I've become a convert to Zotero[1], even though I'm not an academic. It will automatically snapshot websites (although paywalls and such can trip it up) and for many academic sites will find a PDF version and attach it. For anything it can't automatically archive, it's easy to attach or provide a link to your personal archive version. When I need to manually archive something, wget as:
Zotero is a complete reference manager. Academics use it to manage references and create citations and bibliographies for their research. It can index books, articles, papers, and all sorts of things. It has extensions for popular browsers to allow easily adding not just websites, but other sources.
Comparing it with HTTrack is comparing apples and oranges.
Ultimately, the report found that 799 literary tales out of an original 1,170 are still around today. It also found that those stories were written down in a total of 40,614 manuscripts, but only 3,648 of those have survived.
Collective memory seems to be defined as "the shared pool of memories, knowledge and information of a social group that is significantly associated with the group's identity", and I don't really know what information is significant to the human identity. That number also seems to really depend on how we define "shared human memory" given that there's been something like 100 billion people on the planet over time and we don't remember the vast majority of their days, conversations, dreams, or poops.
(Re-using an old comment of mine from a different thread [0])
If you're curious on medieval manuscripts, definitely checkout the following:
Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts [1] by Christopher de Hameml — get a hardcover edition of this book; it has absolutely gorgeous selection of artwork from 12 of the most spectacular "illuminated manuscripts" (including the Book of Kells) in the world. The writer is a marvelous storyteller. This hardcover edition is one of my "prized possessions".
You can browse a lot of these works in great detail on this[2] excellent visual arts website by the Getty Research Institute website.
E.g. you can find the 16th century illuminated manuscript, "Spinola Hours" hereYou have to scroll twice to see the list of 182 images. And you can in turn browse the illustrations it such this[3] calendar-page miniature painting for the month of May. You can see people singing and making merry on a boat, along with other drawings—all on a small page.
Note though, one doesn't need to be religious in any sense (I'm not) to appreciate these art works.
Actually the fact we have 10% is amazing. I would assume it would be much lower. The headline should say "10% of all Medieval manuscripts have been found!".
It could have been better. We have tons of surviving tablets from ancient mesopotamia, there is no way of estimating a percentage but I won't be surprised if its within 40%-60% range. This is inherent in the mediums used: mesopotamian tablets are just hardened clay, no decomposition and no book worms. Even when a tablet breaks, it breaks into a small number of sturdy pieces (unless smashed deliberately and repeatedly). Paper is begging to be lost in comparison.
And this is important because we're repeating this mistake even more gravely now with digital media. Terrible proprietary formats and protocols that are lost like tears in rain the moment the private entity maintaining them closes down, terrible dependency graphs that are never frozen or even properly described (e.g. "runs on Linux" is an implicit dependency that is never explained or explicitly mentioned), terrible culture of "movE fAsT ANd bReAk tHiNGs", and a false sense of security and durability ("The Internet is forever") that makes us increasingly generate information in native-digital ways and convert whatever is not digital to digital then discarding the original. All of this is begging for a mass civilizational amnesia on a scale never seen or imaginable.
Hand scribed and illuminated manuscripts used to cost the equivalent of a house today. It's sad to know that those treasures were lost. I wonder how many just ended up in the dump since the owner's descendents didn't think they had value?
Some googling got me to a quote of "Jehan de Sanlis made this for 6 pence per quire", The Hague, Royal Library, MS 71 A 24, 13th century from https://brewminate.com/making-medieval-manuscripts/ ; I'd guess that illumination and binding these quires (16- or 24-page sheet) doubles the price, so we're at half-pence per page; price summaries from a slightly later time (but different place) like http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng240/medieval_prices.html have similar values (~240 pence/ book) and indicate that a small house costs 500-1000 pence, so a house costs something like 1000-2000 pages worth of books, and it's worth taking into account that medieval manuscripts put less words on a page than modern paperbacks, so the same book would be more pages back then.
From a different perspective, copying the Bible was said to require 15 months of work (Life in a Medieval City, Joseph and Frances Gies) and the price a small house seems to generally be in the range of 1-2 years salary, so a copy of the Bible - which is on the larger range of books - would be comparable to a house.
In any case, an average codex at the time is less than the price of a house but on a similar scale, a collection of a hundred books is comparable to a fancy mansion in the capital.
I don't directly but a NOVA show I saw dealt specifically with illuminated Manuscripts. The books were made of Vellum, a large one would be equivalent to a heard of animal hides', and took years for to complete by hand. It was a rich man's luxurious novelty. My guess is that it would be equivalent to an art piece by a famous artist now. Even the cheap ones had to use parchment which is still expensive. Paper is cheap now but it was very expensive during Medieval times. It wasn't until we got wood pulp paper and automation that it got very cheap and that didn't come until the mid 1800's.
It also accounts to why parchment was so often re-used, in palimpsests, as discussed by others in this thread.
The present-cost equivalent I've heard is from $500k -- $2mm per volume.
As of the 10th -- 15th centuries, a large library (e.g., Papal, University of Paris) might contain 2,000 -- 4,000 volumes.
The combination of cheap papermaking and the Gutenberg press were an impact that's truly difficult to express today, though of course the webserver is in many ways comparable. If there's a difference, it's that there was simply so little printed material in the 15th century that the flood introduced by printing, and the lifting of previous gatekeepers, was utterly profound. The Web produced a flood of media ... into an already media-saturated world, if one that was centred around a much smaller number of individual works, though even that was large relative to an individual. The US has been publishing ~300k books/year since at least the 1950s. An avid reader might tackle a dozen a year, and a book-a-week is a prodigious pace.
Not a house today, but house back then. Another way to look at it was that housing was cheaper (for an arguably much inferior product). I've built some wattle and daub structures and a small house could probably be built in a small number of weeks by a couple of labors. But a manuscript might take a year or more for a scribe to fully copy (with illustrations).
> Some were destroyed in events like library fires, but others were lost when the parchment they were written on was repurposed. For example, fragments of manuscripts were used to bind books and wrap meat. Tailors also used them as measuring tapes. They were also used as material for a bishop’s miter.
I think most of these were lost before any region had one large place known as "the dump", a relatively modern thing
I came across this practice when reading the Chapter of Fathers in the Mishna:
"Elisha ben Abuyah said: He who learns when a child, to what is he compared? To ink written upon a new writing sheet. And he who learns when an old man, to what is he compared? To ink written on palimpsest. Rabbi Yose ben Judah a man of Kfar Ha-babli said: He who learns from the young, to what is he compared? To one who eats unripe grapes, and drinks wine from his vat; And he who learns from the old, to what is he compared? To one who eats ripe grapes, and drinks old wine. Rabbi [Yehuda] said: don’t look at the container but at that which is in it: there is a new container full of old wine, and an old [container] in which there is not even new [wine]."
Parchment doesn't last very long in anything other than ideal environments. Deserts are ideal and so we have found things like the dead sea scrolls in Israel, and Egypt has similar treasures (none I can think of off hand, but they have them). Put parchment in a dump in rainy England and it will rot away in a few hundred years.
The manuscripts we have mostly exist because the people of the past (often Christian monks) cared enough about them to make a copy - by hand. (I assume Monks in places like China or India have been making copies in the same way, I just don't know for sure)
> ...I wonder how many just ended up in the dump...
The really sickening part of studying medieval manuscripts is seeing how frequently they were treated as trash by later generations. We have what are now priceless artifacts that were used as cutting boards or had pages ripped out to be used as food wrapping.
I think this is especially bad with Old English, because once it became a dead language, hardly anyone saw value in preserving the manuscripts. What we have today of Anglo-Saxon literature mostly survived by accident.
Makes you wonder what percentage of ancient era manuscripts have been lost. Between the burning of the Library of Alexandria in the West, to the Burning of Books and Burying of Scholars in the East, [2] and everything else in between; there's been a lot lost to history.
Most lost books weren't lost because they were burned. Ancient manuscripts were usually written on Papryus, which does not last very long. So only the ones that were repeatetly copied survived.
The Library of Alexandria was not destroyed suddenly. It experienced a slow decline over centuries. By the time it completely shut down, it had not been a major center of scholarship for a long time. I suspect that most significant works in the collection would have been copied for other libraries over that long period of decline.
Even more impressive is the percentage of otherwise educated people who don't read, don't care for, and is not even curious for, the ancient era manuscripts that were saved and are readily available.
I think that's even more of a tragedy than the lost in time ones, those are lost to indifference.
Sadly true, and it's not limited to the ancient era. There are tomes from within the past 100-150 years that would shake up most peoples' entire worldview that are readily ignored.
Hell, entire subjects are poo-pooed these days. Dare I say the word 'humanities' around a 'tech' worker?
Lost to indifference, religious or scientific dogma, a lack of curiosity, and even more damaging: a lack of humility.
>Dare I say the word 'humanities' around a 'tech' worker?
I think techies are bimodal. Some (most?) don't get humanities at all, and some are more fervent fans of humanities than many humanities people themselves...
On the bright side, there are likely relatively large caches hidden or lost under the sands and could one day be found in the Middle East and North Africa and dry, rural parts of Europe (like the Dead Sea Scrolls).
Why should there be large caches hidden under sands? Has there really been anything like the Dead Sea Scrolls elsewhere? AFAIK those scrolls were there simply because the sect who wrote or collected them lived in those caves, or nearby.
Why would anyone cache scrolls under sand (or even anywhere outside)? Isn't that quite unlikely, as a general rule?
Not under sand but the Villa of the Papyri is the best bet. Potentially thousands of rolls, definitely containing lost works. They just need to solve the xray scan and digital unfolding.
I've had the pleasure to meet one of the authors of the study at a user meeting of the x-ray scanners they use, since I also work with such machines.
It's a fascinating study!
Depending on the materials used you could also find older texts hidden in already known books. "erasing" and reusing pages was cheaper than making a new book from scratch. For example the only surviving copy of the Archimedes Palimpsest was found hidden in a prayer book.
That doesn't seem true _yet_. I agree it very much is a risk we should be guarding against ... but are there really formats out there for which converters aren't known? It seems like any popular legacy format has a plethora of open-source mechanisms to get at the data (even for DRM) and even hardware might have reversed-engineered specs, or at least old machines being sold on e-bay (though we need to be concerned that won't be the case in a few decades).
Recently it has gotten better. But my understanding that for somethings from 70s and 80s it is real issue. Converters can be made, but there is still pretty rare formats. From various floppies to more exotic tapes and such.
Anyone else find the way they got to this number to be a bit sketchy? There's only a vague description of how they apply some ecological model. (One which, I'm sure, they can never really validate)
Ye I guess there has to be a nice random distribution for the model to work, where as some manuscripts probably were more protected and replicated than 1100s shovelware.
The estimate is not for all manuscripts, but a specific niche of them - "Instead of focusing on all medieval manuscripts, many of which are religious texts, the study focused on narrative and chivalric fiction".
If we include the larger categories (like the religious texts) then it would be higher, but not that much higher, given the many man-months of work each copy required.
Yes, and we know when. It was during the Enlightenment that monastries were raided and the collected works were carted off. Near my town, the books were thrown in front of the carriage to prevent the vehicle from getting stuck.
Disruptions, no matter how celebrated are always connected to a loss of old knowledge. Even if it is loss of "wrong" knowledge, its disaster.
But then, that is life. The most brutal cut possible and only the most vital of information gets rediscovered, repeated and filtered down from word of mouth into another storage medium.
And of that 10% the vast majority are unread, untranslated Latin. I believe there are more untranslated medieval texts than all of the Roman literature we’ve recovered.
While on this subject, does anyone know where to find archives of ancient manuscripts to download? Manuscript collections are scattered across different museums/libraries, and it's been difficult to find any digital collections that for example, would allow you to download all manuscripts from ancient rome in bulk.
Gallica [0] has recommendations and free access to one of the largest manuscript database in the world.
By the way I have a relative who just received a collection from his French family, it includes a few hundred books from antiquity and the renaissance (first or second editions), if you or someone you know are interested in viewing them you can reach me.
Lost, as in when a ship is lost, i.e. destroyed or unsalvageable? Or lost, as in irresponsibly misplaced? Is it possible 90% of medieval manuscripts are waiting next to spare change under someone's couch cushions?
