Rare Ancient Manuscripts Online at E-codices

Posted on February 25, 2009 by JimS

claude80

By Claude Almansi
Staff Writer

Thanks to Rafael Schwemmer, Project Manager/Web Developer of e-codices, and to Sylviane Messerli, scientific collaborator in charge of the library of the Bodmer Foundation, for their help and explanations.

cb-0078_049rCologny, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cod. Bodmer 78, p. 49r (www.e-codices.unifr.ch).

Historia Destructionis Troiae

This manuscript page is from Guido de Columnis’ Historia Destructionis Troiae (or History of the Destruction of Troy). This text is an interesting knot in the rich tapestry of the Troy stories told and retold from Homer to our days. (This tapestry can be explored from Category:Trojan War literature – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [1], for instance.)

In fact, Historia Destructionis Troiae is an early 14th century Latin translation of the late 13th century French Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte-Maure, itself based on several classical sources. This Latin version led in turn to further translations – among these, John Lydgate’s Troy Book (downloadable in several formats from the Internet Archive: see the pages for volume 1 and volume 2), which was one of the sources of Chaucer’s Troilus and Cryseide (see Troilus and Cryseide – Wikisource [2]) and of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (see Troilus and Cressida – Wikisource [3]), among other works.

chaucer“Chaucer reading from Troilus and Cryseide.” From Jane Zatta’s Chaucer The Canterbury Tales.

Thus Historia Destructionis Troiae raises interesting questions: What was a “translation” back then? Is our “post-modern” mash up and remix culture as post-modern as is sometimes claimed? What are these Troy stories and these manuscripts to us?

E-codices Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland

Before July 2007, when this manuscript of Historia Destructionis Troiae was digitized and put online within the e-codices – Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland [5], non-scholars were only able to see it open at a given page by going to the Fondation Martin Bodmer’s Museum and Library [6] in Cologny (Geneva, CH). True, the Bodmer Foundation is one of the most interesting cultural venues of Geneva, with exciting temporary exhibitions alongside its ancient manuscript collections: presently, you can read there letters sent by some of the most important 20th century French authors to Gaston Gallimard, the editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française, which crucially shaped French literature for a century.

Nevertheless, a story in a glass case is a dead story. But now, the manuscript of Historia Destructionis Troiae – together with 362 other manuscripts from 16 Swiss libraries gathered by e-codices – can be viewed in full facsimile. And from any page of the facsimile, with one single click, you can access a scholarly yet highly readable description of the manuscript, provided in turn with links to specific pages of the facsimile.

The description of the Historia Destructionis Troiae manuscript draws our attention, for instance, to f. 88, where a note in Hebrew tells us that it got pawned in 1646.

hdt_f_88r_pawnbrokerScreenshot of the pawnbroker’s note on f. 88 of Historia Destructionis Troiae.

And further down the page, someone, in the 17th c., wrote a love declaration and a poem in Venitian dialect.

The description also points to the instructions for the illuminator scribbled by the editor on some pages, like the ones at the bottom of the page 49r at the beginning of this post:

cb-0078_049r_det_note_circledCologny, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cod. Bodmer 78, p. 49r (www.e-codices.unifr.ch).
Author’s note: Screenshot of the editors’ notes; the one I circled in red says: “fa qua de sovra Troia como lo re Priamo xe (?) in lo so palazo in una gran sala . . . et fa li con le gran barbe” (above, do [paint] Troy, how King Priamus is in his palace in a big room . . . and to them with long beards).

Moreover, from any page of an e-codices digital manuscript, with just one click, you can browse and search all the e-codices collections, or e-mail that page to yourself or others. The correct bibliographical reference gets added automatically to the e-mail.

Innovation and tradition

The e-codices project also highlights eerie similarities in how people dealt with “text objects” back when manuscripts were created and in our electronic era. Just as the editor, scribe, illustrator, and owners of the Historia Destructionis Troiae collaborated in the creation of the manuscript and added their notes to it, you can now add notes – as relevant or irrelevant as the original ones – to any part of a digitized page with tools like Diigo. You can keep these notes to yourself or share and discuss them further with a group or with all readers (see “Links” below).

One thing has changed, though: as we saw, the manuscript of Historia Destructionis Troiae was pawned by one of its owners. This cannot be done with its digital version.

Usability and durability through openness

Of course, this does not mean that digital content cannot be monetized. It can, but not by putting proprietary electronic barriers around it: as I showed in Unhide this Hidden Text, Please about the ActivePaper software and the archives of the Journal de Genève, such barriers only hamper study – and access by people with disabilities. But they are a totally ineffective “intellectual property protection.”

Conversely, the useful features of e-codices are made possible by a judicious combination of several OpenSource software programs, as explained in the New Web Application [7] page of e-codices. Moreover, this choice of OpenSource also ensures the durability of the e-codices archives because, even if the programs evolve, they will always be able to reconstruct them from their source. Whereas archives powered by proprietary software only last as long as the applications are supported by the firms that produce them.

Like the archives of the Journal de Genève, e-codices does not have a commercial aim. However, the absence of proprietary electronic barriers does not mean that others are free to exploit its material commercially. Instead, in its Terms of Use [8], the e-codices team explains very clearly what can be done under what conditions for noncommercial use; it also explains that permission must be requested for commercial use. This approach is also more effective in that users who benefit from it are more likely to defend it (see Wikipedia: Wikipedia Signpost/2006-01-02/Reporter plagiarizes Wikipedia [9]) than if they are hampered by technological “protections” that are insultingly assuming their dishonesty.

Links

The links in this post and a few other pertinent ones have been gathered under http://www.diigo.com/user/calmansi/e-codices+innovate. Some of the links are to pages with annotations, as described in the “Innovation and tradition” section above. You can see the annotations either by clicking on “Expand” on the right of the link, or on “All Annotations” below – which also allows you to add your own comments.

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An Interview with Terry Anderson: Open Education Resources – Part I

Posted on December 6, 2008 by JimS

boettcher80By  Judith V. Boettche

This is my first experience with doing a formal blog posting, although it has been on my list for a while. Jim Morrison suggested that this format, the new blog area for Innovate, might be a good way to more quickly share a recent interview on open education resources with Terry Anderson, director, Canadian Institute for Distance Education Research, and one of the keynoters at the 14th Annual Sloan-C International Conference on Online Learning in Orlando, Florida, on 4 November 2008. Terry’s keynote title was “Social Software and Open Education Resources: Can the crowd learn to build great educational content?”

One of my goals in going to the conference was to interview Terry about his perspectives on open education resources, and I was not disappointed! Terry was very gracious in meeting me over lunch the day of his keynote in the Caribe Royal restaurant. We had a broad-ranging conversation that included his personal experiences with making the book, The Theory and Practice of Online Learning, now in its second edition, freely available on the web. But more on that later.

So here goes. I hope you enjoy it!

terry_andersonJB: Terry, the abstract for your keynote emphasizes the promise of open education resources (OERs) to radically reduce the cost of educational content production and availability. Yet you seem to indicate that educators are not making much use of these resources. Why not?

TA: I don’t think that the availability of OERs has had much impact as yet. Lots of people download content, but how many people use it for serious academic work?

JB: Why do you think that is? What do you think has to happen before the adoption of OERs becomes more widespread and thus more of a force in keeping educational content costs down?

TA: I think there are two issues in the adoption and use of OERs: credentialing and the social support of learning experiences.

People work hard when they are motivated, and most people are motivated by credentialing or earning some kind of a certificate. What is needed for broadening the impact of open educational resources is to provide a pathway for credentialing. For example, with the open courseware from MIT, they provide the courseware resources, but no credentialing. It is up to other institutions to provide the pathway to credentialing. For example, at Athabasca University, a significant number of our Athabasca courses have what we call a “challenge alternative.” This means students can elect to writing an equivalent final exam or completing the final requirements of a course — without actually taking the course.

The second issue is that of social support. Many students find it difficult to learn on their own independent of a social environment. They like to struggle and engage with other learners as they learn. So one of our future tasks is likely to focus on developing educational experiences that include interaction with other students. For example, a learning experience that says, “Go to this site and do this with others who have started at about the same time.”

JB: What about the financial model for OER? How is this going to work? How do we ensure that people with expertise, talent get some compensation for their time and resources?

TA: What we have here, I think, is the same issue that exists with television, music and other creative industries. I think that micropayments are one approach that will work. We see this in the model from Apple with iTunes. Rather than buying a whole album, people select and pay 99 cents for one track of a CD. We need to experiment with additional different models that include reaching out with micropayment models to the long tail of the net —where there are millions of people on line today. We need to begin doing more looking out beyond the 200 or so million people in the U.S.

terry_anderson_sbJB: What about faculty members? Is the micropayments model going to be important for them?

TA: For many faculty it is not an issue. Even today, writing educational materials generally does not mean a lot of money coming back to faculty. And it does not matter as faculty are paid by the state or by the institution! Faculty may dream about writing a textbook that becomes a nationwide top seller, but it doesn’t happen very often.

I think we should move away from a production model where textbooks are written by one or two superstars to a production model with a much larger group of folks. Or move to a co-production model such as we do for research journals.

[Note: Terry’s thoughts on content production models made me think about the Wikipedia model. Maybe we should consider a Chemistry or Physics Resources Wikipedia? -JB]

JB: Terry, what bout the current costs of textbooks and educational materials. Are the costs for educational materials really a big deal?

TA: It really depends a great deal on where you are. When I am working on my campus I have access through our institution’s library database agreements to almost any resource I am interested in using. And this is the same for most of my colleagues in the academic community. So, we start to forget that materials may not be similarly “available” to others. If you go to Africa where the tuition is $45, and the libraries do not have access to content and the textbook is $90 to $100, it’s a very big deal!

JB: Let’s return to the question in the subtitle of your keynote presentation. Terry, do you think the “crowd” can learn to build great educational content?”

TA: Oh, I think “yes!” A colleague and I have been working on a book that is in a long gestation period. The book focuses on the “three aggregations of the many.”

The third “aggregation” is the collective, which is the “crowd.” A lot of people are using the net for many purposes. As they are doing this, they are all leaving traces of their activity, explicitly by voting or buying or doing something; or implicitly by which sites they are visiting and how long they stay on a site. Data mining and data capture techniques include tools that match what some people are doing with what other people are doing with some automatic filtering going on. We are at the early stages of that. Collectives are being used as learning resources without enrolling the class. This means if you use the net fairly frequently, it will reward you.

[Continued in Part II]

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