To be more accurate, they moved farming from a folkway to a science; and they did it in Europe, or at least codified it there, in Al-Anadalus, Muslim Spain. Now, with the Filāḥa Texts Project, a group is using online collaboration to make these Andalucian writings on our common agricultural heritage accessible to everyone.

Kutub al-Filāḥa

The introduction to the project outlines its aims and value:

"The purpose of the Filāḥa Texts Project is to publicise and elucidate the written works collectively known as the Kutub al-Filāḥa or 'Books of Husbandry' compiled by Arab, especially Andalusi, agronomists mainly between the 10th and 14th centuries. These systematic and detailed manuals of agriculture, horticulture and animal husbandry have been sadly neglected and remain largely unknown in the Anglophone world - apart from some of the Yemeni works they have never been translated into English. They not only provide primary source material for the understanding of what has been called the 'Islamic Green Revolution' but constitute a rich body of knowledge concerning a traditional system of husbandry which is as valid today as it was a thousand years ago and has much relevance to future sustainable agriculture."

The texts come from 240 different manuscripts, in 40 cities, spread throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.

The project is collaborative and at its early stage. Many of the elements that make it up are present to encourage the continued presentation, translation and discussion of an important set of historical texts that have been largely neglected.

A Collaborative Translation Platform

The Filāḥa Texts Project consists of the following functions:

• Digitized manuscript facsimiles
• Digitized, searchable and cross-referenced Filāḥa texts
• An online collaborative translation platform to present and translate the texts into English
• Glossaries
• Bibliographies and bibliographic maps
• Published articles
• Relevant links
• Forum

The site has few documents currently available. By providing a platform and publication for both the original, English translations and articles on the texts those bending the project are hoping to make many more of them available. The site employs Lingotek, an online tool for collaborative translation work.

The project is run by the Golden Web Foundation, a U.K.-based "educational charity" devoted to pulling together widely distributed cultural objects and information into a central database and reexamining that cultural heritage in a more integrated fashion, using the Web and other communications technologies.

Botanical treatise page from Princeton University Libray | other sources: @BibliOdyssey

The goal of Starkey's app -- Kings and Queens -- is to bring his book, and history, to life. If you are familiar with the history of the British monarchy, it is one of the most fascinating tales of intrigue, betrayal, politics and power in the history of the world. The topic was begging to be brought to interactive life. Starkey's app is not just a splendid way to blend documentary and books but could signal the future of literature by looking into the past.

Starkey told The Guardian that the app, created by Trade Mobile, "reflects the creative processes of a writer." It gives him the ability to take certain aspects of history and his writing and give them digital life, as opposed to leaving them on the cutting room floor if he were making a documentary.

"All those things you've had to level out to make the line of narrative ... you can put back in," Starkey told the Guardian. "I no longer have to take these decisions that involve sacrifice. The reader can arrive at the judgement for themselves."

Kings and Queens is interactive history at its best. It provides timelines, family trees and lineage and the themes that have emerged in tracking 2,000 years of British royalty. Starkey provides audio and video of the abridged text of his book. Oh, there is also feature footage of the most recent royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton (if you are into that kind of thing).

Her version was that Paul Revere rode through Boston, ringing a bell, to announce to the British that the colonials were preparing to fight. This is not remotely true. He rode silently, to let the revolutionaries know the British were en route.

Update after the jump.

"I didn't mess up about Paul Revere. Part of his ride was to warn the British that we're already there - that, 'Hey, you're not going to succeed. You're not going to take American arms. You are not going to beat our own well-armed persons, individual, private militia that we have. He did warn the British."

It's true that Revere did tell the British the Americans were ready to fight. Later. After the ride. After he had been captured. Without bells. And had firearms pointed at him. In an attempt to rattle and mislead his captors.

So, you know. Palin was right.

As Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs noted, this rearrangement of history has been playing out on Wikipedia's Paul Revere page.

Pro-Palin contributors have been changing, and others reversing, language justifying her comments, as can be seen in the Revisions page for the entry. Here is a discussion centering on the controversy.

Anyone who has written an article or a paper or just done a search in the last few years can tell you how important Wikipedia is as an initial (alas, all too often also an only source) for information. The give-and-take built into the Wiki process seems to be keeping the boat upright, but only just.

Imagine pulling up the entry on deadline for a school paper. Depending on when you tune in, you might be making Paul into a Ninja messenger or a bell-ringing Muppet. Naturally, anyone who accepts a single source as Gospel is not doing the job of a thinking person, but it happens.

The really awful thing, though, is that we live in an age where, on every level, it is considered a sin to be wrong. From advertisers to kids on the playground to the world of corporate PR to politicians, the all-too-common wisdom is to defend the indefensible. That's what Palin is doing and that is what her renfields on Wikipedia are doing, and that's sad, because as anyone remotely successful in Silicon Valley can tell you, without owning our mistakes we cannot learn from them and without learning, we cannot win.

***

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications for Wikimedia Foundation clarified the situation from his organization's point of view.

"The article is right now in semi-protection, which means that only registered editors (those who have a registered accounts on Wikipedia, specifically those who have had an account for more than a few days) can make changes to the page. Only a fraction of pages on English Wikipedia are actually in any sort of protection mode, but this isn't uncommon when the article in question is about an emerging news topic and/or a living person...I think it's something in the order of 1500 or so of the 3.5 million-plus articles on English Wikipedia.

"Right now a group of smart, experienced Wikipedians are having a civil discussion about the article, and as is pretty much always the case with devoted Wikipedians, they want to ensure the article is of the highest possible quality. I expect some new Wikipedians came to this article in an effort to share their views on the topic, either by making edits or participating in the discussion. On the article's talk page you can see where contributors are sharing views and discussing the whole affair. This is 100% normal for Wikipedia and
it's a sign that passionate people are working towards an inclusive but factual article."

Sarah Palin photo by Roger Goun, Paul Revere house photo by Boston Public Library | other sources: Boston Globe

St. Gall isn't resting on its admittedly substantial and ancient laurels. It has now helped to create an entire website devoted to a very important subset of its manuscripts, the St. Gall Monastery Plan website is devoted to "the earliest preserved and most extraordinary visualization of a building complex produced in the Middle Ages."

The website, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, was created in partnership with scholars from UCLA and the University of Virginia.

It "presents the plan, its origins, components, and notations, as well as four centuries of scholarship on the plan within the context of ninth-century material culture." As the earliest and most complete plans for a monastery, including the abbey church and the multitude of other buildings an abbey requires, the Codex Sangallensis 1092 provides not only information for scholars seeking to understand early medieval life. It also provides them a mystery to solve.

"(T)he built structure does not entirely reflect the design of the church on the Plan; and the monastery complex foreseen by the Plan could not, in any case, have been fit onto the actual terrain of St. Gall."

Because of this, most scholars see the Plan "less as a blueprint commissioned by Gozbert for St. Gall than as a generic solution developed by Carolingian monastic authorities for the ideal, or typical monastery that could be built anywhere in Europe. When and why they would have done so has been the focus of Plan research during the last fifty years."

The Plan itself is extensive and all of that information is reproduced online along with scholarship relating to it.

"Drawn and annotated on five pieces of parchment sewn together, the St. Gall Plan is 112 cm x 77.5 cm and includes the ground plans of some forty structures as well as gardens, fences, walls, a road, and an orchard. The buildings are clearly identified by 333 inscriptions. Of course, primary among the buildings is a church (pictured above) with its scriptorium, sacristy, lodgings for visiting monks, and reception rooms. There is also a monastic dormitory, privy, laundry, refectory, kitchen, bake and brew house, guest house, abbot's residence, and an infirmary. Finally, there are numerous buildings associated with the specialized economic operations of a complex community of over 110 monks and some 150 servants and workers."

St. Gall has over 2,000 medieval and late antique manuscripts in its collection. But it also has over 400 digitized manuscripts in the University of Fribourg's e-codices collection. This latest effort, which amounts to a multimedia database of Carolingian monastic culture, continues to place St. Gall close to the front and center of online digital resources for scholars and laymen interested in Western Europe's late Roman and medieval past.

Other sources: @BibliOdyssey

Well, it's that time again, folks. This time, it's the sound of the two trumpets, one bronze and the other silver, that were buried with the boy Pharaoh, Tutankhamum. They laid sealed away for over 3,200 years in the Pharaoh's tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, until that tomb was opened up by Howard Carter in 1922. It was played for the first time in for a BBC recording in 1939.

The trumpets are decorated with Egyptian gods with military associations. According to trumpeter and historian Don L. Smithers, on the Taps Bugler site, the longer trumpet is in the key of Bb and the other is in C.

Listen to the trumpets being played in 1939 by British soldier, James Tappern.

Other sources: A Blog About History

Whitaker's site Al-Bab (the door or gate in Arabic), was an important source of information during the revolution and during further expressions of the widespread Jasmine Revolutions. He discovered that he couldn't access some important documents and began gathering them together via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

"Following the revolution in Tunisia, I have begun updating the Tunisia section here on al-bab. Links to several historically interesting documents had stopped working because of the deletion of websites belonging to the old regime. I have retrieved some of them through the Wayback archive and posted them directly on to the site. They include Ben Ali's speech in 1987 when he deposed President Bourguiba, and his ludicrous victory speech in 1999 when he was re-elected with an incredible 99.44% of the vote."

The disappearance of digital information from attrition or when a user dies has already been recognized as an issue we are going to have to deal with. The death of a regime poses similar problems.

The French entrepreneur and digital activist (and former ReadWriteWeb France editor) Fabrice Epelboin and I, along with a number of others, published an open letter to Facebook, asking them to preserve the information created on their service during the uprising. Our idea was for the information to be archived and people who created it could elect to allow others to view it, thereby securing a crucial moment of communication in a political change of great importance.

It's an issue that our global society is going to have to address better than it is now with ad hoc lunges at preservation, or else we won't lose bits and bytes, we'll lose our history.

The Hellenic device, thought by many to have been used as a calculator for religious festivals. is widely considered to be the oldest extant analog computer. It has between 30 and 70 gears and a host of other parts. The two concentric rings on the face contain the Greek zodiac and the Egyptian months.

Wired quotes University of Puget Sound physics professor James Evans, who led the investigations of the latest team, on why the makers did not gear the difference, as they did the change of the moon's speed. The difference in the speed of the sun is much more slight than the moon. Gearing such a difference, said Evans, would be exceedingly complex.

"Evans and colleagues suggested a simpler way to make the sun dial appear to change speed: Stretch the zodiac. If the spaces on the front wheel of the mechanism were of different widths, Evans reasoned, then the hand representing the sun would take longer to travel through the part of the year lumped under the zodiac sign of Taurus than through Libra."

The original find was a corroded lump. Since then, the device has been scanned using a number of technologies, the most recent a 3D x-ray scan. The scans have shown the constituent parts, most of which would have remained unknown otherwise.

This additional element of the Antikythera mechanism does not make the favorite theory of its use any more or less likely to be true. Nor does it answer the questions of where such complex engineering came from and where it went. It does hint that the mechanism may hold additional secrets and that is exciting for its own sake, quite apart from what it might teach us about our past.

Difference engine photo by Liz Henry | Antikythera image from Wikipedia | other sources: A Blog About History

Starting today, you can tour sites like Rome's Colosseum and the Imperial Forum, the Thermae (Baths) of Diocletian, France's Chateau Fontainebleu, the French countryside, and much more.

The Colosseum in Rome

All the historic sites Google has on file are now listed in the Google Street View gallery, which includes more tours beyond just these new European additions. There are also sections dedicated to cultural sites around the world from UNESCO's World Heritage List, a list of famous landmarks, several popular U.S. highlights, the Hawaii beaches, the ski slopes at Whistler Blackcomb, South Africa's soccer stadiums and a tour of the seven continents.

What's interesting about these "non-street" Street View locales is how they were filmed. Traditionally, with Google Street View, cars with special cameras attached to their roofs drive around the city streets, recording images of the town.

But with these other types of tours, using cars and vans isn't possible. Instead, Google has outfitted a tricycle with camera equipment that lets it take pictures of places that are not accessible by automobile.

The project "Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800" seeks to transcribe and digitize copies of papers from a formative part of American history, previously thought to be lost to fire. Projects like these rarely suffer from a surfeit of funding, so using Scripto to coordinate a crowdsourced transcription has made the project possible.

In addition to making it financially feasible, letting the public take a hand in such a project has the benefit of bringing history close to the volunteer and turning that volunteer into an evangelist for the importance of history to contemporary life. Also, it gives the historians involved a sense, as the documents are transcribed, for what the public finds the most compelling.

The project is funded by the National Historical Publications & Records Commission of the National Archives and the National Endowment for the Humanities' Office of Digital Humanities.

Truman building photo from Wikimedia Commons

The Global Heritage Network brings data from Google Earth, Esri, DigitalGlobe together with social networking information to identify at-risk sites in places where the resources for such surveys are in short supply.

As Discovery News points out in their coverage, destroyed sites are marked with black spots, sites at immediate risk of destruction (rescue-needed) are red, at-risk sites orange and stable ones are marked with green.

So far, 40 of the 80 sites identified as rescue-needed have been supported with threat-and-planning support documents. Those sites include Great Zimbabwe, the old city of Damascus in Syria, Samarra in Iraq and Antigua Guatemala.

The value of saving and stabilizing these sites is not strictly intellectual and cultural. An earlier Global Heritage Network report estimated a $100 billion boon in tourism dollars annually by 2025 could result from preservation of the sites in its database.

Mandela's organization will be preserving and digitizing the archive of a man who served as the democracy movement's most public face, a long-term prisoner on the notorious Robben Island and later the first black president of the country.

Materials included in the digitization project include journals, letters, photos, video and audio recordings, documents and more. The next step will be to offer the electronic archives to the public for research and education.

Google has funded similar projects to this, such as the Yad Vashem holocaust digitization project and the Google Art Project to bring the world's art to digital viewers.

"At Google we want to help bring the world's historical heritage online -- and the Internet offers new ways to preserve and share this information, in Africa and elsewhere."

At the same time as announcing these linked grants, Google also announced a number of projects they are funding to bring more people online in Africa. These include the Tertiary Education and Research Network, the Nigeria ICT Forum and the Network Startup Resource Center.

Robben Island photos by Caroline Ödman | other sources: Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_funds_preservation_of_apartheid_documents.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_funds_preservation_of_apartheid_documents.php International Wed, 09 Mar 2011 14:01:00 -0800 Curt Hopkins Most people who aren't coin queens don't realize how important the little bits of bronze, silver and gold are to understanding our history. The American Numismatic Society's resident geek Ethan Gruber does. So he and the ANS are building a mapping interface for their huge numismatic data set.

"Such a large collection of digital objects lends itself to the potential for meaningful quantitative analysis, including the geographical distribution of coins based on a variety of physical and categorical attributes...Dynamic visualization based on researchers' queries can lead to hypotheses that would have otherwise never been considered."

]]> In other words, allowing for the custom visualization of numismatic data might lead to intuitive leaps in the understanding of history by economists, art historians, classicists and others that both the coins themselves and the data itself would not.

The interface, in the form of a widget set into the Nomisa site, is an open source build, with Apache Solr for the search index, OpenLayers for the display of maps and Ajax to connect the two in a usable interface. Once a coin is entered into Solr, the script Gruber has written checks the numismatic Nomisma ("a collaborative effort to provide stable digital representations of numismatic concepts and entities") to place it geographically.

"OpenLayers then builds its point layer with a KML file generated dynamically from the Solr search results for user's query. A list of facets appears under the map, providing the user with the ability to filter results based on constraints like deity, material, denomination, issuer, and region."

The project is drawing from 400MB of numismatic data, consisting of 560,000 objects. When it launches in mid-March, as a part of the American Numismatics Society's Collections site, it will have close to 200,000 georeferenced objects.

You will be able to search geographically to see what coinage was produced in area mints. You will also have a slider controller that will allow you to fine-tune your searches in terms of time.

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