UiB Research Days

Forskningsdagene, aka Norwegian National Science Week, involves a number of events intended to make research (most often scientific) available to the public and also to create public awareness about research in Norwegian universities and enterprises. In one event in Bergen (with parallels elsewhere), the University together with affiliated groups and other institutions (such as the architectural school) set up booths within a series of large tents and entertain children and some parents over the course of a Friday and Saturday.

The booth before opening, its only empty period

This year, largely at the instigation of Ã…slaug Ommundsen, who wrote and designed all the banners, the Centre for Medieval Studies participated. Activities included paper and parchment samples which children used to distinguish one from the other, writing in runes and (my responsibility) hand paper making.

Åslaug and I worked the booth for the full stints both days. We were aided by Eldar Heide and Frode Hervik on Friday, and Stian Hamre on Saturday. Thomas Foerster and Leidulf Melve helped with the rigging; Biörn Tjällén and Susan Foran, a new postdoc at CMS, with the demolition. Our inestimable director, Sverre Bagge stopped by with two grandchildren on Saturday as did Sigbjørn Sønnesyn and clan. Continue Reading

(Imagining) How Scribes Worked #1

An earlier post discussed Malcolm Parkes’s idea of sense transfer units, that is the amount of text a scribe retained in memory when transferring his/her attention from an exemplar (the text to be copied) to the scribe’s own copy (the text the scribe is writing).

During a recent meeting, I found myself copying sentences from the handout to my notebook and in noticing some patterns began to imagine a sort of trial to see how Parkes’s principle might work in practice.

Using a Livescribe Pulse pen, which is essentially a digital pen that records, I sat down and copied a few lines (as naturally as possible) from a nearby book. Because it records, the Livescribe pen allows you to playback your writing in individual sessions. In everyday life, this feature is meant to be used by students who, using the pen to record lectures while taking notes, can then tap/click a certain part of their notes (either on the special paper or on a monitor after they’ve been uploaded to a computer) and then hear what the lecturer was saying at the time the student was writing.

For the purpose of this exercise, the recording pen allows us to see my copying in ‘real time’ (more or less, I don’t know enough information on the recording speed and processing time to talk about the pen’s reading/recording precision and accuracy). You can see the pauses in my copying and their duration.

The exemplar

The Copy

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The Price of a Book in the Middle Ages

A Carolingian binding


References to the price and labour involved in producing early medieval books in Western Europe are hard to come by. However, thanks to Helmut Gneuss’s reconstruction of a scribal comment (aka colophon) now lost (but transcribed by a modern cataloguer before the loss of the manuscript), we have a unique reference to the price of a book in early English material (it may well be the earliest reference of its sort in western Europe).*

It reads (as reconstructed):

Đeos Boc wæs geal gewriten on feower
Wyken and kostede þreo and fifti syllinges
This whole book was written in four weeks and cost fifty-three shillings.

The hand-written catalogue description of this lost manuscript (probably written very roughly around 1100) has not been printed but Gneuss relates that it was 21×15 cm and contained a Latin psalter and canticles over 152 folios (with another seven folios added later). However, the statement itself gives no indication as to whether the cost involved the materials or only the labour.

Nonetheless, it seems worth gathering some (provisional) points of comparison (about which corrections are welcome; I am especially uncertain about conversion rates and the like). In 900 in England, a sheep was valued at 5 pence (?or about 1 shilling) and a pig at 10 pence (?or about 2 shillings).**

In the medieval Islamic world, an ordinary book could cost 10 silver dirhams (?7 dinars by weight) and a fine one 100 dirhams (?70 dinars). The annual income necessary to support a middle-class family was around 24 dinars. The library in Cairo under al-Hakim (r. 996-1020) had an annual budget of 207 dinars per year, 90 of which went to paper for copyists and 48 for the librarian’s salary. The keeper of the supplies and the repairer of books each earned 12 dinars.***

In Byzantium, annotations from around 900 in the books of Arethas, Archbishop of Caesarea, value his copy of Plato at 21 nomismata (6 8 [Thanks to Marilena Maniaci for the correction!) for the parchment) and Euclid at 14 nomismata (perhaps not including the parchment). Manual workers in Byzantium were paid 6 to 10 nomismata per year. Those in the civil service appear to have earned about 72 nomismata per year at the lower end of the scale (the average perhaps in the hundreds).****

This only represents the early end, which interests me in considering a/the development and/or shift from sacred book to commodity. More examples and comparanda kindly solicited.


—————-
* Helmut Gneuss, “More Old English from Manuscripts” in Intertexts: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Culture presented to Paul E. Szarmach ((Tempe, AZ: ACMRS in collaboration with Brepols, 2008), pp. 411-421 at p. 419.

** from VI Æthelstan, see s.v. coinage in Lapidge et al., The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).

*** from Jonathan Bloom, Paper before Print The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001), pp. 117 and 121.

**** from Robin Cormack, Byzantine Art (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), p. 132.

Malcolm Parkes’s Transfer Units

A Parkes-owned Cappelli


One of the most interesting (admittedly, to me) characteristics of manuscript culture, that is a literate culture distinct from print, is the handwritten transmission of texts, a phenomenon that demands a better understanding of the mechanics of copying. In short, how does the individual read while s/he is writing and/or write while s/he is reading. And how does this practice affect the way that texts shift, move and change.

At the heart of the copying process is the scribe, whose education, habits and working practices vary according to time, place and any number of considerations. Nonetheless, I think that we might be able to talk about some general principles that apply to copying as a practice. At least I would like be able to talk about generalities about reading and writing that can be applied to the specific mechanics of copying.

One attractive principle is the notion of ‘transfer units’ as described in Malcolm Parkes’s Their Hands Before Our Eyes, A Closer Look at Scribes, a significantly revised and augmented book based on the Lyell lectures at Oxford in 1999.

When a scribe copied a text he had to divide his attentions between exemplar and copy, and the degree of concentration required is reflected in the frequency of the transition from one to the other. The transitions may often be detected from minor discrepancies in the spacing or the alignment of the handwriting on the pages of the copy…(In the example under discussion, a scribe, Hrannigil) reproduced the scriptio continua of the exemplar for certain groups of words, which indicate the amount of text he retained in his memory when transferring his attention from the exemplar of a difficult text to his copy. These ‘transfer units’ can be seen in the copy…(and) are also ‘conceptual’ units. (63-64)

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Short take: The Late Age of Print by Ted Striphas


A wonderfully fun book! I read this last winter for a break from the medieval and was well rewarded. I admit that the title initially made me think that it might be a lament for print or an encomium for the digital. However, reading some of the reviews as well as the author’s website and blog assured me it was neither. This is a description of the continuing function and role of print in a late capitalist, consumer-driven society.

The introduction invokes familiar names for those interested in the every day and the book (Lefebvre, de Certeau, Marx); makes special mention of Febvre and Martin’s The Coming of the Book; and suggests that the idea that books are more than a commodity (they represent learning, knowledge and so self-improvement) is in itself a way of distinguishing the good in the commodity market (9).

And in the subsequent chapters amidst the discussion of cultural structures of book production, we learn about bookshelves becoming an integral part of the modern ‘home’, the development of the barcode system and the market in Harry Potter-derived media. All very clearly exposed and tantalizingly spun. Continue Reading

King’s Palaeography: like a phoenix from the ashes…or a water fowl in flames?

What photoshop is for...

n 30 June (which makes it way dated, I know!), the Palaeography Working Group at King’s College issued its final report. Michelle Brown at the School for Advanced Study in London wrote a letter clarifying some (mis)representations, but expressed support for the report’s recommendation to re-establish a chair in palaeography.

The people appointed to the group (and its recommendation) suggest that the group was not hand-picked to whitewash the matter. And given the likely support for palaeography from these individuals, the rationale behind sacking one chair in palaeography only to have to re-establish a chair in the future is perplexing. Of course, I can run through possible reasons, but these would not even be based on gossip or other sources of unreliable information. And I spend enough time talking about stuff I know nothing about when I’m teaching (so I’ll refrain here!).

Most striking to me is how serious or grave or possibly cynical and maybe even short-sighted the thing was. Let’s assume a position is re-established on more advantageous financial footing and suiting the remit envisaged by the working group’s paper. The person offered the new position will be fully aware of the fate of her/his predecessor and other prominent, productive academics who were cut as part of the restructuring at King’s.

Imagine: Hey, we just fired a guy who held this permanent position because we thought it was untenable…erm, you want the job?

Or are we as academic workers so ready to acquiesce, that it ain’t even worth a second thought?

Student reading: how fast is fast enough

Edward Tenner’s column at The Atlantic (Higher Education’s Tech Dilemmas) discusses research that shows that hyperlinked reading is not serving students. For a course a couple of years ago, I and the other instructors wrote the lecture notes out in full sentence and paragraph form (These 15-20 pages for each lecture served as the course reading; it was a short, not a full-term course). Rather than footnote information, I used lots of hyperlinks so that students could click through to manuscript images, library homepages and in at least one case some medieval music. For example, the following on some of the Italian humanists and their writing (just as an image, without working links):

But during the lecture and afterwards, it was made very clear to me that the students weren’t sitting at their computers and eagerly clicking through…in fact, most of the students were printing the reading out and simply following along during the lecture with their paper copies in front of them. I save myself a lot of time by not copying and pasting links into the lecture notes/readings now.

I think the issue is/was that students (at least in a lecture format) want to be told what is important and expect that if it is important the topic, issue or image will be discussed further in class. They’re reading rather pragmatically, not curiously.

Tenner’s column then notes reading speeds (possibly suggesting that the matter is related to the question of hyperlinks???), noting studies that indicate Kindle and ipad reading is somewhat slower. I suspect that this has to do with habits and comfort. The primary constraint on reading text presented in lines is the movement of the eyes which hope and skip around. Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain relates an experiment demonstrating that:

If a full sentence is presented, word by word, at the precise point where gaze is focalized, thus avoiding the need for eye movements, a good reader can read at staggering speed–a mean of eleven hundred words per minute, and up to sixteen hundred words per minute for the best readers

This is three to four times faster than normal, quick reading. Readers who read from four hundred to five hundred words per minute are, according to Dehaene, already close to optimal within the constraints of eye movement (no page numbers for references; I read it on an electronic reader!).

If we want students to read as much as possible as quickly as possible (while retaining respectable comprehension), then we need to hook them up to screens that flash words sequentially based on the individual readers gaze. Of course, this won’t teach them to read curiously, to branch out from the required reading and to consider topic more in depth. Giving students reading material in which links could suggest reliable, well presented and informative sources for more depth seemingly promised to pique their curiosity. That such a format distracts more than allures, not that it might cause you to read a fraction of a second more slowly, is the real bummer.

King’s Palaeography R.I.P

On Friday, the administration of King’s received a friendly write-up in the business section of The Times online. The title, “Making the cut and saving a world-class academic asset”, and the statement that “King’s looks set to keep its chair in palaeography, with a widened remit, after revising its plans” gave the impression that the position would be spared.

However, today (via the facebook group and an email circulated by David Ganz on the Apilist) we learn that Ganz and King’s College London have signed a voluntary severance agreement, the details of which are not public, but which allows either party to state:

‘On 26th January the college announced that, due to financial constraints associated with cuts in Higher Education Funding it would no longer be able to fund the current Chair in Palaeography (a position created by the university of London in 1949) The College has since this announcement re-examined the situation as part of the 90 day consultation exercise and believes that it may be able to establish a new Chair of Palaeography and Manuscript Studies at some point in the future.’

Looks like Trainor told The Times reporter something along the lines of King’s is looking to keep palaeography, which prompted the reporter to relate that it is ‘keeping
its [but, note, not the] chair’, but that Trainor also mentioned a wider remit and future plans, rhetorical moves that allow the administration to try to parry any complaints from the array of local and international protests, but make no firm commitment to the subject. In fact, from a common sense point of view the decision to terminate the position, only (allegedly) to start it up later–there is no practical difference between a chair in palaeography and a chair in palaeography and manuscript studies, other than rhetoric to circumvent labour laws–is bass-ackwards. This is coming from an administration that has, in its mind, worked tirelessly to enhance, promote and preserve the KCL ‘brand’.

Well, outside of contingencies I can’t imagine, you don’t stop producing and promoting a successful product, only to relaunch it under a different name later. At least not if you truly want to maintain the success of the product. On the other hand, if you want to kill something off, but want to keep e-mails about the discontinuation to a minimum, then you might very well discontinue the item, but attempt to palliate concerns by promising that a new, better, improved version, one that will meet all your expectations and more is just around the corner (and repeat and repeat and repeat it until people stop asking).

You’ve got to hand it to Trainor though. He wrapped The Times reporter well around his finger (although seeing as the piece was destined for the business section, it probably didn’t take too much). He managed to make cuts! and save the world-class status of the institution!

Not really, but I guess that’s a better story than ‘Making cuts and destroying world-class academic assets’. What a waste.

Editor’s Choice

The Review of English Studies has introduced ‘editor’s choice’ articles, intended (according to RES) both to promote RES and provide readers without a university subscription with free access to some of the best (!) essays published in the latest issues of the journal.

My recent piece on the Taunton fragment is currently one of the freely available choice articles and will be downloadable without subscription for the next six months or so.

A Few (artistically re-created) Lines from the Taunton Fragment

The Taunton fragment was discovered in 2002 and contains a bilingual (Latin and Old English) version of biblical expositions known as the Homiliary of Angers. When the text was edited for Anglo-Saxon England in 2004/05, the editor suggested that the strange Old English of the fragment represented the language of the author/translator.

Based on a comparison with other Latin manuscripts of the Homiliary of Angers, I argue that the Old English translation had access to a more complete version of the Latin than can be found in the Taunton fragment. In other words, there are mistakes in the Latin that are not repeated in the English translation. Consequently, the Taunton fragment is likely a copy, and the Old English in the text represents a mix of the original translator’s language, the copyist’s language and copying errors that occur during the course of textual transmission (that is the repeated process of copying/re-inscription in an entirely handwritten documentary culture).

In the next year or so, some other work by other people will be coming out related to the homiliary, new manuscript discoveries and vernacular analogues, so in so far as these types of arcane and obscure things go…it promises to be exciting. =)

Worth a long look

rom the always stunning I Love Typography, a short overview on early printing, but more importantly a plan to chart the development of typography from the incunable on with images from special collections from the University of Amsterdam.

Not to knock any of the nice manuscript sites too much, but Amsterdam’s special collections deserve thanks and praise for allowing so many images to be put up on flickr. While some images are marked clearly with all rights reserved, many can be shared and remixed under a creative commons license. Not only does this feel more open than collections that limit viewing to their own web pages (and in some cases viewers) it allows teachers, researchers and artists to explore type in different ways, not to mention comments and queries from the public.

It would be nice to see a similar approach become feasible for large manuscript repositories. Accessibility allowed the Staffordshire hoard to become a public marvel. Part of that comes from treasure being more visual than text, but I don’t know of too many recent manuscript finds that have made their way on to flickr. The more likely scenario to be played out is: fragment discovered, academic who finds it claims it as his/her territory, years later an edition with one or two black and white images is published in an expensive and relatively inaccessible journal, the world continues to turn in indifference.

The only comparable manuscript collection (with a flickr stream allowing you to have its images on your iphone, for example, allowing you to discuss them with colleagues at conferences immediately and easily) that I know of is the Walters Art Museum which is gradually mounting its Islamic collection (with some pictures of the Archimedes palimpsest). More please!