From the Rubric Police to the TechnoScribes

The Rubric Policeman who lives within me and who I normally suppress is busting forth this morning…

I ran through MP online this morning. When I can do this, I normally open up both MissionStClare and the C of E’s 1662 MP and use the 1662 ordo with the readings and collects from MissionStClare. Thus, I’m in line with the lectionary and weekly collects so when M and I pray EP together I don’t get liturgical whiplash. (MSC doesn’t maintain a consistent Rite I—hence the English book…)

Neither of these sources had the Collect for the Feast of the Holy Cross. MissionStClare didn’t have the readings for it either. What’s up with that?! I’ll note that Josh’s Daily Office site had both the readings and the collects… (I would have used the Festal Canticles but again—that’s just me.)

I know that to 99.9% of Christians this kind of detail focus comes across merely as nit-picking and a show of liturgical arrogance and that’s really not my point—and why I try to keep my inner rubric cop on a short leash. (I’m trying to repent of years of liturgical arrogance… ;-)) Rather, the point is about formative patterns. What is the rota that we adopt or have adopted by which we will form ourselves? Liturgical formation is a process that happens over a period of years if not decades. And I’ll freely admit, these things jump out at me because I struggle with them—I’m always tempted to toss my current plan out the window in favor of the next great breviary.

The real issue and explanation in terms of the online offices, of course, is that these aren’t really liturgy issues or rubrics issues—as I see them, they’re database issues. That is, the best way to set these things up is not to put them in place manually, rather it’s to program your pie (kalendrical calculations) to seamlessly plop in all the right pieces at all the right times. In fact, as I see it, missals and breviaries are materials that exist only imperfectly in manuscripts or books. These things have pleaded and cried out for integration with relational databases for centuries and our computer technology has finally caught up to our liturgical vision.

What I’d love to see is a Daily Office site where you could select from a range—what version you wanted to use, which lectionary, which kalendar, with Office Hymns and antiphons or without, with each possible Office either readable on screen or printable as a PDF. The technology’s in place—it’s just a matter of the time…

The big liturgical news of the day, though, isn’t about the Office… Rather, M has been invited at the last minute to celebrate mass at our alma mater’s contemplative Eucharist today so I’ll be spending my lunch hour with her there—hopefully in the service if Lil’ H will permit…

Wikification

Wikipedia is cool. And important. But I’m thinking of something else today… I’m thinking of local wikis, personal wikis.

When I was studying for my doctoral exams I plowed through dozens of books in a wide variety of topics. On my best days, I headed a new file with full bibliographical info, either scanned or typed in the table of contents, briefly summarized each chapter and made bullet-pointed lists of quotes I thought I might use at a later date. On my worst, I’d make some random comments about whatever part of the book I’d read, maybe dismissing it as: “basically coming from Y perspective, not much new, just louder and in English…” or some such. These now exists as Word files scattered across several directories.

I was looking over an Internet Archive scan of Frere’s Use of Sarum the other day thinking, “Gee, wouldn’t it be handy to have a table of contents or a list of chapter headings somewhere accessible for this…”

I’ve become convinced that the best way to handle this, to group my files where I can access them quickly and easily is to migrate them to a wiki.

Hard drive organization between research and sources has long been an issue for me but the more I think about it, the more logical a local wiki is to managing it all.  Especially for maintaining text and image files, the ability to create logical but non-linear structures of organization is key. There are some free wiki sites out there (like free blogging sites) but I opted to go with a more more geeky approach: I’ve downloaded mediawiki–the same wiki that Wikipedia uses–to run on my test server. (Mediawiki requires a MySQL installation and I’ve got one there.) I haven’t had time to fool with it yet and certainly plan not to until the dissertation is done, but I think these are the way of the future.

More Office Matters

Following Josh’s excellent advice I’ve added more clutter to my side-bar… Down below the “Pages” box is now a “Pray the Office Online” box that has links to a few of the best online Office sites I know. If there are others that should be up but aren’t, let me know.

Once again over at the Liturgies of the OJN page, Fr. John-Julian’s plainchant customary is up. It’s a brief guide on how to sing chant and I added a short bit about the pause (caesura) at the asterisk in the psalms.

Tech Is Here To Stay: Learn To Deal With It…

There is a post at one of the great academic web projects, the New Testament Gateway Blog, on the WikiScanner. Dr. Mark Goodacre, now at Duke, has been thinking for a bit about the future and direction of his own project which has grown into an incredible endeavor. Several things here are of interest to me:

• The world is in the midst of perhaps one of the first truly global paradigm shifts with the rise of the Internet. It involves data, who can access it and how it is communicated. We’re all still trying to figure out what it means but one thing is clear: it’s not going to go away. Particularly in this context–students will be relying much more on the Internet.
• As far as tenure goes, one of the fundamental metrics is books and articles published. If we take the first point seriously, then university-type folks need to have more serious conversations about how research and topic databases like data portals, wikis, etc. should be added into the tenure discussion to promote the creation and proliferation of reliable, verifiable data.
• Broadening the scope a bit: congregants and congregations and those seeking knowledge about both will be—no, are—relying more on the Internet as well. What are we religious-types doing about this?
• And is the answer to this question (either in the academic or the religious realms) rooted in organization-wide top-down directives or more of an individual and small-group collective nature? It seems to me it’s the second—but that produces the inevitable problem of content control; how do you distinguish the trustworthy from the flawed and fallacious?
• Because of the kind of material out there and its means of production, one way to move the conversation forward is the growth of “certification groups” who would certify the content of a site according to their standards. Both the blessing and curse of this kind of approach is that the group would essentially have no direct power over the content and the value of the certification would be only as good as the public trust held by the certifying group.

There’s more to think and say about this—but I lack the time and brain-cycles to do it justice at the moment…

Brief Note

I’ve not been around much and will continue not to be.

But… I just had to point to this article that AKMA has brought to our attention on “Adventure: Search for the Colossal Cave.” Those who recognize the name will need no reminding; for those who don’t, an introduction really won’t suffice–because one can never capture what it all means to those of us who played it back then.

The article is fascinating, but doesn’t answer a question that I’ve wondered about for quite a while. At what point in the game’s history did the den of the software wizard disappear? I have vivid memories of the room littered with Dr. Pepper cans sporting a pin-up of a nude Cray-1 supercomputer that somehow was missing from later versions I’ve played… Anybody know?

Busy Night: Normal Life

We’re doing some short-term elder-care right now for a colleague’s aunt who has mild Alzheimer’s. M and the girls have been there all day for the past week plus. It’s a rough schedule and fairly exhausting. I help out when I can in evenings and weekends–so I was there all day today. (It’s like dealing with three toddlers instead of two–one of whom has the same conversation with you every fifteen minutes or so.)

Now, M is at the desk behind me finishing up a sermon for tomorrow’s supply gig; I’m trying to figure out how to install Oracle on my test server since it turns out that my side-job’s web host is discontinuing MySQL support. What fun…

Third Time’s a Charm?

*Sigh* I was planning to get a lot done tonight. Didn’t happen. I made a silly error on protocols for handling file extensions and ended up reinstalling the OS from scratch… On the upside–I’m trying a new OS.

I started out with this box on Ubuntu. That was working okay. Then, I needed to install some stuff but cleverly forgot/couldn’t locate the root password. At that point I said–hey, I’m a Windows guy from before Windows existed–why use Ubuntu which uses Gnome as a graphical interface (a Mac clone)? Why not try Kubuntu which uses KDE–a Windows emulator? (Especially since the price is the same…) It was okay–I had no major problems but I did notice a performance difference. It was slower…

This is an *old* box I’m working off of.

When I made my goof tonight I said, well, why not round it out with Xubuntu which is designed for more basic systems. So, I spent what was supposed to be productive coding time reinstalling the operating system, retweaking Firefox, and setting up my lampp stack. And in case any one else is trying this, I *heartily* recommend this site and its download. After several days trying to manual compile a stack on my Windows unit I discovered their Windows version and was good to go in under an hour. This is the second time I’ve used it on this box (once with Kubuntu, now once with Xubuntu) and haven’t had a bit of trouble.

In the meantime, however while waiting on downloads/installs/and such I’ve been glancing through Oscar Cullman’s Essays on the Lord’s Supper, John Koenig’s New Testament Hospitality, and Luke Johnson’s Religious Experience in Earliest Christianity.

Much more important than these, though, I got to spend some quality time with M which I’ve been missing a lot recently because of my crazy schedule…

Chant Posts from Comrades

bls has linked to the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society. For those unfamiliar with the group, you may recognize the name of Walter Frere, Anglican priest (was he a bishop too? I forget…) and liturgist. He’s one of the biggest names associated with the group and is due a great debt of gratitude for his work on Medieval English Music. Anyway, great stuff including a nice catalog of current stuff in print (in pounds, though…)

Chris has given us some goodies of his own: music for the Compline hymns according to the texts of the Anglican Breviary and the Antiphonale from NLM.He’s using TeX for it–a system that I’ve heard about peripherally but am basically unfamiliar with. After seeing these pdfs I may need to give it a serious look…

Early Medieval Mauscripts

Here’s another static page. The focus is on digitized facsimiles of early medieval biblical and liturgical materials. It’s not meant to be exhaustive or comprehensive but rather selects the sites and manuscripts I work with the most.

Welcome to the New Digs

This is the new web home of haligweorc.

There will be a few more changes coming in the near future. All good as far as I know…

We did loose a post or two and a few comments but other than that, everything else seems to have made the change fairly well.

I’m hoping to have left some baggage behind at the old site. Much less will be written about the Great Unpleasantness; much more will be written about things spiritual and medieval. Hopefully much more will be written of and therefore on the Damn Dissertation. Time will tell…