Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Lightly edited. Also, there’s a lot of stuff I’d love to track down first so as to give a good overview (definitions of unfamiliar terms, URL’s for sites good and bad, interesting books, people I met, scholarly affiliations) but upon looking at my notes, that’s going to be damn near impossible without a month or so for the research and another month of writing – and what would come out the other end would be a scholarly, notated, footnoted, and pompous paper.

So, let’s do the fallback commentary: quick and dirty, and I may add more information throughout the next little while. And if anyone has questions about particulars, write me.

(I not only threw out the 300-page-or-so program before I left Kalamazoo, not wanting to take overweight baggage onto the plane, but they seem to have excised the PDF version from the website – and probably won’t put it in the archived sessions bit for a while. That’s why I can’t give the titles of the sessions, nor any sense of who the participants were unless they are in my notes.)

[And the HTML mark-up problems I had with version 1.0 of this post have been fixed!]

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The iPad 2 I took to the conference was wonderful. It has a long-lasting battery (rated at 10 hours), it has internal illumination so one can use it in a room darkened to show slides, it has WiFi (and some models also have access to the telephone system) to allow Internet access. It’s got a keyboard almost large enough for even my non-slender fingers to almost touch-type on it.

The one problem is that the only word processing loaded on it is Apple’s Notes, which is about as stripped down a piece of software as you can get. You type in new stuff. You can erase stuff word-by-word. It’s got auto-correction if you like. But I couldn’t find any way to put the cursor in the middle of any word to correct a typo, which means you have to put it at the end of the wood and delete and then retype. No formatting other than a choice between three fonts. Not much of anything other than typing, really basic deleting, and automatic saving – you type in one extra letter, and it’ll be there the next time you open that note. And to my great disgust, there’s no Undo feature, which I badly need because I sometimes delete one or two words extra.

So last night I went surfing, and found an App that’s a bit more powerful. Not up to Microsoft’s Word, of course, but it does Undo, and internal deletes, and even has diacritical marks available. The app is Fast Keyboard; I have yet to put it to a good, hard use, so this is not an official recommendation, just a notice that there’s something other than “Notes” out there.

These tablet computers are quite nice. Not perfect, but nice for travelling, most assuredly.

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There was a session on Tolkien and the heroes therein, about which I remember nothing other than having attended.

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HMML is the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, a few miles west of Minneapolis/St. Paul, at St. John’s University.

Their primary mission is to, basically, copy and back-up as many medieval manuscripts as they can get, by photographing them, microfilming them, digitizing them, and otherwise storing for the long term in as good a set of facsimiles as current technology allows.

It has been, is, and will be for a long while a real bitch cataloguing all those books. It’s not a question of Author, title, length of text (as in how many pages), size of book (folio, quarto, octavo….), quires, date made, and how many illuminations there are. It’s a question of all that, plus what the leaves are made of, the color and probable formulation of the ink, ditto the illuminations, the subject of the illuminations PLUS all the people and objects depicted within the illuminations, the full text, and all sorts of what The Professionals call Metadata. Fearsomely complicated job.

“Regular” books, the type you find in your typical library, have a more-or-less standard cataloguing-entry system; the main one I’ve heard talk of is called MARC. There are probably others that are more recent, more usable, and more whatever, but that’s the one I’ve heard. It’s been around for 40 or 50 years, and today’s standard-book standard-cataloguing system has pretty much gotten all the details down right.

That’s not true of pre-printing-press books, of which there are literally hundreds of thousands. (HMML, as of a few years ago, had 90,000 facsimiles.) Trying to come up with a good system that covers all the books, all the book formats, and all the information in the books, for dozens of languages, is fearsomely complicated.

This session was a very basic class on how it’s being done at HMML, in very broad language aimed at people who like old books but are not by any means professional librarians. People like me, for example.

[Lengthy exegesis on Vivarium, Oliver, and the Arca Artium, not gone into here. One’s the main database, the second is the digital database, and the third’s the database for art objects not classified as books – e.g. sculptures, paintings, textiles, and the like.]

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Then, to a session hosted by DISTAFF (Discussion, Interpretation, and Study of Textile Arts, Fabrics, and Fashion, which included a presentation on the people behind the Bayeux tapestry, in essence the presenter’s book (Tina Kane’s The Troyes Mémoire: The Making of a Medieval Tapestry condensed into a half hour. Not the weavers, not the floss makers, not the drawers of the pictures that the weavers went by, but the actual designer(s), the guy(s) who decided what would be included in the tapestry together with where it all would go together with the iconography together with what scenes would go where and what would be included in the scenes. Records of such design work are exceedingly rare; La Troyes Memoire’s a valuable source of information for that reason.

Thence quickly to a short paper on farthingales, by Emma Lehman, an Independent Scholar.

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The day after the session presented by HMML, I went to one discussing the Institut fur realienkunde des mittelalters und der fruhen neuzeit realonline, (and please forgive me if I have misspelled it), a group that is overseeing an attempt to come up with a good cataloguing strategy for damn near everything – material artifacts, paintings, sculptures, books – owned by 500 European institutions with 50,000,000 (fifty million) objects. Even more massive a job than the one HMML is working on, but with lots less text to deal with. Think of it as a humongous card catalog; they won’t have (if I remember correctly) images of the artifacts, but will have links to the institutions that own the objects – you use the card catalog to see what objects you want to see, and then click on a link that takes you to the County Historical Museum for Outer Upper Prussistanistan, which has photos of the object it owns. I think.

…..there’s still no satisfactory OCR (optical character recognition, i.e., usable by computers to convert text-in-books to text-on-hard-drive) software. And they suggest it may take years, especially when you consider not only how many hands were used (everything from Carolingian minuscule to Tudor English secretary hand to Italian humanist script) but also how many languages (Old High Dutch, Old Low German, Church Slavonic, Syriac, Greek, Hebrews…..) there were.

MAREAL’s image server may be found here.

Another database-type scheme is the MHDBDB (the “mittelhochdeutsche begriffsdatenbank”), a “middle high German conceptual database at the University of Salzburg”. Yet another thing I want to check into later. It has something to do with an “intelligent query system”, that, I believe, lets you not only click on a word or phrase to find all examples of that word/phrase in one book but also in other books – and will link to physical representations of the word if it’s a noun (e.g., clicking on “Jesus Christ” will not only find you every book that mentions “Jesus Christ” but also all paintings and sculptures and illuminations that have Jesus Christ the person somewhere in the art work.

They’re nuts, I tell you, nuts. Nuts with OCD. But my kind of nuts with OCD.

They’re also working on “beispiel fragment-identificationem”, the ability to search for fragments of sentences from fragments of pages, in other works. If you have a page, a folio, of which the left half has been eaten by worms or toasted by a fire, you could enter the surviving three sentence fragments (“…nd then Saint J….. which is right above “…..mitted an act of…..” right above “….ite him into b….”), and see if those bits match up any other document – and if it does you know what manuscript your fragment came from, which is a lot more information than you had before. My note on this was “it is quite impressive”, after they did a quick demo of it.

My favorite quote of the session : “Disambiguation is a long process for us.”

At the end, during the questions-from-the-audience portion, I asked about whether there already was a standard cataloguing system for artworks the way there already is for regular books; the common consensus was “HA! We wish!” There is no such thing; every country/grouping-of-museums/professional organization seems to have its own, and I got the impression there’s not only no one system, there’s no approaching consensus on which system will win out, and no desire to even think about having a group think about forming a consensus. At least not yet. That’s why the MHDBDB, and the HMML (up at top of this note) and all the others are developing their own cataloguing system, their own structures, their own databases – there’s no overarching authority nor consensus about which way is best. Hell, there’s no consensus if anything will work, much less which one will work best.

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And, finally, I went to a session on gardens and gardeining. There’s something called the Medieval Association of Rural Studies which is trying to get off the ground, so to speak. I do not know much else about it, but I signed up for their email newsletter.

Some discussion about the uses to which garden produce was put, as opposed to those hoity-toity professional theoretical historians who discuss….well, never mind. I wasn’t expecting much from this bit of the session, and I got it.

Then came a pair of brief presentations on gendered garden transfers (turns out that while women may have done all the gardening, it was by a vast majority the men who actually owned the gardens that the women worked on, at least in this one small town in Provence). The second presenter’s contribution was one of those “I came across this interesting set of data that is good enough to talk about for ten or fifteen minutes, but isn’t worth actually publishing as anything other than a footnote to someone else’s paper” things. For what it was, however, it was interesting.

I have a note to check out the “homepage of Martha Carlin, which you can get to if you Google her; her webpage comes up first”. I will, soon.

By request:
The first edition of Contact Juggling was available through us in the summer of 1990; it was photocopied and stapled within a green cover, and was authored by John P. Miller.
The second, current edition came out the next summer (1991), with James Ernest as the author. This is the one with black covers and a comb spine, and we still have some copies available.
The author suggests that a new, 3rd, edition may be coming out soon, perfect-bound, in a somewhat smaller format but a larger price.

Just added over the past couple of days, 140+ used (some more heavily, some less heavily) cookbooks from the owner’s personal collection. It’s nice to have some free shelf space in the kitchen, finally.

We are in the process of becoming an affiliate of Reconstructing History, a supplier of historical clothing patterns and notions. While they carry such from the 15th through late 20th centuries, we shall carry just those patterns for clothing dating from before 1600, and no notions or sundries.

There will be some mild delays in uploading new inventory, and possibly with answering email and processing orders. The company handing our connection with the Internet (WildBlue) seems to be having severe congestion problems. The only other alternative, since we live in a very rural area, is a telephone line, and that would be much slower.

Bear with us. Or, even better, visit us.

A few selected samples of the digitally photographed books for sale may be found at http://pics.livejournal.com/tedeisenstein/