Forget swords and sorcery. Ever, Jane invites MMO players into the treacherous waters of England’s Regency Period.
Read: Jane Austen game is a proper MMORPG | Crave – CNET.
Now this is a Kickstarter project I can get behind!
Tag Archives: historical
Creature Feature: The Original Frankenstein Text Is Now Readable Online | Gizmodo
Full Post
In the pantheon of classic horror, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ranks as one of the first, and most memorable, monster tales ever told. And while it’s easy enough to pick up a new copy of the spine-tingling 1818 narrative from pretty much any bookstore, it’s now possible to pore over the original, hand-penned manuscript online.
New York Public Library teamed up with the University of Maryland’s Institute for Technology in the Humanities to digitize Shelley’s two surviving notebooks containing most of the work—complete with edits by Percy Bysshe Shelley, her poet husband. Making this almost 200-year-old text click-accessible for a modern audience is only the first step for the Shelley-Godwin Archive, which hopes to digitize the entire oeuvre of the ultra-writerly family of Percy, Mary, and her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.
There’s a pretty extensive how-to on the best ways to navigate the site, which fittingly launched this All Hallows Eve and is currently in beta mode. Have a look around at what genius looked like in the most truly terrifying time of them all: pre-word processing. [New York Times ArtsBeat]
Image: Shelley, M. (1817). “Frankenstein—Draft Notebook B,”
in The Shelley-Godwin Archive, c. 57, fol. 29v.
via Creature Feature: The Original Frankenstein Text Is Now Readable Online | Gizmodo.
Climb Your Family Tree With These Online Genealogy Tools | Gizmodo
The questions of who we are and where we came from can often be answered, not by looking inward, but by looking backward. While nature and nurture certainly play the primary roles in our development as individuals, it’s only through the study of one’s ancestry that we develop a more complete view of ourselves as how we fit into the larger scope of human history. Luckily, tracing one’s roots is easier than ever thanks to the Internet.
The following web services are discussed:
- Family Search
- US Gen Web
- Ancestry
- World Vital Records
- DistantCousin
via Climb Your Family Tree With These Online Genealogy Tools | Gizmodo.
World’s Oldest Jewish Prayer Book Found? Rare Text Purchased By Hobby Lobby President | HuffPost
The identification of the very rare prayer book, dated to the ninth century, was announced Sept. 26 by Steve Green, president of the arts and crafts retailer Hobby Lobby. Green facilitates his family’s array of biblical texts and artifacts, the Green Collection. The text was purchased from a collector.
Read: World’s Oldest Jewish Prayer Book Found? Rare Text Purchased By Hobby Lobby President | HuffPost.
8 Punctuation Marks That Are No Longer Used | Keith Houston | HuffPost
On the face of it, punctuation is not the most electrifying of subjects. A comma is a comma, a period is a period, and a semicolon is an argument waiting to happen. Look past squabbles over grammar, however, and punctuation’s staid veneer peels back to reveal a seething, Darwinian struggle that has played out over two millennia of the written word.
Though the period can claim an unbroken lineage stretching back to ancient Greece, and the quotation mark may boast of its roots in the early days of printing, for every venerable survivor there are countless other symbols that did not make the grade. The road from the scrolls of the library of Alexandria to today’s books, blog entries, and tweets is littered with the corpses of fallen marks of punctuation.
Read: 8 Punctuation Marks That Are No Longer Used | Keith Houston | HuffPost.
Researchers build[ing] ‘Google Earth’ project for the ancient world | theguardian.com
A tool developed by researchers at Southampton University has indexed historic maps, photos and historic documents to provide a simple location search tool for the UK.
The Pelagios 3 project takes data from ancient Latin and Greek sources, which formed the basis of two previous Pelagios projects, and builds on it with documents and maps from Arabic sources, medieval European and Chinese maps, and seafaring charts from the 13th century, cross-linking them into one searchable database.
Read the full story: Researchers build ‘Google Earth’ project for the ancient world | Technology | theguardian.com.
Philly’s Free Library worth the trip for rare-book collection | readingeagle.com
The literary wealth of more than 5,000 years is preserved at this museum-row library that is anything but ordinary.
via Philly’s Free Library worth the trip for rare-book collection | readingeagle.com.
Oldest known complete Torah scroll discovered miscatalogued in Italy | Holy Post | National Post
An Italian expert in Hebrew manuscripts said he discovered the oldest known complete Torah scroll, a sheepskin document dating from 1155-1225. It was right under his nose, in the University of Bologna library, where it had been mistakenly catalogued a century ago as dating from the 17th century.
The find isn’t the oldest Torah text in the world: the Leningrad and the Aleppo bibles — both of them Hebrew codexes, or books — pre-date the Bologna scroll by more than 200 years. But this is the oldest Torah scroll of the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, according to Mauro Perani, a professor of Hebrew in the University of Bologna’s cultural heritage department.
via Oldest known complete Torah scroll discovered miscatalogued in Italy | Holy Post | National Post – May 30, 2013.
If you are interested in religious texts and/or illuminated manuscripts I recommend the Sacred Traditions permanent exhibition at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, Ireland. This exhibition is much more rewarding than trying to view the Book of Kells among the masses at Trinity College. The Old Library is worthwhile but tourists are restricted to a very small area.
infophile 