Tom Roper's Weblog

Literally robust

I enjoyed reading John Sutherland's article in G2 today as I ate my lunchtime sandwich, How language is literally losing its meaning, occasioned by the admission to the Oxford English Dictionary of the abuse of the word literally to add vague emphasis to a statement. 

He also inveighs against the misuse of robust.  A few minutes later, back at my desk, I recieved notice of a new article. The first sentence of the abstract reads thus, This study utilizes an informatics tool to analyze a robust literature search service in an academic medical center library.

What on earth is a robust literature search service? Why would anyone offer one that wasn't?

The article in question is this:
Hinton EG, Oelschlegel S, Vaughn CJ, Lindsay JM, Hurst SM, Earl M.
Building and evaluating an informatics tool to facilitate analysis of a biomedical
literature search service in an academic medical center library.
Med Ref Serv Q. 2013;32(3):235-43

 

Titles and forms of address

'F--- off, grandad!', yelled an aggressive young man with a bicycle at me at Clapham Junction station the other day. It is, I think, the first time I have been called that, but since I am now over half-way through my sixtieth decade, I should not complain. It set me thinking about the modes of address we use for others to whom we have not yet been introduced. In truth, there are no satisfactory ones. Consider the possibilities:

Sir or madam: too archaic for everyday use. When addressed as sir in a shop or restaurant my democratic spirit rebels.

Mate: again has an old-fashioned feel

Boss: much used by students at work, though in tones laden with sarcasm. In any case, too American.

Only revolutionary societies have satisfactorily solved this problem: citizen in France, comrade in Russia. I may start to address others by these titles.

Le Monde on Google Books

As a way of keeping my knowledge of French alive, I read Le Monde on Fridays, a day chose beacuse it's the day for Le Monde des Livres, the book reviews. In today's I was startled to see Richard Ovenden of the Bodleian in the first paragraph of an article on Google Books. It's interesting to read a perspective on this from outside the usual Anglo-American perspective. They note for example that all the editions of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables in Google Books are English translations.

Google, l'utopie du livre pour tous

On cagmag

I bought some Christmas pudding yesterday, from the brewers Harveys of Lewes, on the recommendation of someone whose taste is as refined and reliable in puddings as it is in literature. I remembered that, in my childhood, Christmas pudding was served not only at Christmas, but on birthdays too, and was always known, in the peculiar family argot that my father, his to brothers and his sister developed in their childhood, and passed on to their children, as Christmas cagmag.

I am straying into the territory of linguistic blogs covered so well by blogs like Lynne Quist's excellent Separated by a common language, but I find that the Oxford English Dictionary defines the word thus:

[app. a word of dialectal origin, widely used in Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, and adjacent counties: of uncertain derivation.]
1. a. A tough old goose. b. Unwholesome, decayed, or loathsome meat; offal ; hence anything worthless or rubbishy.

2. attrib. or adj. Unwholesome, decaying, refuse. There is also a verbal use, though I never heard this when young, meaning either intransitively to quarrel or transitively to nag.

This makes sense, as my father's family were physicians from the 18th century onwards, first in Norfolk and then in Cambridge, and Lincolnshire is not far away. In our usage, though, cagmag was not necessarily unpleasant. It denoted a substantial, suet-based pudding, often steamed as in Christmas cagmag, treacle cagmag. Cagmag tout court referred to a sultana suet pudding.

A certain patient of my father's, N, who was not an accomplished cook, would each Christmas give him a cake. My father would accept with grace and then give the cake to the dog to play with in the garden. This gift was known as a N..... Cagmag

Other family phrases I remember are Shakespearean in origin. All the family were keen swimmers, and Lady Macbeth's speech to spur her husband on to murder Duncan was plundered for the lines:
Letting I dare not wait upon I would,
Like the poor cat i’ the adage.

So we would say, 'in an adage', to describe any swimmer or diver who took their time getting into the water.

One of my uncles once misquoted the line from Julius Caesar,
Against the Capitol I met a lion,
Who glazed upon me, and went surly by
substituting a bear for a lion, and when challenged, insisted his ursine version was correct. He was never allowed to forget is error an thereafter any malapropism or misattribution would be called a 'surly bear'

I think Julius Caesar might have been my father's favourite Shakespeare play, perhaps because of its references to swimming. He would often recite Cassius's speech in which he describes a dip with the would-be dictator:

For once upon a raw and gusty day
The troubled Tiber chafing with her shores,
Caesar said to me "Dar'st thou, Cassius, now
Leap in with me into this angry flood,
And swim to yonder point?" Upon my word,
Accoutred as I was, I plunged in,
And bade him follow. So indeed he did.
The torrent roared, and we did buffet it
With lusty sinews, throwing it aside
And stemming it with hearts of controversy;
But ere we could arrive the point proposed,
Caesar cried "Help me, Cassius, or I sink!"

What I did on my holidays

On a recent trip to Normandy on the Newhaven to Dieppe ferry, I stumbled on an idea so good yet simple I am astonished it has never been tried before: French lessons on the ferry. Babette Kundrat of Cosmofil runs 50-minute classes on the Transmanche service for £6, or £10 for a couple, children being free. It's an excellent way to fill the four hours of the crossing, in between the rituals of watching the last of England disappear and the French coast appear at the voyage's beginning and end.

On the outward trip I joined a group of distinctly mixed abilities. It included adults and children, people with no French at all and those with a good grounding in the language. In spite of the wide spread we all learnt something. I enjoyed it so much I took a class on the return journey, and had the benefit of a 1:1 teacher-student ratio. When Babette explained to me the prepositional use of y and en, I was taken back to a hot summer afternoon at school over forty years ago when a master, possibly Mr Billingshurst or Mr Seymour, tried to teach the same point to me and my fellow schoolboys in 2 Alpha.

The school, the Perse, had a formidable reputation for language teaching. Long before I arrived, Chouville and de Glehn had pioneered the use of the Direct Method in teaching French. Indeed, the school's most famous teacher, its headmaster from 1902 to 1928, W D H Rouse, applied the same method to teaching classics†. I was lucky to start French at the age of eight at the prep school. Later, in the first form at the Upper School, I can recall being exposed to educational technology, in the shape of a tape-slide programme on the lives of M. and Mme. Thibaut. I remember little about la famiile Thibaut, except that they lived in a flat in Paris, and had children and a dog; but the fictional families of language teaching blur in my memory, and I would be hard put to distinguish them from the family in Latin classes, who owned a dog called Cerberus.

Later came O and A level, and Racine, Molière, Voltaire, Zola, Camus and Sartre. I also took German to O level with Mr Mitchell, Latin O level with Mr Dunkeley, and a year's worth of Russian with Mr Youdale. The proof of the school's reputation in languages is demonstrated by the careers of my contemporaries, for example David Yeandle, now a distinguished German scholar, who, I remember as a schoolboy, helped by his friend Rupert Limentani, son of a great Dante expert, inventing a language, complete with noun-declensions, irregular verbs, the works.

More modestly, I found that, under Babette's patient pedagogy, much returned that I had forgotten. I found, to my surprise, that I achieved that state that my teachers had always described as the aim of all language teaching, of finding myself thinking in the language.

†Direct Method and the Classics
C. W. E. Peckett
The Classical Journal, Vol. 46, No. 7 (Apr., 1951), pp. 331-367

Base Patrimoine

One of the things I enjoy most about my current job is when I discover resources such as this, which I spotted from a post to the French Studies Libraries Group e-mail list by Teresa Vernon of the French Collections at the British Library. She describes the Catalogue Collectif de France, the CCF, (not the Combined Cadet Force of my schooldays) in particular the Base Patrimoine, 2.5 million entries for pre-1914 items, from 63 regional bibliothèques municipale and specialised library catalogues. 
From the CCF home page, in the left-hand column  click each of the following in turn: Localisation >    Rech. spécialisées >  Base Patrimoine
I wonder why we haven't managed to build anything like this in Britain

WESLINE colloquium: Exploding the Canon

I attended the WESLINE Colloquium, Exploding the Canon. From Medieval Romance to TV Soap:
meeting the challenges in resource provision on 12 September at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies.

David Pearson, Director, University of London Research Library Services (ULRLS)  drew attention in his welcoming remarks to the problems libraries face. All University of London research libraries run at a deficit. The average library spend by  CURL  member libraries rose from £8.5 million in 2004-205 to £9.6 million in 2005-06 and libraries shave to handle an increasingly wide range of resources. David drew attention to the SAS-Space project, their institutional repository, of which more below. He wondered if the arts and humanities were not more backward when it came to self-archiving than other subjects. He also warned of the decline in languages in schools and universities. Languages, he felt, are a prime candidate for collaboration, but collaborative collection management is always popular until an institution is asked to give something up.

He then introduced a panel discussion and open forum on trends in French/Hispanic/Italian studies research and implications for resource provision. The first speaker was Trevor Dadson,  Professor of Spanish at Queen Mary, who reported from the Arts and Humanities Research Council Postgraduate Panel panel. Today’s postgraduates are tomorrow’s researchers and academics, so the results have important implications for staffing and for the future of the disciplines.
Across all languages, between 80 and 90% of applications were in post-1950 subjects, and many ignored book-based subjects in favour of film, cultural studies and the visual arts. Applications also showed little originality, and showed evidence of excessive supervisory influence. He wondered if institutions would have the right resources to support these applications, and whether staffing was adequate. Increasingly Spanish nationals are recruited by British universities to teach the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. He also felt that many of the applications were unsuitable for the AHRC and were more with in the scope of the Economic and Social Research Council.
Then Jane Everson, Professor of Italian at Royal Holloway, reported from the AHRC research panel. One of the difficulties the panel has is in judging applications where one has no experience. There are many also PhDs in modern languages which are not supported by AHRC, and she endorsed Trevor Dadson’s point about applications that fall into the ESRC’s remit. In Italian, a smaller discipline, the medieval period, above all the writers know as the Tre Corone, Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, is still central, and she praised the Bodleian’s recent exhibition, Italy’s Three Crowns. Increasingly Italian nationals, including medievalists,  are being appointed to British university posts. Electronic resources are well developed, particular in Dante and Boccaccio studies: see for example Brown University’s Decameron Web or Princeton’s Dante Project. 

The visual arts remain strong, as does 16th century lyric poetry. Popular themes include women, censorship, driven perhaps by the opening up of the Inquisition’s archives,  the holocaust, translation studies and detective fiction. There is a big  historical gap, with very little interest in the 17th, 18th, or 19th centuries, in contrast to Italy itself where the 19th century remain strong. In the Italian tradition, the preparation of a critical edition remains an important part of a scholar’s career.
Book-focussed research remains important and there is interest in work on secondary figures in Italian literature, cinema (though not yet photography), linguistics, immigrant writing, identity, both regional versus national, national versus European and European versus the wider world, comparative culture, exile and, last but not least, food; see for example UCL’s Cappuccino Conquests  project . In questions Jane was asked whether modularisation could be blamed for the lack of contextual knowledge displayed by applicants, She felt that, yes, it might, or the excessive emphasis on illusory choice in the undergraduate curriculum.

Eleanor Quince of Southampton presented the results of the AHRC Review of research in modern languages undertaken for the AHRC by the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies, an attempt to analyse the intellectual health of the subject area. There are around 2,000 active researchers and 2,500 postgraduates in the field, something which will change as the decline in undergraduate numbers works its way through. There has also been a migration of some linguists out of modern languages, growth in collaborative research, a rise in applied language research, and in interest in intercultural communication and in interpreting and translation studies at postgraduate level. Literature is still a focus, but interest is declining in schools and among undergraduates; gender, post-colonial and cultural studies remain strong. From a chronological point of view, the Cinderella centuries, that is to say the 17th and 18th, are in danger of disappearing altogether. Objects of study are changing, with ICT allowing the development of online editions, and research growing in new genres such as sports literature or graphic novels, while textual criticism is in peril.
Eleanor didn’t mention it, but for me, by far the most interesting element of the report is the analysis of modern languages publishing in part 4 Trends in dissemination.

Michael Moriarty, Professor of French at Queen Mary, gave a British Academy perspective, and drew attention to the BA's response to Dearing .
He was concerned that many resources in the field were not sufficiently known or used, for example CESAR, the Calendrier électronique des spectacles  sous l’ancien régime et sous la révolution . He warned of insularity, and that poor language skills, even at postgraduate level, meant a great deal of teaching is now done through translation. To check the availability of sources in their original language, he had run a check on the British Library catalogue  and those of  the University of London  (I was unclear whether he had used the University of London Research Library Services catalogue for this  or the M25 consortium’s cross-searching tool ) for French editions of the works of three authors, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser and Alain Badiou, with disappointing results. I should be interested to see this exercise repeated on COPAC for a national picture of availability of these texts, indeed would also be interested to see what institutions’ collection development policies say on the matter.

The last member of the panel to speak, who discussed the Research Assessment Exercise, was Margaret Atack, Professor of French at Leeds.  The RAE has rescued modern languages from vocationalism, she claimed, and referred to HEFCE’s review of the impact of quality-related (QR) funding for research in English higher education institutions . In modern languages there was consistency across subjects, but most research is concentrated in the modern period. There is some interest in new areas such as film studies. The age profile of researchers suggests that appointments are not keeping pace with retirements. There is some concern that opportunities for publishing are diminishing, but there are increasing opportunities for e-publication, including in repositories and an increase in inter-disciplinary and collaborative work.

After lunch David Lowe  of Cambridge University Library chaired a session on projects, with presentations by Stephen Bury on the British Library's Content Strategy,  Zoë Holman and Richard Davis  of  the School of Advanced Study, University of London) on the SAS-SPACE institutional repository  and  Ed King  also of the British Library on the BL/JISC Newspaper Digitisation Project This last project will take an impressive range of 19th century British newspapers and make them available online, but we were dismayed to hear that access would be restricted to users in further and higher education. See more here on the matter: http://tomroper.typepad.com/tr/2007/09/british-library.html
In a final session on resources, chaired by Geoff West  of the British Library, we heard a fine report by Vanya Murray, of Oxford University Library Services  on researching film: changes and challenges, a fascinating look at establishing a new service, including some of the issues of classification and certification, format issues, cataloguing and classification standards. There’s some resources based on her guide at: http://languagelearningcentre.wordpress.com/2007/09/13/film-studies-resources/

Stephen Hart, Professor of Hispanic Studies at UCL,  spoke on sourcing material for the study of a living author: compiling a new biography of G. García Márquez an insight into the problem faced by the biographer who chooses to tackle a living subject. The sources available to him included García Márquez’s own radio interviews, documentaries, journalism and his attempt at autobiography, Vivir para contarla as well as interviews with friends, family and servants. But García Márquez is elusive, enigmatic and some times self-contradictory. There is also another biography by Gerald Martin due to appear soon.
Finally Sally Curry, the  CURL/RIN Collaborative Collection Management Programme Advisor  spoke on supporting engagement with the research community through Collaborative Collection Management and the developments towards a British distributed research network. Libraries face problems if space, of budgets, of a loss of specialists and a lack of institutional support. CCM covers selection and purchase, stock transfers, resource discovery and storage (the UK Research reserve) and shared retro-conversion and digitisation. She mentioned the CoCoRUPS  project  a qualitative survey of researchers behaviour in medieval and early modern studies, and the Research Information Network's study  Researchers Use of Academic Libraries and their Services . Visits to collections are declining, and when researchers use electronic resources they may not automatically identify them as having been provided by the library   I was interested to see that collaborative collection management seems not to have advanced very much since the days we were doing it in the ASVIN project

Dearing review

The final report of the Dearing review of modern languages teaching in schools has been published.
For a synopsis of the recommendations see the Language Learning Centre blog, where you will also find links to press coverage and discussion of the report on blogs.

Heuristics and the OED

 

In my Greek class yesterday we discussed accentuation and breathings and our tutor Vicki Roupa mentioned the verb ἑυρίσκω, I discover or find out, as an example of a rough breathing over a diphthong. The English word heuristics is derived from it, she said. Heuristics is a word whose meaning I have never fully understood. I know that it means something to do with finding out or discovery, like its Greek root, but no more than that, so I went to the Online Oxford English Dictionary, available through my university login, but also through my public library.
Here I found a definition. In its singular form, as an adjective, meaning serving to find out or discover or as a noun, a heuristic process or method for attempting the solution of a problem; a rule or item of information used in such a process. In the plural, it means the study and use of heuristic techniques in data processing The citations given are interesting, including Coleridge, Einstein, McLuhan and Chomsky.
There was also an article on the new 3rd edition of the OED in last Saturday’s Financial Times magazine. The author, Richard Tomkins, mention that the cost of an individual online subsrciption is £195. But it should not be necessary for anyone in England to subscribe, if they are a member of their public library, for the OED,  the Dictionary of National Biography and a number of other electronic reference works through the Reference Online service . I can't see any information on the take-up of this programme on the MLA website. I have e-mailed them to ask if figures are available.

 

The Ides of March are come...

...though today is really the Calendae or Calends. But the Dearing review of modern languages was to have reported "by the end of February". There’s nothing on Teachernet, where the interim report appeared last December.