I have been blogging at The Ideophone since 2007, and not all of it has been as ephemeral as my PhD promotor once feared. My short post documenting the etymology of Zotero is apparently the only scientific documentation of where Zotero’s name comes from; it has served as a source in Wikipedia for ages and has received over 15 scholarly citations.

Terminé la última entrada describiendo el inusual comportamiento al entrenar dos modelos de transcripción en PyLaia, 7P y Lucidario B : Cuando las tasas de error en los sets de entrenamiento y de validación de un modelo HTR son demasiado altas, el modelo puede volverse a entrenar —que no es lo mismo que re-entrenarlo , algo que desaconsejo— para lograr nuevas iteraciones (versiones) que corrijan el problema.

Ha pasado casi un año desde mi última entrada sobre Transkribus y varias cosas han cambiado. Poco después de la última entrada, en marzo de 2023, la mejor y más eficiente máquina de HTR de Transkribus, CITLab+ (de la que hablo en estas entradas), fue retirada por una disputa de propiedad intelectual sobre el código de la máquina.

I have suffered from rheumatoid arthritis (RA) for almost twenty years now, which is almost half my life. If I had known back at the start of my diagnosis what I know now, I do not know for sure that things would be very different, but there was a heck of a lot I did not know. How complex is this disease and the things it does? This complex: "Rheumatoid arthritis" sounds like the sort of disease that old people get that isn't very serious.

Over the past few weeks I've been working to pack the entire Crossref database into a distributable SQLite file. While this sounds somewhat insane -- the resulting file is 900GB -- it's quite a cool project for, say, embedded systems work in situations where no internet connection is available. It also provides speedy local indexed lookups, working faster than the internet-dependent API ever could.

Entradas atrás, hablé del proceso de establecimiento del texto final en una edición: la constitutio textus . Central para el establecimiento de un texto es la evaluación ( recensio ) del elenco de la tradición manuscrita de una obra, y dentro de esta, realizar una comparación ( collatio ) que permita hacer surgir una versión definitiva –e idealmente fiel– del texto editado (realmente no se puede ir más allá, pues, como

Language makes us human. But there is an interesting asymmetry in our willingness to ascribe linguistic capacities to non-humans: animals are seen as having none, whereas computers may well master it according to many. What curious conception of language makes this asymmetry possible? And what do Descartes and Turing have to do with it? Notes from a new essay about language between animals and computers.

En la entrada anterior de esta serie me referí a un testimonio perdido de conexión escolástica del Lucidario . Al revisar el ms. 13594 de la BNE, el segundo volumen del Índice y inventario de los libros que ay en la librería de don Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, conde de Gondomar, en su casa en Valladolid , hecho en abril de 1623, di con la siguiente entrada en el fol.

As many of you know, I took secondment from my academic role this year to work on research and development at Crossref. A variety of factors inspired this, not least my health and wanting to be able to work from home. After a year, I have reflected on my experience of transferring to a very good employer outside of academia. If you did the same, your mileage might vary, because it all depends where you end up working and for whom.

2023 continued to pose the all-important question: just how many health disasters can I endure? This year, I started haemodialysis as my kidneys entered the extremely worryingly named "end-stage renal failure". This turns out to be a very long-term prospect, as I can't have a transplant owing both to BK viremia (which caused the kidney damage in the first place) and a conflict with the immunosuppression that treats my rheumatoid arthritis.