To Hell with Technology

  Well there I was, chugging through updating the graphics and formatting in the script samples, when I came upon a section where I had no master graphic files in any format known to modern computing. They must have been some of the earliest examples that I had done, probably from before Medieval Writing was even a website. So there has been a slight delay while I rescanned a whole bunch of images of protogothic and Gothic documents and catalogued them. All done now, so the Gothic documents are now being updated again. The fact that it is raining like Noah's fludde this weekend might mean some more progress gets made. Can't do any gardening without a boat. To think that with fancy modern technology, images become unreadable in a few years, but those original 500 year old scratches on parchment are still there and legible.

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 And then it all goes out of date and you have to do it all again.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.

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!!

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.

Whatever Happened to Shorthand?

You know how you are sitting around after dinner talking about one thing and the conversation wobbles off into something else. It started with reminiscences about how the education system used to be about several decades ago, and I recalled that girls who were not in the academic stream learned shorthand. Those who proved adept at it then went on to become secretaries, rather than humble typists.
Shorthand was gradually eroded away as a result of technological change. The first was the invention of the dictaphone machine, with execrable sound quality, but which allowed letters to be typed without the intervention of a shorthand transcription. The takeover of the workplace by the personal computer meant that the boss sometimes even typed his own letters, without the intervention of a secretary. Likewise, at meetings and seminars there is likely to be a mini-disk machine on the table rather than a person taking minutes. It seems like technological improvement, but the ability to edit and interpret the material being recorded is removed. Silly jokes, embarrassing remarks and offensive asides are all preserved for posterity along with the official record.
Shorthand was employed in the days of the Romans, in a form known as Tironian notes, which appears in manuscripts up to around the 10th century. During the later medieval period university students, legal recorders and others who had to write quickly from the spoken word employed very simplified scripts with numerous abbreviations. Shorthand has not, of course, entirely disappeared. It is making a big comeback in the new guise of SMS speak. Strangely enough, I do not recall anyone in my youth suggesting that the demise of language and literacy was at hand as a result of people using shorthand, which was simply regarded as a practical means to an end.
Does anyone out there still use shorthand?

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.