Slashdot Mirror
1660 Diary Becomes 2003 Weblog
EnlightenmentFan writes "When technology improves a book that was already good, that's good news for nerds. I'm not talking about the Two Towers, but the diary of Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) (pronounced Peeps, as in marshmallow peeps), whose diaries record not only the Great Fire of London and the plague but his many seductions, trickeries, encounters with the king, almost getting executed, etc. Brit blogger Phil Gyford realized that this diary would make a great weblog--clickable footnotes, online feedback and all. So now he is serializing it daily, starting Jan 2, 1660, supposedly over the next ten years. The BBC has the backstory. I hope Gyford will deviate from Gutenberg's 1893 version to include some of Pepys's more outrageous sexual adventures, reduced by the 1893 version to "....""
...or does he manually enter text everyday?
Via blogs4God I found "the Fathers of the Christian Church as well as a few other blog that basically take books, devotionals or diaries out of the past and post them blogs.
I personally think this is a cool way to teach history. I'd like to see more of this on the high-school level as a means of familiarizing students with the great men and women of antiquity on a personal level.
--- have you healed your church website?
It's not a diary as such, but this reminds me of the excellent Bloggus Caesari ("The Original Warblogger") - Julius Caesar's ruminations from Gaul, now in weblog form, a tad over two thousand years later.
I've seen several sites that do this kind of thing, but usually via email instead of a blog. Every week a new chapter of a public domain book is sent to subscribers.
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It'd also be interesting to see other famous diaries given this treatment. Think Anne Frank, or Anais Nin. However, in the later case, the blog's past entries would have to be heavily revised every once in a while
(from his blog:)
"The best thing about Pepys, I thought, when I read the diaries, some years ago, was watching him change, with the country, from the puritan days to the restoration -- watching him discover the theatre (to which he slowly becomes addicted), watching him grow and reinvent himself. The other best thing is that, confiding in a coded diary, he gradually becomes unutterably honest, and thus human, sometimes shockingly so."
I thought you guys might be interested.
I worked on a similar project a few years back: the diary of a revolutionary-war era Maine midwife. No one thought to call it a blog, but that's basically what it is--along with some teaching tools (this was NEH-funded). It's called dohistory.org. A lot of her diary focuses pickling vegetables and birthin' babies, but there's some real drama too; she testified in a gang rape trial, and her husband went to jail (on unrelated tax charges).
To quote a Boston Globe article, now available only in the Google cache:
"Edited out until as recently as 1970 were the clumsy rolls beneath alehouse tables and the gropings in horse-drawn carriages, generally rendered in his unique personal porno style: 'and yo did take her, the first time in my life, sobra mi genu and poner mi mano sub her jupes and toca su thigh, which did hazer me great pleasure.' "
Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
The problem with that is something that every Slashdot reader should be familiar with: copyright infringement.
As mentioned in the BBC article about Pepys' diaries, "Copyright isn't a problem; the remarkable Project Gutenberg, a community effort to make electronic texts of copyright-free books available to everyone, has produced a version of the diary dating from 1893."
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
I thought it was just a "special form of shorthand", not really actual encryption. I find it difficult to believe that he was doing hard-core mathematically-based encryption
Encryption doesn't have to mathematical. Anything that takes a message, applies a transformation to it and is reversible through another transformation can be said to be a cypher. I could make an alternate alphabet with funny symbols and do a 1-1 correspondence of the English alphabet and that would still be a cypher. A weak one, but still encrypted.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Anyway, it is cool to discover that the Pepys family prefers Pee-piss to Peeps, but since most people don't know this, you'll probably be understood by more people if you still just say Peeps, IMHO.
Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
So what? Presumably they are in the original and since that is 300 years old it must be out of copyright by now. Surely there are more recent editions which include the full unexpurgated text? Why can't the 'naughty bits' just be copied from one of them?
Now, I understand that when someone re-prints an old text they are allocated a new copyright, but only on new work (text formatting and layout, footnotes, updated punctuation and spelling etc). But, we don't need any of that, just the original words. If these were just copied into the blog, how would anyone know whose edition they had come from anyway?