medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Hi, yet again, Al,
I've seen the articles. Remember what the road to hell is
paved with???
Bob Kraft has pointed out that we should not ignore
those 19th-centiury works -- and, yes, much research
had been done -- and many of these subject have been
addressed, but -- the sheer number of those works whose
aim was a wholesale attack on religion (the book on "nimbus,
etc." is one of them -- he simply has to insert comments about
Christianity taking over the "pagan" symbol -- as if this were
something new and outrageous)-- or the Roman Church (hey,
fellas, he who casts the first stone, no?), or go out of their
way to support the "desired history" as passed down by the
"Winners" or translations treated as primary sources wherein the
translator chose words in the TL to make a cite in the SL fit their
preconceptions -- including Mommsen et al...
It's hard to think of any of those works that does not need an overhaul...
but we are going to get these whether or no...
As I commented about the nimbus, etc. book; if some art historian used
the research material collected therein and cut the anti-religion bias
(how is that necessary in such a work??) and incorporated modern
knowledge -- then... but do this for 15 million books???
By the time we see a problem the focus of "comic strips," the problem is
already getting out of hand. I can see it already; students relying on
19th-
century works for the "latest" info on a subject and a whole new set of
ready
to turn in term papers. I sure am glad that I wont have to search, page by
page, among 15 million books on-line to find a plagiarized source in a
student
paper.
Now if those same libraries would put images of the originalsfrom
their MSS and 1st editions on-line...that would be a tremendous help
to scholars... and wouldn't add to the plagiarized paper problem.
Ah well -- the "best of all possible worlds," right?
Cheers,
Rochelle
Al Magary wrote:
> medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
>
>>> Would this title be useful to anyone on this thread? It's
>>> available at UToronto as page facsimiles and (not very good)
>>> OCR text...
>>
>
>> I'll check, but I have me doots.... the "halo"
>> shows up on "pagan" sculpture/stelae...and
>> the apparent connection of the Shape of the
>> Law with the Sumerian house of God wasn't
>> known back then.
>
>
> Rochelle, I'm awfully glad you're skeptical about an 1886 book
> online in 2004 because it illustrates one of the great doubts I
> have about the new "Googlebrary"--aka Project Gutenberg Gone
> Wild--plan to digitize 8m books at Stanford and 7m at Michigan
> and make the pre-1923 public-domain titles available via Google
> searches. Search results will, by some unknown algorithm*,
> integrate facsimile pages from the p-d books and two-line
> snippets from copyrighted works (linked to Amazon or
> print-on-demand services). It appears you might be able to save
> the p-d facsimiles one by one, but download an entire work or
> the etext only at one of the participating institutions only for
> their books (Oxford/Bodleian and Harvard are limited
> participants) or, for the public, NYPL. In other words, you
> probably won't be able to see the etext that Google indexes
> on--it could be good, it could be hash.
>
> Cui bono?
>
> Going beyond the oohs and ahhs are some of the blogs--eg, at the
> Washington Monthly:
> http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_12/005344.php
>
> Two articles on Monday that go in depth into the proposed
> workings of this elephantine (or white-elephantine) project are:
>
> --Barbara Quint's column at Information Today:
> http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb041220-2.shtml
>
> --SF Chronicle:
> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/12/20/BUGROAD6QT1.DTL
>
>
> Anyway, we're going to get a good look at the intellectual world
> as it existed before 1923. Hello again, Granddad!
>
> Cheers,
> Al Magary
>
> Here's the footnote:
> *If millions of books have never been on the web and never been
> linked to, how can Google know how to rank them? Who will
> decide what's important when searches these days easily get a
> thousand, a hundred thousand, a million hits?
>
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