book that will tell you much about dictionaries or the OED, though Shea does provide a short bibliography with books that will.

For Shea it seems the journey is the destination. He simply enjoys reading dictionaries. No sooner had he finished reading the OED than he decided to read it again, this time without a deadline, allowing himself to look up intriguing cross-references or literary quotations. I think he might have produced a more substantial book if he had done that the first time around, but that is probably not what publishers are looking for. Feats of strength sell better than thoughtful sauntering. I guess it is up to us to do our own thoughtful sauntering.

Housekeeping: Links Astray and Stroppy Comment Boxes

noreply@blogger.com (Sylvia) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:49:00 +0000

Moving a blog is not unlike moving house: some things inevitably get broken or go missing. In the case of this blog it appears that some links have gone astray so I am now in the process of going through and checking them all. I’m also updating all 294 internal links so you won’t be sent back to my glacially slow old blog on Typepad (reason #27 why I left).

If you’ve had trouble leaving a comment here, give it another try as I’ve changed my settings to broaden the commenting options. And if you see anything else amiss, do feel free to leave a comment or send an email and let me know. Thanks!

UPDATE: I tidied up the template and that is supposed to solve commenting problems. The template I'm using predates embedded comments so it probably didn't have the right code for that section. Fingers crossed...

Ammon Shea: The Making of a Bibliophile

noreply@blogger.com (Sylvia) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 01:26:00 +0000

I’ve always suspected that my parents’ reasons for steering us away from TV had mainly to do with the fact that there were four of us living in a small tenement apartment, and if one person was watching TV the rest of the family had no real choice but to be exposed to it as well. Books, on the other hand, could be read without disturbing anyone else. Most evenings from my childhood that I remember consisted of each of the four of us sitting in the living room, either reading our own book, or having a book read out loud.

My parents also had the habit of reading us bedtime stories that were completely incommensurate with our age, and when my brother and I were seven and nine we were being lulled to sleep by Richmond Lattimore’s translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, Robert Fitzgerald’s Aeneid, and Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. I don’t think they had the intent of educating us young, or believed that we were unduly precocious—they just read what they wanted to read, and we happened to be the ones who were listening.

I bought my first book for myself when I was ten. Stuck at a beach somewhere near the end of Cape Cod one summer, and eventually bored by the normal pursuits of summer, I happened into the clapboard shack by the parking lot that served as a combination of hot dog stand and purveyor of cheap souvenirs. In the back of the store was a shaky wire carousel full of aged paperbacks….

…I grabbed the first book that caught my eye—Three Tickets to Adventure by Gerald Durrell. It was a memoir of sorts, recounting the trials and travails of being an animal collector for zoos in the 1950s.

It was instantly the most transporting experience I could imagine. I had been an avid reader, prone to spending more time while at school in the library than in the classroom, but this was somehow different. Here, fully realized, was the idea that one could just go and find a book that one wanted to read, buy it, and get joyfully and irretrievably lost in its pages.

I suppose it helped that the book I happened upon was humorous and well written (its author to this day remains one of my favorite writers), but more important that that was the idea of escaping into a book. Suddenly it was unclear to me why people bothered to do anything besides read, unless it was of necessity.

I became obsessive about reading, and was not terribly discriminating in my tastes. Gone With the Wind interested me every bit as much as Bullfinch’s Mythology. I would find an author or a genre that seemed acceptable and proceed to shovel everything I could find into my head….

At some point my parents became concerned with the amount of time I spent reading. When I was twelve my father began kicking me out of the house on weekends so that I wouldn’t lie on the couch all day with my nose in a book. All this accomplished was to give me the impetus to go out and find new volumes to read. I would walk several miles downtown, to Fifty-firth Street and Fifth Avenue, where Doubleday had its flagship store. I was more than content to perch on an uncomfortable stool reading all day and then walk home, pretending that I’d been out and about and performing energetic childhood activities for hours.

I’ve never been prone to buying fancy clothes, or meals in nice restaurants. But I’ve always allowed myself to buy books, no matter how meager a budget I was living on at the time. Anytime I come across a book that holds the slightest potential that someday I may want to read some part of it I pick it up and bring it home. It isn’t a mania for collecting—it’s a defense against boredom. The fact that my shelves are filled with things I haven’t yet read and want to, and things that I’ve read before and want to revisit, means I will never be at a loss for entertainment at home.

—Ammon Shea, Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages

Thanks to this book I have learned some very useful and pertinent words. My favourites among these are:

Petrichor: The pleasant loamy smell of rain on the ground, especially after a long dry spell.
I love this smell and never had a word to describe it. Now I do.

Psithurism: The whispering of leaves moved by the wind.
Nice example of onomatopoeia.

Lectory: A place for reading.
See also cozy reading corner.

Onomatomania: Vexation at having difficulty in finding the right word.
Reading the OED may be the cure for this, if one can tolerate the side-effects (headaches, aphasia due to the logjam of words in one’s head, being thought strange by librarians).

“Decoding the Heavens” by Jo Marchant

noreply@blogger.com (Sylvia) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 21:19:00 +0000

Decoding the Heavens: A 2,000-Year-Old Computer—And the Century-Long Search to Discover its Secrets (phew! long title!) is a very well-written and well-researched account of the discovery and study of the Antikythera Mechanism. The Antikythera Mechanism (which I’ve posted about before) is a complex geared device made in Greece in the second century B.C. and recovered from an ancient shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901. Put simply, it displays the positions of heavenly bodies over time. By turning a knob on the side, pointers on three dials mark the passage of time on various scales—solar months, lunar months, Olympiads, etc.—and predicts the positions of the sun, moon (with its phases), important zodiacal stars and possibly the known planets as well. It represents not only the state of the art of astronomy at the time, but also the most advanced mechanical engineering known from the ancient world. However it was probably not a scientific instrument. Why turn a knob around and around when you can easily look things up in a table or do a quick calculation? It is thought that this was actually a luxury item, a personal planetarium for some rich and powerful individual who wanted to have the universe at his fingertips.

We know all this now, but it took a long time and a tremendous amount of painstaking work to get to this point. The mechanism itself is in pieces and badly corroded by sea water. Early archaeologists paid little attention to it. Attempts were made to study it visually, but it was not until it was x-rayed that it started to reveal its true functions. Jo Marchant tells the story of the individuals who caught the Antikythera bug and studied it obsessively for years, sometimes at great personal risk and cost, sometimes without giving due credit to their predecessors and colleagues. They all wanted to be known as the one who discovered what the Antikythera Mechanism did.

This made me think about how science works. The macro view is that knowledge is built up, brick by brick, on the foundation of those that came before—a sort of grand collaboration over time. But the micro view is individuals striving to make major discoveries all by themselves and not being too particular about how they cut out the competition. Would cooperation achieve greater results, or does the lure of glory accelerate scientific progress?

In any case, the lure of glory has led us to understand the Antikythera Mechanism, though some details remain murky. It is likely that it showed the position of the 5 planets then known to the Greeks but those parts of the mechanism are missing except for one gear. Some of the inscriptions on the faces of the device—instructions for its use—have also been lost to corrosion. We still don’t know for sure who made it, where it was made, or who it was made for. But I think what we do know about it is more important that what we don’t. It tells us that the ancient Greeks were far more sophisticated engineers than we though, and more importantly, it tells us to be more careful about making assumptions about the past. So many artefacts have been lost to time and accident, and genius can be so fleeting, that we shouldn’t assume we’ve already seen it all. Though it is possible to trace some legacy of this technology through time to modern clock-builders, the Antikythera Mechanism really represents a geographically-isolated tradition that was snuffed out by the Roman conquest of Greece. There are contemporary accounts of similar geared instruments but, in the absence of hard evidence, scholars dismissed them as fables. If it were not for the accidental discovery of the shipwreck of the island of Antikythera, we would, in our hubris, have continued to underestimate ancient Greek technology. Two thousand years later and the Greeks still have much to teach us.

Classical Bookworm Comes to Blogger!

noreply@blogger.com (Sylvia) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 02:31:00 +0000

Welcome to the new Classical Bookworm at Blogger! After years of frustration with Typepad I have finally abandoned ship and established a new home at Blogger. I’m absolutely thrilled to be here. Setting up this blog has made me realize how much potential this platform has, and with Google behind it I think I can count on Blogger to deliver the kind of innovative features we webheads crave.

Speaking of Google innovations, I couldn’t have made the move without Googlecode’s blog conversion tool. Actually there are several, but I (obviously) used the one to convert from Typepad to Blogger. The only hard part was tidying up my Typepad export file—updating image links, fixing formatting, and removing extraneous material. Editing this file was an unholy bushwhack through Devil’s club in a blackfly-infested swamp until I discovered Notepad++. Unlike Notepad, Wordpad, and Word, Notepad++ didn’t mess with the file encoding and so didn’t cause problems down the line. In fact it was a dream to use, which is not surprising because it was designed just for this sort of work. Countless thanks to the good people at SourceForge.net for making it available.

The beautiful template came from OurBlogTemplates.com, and I’m grateful to the all-knowing interwebs for supplying various bits of code I needed to tweak the template just the way I like it. I should also thank Stefanie for some very astute design advice, and the Extremely Fluffy Cat for providing stress reduction when I was lost in a forest of CSS and XML. The soundtrack for my labours was provided by J.S. Bach.

Now that the formalities are over, how about a little entertainment? I’ve posted this before, but with the Confederations Cup. going on right now it seems appropriate to bring it back. Oee Hellas Ole Ole!

Anne of Green Gables: Orphans and Kangaroos

noreply@blogger.com (Sylvia) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:27:00 +0000

“Matthew went to Bright River. We’re getting a little boy from an orphan asylum in Nova Scotia and he’s coming on the train to-night.”
If Marilla had said that Matthew had gone to Bright River to meet a kangaroo from Australia Mrs. Rachel could not have been more astonished. She was actually stricken dumb for five seconds.
—Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

I’m not sure how I managed to grow up in this country without reading Anne of Green Gables. It is undoubtedly our best-loved children’s classic (though Wikipedia says it was written for a general audience). Of course I’ve seen the wonderful CBC production with Megan Follows, but I hadn’t ever read the book. I bought a copy last year in honour of Anne’s centenary but didn’t get around to opening it. Finally now I am listening to the audiobook, and, not surprisingly, it is a complete delight. I’m still laughing about that kangaroo comment. Things like that don’t translate to the screen, so even though I know exactly what happens in the story I expect to enjoy this book thoroughly. And since there are a total of 8 Anne books, I have plenty more to look forward to.

Read Without Ceasing

noreply@blogger.com (Sylvia) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:55:00 +0000

Sometime in the late eighties, though, when I was in my twenties, I started going to Jahorina in the summer for long reading holidays. I would pack my little fićo (the Yugoslav replica of a Fiat 600) with books and tapes and move up there for a month or so. I was still living with my parents then, which, besides threatening my rightful privacy and personal sovereignty, made reading with sustained attention pretty hard—my parents were prone to designing elaborate chores for others to accomplish. But in our cabin I could read for eight to ten hours a day, fully in charge of my own time, which I regimented like a monk. I interrupted my monastic mission only to attend to the needs of my foolish body, which, in addition to food and coffee, demanded some occasional exertion. Hence, I went for long hikes up the mountain, to the harsh, barren landscape above the tree line. I avoided other people and delayed for as long as possible my trips on foot to the supermarket, a couple of miles away.
For weeks before leaving for the mountain, I would be assembling my reading list. There were all kinds of books on it: from John le Carré’s Smiley novels to scholarly works on the origins of the Old Testament myths; from anthologies of contemporary American short stories to the Prince Valiant comic books. At the top of the list were the thick classic novels that I couldn’t focus on in the city, what with my parents’ choral nagging and the daily temptations of urban life.
In the cabin, I would enter a kind of hypersensitive trance that allowed me to average four hundred pages a day. The book would become a vast, intricate space in my head where I stayed even when eating, hiking, or sleeping. It took me less than a week to read “War and Peace,” for example, and Bolkonsky and Natasha showed up regularly in my dreams. And while I was reading “The Magic Mountain,” on my hikes I conducted conversations with imaginary partners, not unlike the ones between Castorp and Settembrini in Thomas Mann’s novel.
… I went to the mountain to replenish my mind, to reboot its language apparatus. My reclusion worried my parents, and my friends thought I was crazy. But I loved the silence cushioning me while I read.
—Aleksandar Hemon, “The Magic Mountain”

What reader wouldn’t love such a distraction-free environment? My poor books find it hard to compete with all the other projects and amusements in my life. They are just one in a crowd of possible occupations, and being the least time-sensitive, they are too often passed over. DVDs must be returned, gardens must be weeded, appointments must be kept, but books can wait. Is there anything more humble and patient than a book?

via pausetowonder

Derek Price, King of the Autodidacts

noreply@blogger.com (Sylvia) — Fri, 22 May 2009 15:45:00 +0000

[Derek de Solla Price] was born in 1922 to Philip Price, a tailor, and Fanny de Solla, a singer. The couple didn’t have many material possessions, but they had enough money to indulge their young son in his love of Meccano, which was all the rage at the time. With enough ingenuity, the red and green painted girders, pulleys and cogs could be built into pretty much anything a boy could imagine—a bridge, a crane, a car, a spaceship—and Price wasn’t short of either ingenuity or imagination. The toy instilled in him a passion for mechanics and for how things work, which stayed with him for life….
…
Despite his talent, Price didn’t have the money or the background to go to university, so he followed a less conventional route to pursuing the subjects that he loved. He got a job as a lab assistant at the newly opened South West Essex Technical College, which enabled him to study part-time for a degree at the University of London. The physics equipment there was one glorious step up from Meccano. Square and black with clunky dials and flickering green screens, the oscilloscopes, voltmeters and spectrometers were as heavy as stones, and packed full to bursting with valves and wiring. With such instruments you could make sense of things; you could measure the whole world! Price spend hours taking these devices apart, tinkering with them and putting them back together, until his fingers and his heart were intimately familiar with their workings.
He got his degree in physics and maths in 1942 and the college—seriously short-staffed because of the war—instantly promoted him to lecturer. He worked in one classroom often for eight hours straight, learning the curriculum as he taught it. He also carried out research for the military on the optics of molten metals, and the University of London awarded him a PhD for it in 1946. Once the war ended, however, there was no job for him in London… He accepted a teaching position at the young Raffles College in Singapore….
Singapore was wonderful and exotic and it inspired in Price a new love for oriental culture and its history. It also introduced him to the history of science. Raffles College acquired a full set of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society—the journal of Britain’s foremost scientific body, with such worthy members over the centuries as Humphry Davy, Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke. The college library was still being built, so Price seized his chance and took the beautiful calf-bound volumes home with him—into ‘protective custody’, he joked. Accustomed by now to teaching himself everything, he used them as bedtime reading, starting with the first volume from 1665 and working his way through.
—Jo Marchant, Decoding the Heavens: A 2,000-Year-Old Computer—and the Century-Long Search to Discover its Secrets

Price’s reading of the Royal Society papers aroused an interest in the history of science, particularly the history of scientific instruments, especially clockwork and astronomical instruments. When he found out about the Antikythera Mechanism there was only one thing to do: go to Athens!

The Antikythera Wreck and Archaeological Oopses

noreply@blogger.com (Sylvia) — Sat, 09 May 2009 17:57:00 +0000

I’ve posted before about the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek clockwork device that could predict the positions of the moon, the sun, and the known planets. It was found in the first shipwreck ever to be explored by archaeologists, located on a thirty metre-deep shelf off the island of Antikythera in the Ionian Sea. For a long time the corroded lump of bronze was overlooked because of the other astonishing treasures found at the site, including large bronze and marble statues that have been displayed in Athens with much pride since their recovery in 1901.

As it was the first ever underwater archaeological expedition, pushing the limits of the diving technology of the time, things weren’t done in as scientific a manner as they would be today. The archaeologists themselves were not divers, so they never saw the artefacts in situ. Not only did they lose all of the contextual information associated with the objects, there were other unfortunate consequences:

Then the divers announced a further problem: part of the wreck, they said, was obscured by enormous boulders. After some discussion the archaeologists worked out that these must be rocks from the cliff above, dislodged at some time by an earthquake, and soon devised a strategy for shifting them.
The instructed the divers to dig tunnels underneath the boulders, then twine strong ropes around them several times, an arduous task that took more than 20 dives for each boulder. The other end of the rope was attached to the sturdy Mykale (brought out again from Athens for the task) which then steamed at full power towards the open sea. Once dislodged from the wreck, the boulders were to be released from the ropes, rolled down the slope and into the depths below.
…
But then the minister Staïs, who was visiting, had a startling thought. What if the ‘boulders’ were actually colossal statues, so overgrown and corroded that the [nitrogen narcosis-]befuddled divers, working in the dim light of the wreck site, had failed to recognize them? He ordered the next bolder to be brought to the surface—at considerable further risk to the ship. After some tense moments there was a cheering from the decks as it heaved into view through the clear water. It was a huge, muscular Hercules, complete with club and lionskin—eroded but still recognizable as similar in style to the world-famous Farnese Hercules, kept in the Naples Museum. Presumably, they preferred not to dwell on the statues that had already been rolled forever out of reach.
—Jo Marchant, Decoding the Heavens: A 2,000-Year-Old Computer—and the Century-Long Search to Discover its Secrets

Oops. The statues were obviously seriously eroded—marble melts in seawater—but it is painful to think of what might have been lost. Though the shipwreck has been revisited since its original discovery, I haven’t found any sign of an attempt to retrieve those lost statues. For now, along with countless other ancient treasures, they remain the property of the sea.

Happy World Book and Copyright Day!

noreply@blogger.com (Sylvia) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:11:00 +0000

I have the feeling that world events have preoccupied the good people at UNESCO because there isn’t much to see at their World Book & Copyright Day website this year. Nevertheless, public events are being held, including another continuous reading of Don Quixote in Spain, where World Book Day started. You can follow the reading on Cervantes TV (yes, Miguel de Cervantes has his own web TV channel!). I think I’ll be celebrating by dusting off my copy of Don Quixote and seeing if I can pick up where I left off. It’s a good thing I was taking notes or I’d have to start over!

"A Great Idea at the Time" by Alex Beam

noreply@blogger.com (Sylvia) — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 17:52:00 +0000

As you can probably tell from my right sidebar, I am a fan of the Great Books movement, so there was no question of me reading A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books by Alex Beam. Alas, the humorous title is followed by chapter after derisive chapter portraying the architects of the movement as wackos and its followers as weirdos. It seems to be assumed that books by “dead white males” (a phrase repeated countless times in this book) couldn’t possibly contain any worthwhile or relevant content (mainly because they were written by dead white males), and therefore anyone championing them is by definition quixotic (apologies for the dead white male book reference).

Beam puts the magnifying glass on the movement’s missteps: user-unfriendly book design (Great Books of the Western World), overzealous door-to-door salesmen, horse-trading over the canon, and public bickering over pedagogical philosophies. It’s a bit like reality TV in book form: show all the exciting conflict and scandal, and cut out the boring 95% where things go well and people are happy. No doubt it sells but it does a disservice to the books in question and those who appreciate them.

What makes the whole thing perverse is that in the last chapter Beam sheepishly admits that he actually likes the great books, that they are indeed better than other books, that they are the foundation of our culture, and that they are still very much alive and all around us if we have the eyes to see them. Why couldn’t he start out that way? Is it so uncool these days to value and appreciate things that have real human meaning? Beam does suggest that youngsters who are interested in the classics are unmitigated nerds. He is also a journalist and it seems he couldn’t shake the obligatory mood of cynicism and nihilism that pervades the news media today.

Beam does seem to genuinely appreciate the classics to some extent, but they get no substantial mention in the course of the book. They only seem to be taken seriously in the appendix, a list of the works in the Great Books of the Western World annotated by Beam. Although the annotations are extremely short, mostly phrases or short quotations, it is the only place in the book where the content of these books is given any real attention. But it is probably too little too late for any reader who is not already a confirmed “great bookie.” Those for whom “dead white male” is a red flag will come away with the notion that those who like the great books are just as comical and irrelevant as the old men in togas who wrote them so long ago. Too bad.

For a more dispassionate review of this book, visit So Many Books.

St. John's College Seminar on Agamemnon

noreply@blogger.com (Sylvia) — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 19:51:00 +0000

This video is much better in the original Greek.

Check out the related videos for other SJC Great Books hilarity.

sort of via A Great Idea at the Time

"The History of Astronomy"—A Very Short Review

noreply@blogger.com (Sylvia) — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 23:27:00 +0000

I recently finished the first book on my list for the Astronomy Reading Challenge. The History of Astronomy: A Very Short Introduction by Michael Hoskin is part of a series of “very short introductions” covering a dazzling variety of topics, published by Oxford. This very slender but dense volume covers the history of astronomy from prehistory to the mid-19th century, just before the birth of modern astrophysics. It tells the story of how humans gradually grew to understand the true nature of the solar system and started exploring the cosmos with the help of telescopes.

Astronomy began as astrology, an attempt to understand and predict events by the movement of the stars and planets. The Babylonians were particularly eager astrologers, and their meticulous records were very valuable to later researchers trying to create accurate calendars and navigational aids, and ultimately for those trying to study the physical nature of the planets and stars.

While I was reading the book I was also perusing my new Peterson Field Guide to Stars and Planets and was struck by the fact that though we know so much more about the universe than the ancients, we still talk about what we see in the sky in much the same way. Stars are still mapped on the “celestial sphere,” very much like the sphere studded with stars that early astronomers conceived, complete with north and south poles. Star charts are bisected by the “ecliptic,” the path the sun takes across the sky, even though we know it is the Earth that is moving. Astronomers talk about stars and planets rising and setting, and we still locate everything in the cosmos as we always have, relative to our position on the Earth. As much as we can turn the solar system, galaxy and universe around in our minds and view them from any angle, we only ever actually view them from the same place the ancient Greeks did, right here on our wobbly little planet, or just above it in the case of space telescopes. If a medieval astronomer used to using an astrolabe was brought here in a time machine, he would probably have a much easier time finding his way around the sky than I do, no matter how much I might know about galaxies and black holes. I actually find it quite confusing to consider the stars and planets from an Earth-centered perspective, but since I’m on Earth I had probably better get used to it!

I have two other very short introductions waiting to be tackled next, on Galaxies and Cosmology. I look forward to more enjoyable astronomical confusion!

Get Ready for 100 Hours of Astronomy!

noreply@blogger.com (Sylvia) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 22:04:00 +0000

Starting Thursday astronomers all over the world will be sharing their work with the public for 100 hours straight. Over 1500 events in 130 countries have been planned for the 100 Hours of Astronomy, a cornerstone project of the International Year of Astronomy. It’s a good opportunity to complete one of your EVAs for the Astronomy Reading Challenge. If you can’t make it to an event in your area, you can also participate in Around the World in 80 Telescopes, a global live webcast from 80 different observatories. This is not likely to be repeated, so don’t miss it! The websites have all the information you need, and you can also get updates on Twitter @100Hours and @telescopecast. Get ready to be amazed!

UPDATE: It seems that so many netizens are interested in astronomy that we crashed the servers! Oops. It seems to be working now, so if you tried earlier and didn’t get anything, try it again now. Right now I’m watching real time observation of black hole. Wow. You can also watch recorded webcasts from all the previously visited telescopes so you won’t miss a thing. Enjoy!

UPDATE II: They are still having the occasional outage, but one can amuse oneself by reading the associated live chat at ustream.tv. Disappointed starwatchers are sharing theories about the outages—aliens, coronal mass ejections, Conficker, black holes, DRM, Earth Hour, Linux…

I love it when a plan comes together

noreply@blogger.com (Sylvia) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 18:32:00 +0000

Once upon a time I had an idea to build some bookshelves. Though there were occasional spurts of activity, for the most part the project collected dust while my other bookshelves overflowed. However, it seems that if one plugs away at a project long enough, it eventually gets finished. So here it is, my cozy reading corner:

When I originally planned the shelves, they were going to provide room for my collection to grow. As it turns out, I’ve bought a few (ahem) books in the interim, and once I shelved all the piles, there wasn’t much space to spare, as you can see. I have managed to edit out some books, but the reality is that my library is far from complete, so it looks like I’ll be heading back to the hardware store at some point to repeat the exercise. In the meantime, I am greatly enjoying my new reading corner. A cup of tea, a side order of wifi, and I’m in heaven!

Putting the "Ham" in Hamlet

noreply@blogger.com (Sylvia) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:11:00 +0000

Upon my unfortunate townsman all these incidents accumulated with playful effect. Whenever that undecided Prince had to ask a question or state a doubt, the public helped him out with it. As for example; on the question whether 'twas nobler in the mind to suffer, some roared yes, and some no, and some inclining to both opinions said "Toss up for it;" and quite a Debating Society arose. When he asked what should such fellows as he do crawling between earth and heaven, he was encouraged with loud cries of "Hear, hear!" When he appeared with his stocking disordered (its disorder expressed, according to usage, by one very neat fold in the top, which I suppose to be always got up with a flat iron), a conversation took place in the gallery respecting the paleness of his leg, and whether it was occasioned by the turn the ghost had given him. On his taking the recorders,—very like a little black flute that had just been played in the orchestra and handed out at the door,—he was called upon unanimously for Rule Britannia….
—Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

I think Shakespeare might have enjoyed that! The whole tragedy can be enjoyed here.

Literature: Language, Stories, and Something Else

noreply@blogger.com (Sylvia) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 10:53:00 +0000

Joe at Constanza Book Club has something special to say about why he reads great literature. Pleasure, aesthetics, ideas aren’t enough. He wants more:

I want literature that reaches to my sinews, to my very marrow. I want literature to reach me in the depths of my soul, and to touch the heart of how and why I live. I want it to teach me, but to teach me not just intellectually, morally, but spiritually, passionately. I want to feel the literature in my very being, for it to grasp onto the core of a lived life.

Thomas Merton in the Book Vault

noreply@blogger.com (Sylvia) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:05:00 +0000

[Merton] was under orders to keep writing. The abbot had given him the key to the book vault, a chamber full of rare books and manuscripts, to use as a workspace. He wore the giant key on a cord around his waist, a token of his secret life.

—Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage

I’m really taken with this image of the writer imprisoned by his talent, even though he himself holds the key. Merton’s was a voluntary imprisonment, as he voluntarily entered the monastery and pledged his obedience to the Abbot who was now forcing him to write, but it was not as wonderful as it looks on the surface. Fame and overwork were detrimental to Merton’s contemplative life, which was what he entered the monastery for, so his was not a situation to be envied. Nevertheless I find the idea having exclusive access to a writing room filled with old books quite appealing in itself.

Fun and Games with CSS

noreply@blogger.com (Sylvia) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 16:14:00 +0000

Lately I’ve been seriously contemplating moving my blog to another host. Actually I contemplate moving almost every year, but end up staying with Typepad partly because of certain key features and party because of inertia. But things are different this year. Amid much fanfare, Typepad recently “upgraded” its platform, and it’s been a disaster (not that they’ll ever admit it because they are into being “positive”). Oh, the blogs are still up, but the system is riddled with bugs that are taking months to fix and which never should have been there in the first place. I’ve actually had to switch to composing posts in Windows Live Writer (which is excellent, by the way) to save time and frustration. Typepad did add a few “new” features, but they are things the free blog hosts have had for quite some time now, and we are still lacking features that are standard elsewhere. That’s just not good enough for a paid host!

So, I’m looking at Wordpress.com. One downside is the lack of design options, but for a mere $15 a year one can edit the stylesheet (CSS). It’s not quite as easy as Typepad’s more automated design functions, but my level of discontent has gotten to the point that I’m ready to try it. I know a little CSS but not enough to design a whole page from scratch, so I’m trying to learn more now. Whether I move or not I’m sure it’ll come in handy.

CSS design tutorials and websites abound, but I wanted to share one that pausetowonder sent me. The CSS Zen Garden is a showcase of what can be done with CSS. Designers are invited to take the bare bones content of the page and apply their own styles to it. The result is a truly mind-boggling diversity of looks and layouts. You can browse the designs here, but I’d also like to point out some that might be of interest to a bookish crowd: Ballade (Gorey-esque); Odyssey (Homer-esque); Angelus (inspired by medieval prayer books); and Kelmscott (inspired by master printer William Morris). It’s an inspiring collection and makes me think I could perhaps come up with a much more interesting design for my blog. Like everything else it’s a question of time. It’s nice to know what’s possible, though.

Dreadful and Dreary: B.C.'s Inside Passage

noreply@blogger.com (Sylvia) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 10:57:00 +0000

Dread was in fashion in the 1790s, when the word “awful” still had a precise meaning, and images of the vertiginous crag, the dark forest, the storm at sea were calculated to induce a delicious sensation of vicarious terror. It happened that the Pacific Northwest was discovered by whites at the same moment as the idea of the Romantic Sublime was gaining sway. The lonely and forbidding geography of the place perfectly fitted the reigning preconceptions of how a Romantic landscape ought to look. It conveniently combined, within a single view, the essential iconic features of the Swiss Alps, the German forest, and the English Lake District.
There was a single, unfashionable, dissenting voice—that of George Vancouver, known to his men (though never to his face) as Captain Van. At thirty-four, Vancouver was far behind his time…. His posthumously published Voyage gives a candid, heartfelt portrait of the Pacific Northwest as seen through the eyes of a young fogy who was out of touch with the intellectual currents of his own age.
Captain Van took a great shine to Puget Sound and its immediate surroundings. Among the low hills and forest clearings, he was able to imagine himself in a New Albion of close-shaven lawns, artful vistas, rolling fields, and country houses….
But his pleasure in this newfound land soon curdled into repugnance as the expedition sailed north and west into the narrow, mountain-walled channels of the Inside Passage. While his juniors, along with the expedition naturalist, Archibald Menzies, thrilled to dramatic sublimity of their surroundings, Vancouver recoiled from what he saw. The snowcapped peaks were “sterile,” the cliffs of dripping rock and vertical forest were “barren,” “dull” “gloomy,” “dreary,” “comfortless.” Of the much-admired waterfalls, he complained that their incessant noise made it impossible for him to hear any birdsong.
—Jonathan Raban, Introduction to The Pacific Northwest Landscape: A Painted History (Kitty Harmon, Ed.)

Young fogy indeed! Considering how many people come here to retire, and how they love to whack down the forest to put in a lawn that looks like every other lawn that ever was, I think Captain Van would fit in perfectly now. He probably never imagined that some day people would pay good money to travel the Inside Passage and gawk at his “barren” and “dreary” landscape.

Taking Bibliogeekery to the Next Level

noreply@blogger.com (Sylvia) — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 21:35:00 +0000

One of the big downsides of being chronically ill is that I can’t do much to contribute to society, either through work or through volunteering. Work is out of the question, and volunteering is tricky due to my wildly fluctuating energy levels. I just can’t say for sure that I’ll be functional on a particular day at a particular time so it’s hard to make a commitment. I hate being a no-show, and I don’t think other people like it very much either!

Enter “virtual volunteering.” I stumbled across it last night and have discovered that there’s a whole world of volunteer work that can be done online at your leisure. Just about anything you can do on a computer can be of use to a charitable or non-profit organization: research, writing, translating, editing, graphic design, web design, data management, consulting, tutoring, mentoring, and e-visiting the homebound. It’s a great solution for people with disabilities or for people with busy schedules who don’t want any more commuting in their lives.

There are two ways of doing it: one is to offer your services to your favourite charity and see if you can work out some arrangement; the other is to look online for virtual volunteer opportunities. One good place to check is your city, state/province, and national volunteering agencies. Large NGOs may also be looking for virtual volunteers. If you’d like to make a more far-reaching impact, you can volunteer through the United Nations on projects all over the world. The internet itself has need of volunteers, and indeed the first virtual volunteering project was for a website that should be familiar to all of us: Project Gutenberg.

I’ve tended to take Project Gutenberg for granted—it’s just there—but it wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for the tens of thousands of mere mortals who volunteer their time to scan, correct, and format public domain books for the rest of us. The volunteering is done through an affiliate website called Distributed Proofreaders (DP), which provides the online tools to manage, correct, and format books for Project Gutenberg. The whole process of taking a text from scanned images to a polished e-text is complex, but getting started is very easy. You only have to peruse the proofing guidelines, create an account, and you can start proofreading immediately. As you gain experience you will be allowed to work at more advanced levels, and can ultimately become a project manager in charge of overseeing a book through the whole process.

As a compulsive editor and congenital bibliophile there was no question about volunteering for Project Gutenberg. In about 24 hours I’ve already proofread 17 pages from “Fine Books” by Alfred W. Pollard, which was published in 1912 as part of the “Connoisseur’s Library” of Putnam/Methuen. The section I’m working on is all about how dreadful early English woodcuts were, to the point that readers were telling publishers not to bother! The optical character recognition (OCR) is quite good and there are usually only one or two corrections per page. The most fun is correcting the occasional Latin or Greek word, which the OCR software has some trouble with. There’s even a popup tool that helps you Romanize Greek words so you can make them readable in the text. O geeky joy!

Not long after I was underway at Distributed Proofreaders I found out that there is a Canadian version of PG and DP, straightforwardly called Project Gutenberg Canada and Distributed Proofreaders Canada. These websites focus mainly on Canadiana, and our slightly different copyright law means that more recent works are available in the public domain here (Laura Ingalls Wilder anyone?). So I’ll be doing my patriotic duty and signing up there as well.

Do you have any virtual volunteering stories to tell? Do you know of any deserving websites or organizations that could use some assistance from us bookish types? Let us know in the comments!

Orbis Pictus: English–Latin Encyclopaedia for Children

noreply@blogger.com (Sylvia) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 21:32:00 +0000

Earlier this month Project Gutenberg added the Orbis Sensualium Pictus by Johann Amos Comenius to its catalogue. It is a bilingual English–Latin encyclopaedia for children, originally published in 1657 in Dutch and later translated into English. It is said to be the first children’s picture book in print. The volume reproduced at Project Gutenberg, with all the original woodcuts, is the 11th edition from 1727, which gives you an idea of how popular this text was. It progresses logically through the elements that make up the world, humankind, farming, trades, domestic life, navigation, books and learning, astronomy, virtue, society, entertainments, war, and religion. I don’t think children today get such a well-rounded view of how their world works as the children who studied this simple book must have had. Here is an excerpt from the preface explaining the pedagogical intent:

I. To entice witty children to it, that they may not conceit a torment to be in the school, but dainty fare. For it is apparent, that children (even from their infancy almost) are delighted with Pictures, and willingly please their eyes with these lights: And it will be very well worth the pains to have once brought it to pass, that scare-crows may be taken away out of Wisdom’s Gardens.
II. This same little Book will serve to stir up the Attention, which is to be fastened upon things, and even to be sharpened more and more: which is also a great matter. For the Senses (being the main guides of childhood, because therein the mind doth not as yet raise up itself to an abstracted contemplation of things) evermore seek their own objects, and if they be away, they grow dull, and wry themselves hither and thither out of a weariness of themselves: but when their objects are present, they grow merry, wax lively, and willingly suffer themselves to be fastened upon them, till the thing be sufficiently discerned. This Book then will do a good piece of service in taking (especially flickering) wits, and preparing them for deeper studies.

Speaking of deeper studies:

I’m not sure if Master Comenius has done a very good job of making study seem attractive to children, but I suppose staying up late to study is more fun than getting up early to milk the cow.

via LatinTeach

Happy (?) St. Patrick's Day!

noreply@blogger.com (Sylvia) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:06:00 +0000