Reprise on Google, eBooks, Copyright and All That Jazz

  An enigmatic personage by the name of Dr Beachcomber has sent me an email with a link to his posting Google Burns the Library at Alexandria. He has included my reply as a comment on his blog, so I am returning the compliment by referencing him here. Is this what you call some kind of hippy blog-in?
  While I have mildly chastised him for over dramatics in headline writing, the books not actually being burned as a result of having been digitised, there is a issue of concern regarding the quality of scanned digital editions, and another issue brought up by another commenter on the recopyrighting of material already in the public domain as a result of it being reprinted or republished. There is also the very tricky issue of the destruction of original printed or written material after it is digitised.
  Taking the last first (Hey, I'm in Australia, we are upside down here!), I was many years ago doing a research project which involved examining museum records and objects. Now museum curators have a habit of updating their records when they think that a person looking at them is some kind of expert and they ask them questions about things. For historical reasons, I wanted to know what the original records said about the objects. With the old handwritten cards and registers, it was possible to separate the original records from later annotations, and even to work out who had made the annotations and when. Only one museum had an electronic catalogue at that time (1991), and they were quite disappointed that I actually wanted to look at their tatty old paper records. I guess the question is, how many old paper backups do we need to keep for safety? The same applies to books.
  On the second issue, I was told many years ago by a copyright legal bod in my university that it was legal for me to scan out of copyright visual material and republish it digitally, but it was illegal to reproduce digital scans from modern facsimile editions of out of copyright material. My only question about that is, how could anybody tell? At the moment the business interests are noisily defending ever increasing copyright restrictions, but the ready availability of copying and reproduction technology is going to make soup of that, and real soon. I suggest that if you have some favourite old, genuinely out of copyright, books in your particular area of interest or expertise, digitally reproduce them yourself, circulate them among your friends and colleagues, and loudly announce them as public domain.
  The quality of some of the old material scanned and placed in the public domain is an issue. Dr Beachcomber is determined that Internet Archive editions are better quality than those from Google, but I bet he has never spent three days printing a long book page by page from two separate Internet Archive scans, hoping that the pages missing from the two editions do not actually coincide at any point. The end result was a largely black and white edition with occasional colour pages, none of which had bookmarkable or cut and pastable text as they were simply image scans of pages. And the Kindle editions are similarly unnavigable and messily formatted. And the text only versions are unformatted to illegibility and full of OCR errors. But apart from that they're alright. I suspect that there is just some degree of luck with the digitisation of particular works, and how carefully they have been done.
  I have touched on these issues in earlier posts, Eeee! Books, and Scribes, Copyright, Crime and Google, with a short note at the end of Horrible Old Handwriting. I guess the whole issue is just not going to go away real soon.
   The whole issue of preservations of books and text is, of course, not new, but there are so many texts to preserve these days. We have almost no original Roman era texts of the Latin Classics, because they were written on papyrus rolls which fell to bits. These works are mainly preserved from much later copies in vellum codices, much more durable, produced by Christian monks. The thought of these celibate ascetics solemnly copying down the erotic poetry of Ovid and the like is always good for a giggle, but they did. There have even been conspiracy theories that the monks actually forged all the Latin Classics. I doubt it, but how much did they edit, correct, annotate and standardise these texts? Perhaps Cicero or Livy might be surprised to discover what we think they had written.
Postscript: With apologies to Dr Beachcomber, after rechecking, it seems that the download I had such trouble with was a Google scan, although I accessed it through the Internet Archive. It was one of a large set uploaded by one tpb, who seems to be a very messy worker. Perhaps I was dead unlucky, because there appears to be another edition of the same book available through the Internet Archive which is not from Google, so at least they are not claiming a monopoly for their grotty scans.

Bang the Drum

   Got this reference from the blog gladly wolde he. The Campaign for the Future of Higher Education is getting rolling in the USA. I read their list of principles and cheered. Let's just hope they can get the people with influence to listen and are not simply outshouted by the economic rationalists and big business loudmouths who think the whole world should be run for their personal economic benefit.
   One point which resonated strongly with the medieval enterprise in this household was the matter of the use of technology. Yes, some of us have been using it in education for years, and no, it doesn't save money. Using internet and multimedia technology in teaching can be used to do more than simply provide a feed for information. It can be used to enhance the educational experience and to increase inclusiveness by making opportunities for more people to participate. But it is a helluva lot of work and requires an intelligent combining of expertises in specific subject areas with that in the technology itself. And then it all goes out of date and you have to do it all again.
   The whole issue of governments wanting some kind of increased output from higher education while putting less in themselves, and restricting access by making the whole process too expensive for many potential users, is not confined to the USA. The same process is happening here in Australia. There have been protests in the streets on the matter in Britain. In fact, if anyone knows of a country where this trend is in reverse, we all need to know about it. I suggest that this is a campaign that everyone in the educational sector, or for that matter, everyone with a brain, should be getting behind, wherever they be.

Literacy Teaching - Again!

  My two granddaughters, aged nearly 8 and nearly 11, have just been participating in what are called NAPLAN tests at school. I can't remember what NAPLAN stands for, National something-or-other, but they are basic tests of literacy and numeracy, the basic function of which is to see whether kids across the land are meeting appropriate standards in these subjects. Pretty harmless and sensible, you might think.
  Schoolteachers, however, have been whipping themselves into a frenzy of hysteria over it all. Apparently teachers are the only members of the work force who should not be subjected to any kind of scrutiny on the quality of their work. They are also, by their own telling, so naturally dishonest and devious that they very idea that their pupils may be assessed will inevitably cause them to cheat on the testing. And to think that they keep lecturing us on the subject of "values"; a concept dragged into the school lingo by a previous Prime Minister of our fair land who thought that the only people who had any were right wing, avowedly Christian, white males in suits. Ouch, we are getting  political; time for a diversion.
  The teachers also claim that the tests put incredible stress on the kids. I checked this out with my two, who seemed perfectly cheerful about the whole process. When I asked them if anybody had got upset, they did mention one boy, but he has a habit of throwing stress attacks while playing sport, at birthday parties, and possibly represents a child at the stress laden end of the spectrum. As my older granddaughter has a mode of spelling that would grace Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog, I cannot imagine she will do much for their general score, but she was not in the least stressed about it.

  Personally, I think a little stress to achieve does you good. Not that I would advocate beating Latin grammar into the little possums with a birch rod, like they did in the middle ages. It seems a little strange to me that we are so accustomed to literacy and its use in every aspect of what we learn that we find it hard to imagine how much was learned in a non-literate mode in ages past, but we think that assessing the level of literacy that we are achieving poses unacceptable stress. I think there is possibly more stress involved if your deficiencies in the area of literacy only show up at your first job application.

  There has been a little hiatus on updates to the website lately, due to real life interfering with virtual reality, but hopefully I will be adding some new sections soon.

Everything in Boxes

  I hope you all had a good Easter. I did. I spent the whole time at a folk festival - great music and dancing, food and drink, and generally good fun. Somehow though, the talk at these events always gets round to "What is folk music?" or "Is this really folk music?". Frankly Scarlett, I couldn't give a damn. It's all music. Sing, dance, pluck, strum, blow, bang, whatever.
  This set us talking about how the chattering classes are always discussing the classification of things. Botanists in Australia have spent years of their lives arguing about how many species of Eucalyptus trees there are, but the trees grow in the forests just the same. Somebody who was singing a song about starfish claimed that zoologists now insist that they should not be called starfish as they are not fish. Instead they should be called sea stars. Trouble is, they are not in the sky and they don't twinkle. I personally have inflicted on the world a PhD thesis on the ethnic classification of the Dayaks of Borneo, and how it doesn't really work because people are not classified by their characteristics in common, but defined by their differences from others, and they usually have relationships with various different groups of others. Phew! It has taken me about sixteen years to reduce my PhD thesis to one sentence.
  We took one of our granddaughters to her favourite science museum, where we went to a presentation on dinosaurs. They explained that Brontosaurus did not exist, because it had previously been discovered and called something else. There were even suggestions of scientific fakery in order to create more classifications of dinosaurs. Some large critter left those bones behind, and he existed, and wasn't classified for millions of years. It must be very galling to be declassified if the corollary is that you didn't even exist. I shall insist on being cremated when I die so that they can't do it to me.
  I bought a chalumeau at the folk festival. That is a kind of proto-clarinet. On looking up the history of these instruments, there was great argumentation about the precise stage of the process of gradually modifying sound holes and adding levers which makes a chalumeau become a clarinet, and whether the person who is credited with inventing the clarinet really did so, or whether he merely modified a chalumeau. Well, I can blow notes on it now, so a big raspberry to that one. Just stop arguing and make the music.
  Language came into the discussion. There was a French singer who had lived for many years in northeast England and who spoke with a brilliant Geordie accent. She said she hadn't known that there were people in England who spoke other than "proper" English. She originally came from Nimes in the south of France. I went there once, and discovered that there were people who spoke French in a manner that my old French teachers would have thought was most incorrect. But we put all these things in boxes and write rules and fail to recognise that the rules don't always fit. In an earlier posting English 4 U I wrote something about the changing language and got emails from people effusively congratulating me on confirming their prejudices about the necessity to retain "proper" English, when I was saying the exact opposite.
  Paleography, of course, is not immune from this kind of discussion. Learned folks are always arguing about whether you can define a script by the funny little twiddle on the top of the s or whether you should define it by the slope of the ascenders or other minutiae, when we know that in the real world there is an endless range of variation which tends to clump into loosely defined patterns which we dignify with names. But then we talk as if the classifications were the reality, not simply something which we have made up in order to help us think. I have had numerous emails from people sending me pictures of bits of writing so that I can tell them the name of the script so that they can read it. (??!)
  I recently acquired a couple of books about medieval musical notation, and discovered that the same old story goes on there. There are names for the various evolving styles of musical notation, but no exact place where one turns into another. But somehow the emboxment becomes more important than understanding the process of evolution. So we are back where we started, with music, having got absolutely nowhere.

Scripts, Hands and Emails

  There is one particular type of email I get on a recurring basis. Somebody is trying to read a piece of medieval handwriting, but it doesn't look like any of the examples on Medieval Writing. The writer wants to know the name of the script so that they can read it. Alternatively, the writer knows the name of the script, but it doesn't look like the one on Medieval Writing.
  I have included a piece on Scripts and Hands to try and shed some light on this conundrum. Those of you who have been reading medieval handwriting for years know that every piece of writing does not look like its script prototype, and what to do about it. Those just starting out might need a few tips. But then it starts you thinking about the whole process of writing and why it looks like it does and ...........

Eeee! Books

  I have just read another article predicting the imminent demise of the printed book as we know it. E-books are about to rule the world and publishing houses of the traditional kind will plunge into the abyss of bankruptcy if they don't get a new idea. At the same time, our fair city of Canberra is in the middle of a regular twice a year secondhand book fair which is run to benefit a local charity. It is absolutely huge, and gets bigger every year. Are the buyers stockpiling against the paper book millennium? Are those who donate the books turfing out their libraries in order to replace them with a petite electronic gizmo or two?

  I recently acquired a Kindle; not the most sexy of electronic devices, monochrome with a little screen and lousy book navigation. In fact a tiny girl of about two who keeps coming to investigate it when I'm filling in time at my granddaughter's gym class thinks it is the most useless and boring Nintendo DS she has ever seen. Nevertheless it has its uses. I can download for free very imperfect scans of old books that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive, or unobtainable. I can also download recreational reading without filling up my ever decreasing bookshelf space. It's great for reading in bed, because if you fall asleep, it does too, and it doesn't lose its place. It does have the unfortunate feature than when it goes to sleep it displays a grainy old picture of some defunct author. It is quite scary to wake up in the night and find Harriet Beecher Stowe glowering at you over the bedcovers.
   There are some books I think I would always prefer to be in paper form, such as dictionaries, reference material where you might want to have six books open at the same time, or highly illustrated material. I once wrote a review of an electronic dictionary for a journal of online and multimedia matters. The editor said she would never have believed a review of a dictionary could be so funny. A representative of the dictionary wrote an indignant letter with a long list of what he claimed were factual errors or unknowable things, for all of which I was able to prove him incorrect. The journal went belly up, but I don't think that was me. Hey, all I did was speculate on what kind of book you could write with a dictionary that included esoteric Australian slang and a rather peculiar assortment of proper nouns, including the names of French philosophers and nuclear physicists. Then I said I preferred a dictionary with pages.
  I suspect (Nostradamus moment!) that paper books and electronic books will co-exist for a long time yet. Publishing houses will have to get out of their 19th century industrial mode of production and distribution or they will go the way of the dodo. At the moment, it is faster and cheaper to order a paper book online for yourself than have a bookseller do it, and if publishers don't provide electronic services, they are doomed. But for some things, we just like our books.

  The electronic book might just send the book back into a more medieval mode. We have all been taught how naughty it is to write on our industrial type books or to alter things, but with the capacity in electronic media to make annotations on other people's work, or update our own, we might end up with something more like those medieval glossed works with commentary dribbled all around the core text and every version just a bit different. Librarian's nightmare!

More Little French Things

There is now a paleography exercise for the letter close of Jean le Bon.

Little French Things

  What this website needs is a few little French things Patsy. Saffy, pop down and get us a few little French things sweetie!
  No seriously, Medieval Writing needs a few more French things, so I have started with a script sample from a 14th century letter close of Jean le Bon in French Secretary cursive script. I have not done the paleography exercise yet, but will do it soon as it is just a wee little document. Much more fun than sorting out notes and backing up files.
  I have just noted that the Dirty Books article mentioned a couple of posts ago has had its illustrations restored, in a natty format so they zoom out of the page at you when you click on them, so you can see the grubby finger marks, as well as the beautiful manuscripts that they were left on.
  Oh, and about the mulberry tree. Well I will get back to that, but I'm afraid that manuscript has a rather similar effect on me as the consumption of gross excesses of mulberries. I will endeavour to finish the exercise though, imperfect as it may be. I just have a bit of a problem with all that horticultural and gynaecological imagery all mixed together.

Paleographical Passion and Archivist Angst

  Much of the basic groundwork in paleography and in the study of archives was done a long time ago. That is not to say that good work is not still going on, but to get back to the roots of it, it is necessary to ferret out some rare old books. That has had me ratting around in The Internet Archive and printing out great tomes at painful speed, or more recently downloading bad scans of imperfect copies of old books to my Kindle. It all has deficiencies, but better than not being able to get your hands on things at all.
  A noticeable feature of academic writing of earlier times is that authors were allowed to express their passion, and by crikey did they get passionate about their subjects. The following is a series of quotes from Hubert Hall 1908 Studies in English Official Historical Documents Cambridge University Press. This is a working guide to the English Public Records, with a bit of concise history about the various classes of records and what happened to them over the centuries. Pretty dry stuff, you might think, but the following decontexted grabs express some of his feeling about how the records were treated during the 18th and 19th centuries:
  “... we have to deplore almost incalculable losses through premature decay and systematic abstractions. These losses are chiefly due to the deliberate neglect of later official custodians and to the still more wanton refusal of the parliaments and ministries of the 18th and even the 19th century to adopt the simplest precautions ofr their safekeeping.”

  “...the anxiety displayed by enlightened antiquaries to save some specimens of historical evidence from these putrid heaps of parchment ...”

  “By dint of groping on his hands and knees amidst the dust and corruption of the low-roofed cock-lofts of the Exchequer treasuries  ....”

  “Almost within living memory the public Records have been sold for glue by the soldiers and workmen employed to remove them from one pestilential vermin-haunted den to another...”

  “... after a further period of official procrastination, illumined by various destructive fires, the Records are still found in festering heaps...”

  “... the officials who should have been engaged in their jealous preservation were employed as sub-commissioners in preparing worthless texts, imperfect calendars, and misleading indexes...”
  Hubert Hall would no doubt be much delighted with the way in which the Public Records are now housed, and made available for study; another subject on which he expresses strong opinions. He would also, no doubt, be pleased that since his time local record offices have acquired back vast numbers of records that were in private hands, another area that he laments. Not much to be done about the glue or the rats though.
  Perhaps the main point is that modern writings tend to be laden with jargon and complex conceptual baggage, and nobody want to be caught out having an emotionally charged opinion about such matters. After all, Hubert doesn't give the impression that archivists were the dull sort of people of their (probably unfairly ascribed) reputation. We can never convince governments about the importance of educational matters if we just jabber in tongues among ourselves, and never let rip with our angst and passion.

Glossed Bible

And a little bit of medieval detritus that I found has turned out to be a torn fragment of a page of what was once probably a very nice glossed Bible. I have put a segment of it here so you can have a peek.

Monastic Pressmarks

OK, I promised I would sneak a little something in. There is a set of new script samples of cursive writing from the 14th and 15th centuries, as found in monastic pressmarks, basically inscriptions in books as to where they are stored in the library. These are interesting on a few counts. They show the diversity of cursive hands, but they also show something of medieval monastic library practice, and they point out avenues which have been used by researchers for discovering the history of books.
I have made some minor changes to the frame structure of the site, and before you say you hate it anyway and I should throw it out, I might point out that it is only there so that I can do some of these reorganisings when certain sections get overloaded, as I only have to change the navigation frame, not umpty gazillion pages. The script index now has its own section, as that is what a lot of people use the most, and it is getting kind of large. The navigation frame is wider, as I figure you have all got wider screens than the one that it was originally designed for. If the site comes up looking really weird next time you load it, just try clearing your cache so that everything fits again. If your favourite section has somehow got lost in the wash, please let me know.

The Medieval 90s

  The stuff you find when you start looking through old files! No doubt I thought this primitive bit of computer cartooning infinitely hilarious in nineteen ninety something, but it's a variation on the monk in a scriptorium joke that every medievalist had some variant of on their pinboard at the time.  What is really scarey is that the computer the chap is typing on was just like the one I had at the time, complete with little foldup screen which, in my case,would not have displayed that lovely coloured capital as it could only manage vile electric green in chunky pixelated lumps. I wonder if I should re-do it with him holding an iPad, or has this lame old monk/computer joke run its course?
  Actually, I think this was originally a monk with a typewriter joke that I pinched in concept from somebody else. Ah, the 20th century was so medieval!

Dirty Medieval Books

  OK, so here I am dutifully typing up catalogue entries from scruffy old notebooks and sending files into The Cloud and vowing not to do anything fun until the job is done, when the family medievalist walks in with something he found while looking for something else in the London Metropolitan Archives, and I'm hooked.

  One of the things that has always intrigued me in my own collection of medieval manuscript detritus is the greasy finger marks which can be quite apparent on the edges of the pages. I'm sure there is some residual DNA in there, and we could clone ourselves a friar or a devout lay person or two. I even once snagged a tiny little miniature on an orphan page from a book of hours. It went cheap because it was smudged. As it was an image of Veronica's handkerchief, odds on it was smudged by having been kissed by its owner. To me that is value added, but not to the buying public apparently. But somebody else of significant stature in the medieval art history world has got right into this subject.

  Kathryn Rudy has spent some time, effort and ingenuity actually measuring the amount of grot from finger marks on books of hours in order to work out which parts were read most frequently. A brief article entitled Measuring Medieval Dirt can be found on the website of the London Metropolitan Archives. Her longer article, Dirty Books, appears on the website of the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, Volume 2, Issue 1. You have to look it up from the home page as it appears that the site will not let you in through a direct link. It is a long article, but unfortunately the many illustrations appear to have been removed. (They have since been restored.)

  A couple of her main conclusions indicate that late medieval folks were a bit like us; they hit the indulgences pretty hard for fear of the hereafter, and they didn't manage to stay up late enough to complete the entire daily round of offices. Mortal humans all.

  There seems to be a bit of lateral thinking going on in manuscript studies at the moment, with new ways of looking at things and new questions to ask. Those who claim that paleography is dead just need to broaden their definition of the term.

Scribal Anxiety

  I guess new writing technology has always caused anxiety. I mean, a block of stone marked with a chisel has so much greater archival stability than those marks made with black liquid on some flexible but fragile medium. When I was at school, newfangled ballpoint pens were banned because they would cause our writing to become messy and illegible. (They may have had a point there). We had to use fountain pens. (Ask your grandma!) Essays had to be handwritten, not typed, so that the teachers could tell you had actually done it yourself. There were even neurotic fears among the professions that used typewriters for a living. Legal firms employed very accurate typists, because no corrections were allowed on legal documents, as it would then be impossible to know whether the document had been tampered with.
  Then along came computers, and a whole lot of other issues to get anxious about. From the beginning, a major source of anxiety was the storage of our files. My first computer used a cassette tape (Ask your grandma about that as well.) to load and save very small text files very slowly and frequently inaccurately. We printed everything. Then floppy disks came along. (Ask grandma again, and perhaps dad might have a hazy memory of these.) Horrible things happened to these in the early days. People put staples through them so they wouldn't fall out of envelopes for posting. They carefully saved files to them and stored them on top of those oldfashioned monitors that oozed heat and magnetic fields. They left them in the gloveboxes of their cars. My greatest scribal anxiety about them was that if the computer was merely rearranging very small magnetic fields on a thin plastic film, why did it make a noise like a woodpecker in full spate while it was doing it? Possibly they just included that noise as an extra so that you would be reassured that it was doing something.
  Teachers developed new anxieties about the authenticity of students' work when presented as a computer printout. They demanded that students hand in their drafts as well as the final product, not understanding that with this new technology, writings were edited, not redrafted. I remember my now middle aged son carefully editing backwards his school assignments into a more messy form to hand in as a draft. (Hey, it's a life skill!)
  Hard drives were a great boon, and they didn't sound so woodpeckery; more like death watch beetle. Even the youngest of you has one of these I presume, but the earliest ones had a tiny little capacity compared to those of today. As computers became capable of manipulating graphics files, audio, animation, video and all the fun of the multimedia fair, we had to find somewhere to store those files.
  We were advised to use CDs, as hard drives suffered from "bit rot". Mind you, every computer problem I have ever had that was supposed to have been caused by "bit rot" wasn't. It always turned out to be something else. Recourse of the lazy IT help desk expert. Reinstall Windows - bah humbug! On the other hand, those floppy disks suffered from some sort of rot. Anxiety attack as everything stored on them had to be transferred to something else. Worse than silverfish in your vellum codices. Floppy disks were stockpiled by manufacturers then abandoned by so many users so abruptly that stocks were being sold that were ten years past their use by date. Came the time when about fifty percent of floppies in an unused box turned out to be unusable. 
  I have a large collection of photographs of things of medieval interest, used for teaching by the family partnership. They were originally on slides. (Ask grandma again.) They dated from the days when cameras contained little rolls of photosensitive strips, which gave you beautiful images that then started decomposing immediately. We got them put onto CDs, initially by professionals at great expense, but then doing it ourselves as the equipment became available. And always an extra set for backups. 
  Then scribal anxiety again, or rather, illuminator's anxiety. Apparently CDs are not archival after all. Ha ha, tricked you. Buy a whomping great big new hard drive and copy the whole lot on. Apparently they don't suffer from "bit rot" after all. My scribal anxiety at this point was based around wondering how any dumb machine could remember where so much data was and be able to find it again.
  Assorted portable devices for storing and transferring files from one computer to another came and went; very small volume portable hard drives, Zip disks (The players went crick, crick, crick and died, taking the contents of the disk with them!), thumb drives or sticks (OK for short term use but not recommended for archival.) Come on guys, where can a girl get a good scriptorium when she needs one?
  Bought a new laptop and discovered that the hard drive on this slim device has more capacity than the whomping big one originally used for backups. Copy everything on to that. But now we have another cause for scribal anxiety. Offsite backups used to be stored in the family medievalists's university office, but now he is retired, moved all his stuff back home, and everything is in the one place. This in a country replete with droughts and flooding rains, and bushfires.
  Now some clever clogs in the family has convinced me that my backups would be better out there in The Cloud, wherever that may be. Makes sense, but there is a conceptual difficulty. I can't see it, and I don't know where it is. I choose faith over reason and go down that track. But what if governments fall, there is revolution, another global financial crisis, someone steals my data and finds an antisocial use for pictures of medieval manuscripts and misericords .... what if, what if?
  I now have more backups than a dump truck, but I still have to sort out the muddle of handwritten notes stuffed into filing cabinets, printouts of scanned images, overdue library books and other things that have accumulated untidily since I first started this project. You can see where this shaggy dog story is going, can't you. I am just trying to explain why there might not be a lot of new material on the Medieval Writing website for a little while as I rearrange the deckchairs and wait for the next iceberg. Trouble is, as I work through this stuff I keep finding interesting little bits I want to use, so I might sneak a few little things in.
  The good news is, as I work steadily through all my material, I have only discovered one thing so far that appears to be actually lost. It is a rather obscure Old English transcription, and it was on a piece of paper.
PS. If you want to know what my first computer looked like, click here. They've put it in a museum!!

It's Personal

There is something about handwriting that links us to the writer; or at least, we are under the delusion that it does. I must admit to a naive delight in handling a scrap of paper or parchment that a real person has toiled over, marking in their own quite individual way, even if that person is entirely unknown to me.
I guess that is why people collect autographs. A cricket bat or a sports shirt or a CD or a concert program or a book is all very well as a piece of memorabilia, but so much more desirable if somebody associated with it has scrawled their signature and a message on it. I guess we feel in some way that it connects us to our heroes.
When I was a young thing at school, all the authors that we read were dead. So recently I resolved to make an effort to read some literature by people who are still alive. That's how I came to be reading Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man. Somewhat depressing book, full of screwballs and losers. Perhaps the saddest thing about it is that the protagonist (he could not be called a hero), who trades in autographs but is only interested in collecting for himself the autograph of one elderly film actress, ends up discovering that he has invented a persona and a life quite different to that of the owner of the autograph. 
I guess we might be doing the same thing when we immerse ourselves in those historical documents penned by people involved in the affairs of the day. Still, when you know that somebody was clerk of the council during the minority of Henry VI, became bishop of Chichester as well as Keeper of the Privy Seal, and ended up murdered in the street by a mob in Portsmouth because the folk were angry about the losing of some possessions in France, you have to think that your romances and fantasies could be no more exotic and out there than the simple historical truth. It's not just paleography any more, it's personal.

There are people who claim that all history is fiction, but who cares!

Photograph by permission of the National Archives, London E28/G8/18

Merry Christmas to the Myopic

Some little while ago I discovered a comment on somebody else's blog complaining that the fonts on this blog were way too small. What actually happened was that when I changed my blog template, somehow all the existing postings got changed to a teensy weensy little font. It seemed that it could only be fixed by manually going into the html, so I did it for the most recent, and figured nobody reads old blog postings anyway. It seems they do, so I have gone through and fixed the rest, I think. So if you want to amuse yourself by reading old blog postings over Christmas, you won't need to buy a new pair of glasses. Cheers, have a good holiday!

Reading and Listening

I recently received an email from someone who, as an aside to the main conversation, said he was an Oxford graduate in literature and Classics, but he had read all this literature in modern printed editions. They never discussed the manuscript tradition in those courses.

Now this is a great bugbear of mine. Any modern edition of an ancient work from the manuscript tradition is selected, corrected, disinfected, analysed, annotated and authorised. In many modern definitive editions there is no discussion of where surviving manuscript copies reside, or how many were consulted to produce the edition. Surviving manuscript copies of a work can range from one, as with Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or several which are each significantly different, as with Piers Plowman, or hundreds with multiple variations, as with the Travels of Marco Polo. Numbers and variants that survive may be serendipitous, but may at least hint at the popularity of a work, and at how much writers and scribes were willing to alter the work in transcription. It is all part of the story of the story, if that makes sense.
There are studies of the variants of certain well known medieval works, some of which are on the web, as this modern medium is more adaptable to production of multiple variants of texts than the old linear string of little black symbols on a page. I seem to have sung this song before. When it comes to written communication, we are going medieval again.
Modern definitive editions have their place,of course. If your Latin or Middle English or Old Slovenian is a bit wonky, it at least gives you access to something you might not otherwise read. But surely literature studies should be looking at how the work has appeared in its various historic guises, at least as part of the consideration of the text. Ah well, I guess I am never destined to be a Professor of Literature!

In the recent collection by Ralph Elliot, which I mentioned a couple of posts ago, he has an article entitled "Chaucer's Voices", in which he discusses various styles of writing in Chaucer as actually representing the patterns of speech of certain types of people. This, he says, is relevant because in Chaucer's day most people knew the stories from having them read aloud to them. In the middle ages, it was reading, whether you did it with your eyes or your ears. Even legal documents often referred to "those who have read or heard" the document in question. This gives another layer of interpretation, through expression or on-the-fly editing. It was those rotten little black printed symbols that gave texts their unvarying character in the first place; handy for the church, but changing the whole nature of literature.

This Christmas, read aloud to somebody, or tell a story. Merry Christmas!

History of the Familiar

The latest addition to the website is The Strange History of Humanistic Minuscule. It is an odd thing that the form of medieval handwriting that is most familiar to us has a complex history that belies the notion that paleography is about changes to the shapes of letters. In this case, it is about changes to the nature of reading, even if the letters do not change that much and there are only very few absolute criteria that differentiate this family of scripts from what went before, and what continued in parallel with it.

Who Ya Talkin To?

Many years ago I used to have roistering arguments with archaeologists about the relationships between languages and their speakers. There were those who believed that if a whole new language family suddenly spread across the landscape, it meant that a whole bunch of ethnically related people were breeding like rabbits and migrating. Personally, I think that a whole bunch of people who may have been ethnically unrelated suddenly found something in common to talk about, like how you actually grow and cook these strange little grain things now that those big tasty meatbearing critters are getting hard to find.
Suddenly, the World Wide Web has given people all over the world all sorts of things to talk about together, and our languages are melding together. English has become a sort of lingua franca (Now there's a contradiction in terms!), but it is escaping from the straitjacket that the teachers of my youth wanted to keep it in. I was fairly recently rapped over the knuckles by an editor for splitting an infinitive or two, but hey, English has always been an evolving mongrel language. It makes you wonder how the rules of language get there in the first place.
I get a number of comments to this blog which I do not allow to appear, mainly because they advertise dubious services, like Dutch brothels, essay selling services for students who can't be bothered writing their own, drugs of dodgy provenance, and in one recent puzzling instance, white ant eradication services. I'm not sure why they do it. "Hey Honey, I think we've got white ants. I'll just look up that medieval paleography blog and see if they know what to do about it." ??? Nevertheless, here are some snippets which I enclose for your fascination and delight. I have removed all identifiers and urls. If you want an Amsterdam escort service, you will just have to Google it for yourself.
"Our girls will-power oblige all your dreams happen true. Harmonize with them not allowed at website. It's good up to girl and you can rumble a property of ladies inside. If you register doomsday wanted to look in on Amsterdam, by means of a fraction's length bring up the white pennon a call." Glad to see that no fancy singing is allowed on the website, but rumble away.
"X Grammar offers a exorbitant par Nursery entirely Piercing School education. By a multi-cultural environment that promotes perception amongst diverse nationalities, students are provided with the opportunities and resources to appropriate for cross-cultural learners and responsible citizens." I'm glad the nursery school body piercers are becoming multicultural and responsible.
"I give birth to infer from a few of the articles on your website now, and I really like your style of blogging. I added it to my favorites trap stage roster and disposition be checking back soon. Divert repress into public notice my site as well and leave to me know what you think. Thanks." Apparently I am providing gynaecological services for actors.

Now I'm not stuffy about evolving English. Languages grow and change all the time. I have recently been dipping into a recently published book of essays by a man who is besotted with the changes in the English language, from Beowulf through Chaucer to Thomas Hardy (Ralph W.V. Elliott 2010 Chaucer's Landscapes and Other Essays Melbourne, Australian Scholarly Publishing). It makes you want to go and read all these things in their unmodernised versions, just to feel the words rolling along. It's just that I feel a little like the last of the mammoth hunters, and I don't know what the rest of the world is talking about. Is English no longer a national language, but a rapidly differentiating family of languages for the world's new tribal boundaries?

Is Blogging Dead?

I have just received an email informing me that this blog is listed on another blog posting entitled 50 Best Blogs for Medieval History Geeks. I tell you this not to blow my own trumpet, but to point out that there are 49 other excellent blogs listed there. There are some of my favourites, and some I haven't discovered yet so I will have to have a good look myself.
This is particularly interesting because I read recently some IT type claiming that people are not blogging anymore. However, I get the impression that there are increasing numbers of blogs around with something to say. I think it actually means that the very young people are giving it up, using their two minute attention spans in the more rapid fire media of Twitter and Facebook and the like. Perhaps if they expressed themselves in more leisurely media, they would have some thinking time to avoid getting into all the embarrassing situations they seem to manage on those social media.
Meanwhile, we bloggers are just slipping back into the middle ages, or getting middle aged.

John Paston's Books

Recently, when the family medievalist finally abandoned his university office and retired to a study at home, we transported boxes and boxes and boxes of books to a charity which runs secondhand book fairs. We both still have large studies packed to the gunwales with shelves of books. Naturally, in the 15th century when nearly every book was written out by hand, readers and book owners had to be much more selective.
In keeping with my recent trend of putting up on the website examples of horrible messy handwriting of truly interesting content, the last script sample and paleography exercise are a list of books written out by John Paston II in the late 1470s. They comprised his personal library. This funny scrap is part of the famous collection of Paston Letters in the British Library, so it is famous. As well as being in a script that is like cod liver oil, nasty but good for you, it sheds a little light on that whole topic of medieval literacy and the valuation of books. Enjoy it even if you can't read it.
I will get back to the mulberry tree, promise. I'm sure you are as fascinated by it as I am.

Of Tennis Balls and Mulberry Trees

When I was a kid I used to play tennis at a suburban court. Next door was a huge back garden with an enormous mulberry tree. If we should happen to hit a ball over the fence, we would have to climb over to collect it. At certain seasons of the year, this process could be protracted, involving a diversion up the mulberry tree, which was ended when the old lady who lived there would open the back door and yell at us to clear off. She never seemed to do this straight away, but just when she figured we had probably had quite enough.
The latest addition to Medieval Writing is script sample for a very tiny,semi-cursive Gothic rotunda script, as used in a theological work for personal study. I continue on my merry path of tormenting you with horrible scripts of the kind that you probably won't find in paleography books, but you will find if you want to read things in the wild archives and libraries.
I have had this leaf for some time, and have used it on the website to show some of the interesting marginalia, but I hadn't tried using it for a script sample or a paleography exercise as it had me baffled. It purports to be from a work in praise of the Virgin Mary by one Richardus de Sancto Laurentio, about whom very little seems to be known, and I could not find a transcript or translation of his text anywhere. So why not just read it? Well, it is rather difficult, with a lot of abbreviations, but I was sure I was getting something totally confused as it appeared to be trying to say that the Virgin Mary was an almond tree on one side of the page, and a mulberry tree on the other. There was something I just didn't get.
Recently I discovered, not a transcript or a translation, but a complete digital facsimile of an incunabula version of the work on a library website in Germany, and all was revealed. The chapter from which my page was abstracted was all about comparing the Virgin to a hortus conclusus, an enclosed garden, and in the process identifying her with all the different plants therein. Very strange. The Virgin was an almond tree and a mulberry tree and Christ was its fruit.
And to think that in my tennis playing childish innocence, covering myself with red goo up a mulberry tree, I was participating in a spiritual experience with very uncomfortable resonances with the ritual cannibalism to which the medieval Catholic church was so devoted. Mulberries as host, bread as the body of Christ, red dribbles all down the shirt front. Scarey.
I will provide a limited paleography exercise for a segment of the page when my shaking nerves are restored, and I have nutted out what this crazy guy was on about.

What's It All About?

If anybody out there is interested in the history and background to this project, there is an article in which I discuss it in the latest edition of the online journal The Heroic Age. That then links to an earlier article about the travails of my various medieval projects in this age of rapidly changing technology. (And no, I didn't have anything to do with the page design of this website!) It is wonderful to be able to do amazing things on the web. However, when your first computer used a cassette tape to save and load a couple of kilobytes of data and had a lurid green screen with monochrome graphics, there is an awful lot of material sitting as printouts in multiple little bottom drawers waiting for a complete overhaul before it can again see the light of day. Wonderful enigma, isn't it? Computers are this great aid to productivity, but steadily destroy their own products with obsolescence. We live in interesting times.

1066 and All That

One thing leads to another. Having added a section on Special English Letters, I thought I had better put in an example that uses a few of them. There is now a script sample and paleography exercise for a set of manumissions of serfs from the 12th century. The only trouble is, it is in Old English, and I am totally pig ignorant about Old English.
As it is a pretty famous example, I thought it was bound to have been published in translation, but two major sources of published Anglo-Saxon documents that I consulted didn't have it because it dates from after the Norman Conquest. So there is no translation on the website, although the general sense of it can be muddled out, and you will just have to approach it as a letter reading exercise unless I find the Rosetta Stone for it somewhere. (Any suggestions gratefully received.)

Meanwhile, there is just something to ponder there about how we divide history into little chronological boxes and ascribe drastic points of change to the timeline. Yes, the Norman Conquest was a drastic point of change, but Anglo-Saxon language, writing and culture didn't just go POOF! off the map when Harold got that pesky little arrow in his eye. Just like the ancient Britons didn't all get massacred or go and hide in Wales centuries before. Sometimes I think the structures we build to help order our thoughts develop a life of their own. Then we trot off to conferences and seminars to debate the structures, rather than trying to understand the realities of life.

Special English Characters

In the process of filling up those little holes I keep finding, the History of Alphabet Letters section now has a subsection on Special English Letters. Might just be useful for people puzzling over those medieval ancestral wills that they have downloaded from the National Archives, hoping that some ancestor of theirs inherited a gilt saddle from John of Gaunt or suchlike.

Gothic Book Hands

The most recent addition to Medieval Writing is The History of Gothic Book Hands. Not exactly the most original of topics, and probably to be found in more detail in every paleography book ever written, but I guess it should be there. In fact, it should have been there a long time ago, and now it is. In the course of preparing that I kept finding lots of other things that should be there, so I guess I will have to get to work.

Titivullus Goes Digital

In the course of doing some housework on Medieval Writing, I discovered that the version on my computer was missing the History of the Letter z. Now how had I managed to get that far and leave out the last letter of the alphabet? Well, I rectified that, and then found that there was a version of the page on the web already. The explanations for how this happened are limited. 1. I am a complete idiot. 2. Somehow when I transferred everything to a new computer a year or so ago something got lost in the spin cycle. 3. Titivullus is alive and well and stalking the internet. At least he is getting on with his proper job and not wasting time just listening to people gossiping. After all, with Facebook and Twitter the poor little demon would be wearing himself out. And z has been updated.

Paul Simon was Right

"When I think about the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can even think at all" sang Paul Simon in one of his more insightful moments. The trouble is, these days even the crap I learned is proving less and less useful.

I used to be pretty good at using mathematical tables; log tables, sine and cosine tables, logs to the base e. I'm not sure they helped me to understand mathematics exactly, but I could pass exams.Then I graduated to the slide rule. My Dad gave me his special one when I went to university. I still have it somewhere, along with the highly expensive electronic calculator that replaced all of those. I think I can now do all of those calculations on my mobile phone, if I can only work out which sequence of buttons to push.

Then there was the arcane equipment of the chemistry lab, large unchanged since the days of medieval alchemists. It's many a long year since I, or anybody else in the western world, was required to use a beam balance or perform a titration, or fiddle around with stuff made of complex tubing filled with mercury which splurted into the sink if you turned the taps in the wrong sequence. Now it's all done with machines that go ping.

It was in my high school years that I first attempted to learn the guitar; not actually in school of course because in those days guitars were the territory of social deviants like rock-and-rollers and unwashed folkies. A few of us battled along with American how-to manuals and some mutual solidarity, but learning to tune by ear was an issue in the absence of classical training. I recently took up music again, and having an interest in things with large numbers of strings, bought myself one of those newfangled electronic tuners. "How do I program it?" I asked the leather jacketed, silver studded and pierced helpful youth behind the counter. He gave me a blank stare. "How do I make it go?" "You push the little red ON button." he replied, still bewildered. "But how does it know which note I want to play?" He twanged a guitar string in its general direction. "It tells you what note you're playing, and here it tells you whether it's sharp or flat." He obviously thought I was lapsing into senility, but no, I was just delving into ancient but no longer necessary bits of knowledge. Now if I had had one of those things when I was fifteen, perhaps I might have learned how to play the guitar better, rather than spending half my life tuning it.

Music helped to put another nail in the coffin that contains my useless knowledge. In order to maintain my multistringed instruments, I went to buy a Vernier caliper for measuring string gauges. The very helpful salesman handed me something that looked like a Vernier, but had no calibrations on it and no Vernier slide. I must have been staring at it like a complete idiot, because he said, very kindly and gently, "It's got a digital readout." Then he pushed the little red ON button. That's it! Even my esoteric knowledge at reading obscure calibration instruments is redundant.

I do think that with all our highly precise machining of strings and other instrument parts, as well as digital measuring equipment, we might be getting rather more fussy about tuning than about the music itself. I have wondered whether those medieval musicians really played largely out of tune most of the time. A hurdygurdy maker I met once claimed that the precursor of the hurdygurdy was used in the monasteries to teach the melodies of Gregorian chant. As the hurdygurdy is a notorious beast to keep in tune even with modern technology, I suspect I may be right about that.

Medieval Help Desk

I always wondered whether medieval scribes had a Help Desk. You can imagine the kind of thing. "Well first the ink doesn't run at all, and then it goes all blobby. One side of the nib always breaks. " "What were you doing when this happened?" "Oh, nothing. Just saying my vespers." "You mean you hadn't dipped the pen in the inkwell." "Oh yeah, I guess I did that." "And then ....." You get the picture.

Having just spent some considerable time reinstalling my husband's virus checker, only to have it insist that it still wasn't working, I found myself on the international help desk. Seems it is a "reporting error" with the program. It really is working, it just doesn't think it is. All will be well in the morning, don't panic. Meanwhile it periodically puts up messages in screaming scarlet shouting YOUR COMPUTER IS NOT PROTECTED!!! I hope the helpful man on the desk is correct in his diagnosis. I was a bit worried when he sent me a follow up email addressed "Dear Richard ...", but maybe they had had a lot of calls.

However, it seems I am not the first to want to put this into a medieval scenario. Some crazy Norwegians have put out a Medieval Help Desk Youtube video. Maybe you have seen it already. I can be a bit slow to catch up with some of these things.

Times A'Changin', but Same Old Complaints

In my ransacking of the internet for old books of specialist interest, I recently downloaded a book by one A. Wright entitled Court Hand Restored. It is so old that even Google was happy to let me have it, and I wanted it because it has loads of useful information relating to the reading of English legal documents, such as Latin versions of surnames and placenames, abbreviations and strange piggy Latin words found only in English legal documents.

While it was trundling along printing, I read the introduction, which proved to be a little piece of history in itself. The book was originally written not for historians, but for lawyers. The author grudgingly admits that there is probably some sense in legal proceedings being recorded in English, a relatively recent development when the book was first produced, rather than the traditional Latin, but this had resulted in a whole generation of legal clerks who had neither the linguistic or paleographical skills to read and present the primary source material for historical cases; necessary given that the English legal system is based heavily on precedent. The author suggests at the end of the introduction that some historians might also perhaps find it useful.

Now it seems that the English legal system has not actually collapsed under the weight of ignorance, but now historians are complaining that deskilling in these kinds of historical disciplines means that political and social decisions are being made from a position of historical ignorance, and even the curators of the evidence, archivists, are rarely adept in the language and paleography of the oldest of the documents they are curating.

This is happening just when there is some increase in popular interest in ransacking old records by folks interested in their family history, and in the collection of antique memorabilia. There does seem to be a lack of awareness of how recent some changes to things such as legal systems have been. I have been sent images, and seen other examples for sale, of 17th and 18th century documents that people were sure were medieval. I even bought one just for fun.

It is an enigma that the faster things change, the less people want to believe that change has happened in the recent past, and they less they believe that we can cope with change in the future. But what would I know? I'm so old I can remember when there was no such thing as the internet. My granddaughters think it is hilarious that when I was at school we didn't have smartboards, we had inkpots.

Horrible Old Handwriting

Whenever I decide to put up a new handwriting sample on Medieval Writing, there may be some debate on what it should be. The family medievalist is a historian of the later middle ages, and he thinks I should put up endless samples from the English chancery archives from the 13th century onwards, of every type of historical document. He has even been known to transcribe and translate them for me.

I am actually trying to gradually fill in a more broad ranging history of the types of medieval handwriting, including nasty old stuff. He reckons nobody would want to read that, but I have found that not only do people tell me that they have read it, I have even had exercises of very ancient and illegible scrawl corrected by assiduous users.

So in the interest of filling in some of the earlier history of medieval handwriting development, the latest addition is a piece of utterly horrible Merovingian minuscule book hand. I couldn't actually read it properly myself, so I have used a couple of cribs. That should mean, barring typos, that it is reasonably accurate. Nevertheless, any suggestions to the contrary will be gravely considered.

As an additional note, in relation to the last posting, I discovered that there were two copies of the French paleography book in question on the Internet Archive, but that both were slightly defective in different places. So while I am spending considerable time printing it one page at a time, I have saved a tree or two as a result of not printing the whole thing twice. The grand international digital library still has a long way to go, but it is getting somewhere.

Scribes, Copyright, Crime and Google

Now I know I do like to rabbit on sometimes about the continuities and discontinuities in written communication in the middle ages and today, but during the course of the last day or so I have truly found myself, like Alice, down the rabbit hole and behind the looking glass. It all started when I found a link to an interesting old French paleography book published in 1892.

In the days of medieval scribes, there was no such thing as copyright. No sooner had an author put away his quill than everybody was free to transcribe his words, paraphrase them and incorporate them into new contexts. It was only the industrial production of books which set up the conditions for protection of authors and publishers, and then not for some centuries. The purpose of copyright was not to inhibit the dissemination of words, but to encourage them by protecting the investment of those who had set up print runs of books. Authors got paid royalties, so they didn't have to rely on the patronage of kings and magnates in order to eat.

Many interesting books published long ago are no longer available, often because they are only interesting to a small number of people, but interesting nonetheless. Google has been collaborating with some very eminent libraries to make these available again through Google books, but there is a catch. Copyright laws are not the same the whole world over. Rather than try to untangle the mess, Google has simply made certain books unavailable in full text to countries outside America if they have been published between around 1870 to the 1920s, whatever their actual copyright status. This was the case with this old paleography book, written in France, which I was trying to access from Australia.

Trolling around the web to resolve this issue, I discover that one suggestion is to obtain a free proxy in America, so that Google thinks that is where you are. This is very easy. There are hundreds of them, and they make up new ones every day as the old ones are shut down. Furthermore, they advertise this service in terms of not allowing your web surfing to be tracked, and enabling you to access sites banned in your school, workplace or country of residence. The sites have a tendency to have "up yours" or "in your face" kinds of names. I have also discovered that this is the very easy fix to our very stupid country's very stupid proposed mandatory internet filtering. So here I am, consorting with pornographers, gunrunners, terrorists, clandestine Facebook users in the workplace and God knows who else, just in order to read a very old academic book which actually is thoroughly out of copyright, here and everywhere else. Furthermore, very respectable archivists and academics have shown me how to do it, because it is not illegal to read or download this book. It's just the kind of company you have to keep in order to do it.

Of course, there was a catch. The proxy would not allow me to download the book as a pdf file because it was too big. Another proxy with a large download allowance was not actually in the USA. So the second suggestion was to see whether it was on the Internet Archive as a text. It was, but ..... if you clicked on the link to download the pdf, you got sent to .... Google books. I am now part way through the process of printing a large book one page at a time from the Internet Archive, because it is one of those reference type books that are useful to have to hand. It's got huge bibliographies and a large dictionary of Latin abbreviations. Yawn! But it is still cheaper than flying over to Harvard to look at it in the library from which it was Googled.

Isn't it about time that the publishing industry got over its paranoia, and there was some means of releasing elderly books of specialised interest without hysteria about copyright? If the book is out of print, it should be available. The big publishers are not going to have their sales of the next J.K. Rowling or Dan Brown knocked off by a few harmless oddballs downloading dictionaries of medieval Latin abbreviations. I'm sure that long deceased authors of specialist academic material would be fascinated if they could know that somebody still did want to read what they had written, just as I'm sure that even longer deceased medieval scribes would be fascinated and bemused by people rescuing scraps of their work from the bindings of later books and poring over them.

Meanwhile, if you don't hear from me again, you will know what has happened. "Knock, knock!! "Ello Sunshine, you're nicked! You've been using HideMyAss in order to download a little cursiva bastarda. Just come along with me, Madam."

Medieval Science

In writing a new introductory section on Works on Medieval Science for Medieval Writing, it occurred to me how entangled we get in matters of definition. Today we confine science to meaning knowledge that has been acquired by what we now define as the scientific method. In the middle ages it just meant knowledge, not separated from philosophy or religion and not requiring rigorous standards of testing or proof, just a good pedigree in the annals of scholarship.

Of course, in our modern times every day the media trumpets a new piece of data of dubious provenance, draws an untenable conclusion, and then spouts "Science proves ........". That is entirely ignoring the scientific method. When science becomes religion we might as well be in the middle ages.

Kids, Computers and Literacy Education

Our crackpot government here in Oz has decided to steer us through the rough economic times by putting new buildings in schools, whether they want them or not. This is also supposed to resolve a supposed literacy crisis. After all, buildings teach people to read, don't they? And they keep builders in work. And if the builders are building libraries, then the builders also will undoubtedly become more literate, won't they?

In my granddaughters' primary school they built a new library. The school already had a library in a demountable building, so the government thought that the fair thing would be to take the old one away. It was pointed out to the powers that be that this would hardly be a nett gain for the school, and to avoid adverse publicity in this case and numerous others, they agreed to let them keep it. So then the school had to decide what to do with it. Various suggestions were mooted, including using it as a music room. In the end, they decided to keep it as the library, and to use the new, larger building as a computer centre.

So there will be no increased capacity to store books and other reading materials to increase literacy. And they are confining computers to an oldfashioned enclosed facility just at the time when laptops are becoming affordably cheap and new devices like Kindles, iPads and even phones are making it possible for the computer to be on the classroom desk as part of the equipment of literacy.

It is noteworthy that the kids have lessons in which they learn computing, rather than using computers as tools for learning literacy, numeracy or anything else that can be learned. The old computer lab seems such an 80s concept. Recently my elder granddaughter had a day off school sick, but not so terribly sick. She loves to write but for some reason simply cannot spell. We spent the whole day working on a Powerpoint presentation about Uluru, which they had been set for homework. She had not realised that you can type up your script on a computer, and then correct all the spelling so that it comes out perfect. So what do they do on these computers at school?

I have a horrible feeling that they are learning computing in the same way that some of the less literate early medieval scribes learned writing, copying letters out by sight with little or no understanding of the meaning of what they were writing. Now why didn't the government, instead of buying them a building, buy each of them a laptop and hire some inservice training people to get the teachers up to date with their knowledge of computers and how to fly them? Oh, I forgot. This was not really about education. It was builders that were going to be out of work.