Using CBR/CBZ in the Humanities
For quite a while now I have been bothered by the tendency of pages making available handwritten documents online, to scatter the pages of those said documents all across their websites. While it is nice and quite wonderful that those things are online at all, and while those things certainly help a lot in accessing at least facsimiles of original documents and manuscripts, the act of organizing those said pages are getting quite painful. Especially when having to deal with loads of different pages, as one often does when examining handwritten letters in greater detail.
Until now I have been neatly organizing those manuscripts that I needed to take a look at into folders and subfolders. At least I have been trying to. It is a kind of tedious process that always seemed a bit too bothersome to me to be taken for granted. Still, there seemed to be no alternative to that problem lately, while I always figured that reading those letters in one single file might be a bt more comfortable, the most obvious of alternatives to the bunch of multiple .jpgs would have been the everpresent .pdf file format. A wonderful format in my opinion, only very unpleasant to use for larger series of pictures: When used as a way to present facsimiles of graphics and pictures pdfs tend to become uneccessary large and bulky, lose the ability to interact with the pictures inside more directly (like cutting and copying parts of pictures) and are very limited to navigate. Read the rest of this entry »
Revisiting Ye Olde Airship Scare
The whole idea of what seems to be postblogging appeared to me a few times before, and Ihad some ideas of how to do it and some ideas of what to blog, yet I realized in the end that none of them were really feasible. None of these ideas though were as interesting as Brett Holman’s take on the phenomenon of Scareships, phantom airships appearing over Britain in the early 20th century. Brett is blogging appearances of those airships over Britain in 1909 on his blog Airminded in chronological order.[1]
A fascinating concept and something one might keep in mind for other historical events. As I said it has been done by others before, like Holman’s own description of the Sudeten Crisis in that form, David Silbey from The Edge of the American West describing the Boxer Uprising day-to-day or Ross Mahoney taking on the battle of the Mareth Line. I suppose history is full with stuff one could use to that effect.
So, what could be the use of blogging stuff that is long gone? Isn’t that stuff in history books anyway?
Yeah it is, but (aside from the fact that historians need to look at the sources anyway to make sure everything the books say is correct): It actually might give a whole different view on the subject than any history book or other media could convey. Breaking down the course of events in daily or maybe weekly parts, whenever the news would have appeared back then, we could have better insights into the point of view contemporaries might have had.
I think if used right one could use this idea as quite a good tool to teach and research certain historic topics. I wonder if I could maybe do something similar in this blog as well… The problem would be the topics I woul choose for that. As I am a medieval historian I would be more interested in developments from the Middle Ages. Only back then there was no such reliable source of information as the newspaper turned out to be in the 19th/20th century.
[1] he also has a whole subblog only on scareships complete with sources and maps of their occurrences
Resources IV
A Greasemonkey script for your Facebook pleasure: removing all those damn Quiz updates.
North Korean Anti-U.S. propaganda posters: They are offensive towards the U.S. of course, but they also show that North Korea seems to be stuck in the 1960s even in terms of propaganda. Of course when you have the highest percentage of the population in the army AND the bomb you might not actually care about that. Although lately what they seem to do is pissing against the legs of everybody they can.
A collection of links to Medieval Cookbooks: I really have to go through that at one point. Still, I suppose there are far more than just those linked somewhere.
And: a Lifehacker guide on how to build a computer from scratch for people who never have done that before. Something I might try as soon as I have some spare money to get the parts. I always wanted to have a computer I built myself. I’m such a geek. Even though being a history student.
Phrasebook Misery
Anna Etmanska from the Transparent Language Polish Blog in her latest post points out some facts that have bugged me as well for a long time:
Take any random phrasebook (any language will do) and look inside. You will see a whole bunch of very useful expressions that, no doubt, are essential to your survival in a foreign land. Phrases such as: “Where is the national museum?” (Yeah right, like you are really going to understand the answer. A lot easier to look up the museum on google maps before you leave home) or “Can I have it in red, please?” (at H&M you can find it yourself, and if you’re the type who frequents high end stores, chances are the staff will speak some English, even in France) or “I’d like to exchange these traveler’s checks” (just use a bank card, will you?).
So it’s not only me! Other people ask those questions as well! What audience are all those sentences in phrasebooks (not only Polish ones but all of them) actually for?! In any of those books there will be loads of sentences which might be important in everyday communication, but you basically can’t use them. Because you won’t understand the answer the other person will b giving you. The way to the museum might be shown with hands and feet if nothing else helps, but ask the lady at the ticket counter when and where the bus is going from and you will have a problem.
I remember one Polish phrasebook in particular that had a page on relationships. Phrases were going from: “Do you want to go out with me?” up to “Do you want to marry me?” and my personal favorite in this list “I think it doesn’t work with us two anymore!”. A whole relationship condensed onto one single page. Only: who will ever need that?
I mean, what are you even doing in a relationship where you have to break the bad news in a language you don’t even speak? I mean, how did you talk to each other before?!
Analog Communication
I have to admit, I am a sucker for good old analog communication. In other words: letters.
I really like to write them and receive them. My girlfriend agrees with me I think, she seems to like getting them as much as I enjoy writing them.
There are of course situations in which I wonder how much writing letters actually fits into this modern world I was born into. Today I noticed again that the whole service concept the german postal service have is rather, well, lacking. Once we had a post office in the village. I remember that pretty well.
Our village is the main village of our whole commune (for lack of a better word…), so even after they closed down the offices in all the other villages, we still had one.
Of course that was in the mid-nineties.
With time came the privatization of the postal service, and with that the need to make money. With that came the cutting of costs. And with that came the integration of service points into the local supermarket.
Luckily the village still has it’s own supermarket.
So nowadays all the letters and postcards I write at my parent’s place is taken in not by someone who knows about postal rates and whatever arcane knowledge there is to a post lady’s job (I really really appreciate the work they do!), but by the girl from behind the meat counter.
And as it always is more important to get the latest village gossip this can lead to rather long waiting times until someone manages to look for the people who want to post something. The service point, by the way, meanwhile has been transferred from the entrance to the backside of the shop, right next to the beverages.
At least the girl knew what I had to pay for a letter to Poland.
It was kind of shocking to me a year ago, when I sent one of my first letters from Germany to Poland, how much ignorance I could encounter with those people.
“Poland?” the girl asked back then. “That’s not in Germany, is it?”
I thought she was joking. “Well, no.” I said.
“But is it in Europe?”
She wasn’t joking.
She didn’t know our neighboring country.
What are they teaching kids nowadays?
Oh wait, that girl was in school with me.
Help? Seriously…
CSI: Disaster
I don’t know if I should laugh or cry: Over the last two years there has been a big hunt for a female police officer killing criminal with mob connections based mostly around southern Germany and Austria.
In 2006 an officer was shot in Heilbronn and the DNA traces which were brought in from the crime scene showed the presence of a female person at the car the officer was shot in. I still remember that case, a friend of mine was in Heilbronn that day and he told me that the police was frantic searching for the murderer and never found him/her.
The same DNA as in Heilbronn later was found in samples from crime scenes from all over southern Germany, and spreading over to Austria, from small burglaries into garden cottages to acts of violence and vandalism. They even started a whole special department trying to find this queen of crime who managed to elude the authorities somehow, and whose presence never actually could be verified by witnesses, only by DNA samples… and who is more trustful, a (maybe even criminal) witness, or an unbiased DNA sample? Read the rest of this entry »
Resources III
The Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts actually cares about a problem which I have found to be quite serious in digital scholarship: Loads of manuscripts are digitized and available on the net, yet if you don’t know they are there you also can’t work with them. A problem which I have encountered rather often lately when thinking about actually working with the original sources. I just can’t afford a short trip to London just to look up a 10-page apocalypse in the library there… as much as I want to. So having a way of FINDING any of those documents available on the net is like a gift from heaven.
Not really something historical, but fascinating noneteheless… a Russian artist made medieval looking woodcuts of various fantasy and science fiction movies. Oddly fascinating to look at, even though I can’t read a word of what is written there. Makes me wish he actually made a book of these things. Or maybe illustrate one.
People interested in photography and addicted to caffeine (or anyone with the lack of funds for digicams and a professional photolab) might be interested in the fact that one actually can develop films using freschly brewed coffee and a dash of fresh orange juice. Only black and white (even with color film), but the pictures still look fantastic.
If one might not be that interested in photography but rather, let’s say, fashion, coffee obviously also can get used to dye clothes, for example to give jeans a nice vintage look; although of course the REAL jeans affectionado would never actually do that: there is a trend of wearing dry/raw denim in by just wearing it. Raw denim means jeans which never have been treated (stonewashed or otherwise altered) before being sold. And people try to fade them naturally themselves, meaning they wear them down themselves to make them look good and wear comfortably by only having the natural wear and tear of daily use have an effect on their trousers. This includes in some cases wearing them for half a year, maybe a year, without ever washing them (some of them actually have a phobia of ruining their effort by that). Which just might be a bit too much if the only reason for that is to get a jeans that fits and suits only it’s owner. But then… they have their own forums in whih they actually post pictures of the progress they are making, and some of them look, well, pretty fantastic…
Sometimes I wonder if there is really a fetish for everything, and on other days I just believe there is.
Resources II
Jason R. Briggs, Snake Wrangling For Kids, [Link]
A nice little book about programming in Python. Written in a try to be easy to read and understand by children (although failing to be in some of the later chapters), I think if I will ever have kids they will get this book printed out together with their first computer. It might be helpful for them. Most likely I think that because I always would have liked to have some skill in programming my PC when I was a kid.
Jeffrey Elkner, Allen B. Downey, Chris Meyers, How to Think Like a Computer Scientist. Learning with Python, [Link]
Something like the former, just with an emphasis on a more mature crowd. I will definitely try to use the book to understanding some of the concepts of programming. Somehow even after years of using these machines like a pro, I never understood some of the most basic concepts in theit programming.
bookn3rd has a howto on making your own quill [Link]. Now, where do I get feathers? She says it is harder than it looks to master it, but how would I know if I would’t try?
And lifehacker has the idea to use vintage calendars as new ones [Link]. After all the Gregorian calendar is repeating itself every 14 years or so, and some of these old calendars just look really, really good. The lazy breed of course finds another lifehack in that: just put up 14 different calendars on your wall and you will never have to buy a new one.
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