En la última entrada hablé de las transcripciones semipaleográficas de los testimonios del Lucidario emprendidas para esta edición y sus características. Retomo esa explicación para ahondar un poco sobre la experiencia de transcripción. La mayoría de las transcripciones fueron realizadas empleando Transkribus, un aplicativo de transcripción automatizada del que he hablado en varias entradas.

En la última entrada revisaba los requisitos mínimos para una edición del Lucidario propuestos por Sacchi en 2007: a. reducir las lecturas divergentes presentadas por las distintas familias de testimonios; b. descifrar el sentido de los capítulos que solo aparecen en D y E y; c. construir un aparato crítico que dé cuenta de las variantes a lo largo de las familias. Comencemos por lo último, es decir, el aparato crítico.

This is the sixth post in a series inspired by Lake Bell’s audiobook chapter “Sexy Baby Voice.” In previous posts last year, I’ve covered the three key features she uses to define this vocal style – bright resonance (which Bell refers to as “high pitch”), creaky voice (“vocal fry”) and legato articulation (“slurring”), and discussed the various ways that we can manipulate our vocal tracts to create or amplify bright or dark resonances.

How do you solve a problem like a séance? With Python and GPT3, is my answer. I’ve spent this weekend working on the technology for a forthcoming Artangel exhibition in Leeds that features an AI séance.

What is the point of a citation? As Anthony Grafton puts it in his history of the footnote, “the culturally contingent and eminently fallible footnote offers the only guarantee we have that statements about the past derive from identifiable sources. And that is the only ground we have to trust them” (233). So the point of a footnote/citation is to be able to lookup and check that epistemic claims are true? Sometimes.

My next book, tentatively titled Star Trek: Voyager: Critical and Historical Approaches to Ethics, Politics, and the End of the 1990s is now under contract at Lever Press (title definitely needs some work). This, for me, is very exciting. An open-access press with an innovative funding model – so there are no author-facing charges – I am really pleased to be working with Lever.

En la última entrada –antes de las vacaciones de verano– repasé el antiguo stemma del Lucidario , notando que el manuscrito B es el más antiguo de los conservados, a lo que se suma el descubrimiento de dos nuevos testimonios, H en 2020 e I a finales de junio de 2023.

Today’s big news is that Crossref has acquired the Retraction Watch database of expressions of concerns and retractions and has made it openly accessible to anyone who wants to use it. I’m waiting for full confirmation of the license or public domain dedication under which it will be released, but this is still a great commitment of Crossref to the POSI principles. The liberation of this database is good for science and scholarship in general.

This morning I gave the third of my keynote talks this week at the Janeway conference: The Lower Decks. It’s been quite a week and I am exhausted with my kidney failure. Indeed, today is a macabre one year anniversary, precisely, since I had the kidney biopsy that revealed my BK Virus Nephropathy and that my kidneys were going to be totally destroyed. Of course, I didn’t know that quite at that time.

Well, it finally happened, as Queen once sang. But I am not going “slightly mad” as the song professes. Instead, I have decided that the time has come where I need a wheelchair to get around. My arthritic hip damage is substantial and painful – and it’s stopping me going places. I rarely want to go out anywhere “for a walk” because the pain is so great. A wheelchair will help with this. But there are some things about it that bother me.