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 "....""
The good stuff isn't lost to history - you never know how many great works are destroyed by censors. Did Shakespear ever recover from being Bowlderized?
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
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.
While I'm as big a fan of weblogs as anyone, I gotta say this just proves a point I've been making for a while ... there's not much really cutting edge about them. They're diaries that happen to have hyperlinks. The only reason they get read, I think, I is people like to look in other people's windows.
And the view is a lot more interesting in some of those windows than others. Pepys lived a life that's a lot more interesting than almost anything today.
C'mon, baby, kiss The King.
maybe in the year 2300 someone will take the slashdot archives and start posting them daily to a web log...i wonder if people will get the "FP" and "In Soviet Russia" references...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
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 "....""
Yes, the one thing the Internet lacks is sex.
Oh, I don't know. I browse at -1: it's amazing what images can be evoked using only punctuation. :-)
"Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
Jan 11, 1660: Not much happening today. Lost one o my kids in the bog.
Jan 12, 1660: Damne bog ate my dog. Off to the pub for a pint.
Jan 13, 1660: Walking back from the pub early this morn, almost fell into the bog.
Jan 14, 1660: Good Lord.. the Mayor fell into the bog. Presumed lost. Kenny Axeblood wants to take over. 'Aye' I say.
Jan 15, 1660: God hates our wee village; Kenny Axeblook walked into the bog and disappeared from our sight. We think it's that woman with the wart. Off to burn her.
Jan 16, 1660: Burnt the witch and threw her remains into the bog.
Trolling is a art,
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.
.
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'm all for folks reading the "great men" of the past (and the women too), but even after reading the BBC link I'm at a loss to see what makes this medium an improvement.
;)
Yes, you can read a little bit each day -- but is that not equally possible with a book (or even the online version of the diary)?
Yes, people can add comments explaining the "archaic" English (according to the article), but should I trust these explanations? How many Samula Pepys experts will be following this, and how many yowzers?
Blogs can be great tools, but I don't see how in this particular case the medium is especially useful. There's so much hype about technology improving learning, but after watching many a powerpoint presentation, I'm wary of too much hoopla with too little benefit.
But hey, the internet really does need more blogs, so I guess a new one can only be a good thing
We're Slashdotting someone who's been dead for 300 years.
Bet he didn't see that one coming.
-... ---
Was that really necessary? I mean, are there really people out there who don't know how to pronounce Pepys? Did you not learn anything at school? Sheesh!
BTW, I haven't the faintest clue what marshmallow peeps are...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
It is (or soon will be) sem-automated. I have to copy and paste all the text from the Project Gutenberg file by hand. But having prepared these entries in advance, a handy bit of experimental perl will (fingers crossed) publish a new entry each day.
http://www.progress.demon.co.uk/Fun/AOLer-diary
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Never argue with the Viscount Crowhurst, as according to the NYT 9/27/61:
...
London, Sept. 26
Members of the historic Pepys family said today they pronounce the name
"Pepp-iss" not Peeps"
On the other hand, the Encyclopedia Britannica asserts: "The name was
pronounced in the seventeenth century and has always been pronounced by the
family, 'Peeps.' "
The discrepancy came to light when Lady Paulina Mary Louise Pepys faced
a magistrate on a traffic charge. The magistrate, A.A. Pereira, pronounced
it "Peeps."
"Sorry," Lady Paulina said, "but it's Pepp-iss."
The magistrate, thus corrected, then fined her two pounds.
"Of course I'm related to Samuel Pepys, and if he called himself 'Peeps'
he was the first member of the family to do so and none has done it since.
I don't like it pronounced 'Peeps.' "
The present head of the family is John Digby Thomas Pepys, the 7th Earl
of Cottenham and the 10th Baronet Pepys. His secretary said:
"I can assure you that Lord Cottenham pronounces it 'Pepp-iss' and so do
his son, the Viscount Crowhurst"
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).
"And do you pronounce it Fro-der-ick Frahnk-en-steen?"
"No, it's Frederick. Why do you ask?"
"I don't know."
"Let's go, Igor."
"That's Eye-gor."
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 "...."
Sorry, you're going to have to find outrageousness elsewhere. A footnote for Jan 1 reads, This is the first of too many censored passages marked by "...." wherin Mr. Wheatly determines (in this unabridged edition) that some of the words of Pepy's are too raw for our eyes.
The University of California's edition is fairly recent -- I'd imagine there wasn't much in the 1970s that could shock Californians. I'm guessing this edition is more complete, and I'm asking my public library for a copy of it. Here's hoping it's got fewer ellipses (and more eccentricity).
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.
The Two Towers film did not improve upon the book. Faramir is spinning in his grave.
Uh... you are aware, right, that Lord of the Rings is not actually a history? Just to be clear: fictional character, never existed, not in grave. Okay?
I write in my journal
Members of the historic Pepys family said today they pronounce the name "Throat-wobbler Mangrove."
In other news, hillbillies today said that they would prefer to be called "sons of the soil."
I write in my journal
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.
presents the answer to a question posed to me here on Slashdot a few days ago when I was talking about eBooks and Project Gutenberg.
What happens when the language changes only scholars can read Dickens and Twain?
This is what happens.
This can only happen *because* the work is in the public domain and presents one of the greatest arguments for works not remaining in the private domain overlong.
It also serves as a great example of the true social utility of a free internet and I applaud the author for making this great literary and historical document accessable in a modern and entertaining manner.
KFG
My roommate has them aged. He says about after a year they become really good.
I think he is just smoking crack entirely too much.
Man, what a bunch of sissies. My wife has a friend that married a gentleman named "Dorkson".
Yup, you heard me, "Dorkson".
He's a great guy, and all, but man - what do you say to that? Understandably, she insists that we pronounce it "Dorrson" because the 'k' is silent, you know.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
From http://www.studioproteus.com/mn9912news.html :
His diary was written in a shorthand code called tachygraphy that was not deciphered until the 19th century. Pepys never expected the diary to be decoded and so wrote only for himself--the diary is brutally frank
This is a clear example of DRM circumvention! Stop the terrorists! Now, where did i put my UAV?
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
"I can assure you that Lord Cottenham pronounces it 'Pepp-iss' and so do
his son, the Viscount Crowhurst"
If they can't hire a secretary that understands subject/verb agreement, I have doubts about their ability to pronounce their own last names.
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...
Homer: I love you, Pepsi.
Pepys: It's Pepys, Papa Homer
It's probably a lot more interesting than some 19 year old angsty girl talking about her ex-boyfriend saying "BOYS SUCK!@#!@#"
"You are so offeth my friends list!"
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?
has to be the Very Secret Diaries of the Fellowship of the Ring. I haven't laughed so hard in ages, definatly worth a read.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.