by Carl Pyrdum
on December 21, 2010
As you might have heard, Google recently launched the Ngram Reader for Google Books, a tool that lets users search the corpus of texts scanned by Google Books and outputs the results in a handy graph that plots the search term’s frequency in the corpus against the date. Because of the vagaries of OCR, the search engine’s inability to track declension, conjugation, and so on, and the selection bias of the texts that get scanned by Google, the graphs produced by the Ngram Reader should be taken with a not insubstantial pinch of salt. But it’s still a fun tool to mess around with, particularly when it tells you things you already think you know but would nevertheless like to bask in the sciencey comfort of a line graph that tells you them.
For example, the right-thinking Anglo-Saxonists who I occasionally have coffee with at conferences hate it that Seamus Heaney gets all the credit for popularizing Beowulf for the new millenium. Sure, Heaney’s 1999 verse translation did wonders for early English lit course enrollments, but with the Google Books Ngram Reader we can prove with bi-colored scientific precision that the meteoric rise of Beowulf’s popularity was already underway well before then:
Chaucer's popularity added for purposes of clarity
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by Carl Pyrdum
on December 10, 2010
If you’ll recall, when I got my spiffy Kindle 3 some months ago I promised a custom set of screen saver images to replace the device’s defaults with medieval manuscript pages. Well, at long last, here they are.
You can download a zipped rar file of the images here.
There’s 34 screen saver images in all. Some things I put in just because they’re famous–like the first page of the Beowulf MS– some others because they’re beautiful, and some because they’re both. Let me know what you think–unless what you think is “I hate this particular image,” because you’re under no obligation to use them all, you know.
Installation isn’t as easy as I’d like. You’ll have to jailbreak your Kindle 3, and rather than risking getting it wrong, let me direct you to the best set of directions I could find.
And for my readers without Kindles or too squeamish to hack into theirs, which I figure between the two categories is just about everybody, you can always amuse yourself by trying to identify as many of the slides as you can, or by suggesting extra slides for version 2.0.
A complete gallery of the screen savers after the jump:
[continue reading…]
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by Carl Pyrdum
on December 9, 2010
Work continues apace on the big move from Blogger to WordPress. Today I’ve been busily patching up all the links busted because of the difference in naming conventions between the two sites. Every post with ‘a’ ‘and’ or ‘the’ in the title was broken by the move! If you spot anything weird or broken, please drop me a line through the spiffy new contact form above and I’ll get on it.
In the meantime, here’s something to tide you over whilst I work: banners I designed for the old Blogger site but wasn’t happy with. Now we can share in the not-happy-withness.
And if you haven’t discovered already, one of the benefits of the move to WordPress is the cool imagezoomy plugin I can run now. Click the image above to see.
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by Carl Pyrdum
on December 8, 2010
One small thing. If you’re subscribed to this blog’s feed through an RSS Reader, you might have to update your feed address. If you’re subscribed through Feedburner, however, all should be well and things should transfer automatically. But in case they don’t, use http://feeds.feedburner.com/GotMedieval
If you saw a post in your reader this morning titled “Welcome to Hell, Sinners”, then everything has transferred automatically. Stop your fretting. But if you didn’t, and if the above link is so much nonsense to you, there’s a big ‘RSS Subscribe’ button at the top of the new blog. Go to https://www.gotmedieval.com/ and click away.
One more thing. As always, Chrome seems to not want me to quit it or its Google overlords, so if you’re using Chrome, you might want to visit the site the first time in Firefox. Don’t ask me why.
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by Carl Pyrdum
on December 8, 2010
COWER BEFORE ME, NAKED SINFUL MORTALS, FOR I AM THE MOUTH OF HELL ITSELF. PREPARE TO BE CONSUMED, FIRST BY MY FANGED TOOTHY MAW, AND THEN FOREVER BY THE FURY OF VENGEFUL HELLFLAME IN THE DARKEST PITS OF HELL’S HELLISH FURY. THROUGH MY GULLET LIES THE LAND OF ETERNAL TORMENT, DOMAIN OF THE PRINCE OF LIES, WHERE THERE IS NO SUCCOR, NO HOPE, NO…
[continue reading…]
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by Carl Pyrdum
on December 8, 2010
I know this blog has had the stench of death about it for some time now, but today it awakens from its long slumber to pack up shop and move to WordPress. For you, my loyal readers, this should be a mere cosmetic change* and normal service should soon resume without your lifting a finger. Until I’ve got everything forwarding correctly, though, you should probably use the blog’s vanity address https://www.gotmedieval.com/ if you want to make sure you’ve got the most recent Got Medieval brand medieval stuff.**
—
*Moving a blog across platforms is just a simple cosmetic procedure, really, like what they did with that lady who got the first face transplant. That went off without a hitch, right? This’ll be just as smooth, I’m sure.
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by Carl Pyrdum
on October 20, 2010
Just two short weeks ago, I asked my readers to bring me the weirdest bits of medievalia that Wikipedia’s capricious editors have thus far allowed, and my but you all did bring the weirdness. Other readers, if you’ve not already glanced at the comments thread where the entrants are housed, go take a gander. It’s worth the look.
As I promised, in order to decide the winning entry I assembled a blue ribbon panel of medieval history experts, which in this case means more or less a panel composed of the medieval bloggers who I have in my gmail address book. And your fine judges were: [continue reading…]
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by Carl Pyrdum
on October 19, 2010
Only a little over two hours remain in Got Medieval’s first annual Weird Medieval History Contest. The competition’s already pretty stiff, but you can do it! I believe in your Wikipedia-scouring prowess! I’ve already got my judges all lined up and ready to go, so quick, to the original post to field your entry!
Oh, and the picture? Well, I don’t know why that naked guy is leading around the grotesque on a string, but that’s the closest image I could find on short notice that incorporated both “weird” and “wire”–as long as string is allowed to substitute in for wire, of course. (From the always helpful Bodleian Library MS Bodl. 264.)
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by Carl Pyrdum
on October 5, 2010
The following is not a joke. I made a logo and everything.*
For reasons that escape me, the marketing people at the Halloween costume website
Costumes, Inc. contacted me to ask if I’d run a promotional contest for them here at
Got Medieval. I was all set to turn them down until they anted up the cold, hard
cash gift certificates and I figured what the hell? Sell out early and often, I say. So here’s the deal:
I want to find the weirdest claim about the Middle Ages** on Wikipedia.*** And I mean the
weirdest. That’s right–so weird that normally oriented typefaces fail to capture the weirdness, requiring the use of type variants that are tilted slightly to the right! The claim doesn’t have to be weirdly mistaken, either. True but weirdly inappropriate claims or the old weird but true factoids are fine, too. In return for this nugget of oddity, I am putting up a bounty of a $75 gift certificate to Costumes, Inc. That’s enough to get the
inappropriately sexy Guenevere costume and still have room to buy a wig to go with it. How could you resist? Here are the ground rules.
[continue reading…]
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by Carl Pyrdum
on October 5, 2010
Writing three marginalia posts in the same day is oddly taxing. It’s almost like it’d be better somehow if I spread them out over three weeks. Must look into that. So let me close out today with a quickie, from Harvard’s MS Richardson 31, of a she-boar wearing a fetching new hat:
Vanity–it’s not just for mermaids anymore.
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