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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