Macro-Typography: December 2016

2016-12-22

Wonky Meniscus

A meniscus, as we all now learn at about age 12, is caused by surface tension on a liquid. It may make it hard to measure liquid medication. Presumably the entire Pacific Ocean is a couple of millimetres higher than it would be without surface tension.

But Aristotle had a different explanation, which he employed to argue that the Earth was the centre of the universe, and this was believed in the Middle Ages. It figures in a curious scientific manuscript just digitized at the Vatican and uploaded to the Bibliotheca Palatina website.

Here I will let John E Murdoch take over the story. He says the figure:

... pictures an argument that is found in both geometrical and natural philosophical works in the Middle Ages. It is alluded to, for example, in Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century, in Thomas Bradwardine and Nicole Oresme in the fourteenth, and in the margins of various medieval manuscripts of Euclid's Elements, as well as in the present fourteenth-century codex of a geometrical work ascribed to one Gordanus (not to be identified with Jordanus de Nemore). The argument relates to the meniscus of water or any other liquid contained in a vessel (since any point on such a surface is equally distant from the center of the universe). But this means that the closer the vessel is to this center, the more liquid it can contain when "full." This is so because the circular arc determining the surface of the liquid is "more curved" when the vessel is closer to the center of the universe, that is, the meniscus then “bulges" higher over the rim of the vessel. Indeed, it was even maintained that if such a vessel were absolutely full of liquid, moving the vessel further from the center of the universe would cause some of the liquid to overflow, since the surface of the liquid would become less curved.

The passage is at folio 114v of Pal.lat. 1389, one 24 fascinating scientific manuscripts uploaded in the past week:

This is Piggin's Unofficial List number 86. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to DigiVatLib.

Murdoch, John E. Album of Science: Antiquity and the Middle Ages. New York: Scribner, 1984. Topic 254 (page 295).

2016-12-20

Time Trials

Regular readers of this blog will know that a big topic hereabouts is the origin of timelines generally, and in particular how humans got the idea of construing synchronous series of events graphically by picturing them on parallel horizontal tracks.

Here is how it is done in the fifth century in the Great Stemma, with a track at top representing kings of Judah, at centre kings of Samaria and below it, the ancestors listed by the Gospel of Luke:

It is helpful here to use certain fundamental cognitive distinctions laid out by Rafael Núñez and Kensy Cooperrider not long ago in a review paper.

Humans can use (abstract) space to map the passage of time in three distinct fashions in their gesture and speech: projecting deictic time (from where "I" stand), setting an order of events in sequence time (distinguishing the placement of "landmarks" in time), and comparing one or more temporal spans. Scholarly discussions of time sometimes muddle these. As two authors remark:

Philosophers, physicists, and cognitive scientists have long theorized about time –along with domains such as cause and number – as a monumental and monolithic abstraction. In fact, however, the way humans make sense of time for everyday purposes is, as in the case of biological time tracking, more patchwork.

There is no reason to suppose that this typology in the mind transfers easily to a drawing. In fact, the two authors point out that investigating space-time mappings in non-English-speaking cultures by asking people to demonstrate with cards and paper may be handicapped by the fact that this "material realization " needs to itself be learned first:

... arrangement tasks are not well-suited for use in such populations, because they presuppose familiarity with materials and practices that, in fact, require considerable cultural scaffolding.

A similar point was made 20 years ago by Mary Bouquet, who rebuked anthropologists for asking Portuguese people unfamiliar with stemmata to draw their kinship bonds this way.

So what are the tracks in the Great Stemma doing? They don't tell us anything about the Latin concept of deictic time (though that has been very expertly figured out by Maurizo Bettini, who shows the Romans faced the past with their backs to the future), whereas the three tracks seem to demonstrate a Latin tendency to set out a sequence of time from left to right, in accord with the Latin writing system, and they do indeed suggest that Latin-speakers would have compared durations of temporal spans in a spatial way when speaking of them.

It could well be argued that the invention of this type of timeline was inspired by gesture, though I have considered other origins such as game-play. The spans are not exactly calibrated with one another, but match one another in lengths more precisely than a speaker would ever intend to do in gesture.

An intriguing aspect of the Núñez and Cooperrider paper is its mention of the spiral of time perceived in some cultures. The Great Stemma might have something going on in this respect where it loops up at the end and flips, with the script gradually rotating and terminating in a plaque with several upside-down sentences:

These are all aspects that require further study and analysis.

Bettini, Maurizio. Anthropology and Roman Culture: Kinship, Time, Images of the Soul. Translated by John Van Sickle. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1991.

Bouquet, Mary. ‘Family Trees and Their Affinities: The Visual Imperative of the Genealogical Diagram’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2, no. 1 (1996): 43–66. doi:10.2307/3034632.

Núñez, Rafael, and Kensy Cooperrider. ‘The Tangle of Space and Time in Human Cognition’. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 17, no. 5 (2013): 220–29. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2013.03.008.

2016-12-17

Dreamers of dreams

Whatever downers this year has brought, it has been an upper in the science of the mind, thanks to blockbuster proof of the efficacy of deep neural networks. For about half a century, a debate has been under way about the human mind. Is it like a computer? Or just a messy-round-the-edges semblance of such a rational machine?

The New York Times had the story this week in a long-read article by Gideon Lewis-Kraus. The faction who reject the computational view are generally termed connectionists, since they propose that the nuances in the connections joining what we have learned with what we perceive are sufficient to explain thought.

The only way to scientifically prove this is feasible would be to build a synthetic device that works the same way to achieve human-like results. This year, both Google and Baidu succeeded in doing it.

Lewis-Kraus puts this in the context of a stockmarket investment opportunity in artificial intelligence, which is rather like saying the Enlightenment was a historic opportunity to invest in dictionary publishing. What's really happening here is that we are in the midst of developing a new paradigm for understanding ourselves or "what the brain might be up to" as Geoffrey Hinton puts it in this interview.

My research has been built around the hypothesis that humans partly reason with the help of spatial mechanisms in the brain. A diagram (and good layout generally) helps us to make sense of ideas, because it harnesses spatial thought. Like many revolutionary new views of the mind, this does not fit well with the rationalist view of the mind that has risen since the Enlightenment.

We are still immensely far from understanding the mind, but the practical benefits of this year's connectionist experiment make it far less likely that the mind is like a computer, and far more likely that it is an assembly of reasoning effects that simulate pure reason. A neural network cannot shut out irrational deductions, but it could integrate a very mixed bag of inputs.

This may even make us more open to older, pre-Enlightenment ideas such as the classical concept of memory, the western medieval theory of symbols and the idea that we are not natively rational, but learn to be rational. Cognition may not even be limited to one brain, but be distributed across individuals. We are not logical machines. We are dreamers of dreams.

2016-12-14

Standstill

There have been no major releases by the digitization programme at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana since November 28, with no explanation for the standstill, but items from its collection have been showing up on the Heidelberg, Germany virtual Palatina library:

This is Piggin's Unofficial List number 85. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to DigiVatLib.

2016-12-10

After We Die

One of the key features of humanities in the age of print was preservation of both creative works and scholarship about them by royal and university libraries and later by national libraries. The point is of course that we will all be swept away by death and only the greatest repositories maintained by the sole durable institution we know, government, can be relied on to preserve whatever scholarly progress we achieve.

In the age of digital humanities this all becomes more complicated, because the key productions are often owned by universities or commercial organizations. Who is acting to preserve those databases, or even the small local data collections in which so much scholarship is presented? It's not looking good.

Because I am a New Zealand citizen, some years ago I asked the National Library of New Zealand to preserve my scholarly website, Piggin.Net, and I have just been to see what they did about it. The web archiving unit crawled the website every 12 months until May 2015, and then seems to have stopped. I have made many changes to the site since then and this it not reassuring. Will they resume crawling?

At the same time I asked the British Library to preserve another website in which I publish English family and local history, Piggin.Org. Alarmingly, the BL crawls ceased in 2013, although I go into that site from time to time to update information, correct links and fix spellings.

[Update: the BL unit, the UK Web Archive, has promptly replied on Twitter: "We have continued archiving sites after 2013 but they are not currently visible on the website. We are working to rectify this."]

It occurred to me that the country where I pay taxes, Germany, ought to be providing this service too. There is a web archiving unit at the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, but its performance is a disgrace for a great nation. One would assume that a Made in Germany site which does not use the top-level domain DE would need to be added to the DNB archive by hand. However if you read the basic facts page, you discover that (a) it is impossible at the present time to nominate a page for spidering, and (b) a saved page would in any case only be visible in the reading room. This absurdity is (c) justified as a legal matter. But if one wished as copyright owner to opt in and offer the DNB the express consent to put the web-archive copy online, one couldn't. See (a). A catch 22.

To add insult to injury, the link to the web archive collection, such as it is, is dead.

Some of my articles are preserved at Academia.edu and at ResearchGate.Net, but the preservation of my website in its final state after I die is only being assured by one organization, Archive.Org of the United States, with its Wayback Machine. Archive.Org operates on an opt-out basis, meaning it saves everything (including from Germany) unless you expressly ask them not to.

I am very pleased with their work, particularly the fact that they harvest my version changes every few months. (In fact I sometimes go to them to recover versions I have myself lost.) But it is alarming to know that in 2016, archival preservation of the internet is still being left to a single San Francisco foundation funded by donations. They have just announced that they will create an extraterritorial backup copy of their collections in Canada. They are asking for donations. I think it's a very worthy cause.

But I still regard it as uncertain that any university or foundation or publishing company can survive for the next 500 years. This work ought to be funded by our governments,of which most will, in the nature of things, survive the course.

2016-12-05

Palatina Uploads

In the last week, the main uploads at DigiVatLib were from its Palatina collection on November 28:

In Heidelberg, which has first right to post the Palatina digitizations, since a German foundation is funding the work, a total of 34 new items have appeared online over the past two weeks:

This is Piggin's Unofficial List number 84. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to DigiVatLib.

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Macro-Typography

2016-12-22

Wonky Meniscus

2016-12-20

Time Trials

2016-12-17

Dreamers of dreams

2016-12-14

Standstill

2016-12-10

After We Die

2016-12-05

Palatina Uploads

My New Book

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