Flying Solo on the Word Wild Web

  I have had a website on medieval paleography and written culture up and running for around 15 years now, with my email contact on it. This blog has been running for a few years. A Flickr site has been up for a couple of years I guess, initially just for my personal use to help me organise and put into usable digital form a large and messy collection of photographs, but now with some embryonic developing projects. I also tweet in order to keep in touch with people and keep up to date with things. They all provide channels of communication.
  Periodically I get little waves of communication through email, blog comments or tweets, some of which seem slightly peculiar. I guess when you get out of the institutional environment where the protocols of communication and the hierarchies of expertise are carefully mapped, you get different perspective on how people perceive knowledge and expertise. As the various modes of internet communication have developed, the nature of the chains of communication has changed.
  In the early days a common request was from schoolkids wanting answers to very simple questions, or suggestions on subjects for their projects. When I hinted that I thought the idea of their school exercise was to look things up for themselves, I sometimes got told that the teachers had told them to get on the internet and ask somebody. Teachers have got a lot more savvy about the use of the internet since then and I haven't had one of those for a long time.

  
  I do remember that one of these ran along the lines of "I have to do a project on saints. Do you know any good ones?" Erm. The randomly selected one above is from St Mary Castlegate in York.

  Another common communication from the early days involved suggestions for external links for my website, often to very generalised link pages like about.com or Wikipedia or even student assignments or the little hobby pages of individuals pasted together out of scraps from other parts of the internet. With the vast amount of valuable and authoritative information now being loaded on to the internet by all manner of organisations and institutions, these suggestions tend to get drowned in the flood. Replying to such suggestions involved care and discretion.
  Wikipedia has come a long way since then, even if it still has a lot further to go. One strange discussion got entangled with medieval nomina sacra abbreviations and the Holy Trinity. I know a bit about the first but get a bit lost in the haze with the intricacies of the second, but I remember having to try to explain, as tactfully as possible, that writing an article for Wikipedia then citing it yourself isn't the most totally convincing mode of academic argument, especially back in those days when conflicting views on Wikipedia dissolved into all in cyberbrawls.

  Symbolic representations in Thornhill church, Yorkshire.

  A facet which continues to this day is the belief that anyone publishing on the web is  a recognised world expert, and furthermore, in a vast array of fields. I have been asked questions on obscure aspects of paleography, textual history and analysis, iconographic representation, authenticity, stuff dug up by metal detectorists, medieval law, medicine and heraldry. Heraldry! I wish the College of Arms would put up a decent website that at least explains some of the concepts of heraldry and why no single individual, let alone one who has never got very deeply into the subject, knows the coats of arms of everyone who ever bore one from the dawn of the concept to the days of somebody's grandfather's boarding school. I've been sent pictures of arms on things from seals to teaspoons to 19th century boilerplates. 

  All Saints North Street, York. Treasure house of glass.

  Then there is the business of reading the legends on seals. Fortunately most of them just say SIGILLUM FREDDI MERCURI or some such, but that always seems to be disappointing to the inquirer. They think they contain coded information. I did manage to partially untangle a trickily organised inscription in old French on a gold ring once (Yay.) but the finder was taking it to the British Museum anyway and I'm sure they did a much better job.
  The queries about reading old stuff can be diverse and intriguing. I love the letters from folks who have been trying to decipher something for ten years but think I should knock it off for them over the weekend, with my vast knowledge of every script in use before about 1900 and every language known to man. Sometimes it's only something they've bought on eBay or in an antique shop and you're not sure why they want to know anyway. Other times it's some family thing that they suspect contains an amazing privilege, or links to great people or events, or perhaps the ownership of a suppressed abbey reclaimed by the crown and granted to a family ancestor. 
  The latter are sometimes very secretive. They want to show you something of their Amazing Document, but they don't actually want you to know what is in it, in case you gazump them and go claim their abbey or something. So they send a picture of a little corner of it, often chopped off without whole words being displayed and you can't see the whole alphabet or how the letters go together. When you say you think it looks 15th century or whatever, but you really don't have enough information to tell them much else, they think you're holding out on them.

  Any offers? Glastonbury.

  There have been some interesting documents cross my tracks this way. Acquittances from the Hundred Years War. A bit of marginalia in a different script to the main text by someone doing a transcription. I got the letters out but didn't know what it meant. One of his academic pals recognised the text when they were having a night at the pub. Nice to participate in an academic pub discussion in Glasgow from this end of the world. A very creepy Reformation era clerical confession found by somebody scrunched up in a hole in a beam in their ancient house. I think I found it more interesting than they did when I ascertained it wasn't about the house.
  Occasionally I have had images sent of things that have already been transcribed and published. When I've asked why they are reinventing the wheel they have replied that they believe something is incorrect, omitted, wrongly interpreted, but they can't actually read the thing themselves. Three mysteries here. Why would you set off on a project that you don't have the skills to carry out? Why would you think a previous transcription or interpretation is wrong if you can't read the original? Why would you contact a random unknown person on the internet to aid your cause? Demur politely on those. Not my specific area of interest.
  Absolutely on the rejection list are people who want their manuscript treasures valued. I had to put a specific disclaimer on the Medieval Writing website about that one. No way, no bloody way! Rather more strange are the people who want to know what I paid for my little medieval scraps. I even had somebody once demanding to buy one. Perhaps they think I'm running a clandestine manuscript scraps business on the side.

  Not for sale. Not even the strange Spanish ones with curly wurly writing that I can't read and mysterious notary's marks.

  There are people who send pictures of their treasures wanting them identified in some way, who then get slightly miffed if you don't give them the answer they were looking for. An intriguing oddity is the desire for something to be older than it is, even if it is old and interesting already. Then they want to claim they have the oldest whateveritis in the universe. Or they have read somewhere that a certain script, notation, style first appears in the xth century, so theirs has to be at least that old. I tend to go on a simple assessment that if it swims, quacks and waddles it's probably a duck, not a pterodactyl. But feel free to ask somebody else. Nope. They want to convince me. They don't understand that I really don't care.

  An old German duck. Mine. From the same scrap of codex as somebody else's pterodactyl.

  The type of query that baffles me particularly is when somebody wants me to give a one line, definitive answer to something that is the subject of academic debate. If I refer them to some reading, they say no, they want to know what I think. Why? Am I some kind of international umpire? Why do they think I'm qualified to speak on these diverse debates? The weirdest ones come from people who are interested in (Dare I mention it?) the Voynich Manuscript. Quiet now. I have been informed that the VM was written by a Hungarian mystic, that it is in old Dutch, that its mysteries can be solved through the study of late antique beekeeping. VM assertions and queries seem to travel in waves. I once got so sick of them that I wrote a blog post asserting that it was written by Leonard of Quirm (a Terry Pratchett character) and was so screwed up because it had been altered by travelling through the space-time continuum from Discworld. I then got an email from a person who had been trying, valiantly and apparently fruitlessly, to maintain a sensible and sane website on the VM saying that because of me he had had to put up a posting explaining to people the meaning of the word "parody". 
  One of the interesting aspects of having an open, non-institutional web presence is that you can get engaged in intriguing cross-disciplinary discussions. Legal contracts in the digital age or modern urban linguistics or medical science can have roots in the medieval past and there are experts in suchlike fields who are interested to explore them. It is surprising that academics out of their field can be as naive about methods of investigation as members of the general public. They can also be just as inclined to want you to do their basic searching for them. "Do you know of images of ... from medieval manuscripts?" Try the British Library images or Gallica for starters. Ten minutes later, when they couldn't possibly have exhausted those, "Aren't there any others?" Try Sexy Codicology. You can find them all there. Nevertheless this does open up interdisciplinary communication, and may even engender some mutual respect between workers in different areas. The disciplinary boundaries are very hard to breach in the seminar room or academic journal, where walls are built for protection against wolves.
  The madly enthusiastic hobbyists can also generate some great discussion, even if the protagonists get a bit carried away with their obsessions sometimes. I have had a swag of correspondence, by email and blog comment, on the subject of formulations for medieval ink. One modern scribe even wanted to send me a pot of his brew and had to be firmly dissuaded because of what customs and security might make of a vial of nasty, toxic brown stuff in the post. The longest and most enthusiastic blog comments were on this subject, with folks posting their favourite recipes and chemists and paleographers locked in mortal combat.
  The opportunity for such freewheeling discussion has been limited by the curse of blog comment advertising spam. It does seem that blog hosts have thrown in the towel on ridding the airwaves of this noxious menace. I can't even see what point it has for the spammers as I don't see how they can get to a target audience by this means. I guess the open invitation discussions just have to migrate to other internet forums.
  I hope this hasn't read like a long whinge or just a series of funny shaggy dog stories, because there is a point here about engagement outside the academic community. When I first started with this stuff, the university mob were more than disinterested. They were determined that they were not going to engage in this nonsense outside the limits of their traditional academic debating forums. A younger generation of academics is changing the way these things operate and using all the digital tools at their command. However, it would be a shame if this was just used to build fenced academic communities in cyberspace. Engaging with folks outside the ivory tower means understanding the interests, skills and aspirations of those who are not members of a club whose rules have been drummed into all its members.
  Personally, I think all academics should learn or be taught how to write outside their disciplinary environment. Some do. Some don't. Some won't. You can learn at least as much as you teach.

Domesday or Bust

AAAAAAAUUGH!!! There, that feels better.
  You know, my cyberlife didn't begin with Medieval Writing. About fifteen years ago there were some other projects on the go, all relating to medieval topics, and produced on a program called Toolbook, which would have been very good had they got the bugs out of it, kept it up to date with new releases of Windows, properly hooked it into the internet age and generally not flushed it down the toilet. Well, I figured it might be time to try and rescue some of the material from these, which were in use for a number of years by my husband in teaching medieval history, but he doesn't do that any more.
  Discovered to my horror that two of the projects, the most useful ones which had had the most work put into them, were on an ancient version of Toolbook that won't even run on my current computer. So stoked up the boiler and fired up the wheezing old contraption that contains such arcane hardware as a floppy disc drive, a zip disk drive, a SCSI port with an old scanner attached - you get the picture. At least I can copy and paste all the text out of them. I will have to do all the fancy interactive graphics and maps again. The photographs are all in 256 colour bitmap format, which is about as useful as ..... well, since we are in public, something which is not useful. Still, I've just finishing copying and backing up all the masters. The only data transferring device that will work on it, as well as on my current computer, is the card out of my camera, as the old beast at some stage acquired a simple card reader to add to the multiple USB devices hanging off it to make it do things it wasn't originally designed to.
  We designed things differently then. Screens were smaller and lower res, and the multimedia guys straight out of school told us that people would not put up with scrolling pages, so everything was divided up into little gobbets of text. To get more on a page you put in more little boxes that popped up when you clicked things. It makes it look as if there's not much there, but after copying and pasting for three days, I discover I practically have a thesis on the subject of the medieval towns of York, Lincoln and Norwich; and these are only suppose to be examples of how to go about investigating medieval towns. My excuse is that I was still suffering from post-PhD thesis verbal diarrhoea. It can take years to get back to being able to write a single clause sentence using only the words available in the Scrabble dictionary. Then, of course, the web was only just being invented, so there is no webography, and there are numerous interesting sites on various aspects of medieval towns now. 
  I think,having rescued the text, I might park that one for now and launch an assault on the other old one; a synopsis of the structure of the medieval church. It is much snappier, I think ... I hope. The glossary from it is already done and on the web. Easy peasy!
  Just to cheer myself up, I took a look at the current state of the 900 year anniversary Domesday project. This was launched in 1986 as a grand and ambitious snapshot of the nation in digital format. Trouble was, they stored it on 12 inch laser disks which would only run on BBC computers. Well, 25 years on they have launched the website Domesday Reloaded, which contains some of the data from the original project; more promised. The official site is all very cheery and upbeat about how they are going. An article in Computing History is a little more circumspect, daring to use such terms as digital obsolescence and reverse engineering. The Centre for Computing History claims to now have three (count 'em) working Domesday systems complete with players and disks, and has been active in digging the project out of the sludge of obsolescent oblivion. Oh well. at least my little effort hasn't taken 25 years - yet.

   The Luddites have been cheerfully yodelling that the original Domesday Book is still there after 900 years, and perfectly functional. However, big bad Willie's commissioners didn't just take that  grand tome into the field and write the final entries into it. There was once a whole archive of material in the royal treasury that had been used to compile the book, but it disappeared centuries ago. Probably disappeared into the Chancellor's fireplace to warm his feet once he figured that they didn't need it any more. History wouldn't be any fun if all the evidence was still there.

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.

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.

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.

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.

National Curriculum and Literacy

Here in Australia we are embroiled in politics over the implementation of a national curriculum for schools. Great idea in theory, generates more heat than light in any attempt at implementation. One of the objectives of the process is to ensure consistent standards of literacy. See previous sentence.

Our Prime Minister, who loves to be photographed with school kids, informed us that he was distressed that a small child he was attempting to commune with did not apparently associate the sounding out of "der o guh" with the written word dog. Therefore all children should be drilled in phonics. Apart from apparently being unaware that a very small child may merely have been a tad overawed by an assertive man in a suit making strange noises at him, it is a little alarming that politicians, who have plenty of other things to do such as making sure that our economy doesn't go down the gurgler, should feel that by such a trivial observation they can set themselves up as experts on the teaching of literacy.

I have just been reading an article by that eminent paleographer Malcolm Parkes ("Which Came First, Reading or Writing?" in Parkes, M. 2008 Their Hands Before Our Eyes Ashgate) in which he discusses the increasing legibility of writing with the introduction of Caroline minuscule. The abandonment of ligatures and the clearly differentiated individual letters meant that the letters of the alphabet became the basic unit of reading, rather than peculiar graphic signs representing whole words. In the terms of the modern debate about literacy, the writers of Caroline minuscule in the 9th century changed from word recognition to phonics. It helped that Latin was a phonetic language, which English isn't.

As the world gradually became more literate, and the methods and purposes of reading and writing changed, the association of script styles and page layout with modes of reading becomes a set of clues to the processes which the brain uses to decode the written word. Wouldn't it be nice if we could get some experts on the history of literacy and writing to engage in the debate on the teaching of literacy in the modern world, rather than relying on simple minded populist politicians' tricks to design the way we educate our kids? Hey, what was that big pink thing going "oink" that just flew past my window.

Medieval Ephemera on the Web

Just before going completely off the air for a Christmans holiday break, I had an interesting conversation with a fellow independent medieval website owner in Canada. We found we had some similar gripes about the state of educational material on the web.
It seems that many sites produced by web pioneers in universities are no longer being properly maintained and updated, or are even simply disappearing altogether, as their authors move on to new positions or retire. Some very excellent work is simply disappearing into the ether. While museums and archives are setting up massive projects to make their material accessible to a wide range of users, universities are becoming more anally retentive about making their material available only to their registered (fee paying) students. They seem to feel they have no charter to increase access to knowledge by the public at large, nor to keep material available if a specific course is not currently being taught within the institution. Given that the academic community invented and pioneered the internet, and the World Wide Web, in the first place, and they hold all the resources for providing web material easily, this seems to be a niggardly attitude.
Back in the 1990s, when I first started experimenting with digital presentation of material, universities here in Australia were only interested in this kind of material if they thought they could sell it to other areas of the educational community for profit, or at least save themselves some money by using a machine instead of a tutor. There seemed to be no wider vision for increasing access to quality material through new technology. More than a decade on, it seems nothing has changed.
Meanwhile, those of us battling to fly solo have no guarantee that if we were hit by a bus tomorrow that our work would survive beyond the next due payment to our website provider. Out of print books can be found in secondhand bookshops, but off the air websites can only be scrounged from The Internet Archive if you are lucky and know exactly what to look for. Should we be lobbying our universities to expand their social conscience and use their experience and expertise to increase access without promise of immediate cash reward, or should we give up on such idealistic hogwash and try to find some other way to ensure that valuable educational material can remain available for as long as it is of use to someone?

Brave New Web

A few years ago a I wrote an article entitled Multimedia Medievalia: The Fate of Traditional Scholarship in a Post-Modern World, for a collection of published papers. It has recently been republished on the web on the new site Medievalists.net. Re-reading it, I discover it was largely a bit of a whinge about the difficulties of trying to be a pioneer in the use of multimedia for educational purposes. With a bit more water having passed under the bridge, how does that vision stack up?
At the end of the article I did express some optimism that the web might provide the means for building complex meta-projects in which the various elements interlock through cyberspace. Having just gone through the process of repairing broken links yet again in Medieval Writing, I realise that the web is still not stable enough for that. I think I have largely repaired the lists of external links, for now, but I know that there are many links embedded in the hundreds of pages of text on the site that have gone phut, and I could spend my whole time trying to track them down and never get on with putting any of my own content up.
Is the web destined to forever be a place of fleeting meetings of ephemera? I hope I live long enough to prove that wrong.

Maintain the Revolution

In a recent newspaper editorial from this end of the world, in the Canberra Times, it was reported that certain schools in America, which had formerly had a policy of issuing every student with a laptop, had decided not to continue with this policy on the basis that it did not appear to have improved educational outcomes. The editor in question seemed quite pleased about this as he had, on his own telling, never entirely mastered the typewriter, let alone later evolutions in writing technology.
I guess the attitude in both cases is an unfortunate, but almost inevitable, consequence of the way that technology was introduced to the educational arena. I first started paddling around in the area in the mid 1990s. At that time, everyone was a pioneer and people with both academic expertises and computer skills were running around trying many different ways to use this new technology for educational purposes. However, while the capabilities of the new technology rocketed ahead, neither teachers, librarians nor educational administrators had much idea of the best way to make use if it. There are still teachers in schools and universities who are practically computer illiterate. They can open their email, but they don't know how to file it, trash it or delete it.
In my granddaughter's primary school, the younger kids are still being taught "computers" by their buddies in older classes. It seems that new teaching strategies based around the use of the new technology have still not filtered through to many teaching professonals, and it is still thought necessary to learn "computers" rather than using them creatively for learning something else. If the students with the laptops are using them for idling away their time in chat rooms or accessing YouTube, it is because they are more computer savvy than their teachers.
The answer is not to take away the computers, especially as there is now an ever increasing amount of high quality educational material on the web, and this is in a rapidly expanding phase. The time is ripe to take teachers at all levels of the educational spectrum out of the classroom for long enough to learn, not only the mechanics of using computers, but strategies for finding, sifting and using the wealth of educational material out there and incorporating it into their lessons. Find out how to use chat room technology to build a science project. Use YouTube to share knowledge with other students.
Those of you who are already converted can just keep practising with your quill pens, because, as users of Medieval Writing know, modern technology can be used to learn about ancient technology.