Sounds of Lindisfarne

We've been working a lot recently on the Lindisfarne Gospels, making website, kiosk, Kindle and iBook versions. Which isn't to say we're satiated. The intricacy of the cross-carpet pages,  the startling immediacy of the title pages for the Gospels, the interlinear annotations to the Latin text all make this a book of endless fascination.

But we were still surprised and delighted that Chris Watson has released a CD called "In St Cuthbert's Time" which is "a sound installation that reflects the acoustic landscape of that island during the time that the Lindisfarne Gospels were being considered, written and illustrated."

It was produced with Durham University's Institute of Advanced Study, and sounds like a remarkable project. As well as an installation it's available as a CD.

What books like the Lindisfarne Gospels have the capacity to do is to transport us back to the time of their creation. The evidence of their handling, the techniques of production, the annotations and the wear all speak volubly of the sacred time and space in which the work was made. To spend time in the company of the book is to let the 21st century fall away.

This evocation is sometimes hard to conjure up and I hope that Chris Watson's work will help the process. Very often we spend our time in pursuit of the facts about a book or trying to decode the meaning of the text. We don't allow ourselves to be transported back to it's world and our capacity for speculation, wonder and serendipitous connection is diminished.

I tracked it down on Caught By the River by the way, one of my favourite websites.

The iBook of the Gospels is also available here.

The Lost Library of Glastonbury

I've always had  a fascination with lost knowledge. There's an expanding corpus of knowledge in any given area, but is that everything that's ever been known about the subject? The hidden libraries of Timbuctou and the discovery of manuscripts at St Catherines Monastery are particularly gripping examples of these.

But, if we can fillet the unhelpful grail mythology from the tale, so is the lost library of Glastonbury.

So far as we can tell, the monastery was founded before 601. William of Malmesbury, probably the foremost historian of the 12th century, visited the abbey in the early part of the century and saw a charter of that date demonstrating a grant by a king of Damnonia at the request of Abbot Worgret of the isle of Yneswytrin to the monastery there. 

The Life of St Boniface, written by his disciple Willibald, mentions the abbey in the mid 8th century, and it also gets a mention in the 10th century Anglo Saxon Chronicle. We know St Dunstan was Abbott in the middle of the century and there is mention in the Domesday Book of 1086. After that William of Malmesbury picks up the tale some time after 1200 and we move through the 13th and 14th century towards the bibliographic apocalypse of the reformation. 

We'd be right to guess, therefore, that, by the reformation the abbey would have collected a significant library in it's 900 year history, despite the predations of the Danes and William the Conqueror, as well as regular fires, thefts and losses. This is born out by a survey of the abbey library made by John Glastonbury in 1247, as catalogued by the precentor William Britton. In the survey there are over 400 volumes, some, no doubt, with multiple manuscripts bound together. There are the writings of the early church fathers like Augustine, Gregory and Athanasius, but also some intriguing curiosities. 

What was "the second part from the psalms (old)"? If it was deemed old in 1247, how old was it? And what were "two English books, old and useless". Saxon, most likely, but what were they? And of the classics from Plato, Seneca, Orosius and others, were they just faithful copies of texts that have come down to us today, or did they hold now lost writings? Not to mention the transcriptions, transliterations, marginalia and appendices that these books must have had. Many were undoubtedly Saxon, but some may well have been earlier. If the abbey was founded in the middle of the 6th century (say), the Romans had only left these shores 100 years previously. How many of the books had come from their empire?

After this enticing survey in 1247, we know that, as the abbey grew rich along with the church, other manuscripts flowed into the great library at Glastonbury. Our next chronicler is John Leland, who, before he became a de facto antiquarian to Henry VIII, visited the monastery library for his own benefit in 1533, before the dissolution. A renowned (if slightly mad) bibliomane, the doors of the library were opened to him and his response was electric "Scarcely had I crossed the threshold when the sole contemplation of these ancient books filled me with I know not what—a sort of religious fear or stupor, and made me pause. Then, having saluted the genius of the place, I most curiously examined for some days all the shelves". 

Maybe Leland knew the end of the abbey was in sight. The bishop, Whyting, was harrassed by Thomas Cromwell from about 1535, and was now an old man. He had graduated in 1483, so, by now must have been over 70. Through the late summer and autumn of 1539 Abbott Whyting and the brothers were further harried by Cromwell, who had seen to it that, by this time, Glastonbury was the last abbey standing in Somerset. By October, Cromwells men were ransacking the abbey. 11,000 ounces of gilt plate, 6,000 ounces of silver, cash of over £1,100 and even furniture were hauled back to the king.

Whyting was given a show trial and executed on the tor that stands outside the town. He was hung, drawn and quartered and the parts of his body displayed in Bridgwater, Ilchester, Wells and Bath.

And what of the books? Leland had estimated there to be over 4,000 volumes at the time of his visit. The greatest library in England and a treasure house of the rarest and most important books.

Well, the stories that have come down to us are tragic. Bindings were ripped from the books, and the jewels and gilt prised off as treasure. The folios inside burnt. We hear of thousands of pages blowing away in the wind, gathered to be used as toilet paper or to scour out candlesticks.

But we know of 40 or so that survived, rescued from the flames by Archbishop Matthew Parker and Sir Robert Cotton. The former now known as the Parker Collection, and the later forming the basis of what became the British Library.

These are books like Prognosticon futuri saeculi by Aldhelm, now at the BL:

Or here is a fragment of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle of 890, now at the Parker Collection:

So while much as been lost, at least some remains. And maybe there's more to be found.

A couple of years ago I worked on the lost minutes of the early days of the Royal Society. Kept by Robert Hooke, they'd been mislaid sometime just after 1700. In 2006, during a house clearance, a tattered manuscript was found in a cupboard in a house in Sussex. It was the lost minutes -  a record of the intellectual sparring between Hooke, Boyle, Newton and others. Amongst other things it identified the fact that Hooke had invented the balance spring as a doodle on the back of a page, an invention hitherto credited to Christian Huygens.

You never know what remains to be found. Lost knowledge doesn't always stay lost.

If you want to pursue this fascinating area of study I looked at The Victoria County History of Somerset (vol 2), the Somerset Extensive Urban Survey and much enjoyed Michael Wood's account in In Search of England. Had I more time, I'd have tried to turn up James P. Carley's  "John Leland and the contents of English pre-dissolution libraries" which seems to be a recent definitive work on the subject. William of Malmesbury you should find at the Internet Archive.

You'll also have to forgive my sketchy scholarship. As a technologist rather than an academic, I'd like to think this might be forgiven on account of my amateur status.

Leaving the field

A little while ago I wrote about how difficult it is for small app developers to make it, in competition with the huge marketing spend of big app houses.

Today it was sad to see that Agant has let go all of it's staff, citing that the app development environment is just too risky.

I feel sorry for the company and the founder, and he proposed a number of solutions for making his apps more appealing, including time-limited trials which make perfect sense.

But a number of things come back to me:
- you're never going to change Apple. They have a stranglehold on the paid-for apps market.
- you need friends in high places to succeed. Apple would be a good friend to have. Failing that someone with deep marketing pockets
- outstanding quality will succeed partly because it attracts friends. Touchpress, for example, do well and turn out apps with high production values (and budgets)
- originality will attract eyeballs. If your app is pretty much like a dozen other apps in the store (at least to the consumer) then how are you going to differentiate yourself. Seth Godin wrote about this last week. If you're doing something new, you'll generate a buzz and sales will follow.

None of which is a comment on Agant's efforts. I've not used their apps.

But any independent developer should pay careful attention what the market is telling us.

Remember - during the goldrush most prospectors didn't make a dime, and the real winners were the guys who sold shovels and the corporations who came in and swept up the land rights. Little guys never lasted long.

Skeuomorphism hits the headlines

Most gratifyingly, the subject of skeuomorphism has become a hot topic in the last weeks as Apple have refreshed iOS and done away with the green baize of Game Center, the ripped paper of Calendar and the stitched leather of Notes.

Having written an essay for this for Tate a while ago, which I also posted here, the BBC tracked me down and Sam Judah interviewed me the other day. His piece is now live on the BBC website.

I think there's still a debate to be had here. Hideous forced metaphors, especially in productivity apps have no role for me. Cut to the chase please, I have work to do.

But in other contexts, such as gallery interactives, or apps designed for a more leisurely experience, then surely there is space for an alternative view.

As I said in the interview:"Is there no room for ornamentation, for playfulness, for beauty? Are we all going to live in a minimalist world and walk around wearing grey polo necks?"

Interoperability gets serious

The other week I was in Paris for a conference on interoperability. It was the working group of the IIIF, the brainchild of a consortium of libraries including the British Library, Bibliotheque Nationale, National Library of Norway, Los Alamos and Stanford.

The efforts being made in this area are immense, and, since I've been involved in this field, something of a holy grail. As research slowly becomes digital, the concept of information being locked in discreet digital silos becomes more and more absurd. Ingest of just metadata into a vast database (Europeana) or strict adherence to standards before ingest of metadata and image into another vast database (Biodiversity Heritage Library) do surely not, in the end, point the way forward.

And yet, what to do? Decisions over digitisation and metadata standards that were taken decades ago affect us now and prevent effective cross-collection search and collaboration.

IIIF is designed to address that problem by developing metadata and image APIs as well as a comprehensive image markup model called Shared Canvas.

It was fascinating to be involved in the emergence of something so potentially game-changing. The unsung heroes of interoperability will be those who sweat the details over the schema and the API. My job is then to build software that exploits this liberating commonality and frees the repositories up for researchers. They make me look good.

So thank you to Tom Cramer for inviting me and I look forward to seeing how this pans out.

Changing views

Our office, as I may have mentioned before, is on the street that Charles Dickens grew up on. We're at number 106, he was at number 22.

Walking past the other day, I stood outside his front door and took this photo.

I thought, initially that Dickens would have been horrified, seeing the cranes, the lorries, the builders and the noise and dust. They're building a Crossrail station.

But then I recalled that he grew up in this street during one of the biggest phases of population growth London has ever seen.

When he was born, in 1812, London was already the largest city in the world, an unimaginable heaving mass of just over a million people crammed into a decaying, often medieval, housing stock.

By the time he died in 1870, the population was 3.3m, swathes of old rabbit warren housing had been swept away, and the seep into the suburbs had well and truly begun.

So he'd have lived with change, noise, disturbance and an uncomfortable sense of things not being what they were.

Our changes are now digital as much as physical, and the world around us is changing as fast it did for Dickens.

A new landscape is being created.

It's just, when you walk down my road, you can't see it.

ps. This weekend, 9th June, the house got finally a blue plaque. Thanks to Spitalfields Life for running a story on that.

To the Fens

The middle if nowhere depends, of course, on where you start from.

Early maps (like the Mappa Mundi) had Jerusalem at the centre of the map. Having built an empire we decided that England should be at the centre of our maps.

It's argued, with some reason, that there has been an unintended but clear divide building between London and the rest of the country. London has wealth, power, a rampant property market and a disproportionate number of our cultural institutions. We tend to think it's always been like this.

But that's not quite true.

In Saxon times the capital of England was briefly Winchester, and in the 14th century King's Lynn was the most important port in England. Times changed and sea levels fell, and Kings Lynn found itself a backwater as Liverpool and London took precedence.

But great buildings of that time remain, and Oxburgh Hall is one, now in the care of the National Trust.

I was there to look at a selection of wallpapers the family had kept since the early 18th century. Most of  us keep the odd length of wallpaper or spare bathroom tile in our attic, but this looked more deliberate. More a case of keeping a record rather than being able to re-paper a damaged section.

Old families often think in this way. The regard for the future is as keen as that for the present. They are aware, all the time, of their custodianship of a house rather than ownership, their sense of obligation to unborn descendants.

In a little room, with the spring sunshine streaming in, we gathered round a small table and looked at the scraps and fragments and wondered at the mistress of the house carefully boxing up these remnants after the decorators had left. For the future. As it transpires, and how impossible for her to conceive this, for us.