Thanks for the many helpful comments and apologies
for the negative tone of my original message. On a positive note I would
like to enumerate a number of ways in which I have found computers to be
helpful. In the majority of cases, however, it has been me as an
individual using technology (mostly quite crude, MS office style technology) to
do things. I.e. a domain expert who also uses IT as best I can. The idea
of non-domain specialists who are proficient in IT of itself is in my view an
'old world' view of technology that takes us back to mainframes and specialist
programmers building big systems and databases. But the world we live in, since
the PC arrived in the 1980s, is increasingly end-user computing.
1. Spell checking. I have written one program
to do this, which involves computing all possible Latin inflections in one fell
swoop. The MS Word checker, as you probably know, does not understand
inflection. This does not matter with English, which is comparatively
uninflected. The problem is that there are a few million possible words
required, which is simply too big for MS word, which collapses. The right
way would be to construct a proper parser which understood Latin grammar, but
this is beyond my skill. (Well, possibly not, as my MSc was in natural
language processing and machine translation, but my knowledge of that tells me
the job would take more time and effort than I have).
2. More successful was a simple correction
function using the VBA 'textreplace' function. The reason I need this is
to convert printed versions of Latin text into digitised versions. OCR is
still pretty hopeless at character recognition, as we all know, so the corrector
function looks for impossible letter combinations. For example, OCR
generally confused 'e' and 'c', so renders the Latin 'essent' as 'esscnt' or
'csscnt' or something like that. So I search and replace 'cnt' into 'ent',
knowing that 'cnt' is not possible. There are hundreds of other
examples. I also check for known mistakes on common words, e.g. 'vcl'
should be 'vcl' and stuff like that.
There still remains the bulk of the work, which is
formatting the material correctly. OCR is not very good at understanding
footnotes, Greek words, other parts of the critical apparatus, and getting this
right requires simple hard work. I have a little image of a medieval
scribe on my screen, who was doing exactly the same thing, really.
3. I have a Latin site searcher on my website
http://www.logicmuseum.com/latinsearcher.htm which
uses the Google search engine to look for Latin expressions in a targeted
way. This means I can search for hundreds of examples in the original
Latin, in many cases matching the Latin to an English translation, e.g. like
this http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q="quod%20quid%20est"+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.logicmuseum.com&meta=
. This is in principle no different to the way that a dictionary or
wordbook gives you an example of how a phrase is used by the classical authors.
The difference is merely the scale. A dictionary will give you a handful
of results, the search linked to above gives you 53. Again, this is not
sophisticated technology - a few lines of Java plus the already existing
Google.
4. I have just implemented a wiki on the same
site http://www.logicmuseum.com/wiki/Main_Page .
This was fairly simple and used existing technology (Mediawiki and Semantic
mediawiki). The ambition is to provide access to all the key (Latin) texts
of the medieval period - the principles are outlined here http://www.logicmuseum.com/wiki/The_Logic_Museum:What_is_the_Logic_Museum .
Again, the main principles are no different to the old way of doing things. For
example, I used 'anchoring' to index Aristotelian texts to their 'Bekker number'
(a pre-computer way of locating any Aristotelian text by page, column and line number of the 19C Bekker edition).
5. I have used the (fairly basic) MediaWiki
implementation of tables to make parallel Latin English translations - thus
fulfillling the ambition of bringing these wonderful works to a wider audience.
E.g. here http://www.logicmuseum.com/wiki/Authors/Ockham/Summa_Logicae/Book_I/Chapter_11 .
This is an area where pure IT could actually help, as the Java
based CKeditor is awful, full of bugs and difficult to use. But it is
usable. Note the green tick marks on the page which tell me that the page has
been checked once (but not peer reviewed). This is the technology version of a
system that translators have used for centuries.
On the general subject of bringing to a wider
audience I was inspired some years ago by the site of a critical edition in a
specialist library. It was fifty years old, in tatters, with pages
missing. To locate these texts you had to use a card index. When you took
the book out, you had to fill a form in and place it on the shelf. Then
you would place the book on a trolley for it to be filed by some clerk.
The building itself dates from the 1930s and has not received a lick of paint
since then. There has to be a better way
than this. Add to that the fact that, even though I have the run of the finest
London libraries, there are many important texts that they do not have (e.g. the
Alluntis edition of Scotus' Quodlibetal questions - not in any London
library). Why do people spend a lot of time and effort preparing these
editions, to have some press squirt ink onto paper, publish them at hugely
inflated prices, even though the main work of doing them (preparation and peer
review) was unpaid labour? There has to be a better system - although the
problem here is economic, not IT related.
6. Which naturally brings me to wikis.
Daniel Paul O'Donnell ("Disciplinary impact and technological obsolescence in
digital medieval studies" online here
makes some very good points on this. The
technology of wikis is proven, yet academic specialists do not use them.
He says (correctly) that this is an economic problem. Wikis depend on
collaborative effort, where the contributions of the individual are subordinate
to the interests of the group. But "in my experience, most
professional scholars initially are extremely impressed by the possibilities
offered by collaborative software like wikis and other forms of annotation
engines—before almost immediately bumping up against the problems of prestige
and quality control that currently make them infeasible as channels of high
level scholarly communication ... Professional scholars traditionally achieve
success—both institutionally and in terms of reputation—by the quality and
amount of their research publications. Community-based collaborative projects do
not easily fit into this model. "
I believe these problems could be resolved by
better use of categorisation and markup (to address the quality control issue),
and by allowing 'ownership' of designated pages on the wiki. There is
absolutely no reason why a critical edition, or a translation, could not be
produced entirely online, by a collaborative effort of a small group, working in
different parts of the world. I would welcome ideas on this, from anyone
working on editions, or translations. There has to be a better way than
would we have now, and perhaps this could be achieved by appropriate use of
technology.
Edward