Eumaeus - The Noble Swineherd

Imagery of the Bankes Homer

2012-01-08T23:23:00.000-05:00

Thanks to the cooperation of the British Library, and particularly Claire Breay and Chris Lee, the Homer Multitext can now offer a stunning panoramic image of the Bankes Homer (BM Papyrus 114), containing most of Book 24 of the Iliad.

This image is being hosted on the project’s server, a resource provided by the University of Houston’s Center for High Performance Computing, Keith Crabb, Director.

Access to this image will allow us to continue editing the electronic edition of the Bankes Iliad, a project begun at Furman University in 2009 by David Creasey, Kylie Elliott, Talley Lattimore, and Brett Stonecipher.

Working in Lichfield

2010-06-23T18:09:00.000-04:00

My wife, Amy Hackney Blackwell, is posting an ongoing blog about our current travels, here. Hers is probably much more engaging than mine.

Professor Bill Endres of the University of Kentuky, after several months of conversation, has arranged for the team from the University of Kentucky and Dr. Brent Seales Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments to travel to Lichfield Cathedral, in Lichfield, Staffordshire, England, and to digitize two of the Bibles in the Cathedral’s library.

The two books are a Wycliff Bible, an early English translation dating from approximately AD 1410, and the famous St. Chad’s Gospel, a Latin Bible from approximately AD 730, on whose margins are annotations that represent the earliest written examples of the Welsh Language.

Thanks to the relationship of trust that Dr. Endres established with the Chapter of the Cathedral, and the open-mindedness of the Chapter, and in particular of Canon Chancellor Pete Wilcox, the University of Kentucky secured a forward-looking contract that will allow the images and other data from these Bibles to be used for scholarship and teaching under a Creative Commons license. At the same time, the University of Kentucky is going to work with Lichfield Cathedral to explore ways to create commercial products for the Cathedral that will take advantage of the data – an iPad/iPhone facsimile-browser is under development, for example.

Brent Seales invited Amy and me along because of our experience with the Conservation Copystand, and as an opportunity to explore techniques of digitization using the big copystand and the portable copystand that Furman University bought.

For the work, we will use an old-fashioned bellows camera with a medum-format digital back. The digital sensor is monochromatic, and 38 megapixels. The resolution is a good thing, and the lack of color is also a good thing. In a normal, color, digital camera of, say, 24 megapixels, there is a color filter laid over the sensor. Of the 24 million pixels, 8 will be filtered through red, 8 will be filtered through green, and 8 will be filtered through blue. So each full color "pixel" will consume three pixels of resolution. The software in the camera will merge the three pixels into one, full-color pixel, at the cost of some softness to the image.

Our black-and-white camera has no color filter in front of the sensor. This does not mean that we won’t have lovely color images of these Bibles, however.

The lights for this photography consist of banks of LED lights, with each bank bank of LEDs emitting a specific frequency of light. There are thirteen banks, ranging from ultraviolet, through the visible spectrum (blues, greens, oranges, reds) down to several levels of infrared. The camera and lights are controlled by a computer, which will automatically cycle through the spectra of light, taking a picture for each one.

The result is thirteen monochromatic images, each showing particular features of the page, as different kinds of ink and different kinds of stains or damage reflect differently.

At the end, the thirteen images can be merged to create full-color images that take advantage of the full resolution of the sensor. Other “false color” images can be generated to suit particular kinds of analysis.

In addition to this digital photography, the team is capturing structured light data, which involves projecting a series of patterns on the page, and photographing each one. From this data, we can generate a 3-dimensional model of the page.

All the while, we have to take care for the alignment of the book, stresses on its binding, the humidity and temperature in the room, and the fact that the Cathedral is in full operation around us, with visiting school groups, several services a day, guided tours, and all the business that has transpired here for over five hundred years.

Tomorrow I will try to write about the significance of the Wycliff Bible.

A Weekend in London

2010-06-20T17:36:00.000-04:00

Amy, the kids, and I spent the weekend in London. We wanted to meet David and Juan at the British Library, but also realized that this was our one and only chance to do any tourism in London, since we will be working in Lichfield all week, and flying to Paris from Birmingham. So we took the train from Lichfield Trent Valley station to Euston station, which is right next to the British Library.

There, we got to have a nice coffee with David Jacobs, of the Conservation Department, and Juan Garces, of Western Manuscripts. Juan was working over the weekend, getting ready for their unveiling of a new digital presentation of some ancient Greek manuscripts. David had come in just to see us.

We got a nice lunch at a French Gastro-pub, then set out to have as much tourism as we could stand.

We spent a chilly afternoon making our way toward the Thames river, with a nice stop at Coram’s Fields, a kids-only park run by a private Charitable Trust. Will and Zoe did a good job making friends with the local kids, and got some running and playing in.

We nearly perished, since our planned late-afternoon snack time coincided with our crossing of the City, the area around Fleet Street where everything was utterly closed on a Saturday afternoon. We would have been happy for one of Sweeney Todd’s and Mrs. Lovett’s Meat Pies. By crossing the river, we discovered an ice-cream shop and our sanity was restored. We ended the day with a cruise on the river, a cab ride back to Euston Rd., and dinner-and-World Cup at the Euston Flyer.

On Sunday, we met Juan and his wife Bronwyn at the BL, and had a lovely lunch at a Spanish restaurant. The kids watched more World Cup.

We then did the British Museum, mainly mummies and the Elgin Marbles. We just got back to Lichfield, where the lovely staff of the Cathedral Lodge Hotel had our room wating for us. We start work at the Cathedral tomorrow morning.

Litchfield

2010-06-20T07:38:00.001-04:00

We have traveled to Litchfield, England, as the advanced elements of the team that will digitize two Bibles in the library of Litchfield Cathedral.

On Wednesday, Amy, Will, Zoe, and I drove to Charlotte and took a flight to Gatwick. We chose to take the bus from Gatwick to Litchfield, rather than a train, since the bus would allow us to avoid a £100 train ride into London. In retrospect, this was not the best plan. These pictures are from our 3-hour wait for the bus from Gatwick. We survived, However, and got to our hotel at about 6:00 on Thursday. The kids were real troopers.

On Friday we had a very pleasant initial meeting with Canon Chancellor Pete Wilcox, who showed us the Vestry room where we will set up the conservation copystand. The staging area will be either the Pedilavium, which would be a bit public, or the Choristers’ Vestry, which would be ideal for us, if not for the Choristers.

Everyone at the Cathedral was warmly welcoming. We got an impromptu tour, as the Nave filled up with schoolchildren arriving for a day of Cathedral-related activities--music, drama, calligraphy, painting. Zoe was particularly taken with the English kids, who looked fabulous in their uniforms.

We spent the rest of the day wandering around, watching some Grebes building a nest in a pond, watching the US/Slovenia game in our room, and watching England/Algeria from the extremely pleasant “George IV” pub, whose proprietor is our new best friend in Lichfield.
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I will talk a little about the two books we will be photographing, the agreement with the Cathedral, and the technology involved in my next post.

We are on a train to London now, on Saturday morning, to see David and Juan at the British Library, and to do tourist things for the weekend.

On Monday morning the gear will be delivered, and we can get down to business.

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C.I.T.E - The Infrastructure of the Homer Multitext (Part 1 - Introduction)

2010-05-27T02:09:00.000-04:00

I just posted on Casey Dué’s “Oral Poetry” blog Part 1 of an overview of the technological infrastructure of the Homer Multitext.

The first steps - #2 in a series

2010-05-25T23:58:00.002-04:00

The elaborately synchronized plans that will take us to Lichfield Cathedral, and thence to the Real Monasterio de El Escorial outside of Madrid have lurched into motion.

I’ll go into more details in a future post, but the short version of our plans for Europe this summer is this: I will be tagging along with the team from Kentucky as they take digital Images of two books at Lichfield Cathedral. The first is the so-called Saint Chad Gospel, and the second is an early English translation of the Bible. The Kentucky team and I, joined by my Homer Multitext colleagues, will (if all goes well) go to Spain to capture imagrery in 2-dimensions and 3-dimensions, of two early Greek texts of the Homeric Iliad.

The Conservation Copystand, a big hunk of equipment built for the Center for Hellenic Studies by Manfred Mayer in Graz, has begun its journey from Greece. If all goes well, it will be waiting for us in Lichfield when we get there.

The excellent Christos Giannopoulos, who manages the CHS’s center in Nafplio, Greece, has made arrangements to pack the huge, heavy thing. Matt Field of the University of Kentucky’s Vis Center handled the arrangements from the US side.

David Jacobs, Juan Garces, both of the British Library, and Chris Collins of the British Museum, will be going to Lichfield and El Escorial to set up environmental monitoring equipment that will give us baseline data on the circumstances that these ancient manuscripts are accustomed to. According to David, the important thing is to avoid changing the environment too much as we photograph the books.

Next week, I will drive to Kentucky for the hardware-integration test, where we will see if the multispectral lights, the digital camera, and the 3-d mapping system can work together.

In the meantime, I have been working with Andrew Canon, a rising Senior at Furman University, on issues of XML markup of Greek texts. He will be joined in this work by Susannah Morris and Andrew Corley when they get back from Turkey.

More details about all of this anon...

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Bringing it together - #1 in a series

2010-05-25T00:55:00.003-04:00

The main reason I started writing this blog, after years of eschewing the “social internet” was to keep a public record of things, personal thoughts and experiences certainly, but mainly things related to the projects that occupy so much of my time.

I think that this might be particularly interesting to current or prospective students of Furman University, where I teach Ancient Greek in the Department of Classics.

My two main research projects these days are closely related. The first is the work I do for Casey Dué and Mary Ebbott, who are the Editors of the Homer Multitext, a project of the Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University; my friend Neel Smith and I work on the technological infrastructure for this digital-library project.

This project aims to collect as much real information about the history of Homeric poetry as possible, and share it with the widest possible audience in the most useful ways we can imagine. Along the way, the project’s editors hope to further their insights into the fundamental nature of the Homeric poems as oral compositions, products of a tradition of composition-in-performance (like jazz music) whose influence persisted long after the poems ceased to be songs to be sung and had become mainly written texts to be read and studied.

The second is my work with Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky’s Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments, on an NSF-funded project called “FoLIO: Framework for Longitudinal Image-based Organization”. I have worked closely with David Jacobs and Juan Garces of the British Library on this, as well.

This project aims to develop techniques and standards for organizing collections of images and registering them with each other in such a way as to allow measurement along different axes. For example, how can we organize images of a manuscript taken in 1900 and others taken in 2007 in such a way as to measure change in the physical artifact over time? Or, how can we organize the collection of a patient’s medical imagry that might include x-rays, MRI imagery, and ultrasounds, so that the same structures can be measured and compared precisely?

This work is nothing but pleasure for me, for a number of reasons. First, my professional collaborators are both brilliant, and great friends. Words cannot express what a luxury this is to me.

Second, my professional collaborators range from senior scholars to undergraduates at Furman University, and it is impossible to imagine this work going anywhere without all of their contributions.

So, in the postings that follow, I am going to try to describe each of these projects, include some pictures, and generally set the stage for the regular updates I plan to post this summer, as my collaborators and I pursue our projects in Greenville, as well as in England, France, and Spain.

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On Shooting Stuff

2010-05-23T00:49:00.002-04:00

I have been able to take my kids camping a few times recently, to our family's land in Lancaster, SC. Our preferred spot is in the "Grandpa Tract", so named because it was the site of my great-grandfather's childhood home (now long gone).

This is Zoe, my 9 -year-old daughter, earlier in the Spring, having her first outing with the Marlin .22 rifle that my buddy Roy gave to my wife some years ago.

Most recently, I took my son Will down, and we spent a Saturday morning trying out my first batch of hand-loaded ammo for my Garands. It is soooo much easier doing this kind of thing out in the woods, than at the Gun Club, since I can do all tha back-and-forth adjusting the target-stand, the chronograph, and all that, without having to inconvenience anyone else.

For anyone interested in these things, here are the specs on the batch of .30-'06 that Will and I tried out:

Brass: Korean mil. surplus, headstamped PS-76, once-fired, trimmed to 4.840"
CCI #34 primers
150-grain FMJBT bullets (Winchester bulk)
48 grains of IMR-4064

They shot fine. I shot a string of Korean surplus M2 Ball for comparison. That string averaged 2877 fps, with a standard deviation of 18.94 fps. The group at 100 yards was about 3", on average.

My batch averaged 2772 fps, with a standard deviation of 17.02. The group was closer to 2 moa.

Now, I am a lousy shot, having difficulty hitting the side of a barn when I'm inside the barn, so I'm mostly looking for consistent velocity here.

Actually, this time, I was mostly looking for not blowing up the rifle or my own self. In that at least, I was successful. I want to bring down the velocity a bit, and see if I can get smaller groups shooting off the bag. Every milsurp M2 round I've ever chrony'ed out of my two Garands has even well above the nominal 2700 fps. I don't know if that is my chronograph, or the fact that they both have new barrels, or what.

But anyway, Will and I had a good time, and I was thoroughly satisfied by the fruits of my neophyte efforts at reloading.

As a break from the books-and-computers realm of my professional life, the world of metal, powder, scales, and calipers of the reloading bench is very satisfying.

Be safe, and remember Jeff Cooper's Rules of Gun Safety!

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That Japanese Lady and the iPad

2010-03-22T02:53:00.006-04:00

Part 1: Revolutions

This is my inaugural blog posting here. Since I signed up for Blogspot intending this to be a dumping ground for random musings, I might as well start with my current hobby, which is following the vehement iPad-hating that seems to have taken over most technology websites (ArsTechnica, SlashDot, Engadget, etc.).

Of course, the usual professional-Apple-naysayers have jumped all over the iPad as an already-certain flop (John C. Dvorak, whose perfect record of failure in analyzing Apple stuff—the original Mac, the iPod, the iPhone—doesn't dissuade him), and that idiot Rob Enderle (who is content with his Ferrari laptop, one supposes). I am not providing links to these guys, since you can find them as easily as I can.

The critics from among the dēmos, the comment-writers on articles published by technology blogs are more interesting, since they represent real people with real, not-payed-for, opinions, one presumes. I've read hundreds of their comments now, and I think I can sum them up: too big for what it does; no Flash; no slots/ports/pen/"real OS"/camera. This and a bunch of ad hominem about how the "fanboys" will "buy anything with an apple on it" because it is "shiny" and "fashionable" (remaining ignorant of the circular logic inherent in "the masses will buy anything that is fashionable").

There have been, of course, no end of responses to these arguments, the most thoughtful and well researched being those of Daniel Eran Dilger through his "Roughly Drafted" blog.

I think the iPad is going to solidify a Fourth Apple Revolution, for reasons that the haters have missed, and even the most inciteful supporters of the iPad have not articulated fully.

The point is "Applications" and therefore "Developers".

The figure of a sweaty Steve Ballmer from Microsoft jumping around like a Barbary Ape while shouting "Developers, developers!" amuses my days and haunts my dreams. So it is ironic that no one misses the point of the iPad more than him.

Apple has (for a fourth time) stolen a march on its competition by re-inventing how we think about applications.

The first Apple revolution in Apps was the Apple //, about which I have nothing to say, since my parents would never have considered buying me one, so they were apocryphal objects of remote adoration in my youth (I did have a C-64 that I bought with my own money, but no disk drive, so it sucked).

The second was, of course, the original Macintosh, for which (to me) the iconic image is not the cursive "hello" text, nor the "happy mac" icon, nor screenshots of the desktop, but the beautiful "Japanese Lady" drawing by the brilliant Susan Kare, used to show off MacPaint 1.0.

The original Mac got lots of press back in 1984, then languished for a while.

I bought a Mac Plus between my freshman and sophomore years of college. My choice of Mac over "IBM" (as we thought in those days) was informed by the fact that the Macintosh could do Greek, and I was newly enthralled by my study of Classics.

One of my fellow students--this was 1986/7--at my hippy liberal arts college supported himself as a graphic artist. I remember him asking me if I had a program called "Aldus PageMaker", which of course I didn't, nor had ever heard of. But PageMaker, combined with the "ecosystem" of the Mac's GUI, its demonstrated ability to do bitmapped (and vector) graphics, and Apple's original LaserWriter invented a whole new world of applications: Desktop Publishing, then Photoshop (timed to the release of the original Apple-branded scanner).

So the original Mac re-invented the world of "workflow'.

The third Apple revolution was the most subtle, since it happened in early 2000s, when the landscape of Windows/Mac/Linux was already complex, with lots of distractions. But this was Steve Jobs decision to keep the core Unix underpinnings when Apple released OS X. For the first time, there was a slick, integrated (sorry, Linux fans of the early 2000s), consumer OS that came with "emacs", "less", and "top" out of the box.

The Mac OS was a joke in the 1990s. I was at a conference in Rhode Island (perhaps in 1998?), and for some reason my personal laptop (a Wallstreet Powerbook G3... a lovely machine, thick as a Virginia ham, hampered by the crappy Mac OS 8.6, or 9, or whatever) was shanghaied to be the machine that everyone would use to presented their talks. Imagine my shame when some real computers-in-humanities guys got on my precious PowerBook and asked "Where's 'curl'?"

But while the popular press was freaking out because the OS X Public Beta didn't have a DVD Player app, a huge number of developers were noticing that it was a real UNIX OS and could could run Photoshop and gcc, Microsoft Office and perl. So now, when you look at pictures of a gathering of real technology geeks, the vast majority are using Apple laptops.

And this is why last week I was able to use Apple's Automator software to create, in about 5 minutes ('cause I'm slow) a double-clickable "app" that runs a complex series of "rsync" commands that back up all of my crap to a variety of locations, from plugged-in disks to remote servers.

So the first "app revolution" was "here are some apps you can use!". The second introduced the future, when editing of physical media yielded to editing in the digital realm. The third was a fusion of the two… the best apps of the Desktop World of the 80s and 90s, combined with the really useful little wirehead utilities, some of which dated back to the 1960s.

But those "best apps of the Desktop World of the 80s and 90s" are a problem. We all bitch about them. MS Word is bloated and slow; Photoshop is bloated and slow; Excel has a bunch of useless crap built in because secretaries use it to make lists; and so on. The only apps that people seem to like are the ones where the big software houses have had to start from scratch, such as Adobe Lightroom, or were really motivated to make fundamental changes looking to the future, such as Microsoft's Windows 7.

At the same time, the recurring meme among Apple-bashers was "there aren't any apps", which usually meant "MS Exchange" and games.

But with the introduction of the iTunes AppStore for the iPhone and iPod Touch, Apple has created an entirely new world of software development. This has more to do with the notion of "desktop accessories" that the brilliant Susan Kare was instrumental in including in the original Macintosh… small, focused applications with limited memory footprints that perform specifically useful functions.

That is what the iPad is all about. We can see the iPhone and iPod Touch (and "Dashboard even earlier") as forerunners, much as the Lisa was to the Macintosh.

Apple has bet that a significant number of people want a utility piece of hardware that can do specific things well, with a highly functional user-interface, and an appealing size, weight, and appearance. And Apple is betting that more people want this than want a does-everything-a-computer-does device that happens to be small, or lack a keyboard, or respond to fingers.

But the important part of this gamble is… 150,000 applications in the iTunes App Store. Sure, a bunch of them are crap, and you can't get purient-image-slideshows.

But where Ballmer of Microsoft chanted "Developers, developers", Jobs of Apple has gone off and rounded up about a hundred thousand of them, who know how to program for this thing, who know that their apps don't need to be Photoshop to be successfull, and who have a guaranteed market of enthusiastic consumers.

This universe of developers is entirely independent of any “traditional” operating systems. So the historical advantage enjoyed by the (bewildering multiplicity of) Windows operating systems has just vanished from this field of play.

I ordered an iPad.

I will use its Apple-supplied apps to organize personal photos, navigate foreign towns, watch movies, listen to music, and read books. I'll buy iWork apps to edit documents and do kick-ass presentations in Keynote for my students. I'll use my already-purchased iPhone apps to drive my digital camera when it is mounted on a copystand, tune my guitar, calculate data for hand-loaded rifle ammunition, look up words in the Oxford Greek-English lexiction and Latin-English dictionary. And I'll look forward to what happens as developers of iPhone apps explore the new landscape of the iPad.

Oh, and surf the web. With the iPad announcement, I finally understood why Apple never released a successor to the lovely 12" Powerbook G4, which (until April 4) is still my preferred couch-top portal to the World Wide Web.

Part 2: Freedom

Yes, I know that the iTunes App store is a "walled garden", anathema to freedom-loving open-source software users. As someone who relies on OSS for his professional work, I have a lot of sympathy for this. But OSS has thrived in a world dominated by proprietary operating systems, and will continue to thrive, since it provides tools that people need.

On a daily basis, I use Tomcat, Apache2, tcsh, ant, rsync, and dozens of other OSS apps on my MacBook Pro. I see no signs of hostility on Apple's part toward this functionality.

All that lovely Unix stuff survived the 1980s and 1990s, because it was really useful. Because it was so useful it was brought forward, or replicated, as open sourced Linux stuff. Gradually, even the big guns of proprietary software are being replicated: The GIMP, Open Office, not to mention the phenomenally successful Firefox (and, dare I say it, WebKit).

PageMaker and Photoshop eventually ran as well, if not better, on Windows as on the Mac OS. Linux eventually caught up to, and exceeded, UNIX as an enterprise-quality operating system (sorry, SCO scumbags). There will come a day when the iPad of 2010 and 2011 seems quaint and restrictive compared to Open Source alternative solutions.

My 24-megapizel photographs lovingly post-processed in Aperture put Susan Kare's "Japanese Lady" to shame, except that they don't, because Ms. Kare is a true artist and I am a techno-hack whose only advantage is a quarter-century of technological progress.

Which is entirely the point. Apple's innovations—which consist of integrating existing hardware and software into systems with human beings at the center—are supposed to empower losers like me to produce work that approaches that of real artists.

And so it will be with the iPad. As ever, it will be Apple that lays the groundwork. Apple will define how normal people interact with a digital media appliance: what kinds of apps work well; what kind of UI works well; what sorts of features does it need; what features does it not need. (Hint: Flash is the .bmp of the 20xxs.)

By the time that the iPad of 2010 seems dated, the efforts of HP and Microsoft to cram a full-fledged desktop/laptop OS into a tablet, when compared to the iPad, will seem as quaint as a Kaypro Portable compared to a PowerBook 140.

I'm already running Ubuntu Linux on my MacBook Pro about 20% of the time, and admiring its polish, speed, and efficiency. I can see myself in 2015 experimenting with an OSS finger-based tablet with the same pleasure and admiration.

But for the time being, I'll use my "real" computers for those tasks for which they are well suited, and look forward to grabbing my iPad when it is time to play the guitar, surf the web on the couch, work up some new .30-'06 loads for my Garands, or present the first twenty lines of the Iliad to a class of Greek students.