More Updated Graphics - Rustic Capitals

  Creeping along updating some of the Medieval Writing graphics with fancy colour images downloaded from the British Library, we now have amazingly improved visuals for rustic capitals script. The page is unusual in that it uses this script, more commonly used for headings, for the whole page, and there are some unusual features of script formatting. While mostly they just wrote in horizontal lines in more or less continuous form, sometimes the scribes just cut loose. Check out the paleography exercise to see what I mean.

Painful Progress

  As promised, I am working, excruciatingly slowly, on replacing older graphics in Medieval Writing with better ones, with especial thanks to the British Library for allowing their high quality colour images to be freely used. Some of the images in the first paleography exercise for uncial script have now been updated. Unfortunately it makes some of the other old black and white bits and pieces in the exercise look even worse. Can't win.
  I will try to split my time between this project and my blockbuster epic Flickr project to not only display, but organise, my medieval photographs. That may take a day or two.

New Year's Resolution, Right

  Since trying to get my real life / cyberlife balance a bit more in synch, I can hopefully get back to a bit more medieval paleography and beaut stuff like that. I hereby promise that I will spend less time scrolling through amusing pictures of anthropomorphic rabbits and the like in digitised medieval manuscripts on Twitter, and more time on using some of these ever increasing resources to do something useful, if perhaps less entertaining.
  Making a start I have replaced one (Yes one, count it) old black and white British Library image of uncial script with a colour image downloaded from their website with the marvellous new provisions that you can play with it however you like. No bunnies or exquisite Virgins, but much more real and lifelike image of the text. I will proceed from here.
  Now I just have to think about what to do about those now grotty old Flash exercises with the crappy photographic reproduction. Do I just do them all over again with my antique version of Flash (which miraculously still actually works) or is there something easier and quicker? Suggestions gratefully received.
  Excelsior!

Back, or Forward, to Hieroglyphics

  Many years ago when multimedia was a novelty and the world was young and innocent, twelve year old multimedia designers told us that the written word, in terms of alphabetic spelling, was going to become extinct. We were told that the more intuitive mode of communication for hypertext links and task initiation was in the use of graphic symbols; pictograms or ideograms, although young multimedia designers were unfamiliar with these terminologies. They called them graphic hot links back then.
   As a middle aged fogey back then, as opposed to the geriatric fogey that I am now, I begged to differ. After all, what is so intuitive about a quasi-3D button on a 2D screen and what is so intuitive about doing everything by pressing buttons anyway? My granddaughters would not understand this now, and their opposable thumbs are developing whole new skills and functions. I compromised and wrote captions on my buttons in my alphabetic dogmatism.
   Nonetheless, I fail to see what is so intuitive about a picture of a rabbit running across the bottom of the screen as a navigation symbol for the next page, or about a cartoon dog fetching items from a letterbox as an email link. Furthermore, the use of graphics shaped like electrical switches is not intuitive, it is merely utilising learned symbolic communication from older technology. Besides, I can never work out which is on or off anyway since they changed real switches from little levers that pointed up or down to rocker switches with a vertical line and a circle on them. These are ideograms in their own right, but not particularly intuitive.
   I think it was because the web started off as a text based medium that restored text links to respectability, even though it is now filled with everything that whistles and sings. Drop down menus had words on them, even if menu shortcut bars had symbols on them. We went back to believing in alphabetic writing for a while.
   I have noticed a recent return to graphic symbolism, but the symbols have become even more simplified and abstract. Gmail now has strange little monochrome graphics instead of headings that say "trash", "archive" or "label". I have to hover the mouse over them to make the words come up in order to know which is which. My antique Kindle (nearly a year old!) has real buttons which say "menu" and "home" and the like, while my husband's new one has buttons with strange little symbols which all look like little geometric grids, indistinguishable one from the other without a good light and reading glasses. We are going back to pictograms, but they do not have the essential characteristic of being readily distinguishable.
   Intriguingly, as technologies change, the pictograms themselves are becoming increasingly abstracted. The standard graphic symbol for "save", for example, is a picture of a floppy disk, which many younger users of computers may never have even seen. The pictogram of a floppy disk has transformed into an ideogram for saving a file to whatever medium is being used. The garbage can symbol for trash is well recognised, but I always used to panic when using a Macintosh because to eject a removable medium, you had to drag it to the trash. The learning part of my brain recognised this as merely a process, while the intuitive part always panicked that I was trashing the contents of the medium and my files would all disappear. Mind you, with Windows I had a mental problem with clicking the "start" button to turn it off, but they have fixed this now as the button has no misleading captions, just that annoying little quadripartite flag, which is neither informative nor intuitive but merely an arrogant brand recognition symbol. Is this simplifying onscreen communication, or making the language of the process more complex and subtle?
  On other technological gizmos, real live buttons are no longer the simple analogue for binary function that they used to be. Gadgets get smaller, so rather than fill up space with loads of buttons, a few buttons perform different functions when used in different combinations. To remember how to work these permutations and combinations we have to read the manual. Back to ye olde alphabetic writing again, and yet I remember when it was considered that operating manuals, whether for gadgets or computer software, should be quite unnecessary. The more graphic and intuitive it gets, the more we need the words. 
   Old books about writing put these various schemes on a timeline of increasing conceptual complexity; pictograms, ideograms then alphabetic writing. We are actually using a combination of all three today, which some would say is the death of proper writing, but I think may represent a whole new complex of mental decoding of symbolic language.
   So why am I rabbiting on about this stuff right now? Well, just to keep you amused and to deflect attention from the fact that updates to Medieval Writing may be a few weeks off yet, as we are in school holidays down here and that means extensive visits from granddaughters, and besides, I am just in the process of buying a new fishing kayak.

Surging Forward into the Past

   Having spent a good deal of time rescanning old photos and reorganising my photographic collection of medieval manuscripts, I have begun the process of updating some of the more manky old photos in the script examples section of Medieval Writing, as well as reformatting, updating links and all that jazz. This will take some time, so be patient and we might get there in time for the next great leap in the digital revolution.
   However, there are a few points for users to note. If the photographs are larger and less compressed, they will take longer to load. If you are still running on a windup clockwork modem, please be patient. I cannot turn scans from black and white photographs in old books into living high definition technicolor. I cannot make the script in the photographs more legible than it is in the original manuscript. I cannot remove difficulties like flaws in the vellum, stains on the page, or writing visible from the other side of the page, nor should I try. These are the difficulties you encounter in the real live world of manuscripts.
   I am not going to rescan the sets of alphabet letters. I had a number of discussions with colleagues right at the beginning of the project about the use of alphabet sets. Personally I think people just carry them around and stick them under their pillow rather than use them effectively if they are available. That is why they are all on rollovers so you can't just print them as sets, not, as one correspondent suggested, that I think you might steal them. Hey, you can have them. They're yours. I actually think it works better to hunt for the letters in context, but I included the separate letters so as not to cause palpitations among the troops. But I'm not doing them again.
   Somewhere along the way I will get tired of all this reinventing, and sneak in some new stuff from the increasing piles around me. Meanwhile, have fun with it.

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!

Problems Scribes Didn't Have - Or Did They

I was recently looking at a comment about my website Medieval Writing on a bulletin board. I don't do this for vanity, but for quality control! A user was recommending certain pages as useful for learning to read a particular medieval script, but complained that the images of the letters were highly compressed and contained artifacts. Of course, my initial response was to harrumph mightily, but it is true.
The problem is that what I see on my browser on my computer may not be exactly what another user sees using different hardware, and what is an acceptable download speed for graphics on one connection might be utterly impossible on another. When I first started the website, I had a slow dialup modem connection, as did most people especially at home, and I based my benchmarks around that. I have also recently upgraded my vintage Windows 98 computer with CRT screen for a new laptop with a hi-res flat screen, and crikey, does that make a difference to how the graphics look. Images on the old CRT screen have a tendency to be warm and fuzzy, and I was forever trying to sharpen them up. Images on my new screen are cold and crisp, with a tendency to be jaggy and full of inexplicable dots and squiggles if they have been optimised for the other screen.
Now, do I assume that everybody these days has a broadband connection and a modern screen, or do I still have to cater for the dial-up connections and the old computers? I guess it just has to be a compromise. I have been castigated by users for not catering for Linux users or optimising for all the different browsers in existence. Some major upgrades have been made to the site in the past to resolve some anomalies, and if I had the resources of, say, the tax office, I could get my IT minions to produce a version for everybody, and an automatic detection system to steer each user into the right version, but I'm afraid that medieval paleography just doesn't have the same resources as tax collection, especially when you're trying to keep it free.
The only consolation is that if the users of the site are going to practise their skills on real medieval documents, they will find that the letters in those documents are as uneven, jaggy and as full of artifacts as any jpeg. Scribes didn't actually write using model alphabets. And they had problems with their technology. Sometimes the writing turns really nasty when the scribe has changed his pen and the new one just won't flow properly. He just had to re-cut his quill- no help desk!