Wincing at Light

Some Nifty

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I’ve got to send props to Cubicle Buddy Grant for pointing out to me the new online repository for the Codex Sinaiticus.  What is the Codex Sinaiticus, you ask?

To WikiQuote:

Codex Sinaiticus (London, Brit. Libr., Add. 43725; Gregory-Aland nº א (Aleph) or 01, Soden δ 2) is a 4th century uncial manuscript of the Greek Bible, written between 330–350. While it originally contained the whole of both Testaments, only portions of the Greek Old Testament or Septuagint survive, along with a complete New Testament, the Epistle of Barnabas, and portions of The Shepherd of Hermas (suggesting that the latter two may have been considered part of Biblical canon by the editors of the codex^[1]). Along with Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most valuable manuscripts for textual criticism of the Greek New Testament, as well as the Septuagint. It is the only uncial manuscript with the complete text of the New Testament, and the only manuscript of the New Testament written in four columns per page.

So here’s the skinny:  Profs David Parker, Dr Peter Robinson and Dr Scot McKendrick were tasked with re-assembling (virtually) the known pieces of the Codex Sinaiticus from its literary/political diaspora (assuming that four locations — the British Library, St. Catherine’s Monastery of Sinai, Leipzig University Library, and  the Russian National Library — counts as a diaspora).

From an ancient manuscripts standpoint, I’m told that this is a huge deal, because normally getting a close look at these sorts of materials requires lots of frequent flier miles, a fortune in white cotton gloves, more visa stamps than you can shake a stylus at, and a whole lifetime’s worth of political hand-shaking and ingratiating just to get ogle privileges.  (And not being an ancient manuscripts scholar, I’m almost 100% certain that I’m making this portion of the achievement sound much less impressive and correspondingly tedious than it actually is.)

Some Queries

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And while that’s fascinating and butt-loaded with scholarly intrigue and all, I’m much more impressed with the technology (and the the thought that preceded the technology) behind it.  In short, the problem with ancient manuscripts — no matter how efficiently they’re stored — is that they’re all rotting away.  Some faster than others.  The interwebs, essentially a ginormous library with infinite shelf space and perfect climate control mechanisms, present an interesting short- to medium- term solution to the problem of primary source decomposition.

In short, take the putrefacting pages of said manuscript, image them with the highest definition camera you can get your grubby mits on, and preserve them for posterity…at least until you realize you might have backed Betamax.

And that’s the problem with curating online/digital Treasures of Western Civilization. There’s only one Codex Sinaiticus, and it isn’t going to last forever.  So someone has got to ask how we’re going to preserve it once the true primary source document ceases to exist.  This is where the puzzle gets interesting to me (and where the fact that they actually got this project done enters the realm of the amazing).  Ancient manuscript scholarship (even ancient manuscript biblical scholarship) being what it is, what you’ve got is a massively important and ultimately finite cultural resource — one of the core sources from which all modern biblical translations are created — which maybe half a dozen people a year need to study for serious academic work, so your audience is minute in the extreme.  Plain translations as a preservative mechanism are straight out, because you can’t translate — even word-for-word literally — without making inevitable editorial decisions.  A project like this can’t just duplicate in another media, it has to replicate it if the process is going to be of any lasting value.

Some Context

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So let me ask you, when was the last time you fired up Zork from  5 1/4″ floppies on your XP or Vista machine? Or even better, how often are you still annihilating the world in Nuclear War on your fancy-schmancy Amiga?

(And don’t even say the word emulator to me.  That’s either completely beside the point or exactly my point, I haven’t decided which.)

The point is that technology changes.  We all know this.  Tech changes and we buy new stuff.  It’s the American Way.

Tommy Lee Jones alluded to this phenomenon Men in Black when he was showing off the cool alien media storage innovation to a newbie Will Smith and made the wry observation that he’d have to buy the White Album again.

That’s the way tech works.  Somebody creates a new platform.  It’s outrageously expensive.  People adopt it, price goes down, the tech becomes ubiquitous, and the paradigm shifts.

As with Zork, this presents problems for the digital curation of ancient manuscripts.  The tech you pick for media storage today is very likely to be obsolete in ten years.  In twenty years, people might not even have the equipment around anymore to leverage your media.  And when your potential long-term audience is a half-dozen tweedy academics a year, the chances that someone will save the hardware/software combination necessary to access the media or that some do-goodnik hacker will throw together an emulator to port your old media into a new-fangled environment shrinks dramatically.

Some Application

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In 1989, I wrote a (horrible) science fiction novel entitled The Call of the Master (which is incidentally part of an equally horrible trilogy which continues with The Will of the One and The Way of the Elder).  This series of novels is so horrible, I have no doubt that were I to post it here, the entire interwebs would immediately commit some outrageous act of apocalyptic self-immolation to preserve the collective IQ of the human race.

Nevertheless, I’m irrationally fond of this series of manuscripts because they marked various educational points along the road of my writing development.  Even mistakes are signposts.  Series of mistakes are even more meaningful.  A whole trilogy of questionable creative decisions is akin to stealing fire from the gods.

Call of the Master was originally composed on a battered old IBM PS/2 using the now-defunct word processing software DisplayWrite 4, which saved documents in the now equally-defunct DCA format.  When my PS/2 gave up the ghost, I got a generic Windows 3.1 machine and converted CotM to another word processing format…the name/type I no longer recall.  This torturous process (defying even the most outrageous logic of human communication) made the manuscript even more horrible by inserting huge chunks of white space and arcane line breaks into the mess of text.

A short time later, I upgraded to one of the early iterations of MS Word…only to find that I couldn’t convert this now-forgotten format into a format MS Word could read.  So I had to print the whole thing out (anomolous page/line breaks notwithstanding) and type the whole thing up again from scratch.

Inevitably, I made a great many editorial changes between the printed text and the new digital version (and in the process, making it even more horrible, if that can be believed).  Nothing ruins truly abominable material like good editing.

Here’s my point:  The original source material, as it was initially written and edited in DW4 has been completely lost.  I couldn’t recreate it if I tried (or if I wanted to).  All I’ve got is a manuscript that’s eight or ten iterations beyond the original.

And I dutifully upgrade this document (now in .docx format) with each new generation of word processing software.

I do this with all of my writing files, though my preferred format these days is RTF.  It’s how I preserve my literary output.  I use RTF because it seems to be the most readily port-able format available (with the exception of plain text, obviously, but plain text presents its own host of issues with formatting and readability).

The end result is that I’ve got some really creaky manuscripts loaded with MS Word cruft from generation after generation of format conversion.  The consequence is that each time I convert it again, MS Word freaks out and tries desperately to make sense of underlying code structures from previous (poorly implemented) software iterations into the new word processing environment.  Admittedly, much of this cruft is from questionable document formatting decisions I’ve made (or equally poorly implemented), but cruft is cruft, and it will eventually render my manuscripts un-convertable.

Which means I’ll have to type them up from scratch again.  And I will undoubtedly made editorial changes along the way (because that’s what writers do).  And just like that, the original documents will be lost.

Sort of makes you wish for some old school cuneiform tablets, eh?  At least Hammurabi didn’t have to worry about version control.

Some Final Points

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So once upon a time, I decided to upload my novels to the interwebs so folks who aren’t me could read them.  I put them in txt, rtf and pdf formats.  Then a paladin of digital literature named Matt came along and offered them in a couple dozen new and different formats for a vast array of digital reading devices.

And chances are that in ten years, all of those formats will be obsolete.  In ten years, we might not even be using HTML anymore.  In ten years, it’s almost certain that this blog will no longer exist, and likely WordPress right along with it.

A veritable (or is that virtual?) ton of original blog content will be lost to the aether.  Most of it won’t matter, of course, but I don’t envy the task of early-22nd century historians attempting to document this historical period of digital content creation.

Even digital media rots when the mechanisms/software for interpreting it disappear.

Or as a relatively recent iteration of the Codex Sinaiticus puts it:

2	Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
3	What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?
4	One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

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