Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Zooniverse and Intelligent Machine-assisted Semantic Tagging of Manuscripts
Once there's a critical mass of digitized Sanskrit manuscripts available, I think it would be very interesting to contact the people at Zooniverse and discuss the possiblility of a Sanskrit MS-tagging project, like the War Diaries.
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Tools for cataloguing Sanskrit manuscripts, no.1
In the post-office today I saw this piece of board that's used as a size-template to quickly assess which envelope to choose. This is a formalized version of the same tool that I used for the many years that I spent cataloguing and packing Sanskrit manuscripts at the Wellcome Library in London. I made a piece of board with three main size-outlines, for MSS of α, β, γ sizes. Anything larger than γ counted as δ. Palm-leaf MSS were all ε.
It was nice to see the same tool being used for a similar job, in an Austrian post-office!
Friday, December 13, 2013
Thursday, December 12, 2013
From Gnome to Cinnamon
Gnome 2 and 3
Ubuntu with Gnome 2 |
Ubuntu with Unity |
Gnome 3
Gnome 2 and Unity both had their virtues and their flaws. The six-monthly upgrade cycle ("cadence") was never as smooth as it should be, so there have often been niggles that lasted a few weeks or months. I didn't like Unity's two different search boxes.Ubuntu with Gnome 3 |
The biggest boo-boo in the development of Gnome from version 3.8, was fooling with the default file-manager, Nautilus. Many people have complained about the stripping out of function, like split-screen, and that was bad enough. So was the nonsense about shifting the menus to the panel bar (or not!). But what hasn't got mentioned so much (at all?) is that the new Nautilus changed all the keyboard shortcuts and rearranged the shortcuts relating to the menu system. So Alt-F didn't bring up a "File" menu any more, for example. Right mouse-click+R didn't begin renaming a file. If one uses computers all day, then one's fingers get trained, and no interface designer should mess with that stuff without expecting backlash. With Nautilus 3.8, it was like being a beginning typist again, looking at my fingers, chicken-pecking for keys.
I liked the general design model of Gnome 3, with the corner switch to the meta level for choosing programs, desktops, and so on. Searching for lesser-used programs with a few keystrokes rather than poking hopelessly through nested menus. Much better. A genuine and valuable contribution to the vision of how a computer should work.
Thanks to Webupd8, I was able to work around the Nautilus problem by uninstalling it and using Nemo instead.
But things just kept going wrong. The shell crashed too often. On two of my machines it stopped coming up at login, and had to be started manually. Only after a couple of weeks did I track this down to a bad file in ~/.config/gnome-session (and I'm still not 100% sure). Frequent crashes of the gnome-control-panel and other utilities. More and more extraordinary tweaking to make it comfortable and useable. Finally, I've had enough.
Cinnamon
Ubuntu with Cinnamon |
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Human interfaces
Friday, October 18, 2013
Sanskrit manuscripts lost with the Titanic
Adheesh Sathaye mentioned today that the terrible sinking of the Titanic in 1912 was also the occasion of the loss of fourteen Sanskrit manuscripts of the Vikramacarita. The MSS were on their way from Bombay to Edgerton in the USA.
Here is Edgerton's account, also kindly supplied by Adheesh.
There's an uncomfortable ambiguity in Edgerton's prose, regarding the predicate of his expression "terrible disaster."
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
Kenney on the poor success-rate of editorial conjectures
The point being, be careful with conjectures, and remain sanguine that - if it is ever possible to check - over 95% of your conjectures will be wrong.
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Thursday, October 03, 2013
Checklist of things to do on reinstalling Ubuntu
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
"ucgadkw" and UCL
But that has all now been unplugged and switched off. I was not informed or warned about this, and a UCL computer support person has just told me that it is unlikely that I'll be given access to my old files because apparently they don't belong to me, but to UCL ("work for hire"). I have a backup, but it is slightly out of date.
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
Minimal example of XeLaTeX with Velthuis input mapping
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\newfontfamily
\sanskritfont [Script=Devanagari,Mapping=velthuis-sanskrit]{Sanskrit 2003}
\begin{document}
\sanskritfont
\noindent\huge
aasiidraajaa nalo naama viirasenasuto balii|\\
upapannairgu.nairi.s.tai ruupavaana"svakovida.h||
\end{document}
Monday, July 08, 2013
Resources for OA book publication
There is also a growing field of services for publishing OA books. Some research funding agencies, such as the FWF in Austria, require contractually that books too should be published OA. To me, the business model for OA book publishing is less clear than that for journals, and I see many difficulties. Nevertheless, the field is growing.
Some resources:
- Directory of Open Access Books
"The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Academic publishers are invited to provide metadata of their Open Access books to DOAB. Metadata will be harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact." - Knowledge Unlatched
"Knowledge Unlatched is a not-for-profit organisation committed to helping global communities share the costs of Open Access publishing so that good books continue to be published and more readers are able to engage with them." - Open Humanities Press
"The basic idea is simple: making peer-reviewed literature permanently available, free of charge and freely redistributable by taking advantage of the low cost and wide access of internet distribution." ... "After looking at the various efforts underway, we concluded that an editorially-driven international press, focused on building respect through its brand, is what is required to tackle the digital 'credibility' problem. With OHP, we aim to emulate the strengths and flexibility of commercial presses, while avoiding the institutional limitations of the university-based e-presses." - Open Edition
"OpenEdition is the umbrella portal for OpenEdition Books, Revues.org, Hypotheses and Calenda, four platforms dedicated to electronic resources in the humanities and social sciences." - Open Edition Books
"OpenEdition Books est une plateforme de livres en sciences humaines et sociales. Plus de la moitié d'entre eux est en libre accès. Des services complémentaires sont proposés via les bibliothèques et institutions abonnées." - Open Access Publishing European Network
"Online library and publication platform. The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences. OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality controlled collection of Open Access books, and provides services for publishers, libraries and research funders in the areas of dissemination, quality assurance and digital preservation."
Monday, June 24, 2013
Where's that Book? On the physical locations of knowledge
For me, the act of remembering academic matters often goes as a rapid internal dialogue, something like this: “Ah yes! So-and-so said something about this. Now what was it exactly? Hmm.” Then I would turn from my desk towards the shelves, thinking, “With the books on topic X. Top right, at about eye-level.” In my mind's eye, my attention roams to the spot on the wall where the book was located. Then I would get up, fetch the book, and find the passage I was after.
In my spatial memory, the phrase “books on topic X” need not actually refer to a subject location. It could be books of a certain colour, especially if a series were all printed in the same style of binding. Or books of a certain size, or that I bought or was given at a certain time. The arrangement of books on my shelves was – and is again – mostly subject-wise, but there are exceptions. But this doesn't affect my ability to remember spatially where books are. As long as the books are where I put them in the first place, then I can rapidly and efficiently find them again.
The distress I experienced when the books were put into somebody else's logical order was a very real reduction in cognitive power.
I have experienced this several times since then, especially when moving house or office. Physically displacing my personal book collection results in a loss of bibliographical and cognitive control. That control is never quite recovered, in spite of attempts to reproduce the original arrangement of the books. Such a rearrangement is never quite possible. This is partly because the layout of the new storage space does not lend itself to reproducing the original ordering. But also because one's physical resources of energy and time do not allow for a full recovery of the original arrangement.
All this raises the broader question of books, locations, and memory. My own method of relating cognitively to my books is, I suppose, a pale version of the famous medieval European concept of the Theatre of Memory, so eloquently described by Frances Yates. [At this point, I recall that the Yates book is at above head-level on the second column of books in the next room. I fetch it, and write out the bibliographical information for the following footnote.]1
Further points for development:
- On moving libraries, the Kern Library.
- What is lost, what is gained.
- Open access versus closed access.
Reflections on translation from Sanskrit
Monday, May 27, 2013
XeLaTeX for Sanskrit: update
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Changing publication models
What does all this mean?
What it means is that publishers are no longer necessary for performing the traditional roles of book production and distribution. Authors can now do this satisfactorily for themselves at marginal cost, high quality, and with international distribution.
What remains? What I call "Gatekeeping" services. With today's deluge of free online resources, what we all really do need is someone to take responsibility for guaranteeing high intellectual quality. Trustworthiness.
Traditionally, this was also a role performed by some publishers, especially the university presses. A book on Buddhism from Cambridge University Press *should* be of a different calibre from a book on Buddhism from, say, Harlequin or Mills & Boon. The good academic publishers acted as gatekeepers, offering an implicit guarantee of intellectual quality.
But if you look more closely at this arrangement, the university presses rely heavily on the free services of university staff for refereeing, book acquisition, series curation, and sometimes even content-editing and copy-editing. In-house copy-editing was usual, however, and often of a high standard.
Another service that a big university press provides is prestige. A young scholar with a book published by Princeton is likely to do better at getting a job than another with a book published with a publisher of less prestige. This is because appointment committees are willing to take the implied quality-guarantee of Princeton UP. But again, Princeton only publishes books because unpaid academic referees at universities give the thumbs-up. The process is circular.
What remains is the need for gatekeeping, for the guaranteeing of quality. If publishers really took that seriously, and divorced their editorial selections and quality judgements from their need to remain profitable, then they might salvage for themselves a genuine role in the future. I cannot see a way in which genuine academic quality can be guaranteed by an institution that simultaneously has to satisfy criteria of profitability. As long as their are two goals - quality and profit - there will inevitably arise cases of conflict and compromise. In short, gatekeeping is the job of (publicly-funded) university staff, not a (commercial) publisher.
The alternative to this is that university staff take back into their own hands all the processes of the production and distribution of knowledge. In fact, this is the change that the major funding bodies are pressing upon us, with the widespread requirement that publicly-funded academic research be published Open Access. It is also the original idea of the university press.
Here's a hypothetical model for a future academic book series.
- Author on a research grant or university salary writes a book.
- The book is typeset using LibreOffice or TeX. The university department provides some secretarial support to help, or some money from the research grant pays for smart word-processing by an agency.
- The book is sent to an external commercial copy-editing company to tidy up the details. A smart, accurate PDF results.
This is paid for by the university department, or out of the research grant (this is already common). - The
PDF is submitted to a panel of academics somewhere who curate a book
series, judging the intellectual quality of the submissions. The book
is accepted as an important intellectual contribution..
- The PDF is uploaded to Lulu.com or Createspace, where it is
turned into a print-on-demand hardback book for sale internationally
through Amazon etc., and in bookshops.
Lulu are the printers and distributors.
The ISBN is provided by the university department, so they are the publishers, not Lulu. - The book is advertised through a prestige university website that promotes the book as an intellectual contribution, contextualizes it as a university-curated product, and made available for sale through a simple click link to PayPal, Amazon, etc. The university's series name is printed in the book, and splashed all over the website.
Please blow holes in what I've said. There must be an elephant in the room that I'm not seeing.
(reproduced from my post to the INDOLOGY discussion list, 15 May 2013)
Saturday, May 11, 2013
emusic.com solution for Linux
But - strangely - they have never supported Linux properly.
Many thanks indeed to Matt Woodward for pointing out that all Linux users need to do is install emusicj and then point and click this link:
!
Tuesday, April 02, 2013
Future philology
- Interedition
- Gregor Middell's work on Juxta etc.
- Tanya Clement's work on Juxta etc.
- Digital Resource for Palaeography
- The various projects at the Huygens Institute in DH (here).
- The work of the European Society for Textual Scholarship (http://ests2012.huygens.knaw.nl/)
- Textualscholarship.nl
- http://www.e-laborate.nl/en/
- Edward Vanhoutte's work
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Converting XeLaTeX into ODT or MS Word
C. V. Radhakrishnan today pointed me to this discussion on the TeX4ht mailing list:
- http://tug.org/pipermail/tex4ht/2013q1/000719.html
(or more neatly, here.)
As far as I understand, TeX4ht won't support fontspec or XeLaTeX
technologies of using system fonts that do not have *.tfm's. In effect, by
adopting TeX4ht, one is likely to loose the features brought in by XeTeX.
However, here is another approach.
1. We translate all the Unicode character representations in the
document to Unicode code points in 7bit ascii which is very much palatable
to TeX4ht. A simple perl script, utf2ent.pl in the attached archive does
the job.
2. We run TeX4ht on the output of step 1.
3. Open the *html in a browser, I believe, we get what you wanted. See
the attached screen shot as it appeared in Firefox in my Linux box.
Here is what I did with your specimen document.
1. commented out lines that related to fontspec package from your
sources named as alex.tex.
2. added four lines of macro code to digest the converted TeX sources
3. ran the command: perl utf2ent.pl alex.tex > alex-ent.tex
4. ran the command: htlatex alex-ent "xhtml,charset=utf-8,fn-in" -utf8
(fn-in option is to keep the footnotes in the same document). I have used a
local bib file, mn.bib as I didn't have your bib database. biber was also
run in the meantime to process the bibliography database.
5. open the output, alex-ent.html in a browser. I got it as you see in
the attached alex.png.
Radhakrishnan's PERL script utf2ent.pl is#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
for my $file ( @ARGV ){
open my $fh, '<:utf8 br="" cannot="" die="" file:="" file="" open="" or=""> while( <$fh> ){
s/([\x7f-\x{ffffff}])/'\\entity{'.ord($1).'}'/ge;
print;
}
}
For Radhakrishnan's continuing comments on TeX4ht development, see
TeX4ht's homepage:
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Some OA journals that publish S-Asia related research
And see the India-related list that used to be maintained by Scholars Without Borders (mostly science and medicine):
Saying that a journal is OA still leaves some critical questions unanswered. E.g.,
- Is there a "going in" fee, or Article Processing Fee (APF)?
One of the items in the list above charges $300. Several of the big houses like Brill, Elsevier and Springer will also publish your article as OA, even in an otherwise non-OA journal, if you pay them enough. Their APF prices are typically $3000 (Springer, Elsevier). I am not interested in including such journals in the list above, as I consider anything above $300-500 to be profiteering. APFs of $300-500 are typical of some even very large OA publishers like Hindawi, proving that this is a valid business model.
Quite apart from my personal view, I do not think APF fees of $3000 meet most people's normal expectation of the meaning of an Open Access journal. As South Asianists, we are interested in access for both readers and authors in countries where scholars are relatively poor. A high APF mutes less wealthy authors. As such, both Gratis OA (also called "Diamond OA") and low or zero APFs are indexes of relevance. - Copyright: being OA means that whoever owns the copyright has given permission for the article to be disseminated at zero cost. But it doesn't say anything about who owns the copyright of the article. Many OA journals allow the authors to retain copyright, but not all.
- Is the journal online-only, or both online and in print?
- The online version is free by definition, but the print issues would usually cost something. How much?
- Is the journal indexed by the main global indexing services?
- Is the journal peer-reviewed? Strongly or weakly?
More distinctions (e.g., Gratis OA (free of price) and Libre OA (free of price and rights restrictions)) and discussion in Wikipedia (consulted 13 Feb 2012). The Sherpa/Romeo website helps with some of this.
I'm putting some indicators in parentheses after the journal title, for those cases where I can find out the information without correspondence.
It is often hard to find out these facts from the journals' websites. This suggests to me that for some of the editors, the various business models of OA publishing are not always well understood.
[2022-11: I keep the above list up to date as I hear of new journals. But some of the work of this blog post has now been superseded by FOASAS.]
---
*APF = Article Processing Fee, a fee that the publisher charges the author or the author's institution for publication in the Open Access journal. See discussion in Wikipedia (consulted 12 Feb 2012).
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
TeX implementations in the Cloud
The more mature products (2014)
- ShareLaTeX
XeLaTeX and pdfLaTeX, biber and biblatex.
Based on the most recent TeXLive.- Open-source version of ShareLaTeX for self-installation.
- Overleaf (formerly WriteLaTeX)
XeLaTeX supported since March 2014.
Based on the most recent TeXlive.
Others of varying levels of activity (2014)
FlyLaTeX (self-hosting; free and open-source)- TeXTouch (iTunes, iPhone editor, can compile when online)
- Verbosus (with Android and iOS apps)
- Blue Publications
- LaTeXLab - requires your Google login details :-(
- Pine from Sayahna.orgIn alpha test (a document processing system in the cloud that makes use of MediaWiki and its resources)
- CloudTeX from Sayahna.org
XeLaTeX and LuaTeX supported. Working prototype available to testers. - A different CloudTeX Seems to have gone quiet as of 2013.
SpanDexClosed.
XeLaTeX and LuaTeX available, but limited Unicode fonts.- ScribTeX (phased out as of Feb 2013, in favour of ShareLaTeX, but still exists)
MonkeyTeX (4/2014)