Book update

Last night, at around midnight, I finished the last revisions on my book and shipped it off to publisher. My editor will be taking it to the London Book Fair next month. She also told me Nature has requested a review copy.

The missing Swedish source

The other day, I went to check out how I referred to something in chapter four to make sure I was consistent in chapter five. To my horror (really, horror), I discovered that the version I had saved was not the last version I wrote; it was the one before. All of the editorial corrections and content additions I had made were gone. After the predictable two hours spent checking everywhere for the corrected version, hoping the additions were in another file, and repeatedly looking in the trash can, I arrived (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression) at an acceptance of my screw up.

Sigh, do it over. My many-times published, childhood friend, David Neiwert, pointed out that, while this is horrifying, having had a chance to get your thoughts together once and mull it over, the second version is usually better. He's right. At least that's how it works in non-fiction. I'm sure many poets would punch us in the face for saying that. But, then, poets are an emotional lot.

And so, after remaking the editorial corrections, I spent today recreating the missing addition. Naturally, I went back and re-researched it. My new version is four times as long as the last version. Telling it in greater detail might add clarity to the narrative, but there is  a problem. This anecdote is the weakest sourced section in the entire book. It's based on what I call "the missing Swedish document."

One of the reasons this book has taken nine years to write has been that I have sourced everything. I don't want to claim to be able to read the minds of long dead people. When I was a kid, the young people's histories we were given (often written in the 19th century) were full of "when Bobby looked at the open sea, his mind was filled with thoughts of the adventures he would have." For all we know, Bobby was filled with terror at the thought that he would be raped half way around the world before dying of scurvy. And leaving such a childish genre, my own graduate studies were filled with statements of what Stalin wanted or was planning. Was Stalin planning to invade Western Europe when he died in 1953? I think he wanted to. I'm not sure he was brave enough to actually have planned to do it. In my studies, the only solid evidence I've seen is that he planned to invade Yugoslavia later that year.

Back to the mammoth. I have what I think is a significant anecdote. I've hesitated to add it because I can't source it. All I have is "a certain Swede said... ." I'm sure I know who the certain Swede is, but I can't find where he said it nor can I find a direct quote anywhere else. All I have is this oblique reference. I'm sure the first reviewer of the book will latch onto this point and ask about it.

I'm doomed.

Some notes on translating

So far I've translated about 2000 pages out of ten languages that I don't speak. Here are my top three problems:

1. Though most of what I translate is technically in the modern form of these languages, the spelling isn't. If I actually spoke the languages, I could pronounce the words out loud and them figure out.

2. Some writers are overly flowery or just plain bad stylists. This often defeats the available grammar of my translation programs leaving me to bludgeon my way through in short phrases or even word-by-word.

3. Actual typos in the source material. I figure out the grammar part and start entering every possible variation I can into various dictionaries and none of them is a word. Finally, I realize they weren't minding their P's and Q's and everything is fine.

Bonus observation: About three years ago I noticed something odd about the way the long and short S was used in some documents. There two sets rules for their use. The difference centers on when to use the short S. In some pieces they would be using one set of rules and suddenly shift to a different set. At first I thought they didn't have enough pieces of long S type to do some sheets and shifted over to the rules that allowed more short S's for those sheets. Just last week I finally figured out what was really going on. I was reading a monthly journal that probably needed to be assembled and printed fairly quickly. The printer was a fairly large house and must have had more than one typesetter working in the shop with some of them using one set of rules and some using the other.

I'm writing this to avoid working on a Latin document that is rife with sin #2. Get back to work, John.

Progress report

I think I'll do these weekly.

In the last week, I finished on chapter and started another. That means the week involved as much research as actual writing. The final word count for the week is 5400.

On the second, I was thinking about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a challenge for aspiring writers to pound out a complete draft of a novel in just thirty days. There is no way I can finish my book in a month, but I'm shooting for two and a half chapters. That will put me past  the halfway point. Then, I fix myself a nice dinner with a decent bottle of wine and get back to work.

Another unicorn and how I came to write the book

The mammoth book grew out of an idea for a single blog post. I love forbidden history and catastrophist books, such as those about Atlantis and Velikovskyism. It doesn't take long when reading these to notice that the all depend on a limited bits of evidence to prove vastly different theories. Among the favorites are the Great Pyramid and frozen mammoths. Out of curiosity, I decided one day to look at the history of mammoth discoveries to figure out what was known at the times different Atlantis writers wrote since it wouldn't be fair to criticize them for not knowing something that hadn't been discovered yet. As the blog post got out of hand, it occurred to me that this long essay could perhaps become a small book. I had four books on mammoths at the time. I figured those four and a couple of books on paleontology would be all I needed. I wasn't that serious about it; it was just an idea.

Just as the blog post had gotten out of hand, the essay began to get out of hand. In each of the books I found discoveries and ideas that I wanted to know more about. I began mining the bibliographies of those four books. I found minor mistakes in them and differences of interpretation that bothered me. I mined the bibliographies a little further. One day I shelled out almost eighty bucks for a Nineteenth Century book and realized that I was starting to get serious. Atlantis had vanished from the idea and it was all about mammoths. About five years ago, I realized I really was writing a book. When I began spending more and more time tracking down primary sources for various bits of data and context, I realized I was also writing the dissertation that had never happened when I dropped out of grad school.

And then I entered my translation phase. When I first got serious, machine translation was still pretty iffy, but it's improved dramatically over the last few years. Whereas I once groaned at the thought of doing a few paragraphs of a modern language, I now think nothing of ten pages of Latin. Naturally, this has meant digging into even more original sources. Sometimes this means even when an English translation is available, I'll go to the original to make sure I'm not missing anything. This is how I made my latest discovery.

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz is probably best known for inventing calculus. But he was much more than a mathematician; he wrote about philosophy, medicine, physics, linguistics, history, and politics; he tinkered with lamps, clocks, pumps, and invented an adding machine; I've heard he mixed the best Bloody Mary in all Germany and danced a mean Polka; he also took a shot at geology and paleontology. In 1690, his patron, the Elector of Hanover, commissioned him to write a history of the province of Brunswick. Leibniz chose to start with the geological prehistory of the land as a background for the human and dynastic history. He didn't get any further in his history. Thirty years after his death, this essay was published under the title Protagea.

Leibniz's contribution to mammoth history appears in Protagea. Leibniz recounted a story told originally by Otto Gericke, the inventor of the vacuum pump, of the discovery of some unicorn bones near Quedlinberg in the Harz Mountains. He also published a reconstruction of the unicorn skeleton that he received from an unnamed second source. The teeth are probably mammoth's teeth and the skull is probably from a woolly rhino, but the horn, which was reassembled from pieces, is clearly a mammoth's tusk that was straightened by the reconstructors. The unicorn drawing is a standard part of mammoth lore.

I had read that Leibniz's text description was lifted from Gericke's almost word for word. The "almost" got my attention. Yesterday, I decided to compare the two to see if Leibniz had left out or changed anything (he hadn't). Gericke's description is in his book on the vacuum pump. Don't ask me why; that's just how they rolled in the Seventeenth Century. Naturally, the book is in Latin, but so is the first edition of Protagea, making a direct comparison possible. While hunting for the passage in Protagea I came across a familiar word "mammotekoos"--mammoth bones. This word appears two pages before the unicorn story but it has never been mentioned in any previous book on mammoths.

I know of only one other mammoth writer who has mentioned Leibniz’s mammotekoos, but not in the context of mammoths. Claudine Cohen, a French historian of science, published The Fate of the Mammoth in 2002. About a third of her book covers the same material that I'm covering. She uses Gericke and Leibniz unicorn as the launching point for one of her chapters, but she missed the mammotekoos. Ironically, in 2010 she edited and published an English translation of Protogaea with commentary. In the chapter where mammotekoos appears, she has a small footnote on the word. If she had written the Protagea commentary before her mammoth book she would have been able comment on the relevance of the word in the context of mammoths and all I would be able to do would been to agree or disagree with what she said. Ha-ha, now I get to go first.

Alright, what is there to say about Leibniz and the word mammotekoos? The context of his use is a passage about bones found in the caves of the Harz Mountains. These caves are a treasure-trove for paleontologists. Many of the caves contain bones of Pleistocene megafauna such as cave bears, woolly rhinoceros, and mammoths. Leibniz took the, then common, position that these bones had been washed there by the Biblical Deluge. He also held to a less common idea that the North Sea had once extended as far south as the Harz Mountains. This idea was necessary to explain seashells in lower strata. In Protagea, he suggests that the latter could also be used as an explanation for unicorn horn and other fossil ivory, in that they were probably really walrus tusks.

Here is the quote. It's a mix of Cohen's translation and a little grammatical editing by me. 

So there was nothing to stop foreign animals to be brought to us by the force of the waves, although I find elephants less believable because they could belong to the Rosmarus [walrus] I mentioned above. The teeth reportedly dug up in Mexico are perhaps of the same kind since no elephants are found in America today. I would say the same thing of those heavy teeth, like the bones of whales, called Mammotekoos by the Moscovites and attributed to the elephant, as Witsen reports. Yet, I will not obstinately deny that true elephant’s bones are sometimes found. Certainly, we have seen teeth and a part of the tibia and other bones taken from the Scharzfeld cave. No one could say whether they came from an elephant or similar animal; whether in the past they might have been more widely scattered throughout the world than today; whether their nature or the nature of the world had changed; or whether they had been moved from a far country by the rushing waters.

 Leibniz is clear that the bones in the Harz Mountains are not something that can be taken for granted; they are problem that needs to be solved. He lists several possible solutions and lets us know his preferences: the Biblical Deluge for most bones and a further south coastline for most of the ivory. He also recognizes that the ivory is the biggest problem and allows that some of it could be elephant ivory. For real elephant ivory, he still prefers the Biblical Deluge but admits that it is possible the elephants could have been native the region, but that would mean either elephants were different in those days or that the environment was. That final point is an interesting foreshadowing of things to come. The environmental solution would not have been entirely outrageous as many philosophers believed the Earth had been uniformly pleasant with a year-round growing season and that seasons were part of the wreck of the world brought by the Flood.

This passage is important in that Leibniz is the first writer to bring together European fossil elephants, giant bones from the New World, the majority of which would have been mastodons, and the Siberian mammoth and recognize them as probably related species. Of course, his solution that they were all walruses is wrong, but not unreasonable for the times. The Witsen Leibniz mentions as his source for mammotekoos Nicholaes Witsen. Witsen knew ivory. As a Dutch merchant he had been to the East Indies and to Africa where he had purchased the tusks of both Asian and African elephants. He knew about Siberian mammoth ivory because he had been to the markets of Moscow and interrogated the ivory merchants there. In his book on Russia and Siberia, Noord en Oost Tartarye, he recognized that mammoth ivory looked like real elephant ivory. He wouldn't go so far as to say it really came from elephants only that, if it did, it could only be because dead elephants were washed there by the Flood. Witsen did not mention walruses, but he did say that most mammoth ivory came from the Arctic coast. By the time of Witsen and Leibniz, Europeans had known about the Russian ivory trade for over 150 years. Leibniz, who had not seen a mammoth tusk, appears to have assumed that mammoth was no more than another name for walrus. He was not the last to make that assumption. As late as thirty years later, after whole tusks and other bones of mammoths had been carried to Western Europe for examination, Theodore Hase could still publish a fifty-eight page tract arguing that mammoth was another word for walrus.

This passage in Protagea offers something for Leibniz scholars, though I'm not sure if it rises above the level of curious trivia or not. Leibniz devotes quite a few pages to fossils so I'm sure everything I said above about Leibniz’s attitudes regarding fossils has been said in the past; only my emphasis on elephants and mammoths is original. The word mammotekoos is a point that can be used to date that part of the Protagea. It is known that Leibniz worked on his history through 1691-3. Witsen's Noord en Oost Tartarye was published in 1692, placing Leibniz’s composition of that passage in the second half of the period. If Leibniz had published Protagea as a separate volume as soon as he finished it, his would have been only the third time any form of the word mammoth had appeared in print.

This is why my book is taking so long. Not only have I spent almost three years translating and retranslating primary sources and lost most of another year due to personal crises, I also have these obsessive moments when I'll spend two days analyzing a half of a paragraph. On the other hand, it's this kind of obsessiveness that leads me to make new discoveries. Up above where I said Protagea could have been the third time any form of mammoth had appeared in print, the Oxford English Dictionary would tell you it would have been the second, with Witsen as the first. I know of an earlier one. As far as I know, I'll be the first person to draw attention to it. That alone should be a good enough reason for you to buy several copies of the book when it comes out.

And now, since the original purpose of looking at Leibniz was to comment on the Quedlinburg unicorn, I should get to work on that. I'll post a partial rough draft with the amazing drawing later today or tomorrow.

No blogging this week

I actually have some paid writing work. It's only the second time this year.

Plagiarism at the BBC

As if the science blogging world wasn't in enough turmoil this week, we have our own little plagiarism scandal to deal with. People who know me, know I have strong feelings about plagiarism. I hate plagiarists. Today we have a successful and established media figure apparently stealing from a fledgling writer and acquaintance of mine.

Last week, Brian Switek published a short piece on his Smithsonian Magazine blog about the discovery of fossil marks left by a dinosaur attempting to dig into a mammal's burrow. Yesterday, Tom Feilden, a science correspondent for BBC Radio 4, published a short piece on his blog that repeats verbatim sentences from Switek's post including an entire paragraph, which Fielden attributes to the discoverer of the fossils. Two examples will suffice to demonstrate the apparent copying.

Switek:

On the mammalian score, a specimen of the relatively large Cretaceous mammal Repenomamus robustus described in 2005 was found with the bones of baby dinosaurs in its stomach—-it had apparently fed on young Psittacosaurus shortly before it died.

Feilden:

One clue, which appears to give mammals the upper hand, comes from the fossilised remains of a relatively large mammal, repenomamus robustus, discovered in 2005. It was found with the bones of a baby dinosaur in its stomach--apparently it had snacked on a young psittacosaurus shortly before it died. Score it one-nil to the mammals.

Not only is the wording similar, but notice the placement of the dash and the use of the sports scoring metaphor.

Switek:

The first trace fossil type was made by a digging dinosaur, probably a maniraptoran similar in form to Deinonychus and Troodon. At first glance it doesn’t look like much-—just a lumpy bit of sandstone-—but if you look carefully, a claw impression and numerous downward-arcing grooves can be seen. It appears that the dinosaur was repeatedly sticking its foot into the hole and raking out sediment, a behavior consistent with the idea that these dinosaurs probably did not use their arms to dig because their feathers would have gotten in the way or been damaged.

Feilden:

The first trace evidence shows scraping marks in the sandstone rocks made by a digging dinosaur, probably a deinonychus or Troodon.

Below the claw marks numerous downward arching curves...

[...]

"If you look carefully," professor Simpson says, "it appears that the dinosaur was repeatedly sticking its foot into the hole and raking out sediment. Behaviour consistent with a carnivore digging out its next meal".

Both are short articles; these two examples make up almost half of their lengths. There are similarities and exact borrowings in the rest of the two pieces.

Professor Simpson is Edward L. Simpson, the first author listed on the scientific article that both Switek and Feilden are reporting. It is possible that both writers are borrowing from Simpson. Unfortunately, the article is hidden behind the pay-per-view firewall of the journal Geology, so I cannot check that. I know Switek, so I do not think he is also a plagiarist. However, even if both Switek and Feilden were both plagiarizing the same source in the same way, this would not excuse Feilden or diminish his crime. Plagiarism is almost never a one time thing. Plagiarists usually steal not because they are unimaginative but, rather, because they are lazy and feel pressure to keep producing. If they get away with plagiarism once, they will almost always try it again until it becomes a habit. If someone has the time or the energy, they should look over Feilden's earlier work. If he is a serial plagiarist, he needs to be exposed. If this is his first offense--however unlikely that is--he needs to be smacked hard so he will not try it again.

The BBC needs to investigate this and make a quick and public response.

Writing popular science

Earlier this week, David Williams (Stories in Stone), Michael Welland (Through the Sandglass), and Brian Switek (Laelaps) began a series of blog posts about writing and publishing a popular science book. As someone who is bogged down in the middle of the process, I'm finding these posts very helpful. If you are thinking about writing non-fiction or, like me, muddling along and thirsting for practical and actionable advice, this series id a good place to start.

Writing a Book: The Idea, The Proposal, and Publishing
Writing a Book: Part 2, the Writing

Thoughts on writing a popular science book (1): making it interesting, finding a publisher
Thoughts on writing a popular science book (2): Writing and structure
Thoughts on writing a popular science book (3): the tedious but important stuff

So you want to write a pop-sci book: Part 1: From idea to agent
So you want to write a pop-sci book: Part 2: The value of blogs
So you want to write a pop-sci book: Part 3: Writing the damn thing
So you want to write a pop-sci book: Open thread

I've been interviewed!

The tireless Bora Živcović, AKA Coturnix of A Blog Around the Clock, one of the founders of the Science Online conferences, editor of the first Open Laboratory anthology, etc., has interviewed me as part of a series of interviews of participants in ScienceOnline2010. Like the conference, the subject of the interview is science communication. Bora will be putting these interviews up all year. Most of the interviewees are bloggers, many teach, and a few are paid science journalists. It's a very interesting crowd.

Published!

The Open Laboratory 2009: The Best in Science Writing on Blogs was released today. I'm excited that one of my mammoth pieces was chosen for inclusion. The story of the Adams Mammoth is something that will be included in my book, so this essay is a sort of sneak peek at things to come. You can read the original version of the piece here or here.

Open access isn't the same as free access (#scio10)

There is one point from the discussion following our ScienceOnline2010 presentation that I want to elaborate on. This is the way in which credentialism excludes amateurs. This is a problem that I face.

The internet has made accessible vast amounts of literature for much wider audiences than ever before. Many of the original sources that I have been able to use in my research would not have been available to me just ten years ago. Many early journals existed for only a few years, in very small numbers. To read them, I would have had to travel to major libraries in Europe and the Eastern states, which would have been prohibitively expensive. Once at those libraries, I would have needed to get access to their rare book collections, which would have been very difficult since I lack an institutional affiliation. Because of Project Gutenberg, Google Books, and the efforts of many libraries I can now read these works online and, in may cases, view scans of the actual pages without traveling.

My point about lacking an institutional affiliation is very important. Most of the people at ScienceOnline2010 were associated with some kind of university or research institution. It was so taken for granted that they put it on the name tags, as if the affiliation was part of their name. I'm sure that it is standard practice at all professional conferences to assume the attendees are all in that profession. However, this was not a scientists' conference; it was a science communicators conference and communicators were defined as including bloggers who just happen to like science. Many attendees commented that it would have been useful to put peoples' blog aliases or online avatars on their tags along with their names. However, I didn't hear anyone suggest that these identities should have been put on the tags in place of their affiliations. Lacking an institutional affiliation, I put down Clever Wife's soap business, just to have something to fill in the blank.


My conference badge
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The wonderful era of online access, which I mentioned above, is already facing counter-pressures to close it back up. The attendees were all familiar with the problems of modern scientific journals. They are ungodly expensive to purchase and many libraries don't have all of the relevant titles to their research. Many journals are beginning to address these problems by putting their content online, allowing institutions to purchase subscriptions that give access to the members of that institution wherever they are. That's great for them, but a barrier to everyone else. As an alumnus of the University of Washington, I'm supposed to have the same access privileges to library resources as do current students. The catch is that those privileges do not extend to internet access. To read journals, I have to go to the library. That's not a problem for people who work at the University, but, to someone who does not work there, it means making a special trip to read any given article. In those who do not work on or near a university library, the internet revolution has changed nothing.

Many of the journals who have put their content online do allow laypersons to access their articles, but we have to pay by the article. The prices range from ten to forty dollars per article with no consideration for length. Scientific research articles are usually quite short; one article I want is three pages long and will cost me forty dollars to view. For current research articles, I need to determine if it is relevant to my work without actually seeing it first.

The pay-per-view firewalls deprive an historical researcher of important context. The Proceedings of the Royal Philosophical Society are a perfect example of this. A few years ago they began posting online scanned images of the pages of their entire run. These were treasure to me. Whenever I went looking for an article, I browsed the entire issue to get an idea of the intellectual context of that one paper. This was not only useful, it was a lot of fun. In my presentation, I mentioned letters from landowners about natural oddities discovered on their land. As recently as the late 1700s, the Proceedings printed letters as trivial as someone finding a turnip in the shape of the Prime Minister's head. Priceless!

Last spring, with the scanning complete, the Society turned management of the digital archives over to JSTOR, a for-profit institution. Most of the attendees at our presentation were not even aware of the change. Because of their institutional affiliations, nothing had changed for them; they simply go online and read whatever they want. For me and people like me, it costs ten dollars for each article and letter unless we make a special trip to the University library.

As I mentioned in the presentation, the professionalization of the scientific world was a great thing in many ways, but, along with breaking down some barriers to the free exchange of ideas, it created new barriers. It divided the scientific world into two classes, active practitioners and passive spectators. Threats and barriers to the free and open access of ideas are not limited to censorship and social pressures; sometimes they are as simple as cost and distance.

Mammoth Tales: the blog

I have been thinking for a while about starting another blog. I began to think about this as I read about the advantage of an online presence for promoting a book. My idea was not to create a blog only about the book, but one that was less political, more sciency, and to perhaps limit the smart-assery a bit (but only a bit). Everything I learned at the ScienceOnline2010 conference tells me this is the right way to go. The biggest lesson of the conference, in this respect, was "stop goofing off and get it on line." That said, I'm proud to present Mammoth Tales.

As I just said, Mammoth Tales will be less political and more sciency than archy. It will be less of an all purpose blog than archy. Still

In politics, my editorial policy will be to exclude politics that aren't relevant to the larger theme of the blog. Politics, like religion, can be a distraction from a business' primary purpose. How often do we hear conservatives complain about how a celebrity's off stage liberal politics ruin their enjoyment of that celebrity's performances? How often are non-believers turned off by businesses that advertise the owner's religion? I am very strongly opinionated in my politics. If you hadn't noticed that, go back over archy's with a carefully critical eye. I don't want to unnecessarily annoy my other audiences.

It is not my intention for Mammoth Tales to be all mammoths all the time. I intend to use the site for anything I write that is related to science including science journalism, science education, history of science (and maybe a little plain old history). I plan to do more linking to stories that I find interesting, even if I don't have much to add to the stories. I also plan to us more capital letters in the titles.

For the time being, Mammoth Tales post will probably be not much more than a subset of archy posts. I'll cross post anything from archy that fits the editorial slant of the new blog. I'm thinking about a model in which I give some science news a short post in archy and a longer treatment in Mammoth Tales. We'll see how that works out. I plan to repost many of my old mammoth posts from archy and add updates to a few. I hope that makes it interesting enough that archy readers will want to check out both blogs from time to time and, on occasion, flip back and forth between the two driving up the hit meter on both.

Finally, be patient, the new blog isn't very pretty yet (it is nothing more than an off the shelf Blogger template). I still need to populate the blogroll and make a compelling logo. That comes later. the important thing is to get the site up and running and to put some words on it for you to read. As the old cockroach wrote:

they
are always interested in technical
details when the main question is
whether the stuff is
literature or not

I hope it is.

scio10 We're back

I got home at about eleven last night after a seven hour flight and sixty dollar cab ride. Clever Wife met me with hugs and chocolate cake. Then I slept for eleven hours. One more cup of coffee, and I'll feel normal (though I should aspire for something better than that).

The flights were safe and on time. On the way, I read most of the way (Anthony Grafton's Defenders of the Text) and took a short nap over North Dakota (Minnesota and Montana residents can insert their own joke here). On the first leg of the trip back I read Sydney Perkowitz's Hollywood Science. The book was an easy enough read that I expected to finish it on the second leg. Instead I sat next to a man who was so interesting that we talked non-stop the entire trip. Fortunately for her, the young woman sharing the row with us was listening to her Ipod so she didn't have to put up with two geezers bonding.

Every session at the conference was interesting and I got something of use out every single one. I'll post separately about some of the sessions. The socializing and networking went better than expected. I'm naturally rather shy, though I can be a crashing bore when I come out of my shell. I think I managed to stay in the middle most of the time. I must have done something right, I just received a friend request in Facebook.

I had one technical glitch. I took our spare cellphone and skipped taking the camera thinking I could use the phone and it would be one less thing to carry around. Then I discovered that the camera in the spare phone doesn't have a flash. There will be no pictures except those others send me (which probably won't be of me at my best).

The biggest problems for me were medication related. I've reached the age where I have multiple prescriptions. I'm bit of a physical mess. between us, Clever Wife and I have something like eleven prescriptions. I had at least one unpleasant reaction each day, each one worse that the previous. The first day, I went to a session on graphic tools and found my eyes so dry that I couldn't focus (naturally the eye drops were back at the hotel). On day two, I had an attack of tremors during my presentation (I'll post the presentation later today or tomorrow). The last day, when I should have been running around trying to make my best impression for some last minute networking, I had an attack of tremors so bad that I couldn't eat with a fork at lunch. If there hadn't been finger food, I would have gone hungry. It was only at the airport that I realized I had taken a second dose of the morning pills the night before and was going through violent withdrawal from the night pills. When I popped a night pill, the tremors were gone in twenty minutes. At home, I have avoided this by using a daily pill box. I understood that TSA regulations required me to carry all of my pills in the pharmacy labeled bottles, so I left the pill box at home. Let's call that one a learning experience.

Now, I have to check my Luddite paper notes from the conference and try to put everything I learned into action. I need to get over my Twitter aversion and join the noise. I started tinkering on a more specifically blog a while back; I need to finish it and get it online. I need to send letters to the people I chatted with (networking, you know). I need to get an agent for the book. I need to work on my elevator speech. I need to do the laundry from the trip. I need to get a new sport's jacket because the old one is getting really ratty even though I've only been wearing it for nine years. I need to get some groceries and fix Clever Wife a nice dinner. I need to make it up to the cats. Blah blah blah. And so on.

A little bit of mammoth in the night

I just finished the first draft of a mammoth article. Clever wife read it and gave some comments. She's been my primary editor for about twenty years, so I trust her feedback. I've already draft two. I hope to have a clean draft ready to pitch at magazines by the end of the week. If no one wants it, I'll chop it into pieces and use it for blog posts. They should be recognizable by being better edited than most of my posts.

Danish

I just finished two weeks of translations; Monday I return to writing. Most of what I translated was in German, but the last document was in Danish. It looked a little weird at first, but it wasn't too hard to get the hang of after lots of German documents. The only thing that puzzled me was their tendency to stick null sets (Ø) in the middle of words. I suspect it has something to do with Nils Bohr.

Social networking

I'm suspicious of the whole social networking thing. First off, I'm not very sociable. Secondly, I'm pretty private, I don't want to tell the whole world about my every action. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, I don't really need another time suck, I'm a blogger. Still I'm told there are some practical uses for it--publishers like prospective authors who can contribute to the marketing of their books--so I'm giving it a shot. I just set up a Facebook page. If I'm feeling especially bold, I might even try Twitter later this week.

Lost in translation

One of the great joys of the mammoth project has been going over the primary sources. Just a few years ago, I wouldn't have been able to research this topic without massive financial support. The seventeenth and eighteenth century sources are hard to find and the research would have involved traveling around to visit various rare book collections. Only a few have been reprinted in more recent times. Now, thanks to Project Gutenberg, Google Books, the Library of Congress, and others, I can look at digitalized versions of most of the sources I need by way of the internet. The digitalized versions preserve more than just the text, by presenting the appearance of the original--the fonts, the layout, and the illustrations--I can get a much better sense of how these ideas were communicated and experienced at the time. The only thing missing is the smell of old paper. The price I pay is in temptation. What started out as a popular history is slowly being transformed into the dissertation I never wrote. Why take anyone's word on anything when I can go hunting for the original source?

With the Teutobocus, the original sources are all in French, a language I do not read. Computers and the internet help here, but it's hard work. My process is something like this. When I find a French source, what I usually find are PDF or JPEG images of the pages. If I find them on Google Books or Internet Archive, I can use the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) scan that they provide to get a text that I can work on. If not, I have to download the PDF or JPEG images and run them through an OCR program on my computer to get a text file. Once I have a text file, I need to clean it up. OCR scans are always filled with mistakes and pre-nineteenth century printing is always messy and out of alignment. On top of that, OCR programs are completely stymied by older typographic conventions like ligatures and the long S. Of course, there are some images that the OCR programs can't read at all. In those cases I have to transcribe it by hand. Typing something in a language you don't understand amounts to pounding it out one letter at a time.

After creating an accurate text file, the translation begins. I need at least five browser tabs open to translate. I usually have two machine translation tools, a dictionary, a verb reference, and a search window in front of me. I copy a paragraph out of my text file and paste it into the first translation tool (Google Translate). The first translation is rarely usable. A little history is in order here.

The first Académie française dictionary was published in 1694, so when I work on any documents from prior to that date, I'm dealing with a melange of regionalisms, outdated traditional spelling, and personal preferences of the printers. My job might be easier if I had a translation tool that worked in Occitan (the southern french dialect), for comparison purposes, but I haven't been able to find a free one. The two dictionaries published in the eighteenth century made major spelling reformations. The dictionary of 1835 made a vowel change that affected the imperfect conjugation of every single verb in the language. So, my first machine translation only serves to identify the words I need to work on. I'm getting fairly adept at identifying the patterns of change and can correct a paragraph for a second pass through the translator in less than a minute.

If I can make out the sense of the author's meaning at this point, I paste the text into a new file and go on to the next paragraph. If I can't, I start using the other browswer windows to do some detective work. If the first translator produces English words, but nonsensical sentences, I try using the other translation program. I also go to the second translator for words that stump the first program. Sometimes breaking a sentence into phrases gives me a better result than attempting to translate full sentences. Splitting apart the contractions that appear in every sentence also helps.

If the second translator doesn't help, I move on to the dictionaries and verb references. I can usually recognize when a word is a verb and look for less common conjugations. I can also hunt for secondary meanings for words. If I can't find a meaning for a word, my final resort is to Google it and see what turns up. When looking at some letters of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, a savant who wrote in Aix-en-Provence in the first third of the seventeenth century, I found the solution to several problematic words in Catalan and Italian.

If none of that works, i call up someone who can read French and whine until they help me.