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Jazerus posted:people on this very forum professionally analyze the records of 1600s mercenary companies to trace the intricate details of the lives of random nobodies who shot pistols out of bar windows for fun We're having more problems preserving certain records from the 1990's alive than those from the 1690's thanks to the messiness of our digital revolution.
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Jun 9, 2017 07:11
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verbal enema posted:Wow this is gonna sound dumb but I always thought France and Ottomans was just like an EU4 thing but I guess they were cool The Ottomans were cool with alot of people, especially in italy. Most of the metallurgic experts were hired there, also locksmiths. For some reason their mining sector was never up to task and you see them buying in bulk in Venice and France from the 15-17s It was actually France who propped them up, when the Habsburgs started to steamroll them in the 1700s. France also trained a modern army that would eventually shoot the janissary corps to pieces in the auspicious event
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Jun 9, 2017 08:08
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:I have never seen this thread be so amateur in its discussion and this is coming from half a decade of reading/posting in it. Also I have completely insane opinions. 
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Jun 9, 2017 08:53
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Mantis42 posted:Please. By that point in the future they've all migrated to Prezi. God I hope not.
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Jun 9, 2017 09:53
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:I have never seen this thread be so amateur in its discussion and this is coming from half a decade of reading/posting in it. Also I have completely insane opinions. Don't take it personally, I have no idea who you are or what you were arguing for.
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Jun 9, 2017 10:57
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:We're already having problems with recordkeeping in the digital age with changing formats and the shelf life of certain things and, again, who knows what could happen in 500 years. I am not attacking you personally. Only because some people are loving lazy about transferring their stuff forward. Or insist on sticking to the cheapest storage possible. There are commercially available CD-R, DVD-R and BD-R discs that use an artificial stone material and can be burned in any modern optical disc burner that supports a normal DVD-R or BD-R, and those discs are expected to be able to last a thousand years before they become unreadable due to decay in the material. There is also extensive documentation of all sorts of popularly used computers in the necessary forms to allow running their software on any arbitrary future computer system. It is very rare these days to find data that's truly inaccessible or software that's truly unrunnable, as opposed to data and software that's merely a colossal pain in the rear end to deal with extracting and using. And if you don't trust any of that, printing poo poo out on good quality paper stock and storing it in sensible places still works wonders for preservation. Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:We're having more problems preserving certain records from the 1990's alive than those from the 1690's thanks to the messiness of our digital revolution. No, we're really not. Unless by "certain records" you mean stuff that was randomly tossed on a disk and kept in some lovely humid and hot attic for 20 years because nobody thought it'd be needed again. When the data's there and hasn't been destroyed by terrible storage practices (much as a lot of paper records just went up in flames or oops ended up in a flood), it's fairly easy to extract it with all the various tools people have developed specifically for recovering marginal or odd media. And then you can migrate that extracted data to a better storage solution, and continue doing that as necessary.
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Jun 9, 2017 15:26
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Plus, isn't the sort of data that gets destroyed because it isn't stored properly the sort of things that we'd be lucky to get a few tiny scraps of from earlier periods? That's not the sort of data that would end up on an archive shelf.
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Jun 9, 2017 15:40
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Digital data archiving is a legitimately enormous problem that isn't solved yet. It's not going to be like those periods where we have literally no written records, but without some active effort on our part the majority of the data being generated now will not be available to future historians. There is some of that being done but not enough. Some sort of properly funded UN project backing up data, actively maintaining legacy systems, migrating data to new formats as they become available, and creating multiple backup systems would be ideal. It's a ton of work though.
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Jun 9, 2017 15:46
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Truly we stand on the shoulders of giants.
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Jun 9, 2017 15:53
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Grand Fromage posted:The problem with the "someone else would've done it" thing is that okay, fair enough, but someone else doing it can be a huge difference in how history plays out. The discovery of America is a good example because Pedro Cabral did it by accident 8 years after Columbus. History isn't deterministic but neither is it really chaotic, and often trends appear to resemble stochastic processes. Often determining whether a given outcome is driven by a larger trend or natural random variance (aka a great man or w/e) just depends on the scale of your analysis.
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Jun 9, 2017 20:00
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Grand Fromage posted:Digital data archiving is a legitimately enormous problem that isn't solved yet. It's not going to be like those periods where we have literally no written records, but without some active effort on our part the majority of the data being generated now will not be available to future historians. There is some of that being done but not enough. Some sort of properly funded UN project backing up data, actively maintaining legacy systems, migrating data to new formats as they become available, and creating multiple backup systems would be ideal. It's a ton of work though. It's going to be very interesting for future historians to get data on commerce. Between corporate document retention policies and security, we either or destroy even the most innocuous of business documents.
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Jun 9, 2017 22:22
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Jazerus posted:people on this very forum professionally analyze the records of 1600s mercenary companies to trace the intricate details of the lives of random nobodies who shot pistols out of bar windows for fun was
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Jun 10, 2017 10:38
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:I apologize, GF, I have nothing but the greatest respect for you. I have strong opinions, and I don't always express them in the best way. I have been trying to say that the study of history has moved on from a 'people and places' sort of narrative to the study of things like ice cores, tax rolls, cultivation patterns, and the use of certain words over time. I had no idea that fully discredited "Great Man" theory was so prevalent in this thread and I was genuinely shocked. I apologize to you for my words. I apologize for how they were expressed. I do not apologize for the ideas behind them. I think you posted in the wrong thread, since no-one here actually defended that dead theory. Please link to the thread where everyone defended the "Great Man" theory, we could need the laugh. Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:My point was that, over time, as records are lost and events fade into the rearview, professional levels of historical analysis become basic. Not through any fault of theirs. Man, the history books you've read must be really lovely then, considering to this not happening at all in the books I've read. It just starts to become more and more an archaeological analysis. Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:We're having more problems preserving certain records from the 1990's alive than those from the 1690's thanks to the messiness of our digital revolution. This argument is irrelevant, because the amount of data the digital revolution caused is absolutely staggering. Even with something absurd like 90% of this data lost, what survives will still be a lot more meaningful than what survived from 1690 to today. Obviously, the loss of data could be really uneven for some reason and let's say, wipe out all knowledge of golf, but overall that'll not really diminish the ability of future scholars to make meaningful analysis.
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Jun 10, 2017 15:37
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We will probably end up deciding clay tablets with binary code at the atomic level are best for storing successor data. Then we will devise a simple picto language for our successors to know what is on each tablet. But they'll not get it and miss the digital code, while marveling that we could write at all 5 thousand years ago.
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Jun 10, 2017 16:01
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Reading the confessions of St.Augustine I've run across a footnote that says that reading silently was uncommon in antiquity. Does anyone know if this is true, and if so how do we know? Besides Augustine himself commenting on Ambrose's practice of reading silently It would seem odd to me that an ancient text would mention whether a reader was vocalizing during their reading.
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Jun 11, 2017 03:36
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Gaius Marius posted:Reading the confessions of St.Augustine I've run across a footnote that says that reading silently was uncommon in antiquity. Does anyone know if this is true, and if so how do we know? Besides Augustine himself commenting on Ambrose's practice of reading silently It would seem odd to me that an ancient text would mention whether a reader was vocalizing during their reading. This was a point of view that enjoyed a brief academic vogue. There was even a book published that linked it to the unspaced text used in Classical Latin, the argument being that when there are no breaks between words you need to read the text out to get the sense of it. However, there was pushback against this too and as far as I know there is no particular evidence that people in the ancient world could not or did not read silently; here's a decent paper on why the case against silent reading is overstated, with examples of demonstrable silent reading from antiquity. What is certainly true is that ancient literary culture developed out of oral tradition and public readings of written works continued throughout antiquity to a degree that would be considered somewhat unusual today. It's no surprise in light of that that people read texts to themselves out loud more so than people today do.
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Jun 11, 2017 03:54
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Gaius Marius posted:Reading the confessions of St.Augustine I've run across a footnote that says that reading silently was uncommon in antiquity. Does anyone know if this is true, and if so how do we know? Besides Augustine himself commenting on Ambrose's practice of reading silently It would seem odd to me that an ancient text would mention whether a reader was vocalizing during their reading. This is one of those ideas that get into academic vogue despite a moment's common sense suggesting it's nonsense. Like, how would anyone be able to have secret correspondence if everyone ready everything aloud?
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Jun 11, 2017 03:59
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Perhaps what would be odd would be to be in a very public place or some similar situation and read something silently, maybe with the expectation that if you were going to read out in public you should do so aloud? And so writings would occasionally comment that some person or another was noted for reading silently, intending that the audience would understand they meant in public, leading people from centuries later who didn't think about it too hard to go "aha! so the default way of things was to read aloud at all times!".
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Jun 11, 2017 04:06
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skasion posted:There was even a book published that linked it to the unspaced text used in Classical Latin, the argument being that when there are no breaks between words you need to read the text out to get the sense of it. Wow that shows a lot of language ignorance. Over here in East Asia, the norm is no spaces in text. As a language learner I find it immensely frustrating but the native speakers don't have an issue with it. Romans would've been the same way and not even given it a moment's thought. I do sometimes wonder how they managed with all the abbreviations, but, again, Asian languages do that all the time today so it can't be that hard.
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Jun 11, 2017 04:09
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The argument made (as I recall from reading a summary of it, I haven't read the original) was that pictographic languages are easier to read without spaces than syllabyries or alphabets, which means that presumably they concede China has always had silent readers
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Jun 11, 2017 04:12
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fishmech posted:Perhaps what would be odd would be to be in a very public place or some similar situation and read something silently, maybe with the expectation that if you were going to read out in public you should do so aloud? And so writings would occasionally comment that some person or another was noted for reading silently, intending that the audience would understand they meant in public, leading people from centuries later who didn't think about it too hard to go "aha! so the default way of things was to read aloud at all times!". nah read the paper silent reading in antiquity was common and unremarkable among the literate the thing about ambrose reading silently is that he always did it, which was considered unusual since most ancient literature was written to be performed.
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Jun 11, 2017 04:21
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cheetah7071 posted:The argument made (as I recall from reading a summary of it, I haven't read the original) was that pictographic languages are easier to read without spaces than syllabyries or alphabets, which means that presumably they concede China has always had silent readers They are, Chinese isn't as bad, but Korean is an alphabet also written without spaces and Japanese has its syllabaries so same problem. I'm not up on all the research but I think if you're being really technical, there is no such thing as silent reading because we all subvocalize. I'm not sure it's possible to read with absolutely no muscle movement in the throat.
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Jun 11, 2017 04:25
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skasion posted:This was a point of view that enjoyed a brief academic vogue. There was even a book published that linked it to the unspaced text used in Classical Latin, the argument being that when there are no breaks between words you need to read the text out to get the sense of it. However, there was pushback against this too and as far as I know there is no particular evidence that people in the ancient world could not or did not read silently; here's a decent paper on why the case against silent reading is overstated, with examples of demonstrable silent reading from antiquity.  . I didn't know Ambrose was such a well educated former proconsul though.Vincent Van Goatse posted:This is one of those ideas that get into academic vogue despite a moment's common sense suggesting it's nonsense. Like, how would anyone be able to have secret correspondence if everyone ready everything aloud? To be fair the footnote says it was uncommon not impossible. Grand Fromage posted:Wow that shows a lot of language ignorance. Over here in East Asia, the norm is no spaces in text. As a language learner I find it immensely frustrating but the native speakers don't have an issue with it. Romans would've been the same way and not even given it a moment's thought. Does Chinese have anyways of dealing with it at all. I thought Japanese was crazy with no spaces until you actually get a foundation in it and the Hiragana and Katakana separate things out so it's actually pretty easy to read. Chinese on the other hand looks like a complete brick wall of characters that my mind immediately rejects when it sees them.
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Jun 11, 2017 04:30
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No. Korean does it sometimes but I have never seen spaced Chinese text. They have adopted some punctuation from European languages, so when you see a novel there's formatting but usually everything is just written in a block. Punctuation is optional and used inconsistently.
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Jun 11, 2017 04:38
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Grand Fromage posted:They are, Chinese isn't as bad, but Korean is an alphabet also written without spaces and Japanese has its syllabaries so same problem. this is what the research says but i wouldn't be shocked if it was wrong. every time i read a subvocalization research paper it makes sure to assert the key role of subvocals in reading comprehension and it's like a circular citation loop if you try to trace the origin of that assumption. if you're reading a sentence entirely linearly and slowly enough then subvocalization is inevitable, but if you're taking in entire chunks of text at once like phrases or sentences (which i do regularly and i have always assumed most people who read a lot do too) any muscle movements that do occur cannot possibly meaningfully code for the entire sentence. which doesn't seem like actual subvocalization. i dunno, subvocalization just strikes me as an extra-fishy subfield of psychology which is itself suffering from a philosophical crisis wrt replication and the validity of results at the moment
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Jun 11, 2017 04:42
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Grand Fromage posted:Wow that shows a lot of language ignorance. Over here in East Asia, the norm is no spaces in text. As a language learner I find it immensely frustrating but the native speakers don't have an issue with it. Romans would've been the same way and not even given it a moment's thought. I would imagine that it's simply a skill to be learned along with the language. A subconscious process operates to scan the letters and recognize meaningful groupings, be they abbreviations, numbers, names, or words. Those word breaks are then passed to the conscious mind working a few milliseconds behind it, so the meaning of the text just springs out of it without consciously parsing it. It would just be a part of reading. Punctuation and spacing makes reading easier, by allowing for pauses and addition of emphasis, so that the writer can carry on a sort of a direct conversation with the reader, with the words as the intermediary. With ancient texts, I've noticed that they read more like a dialog with the medium - i.e., writing is a process of conveying information to the paper as you would a servant, and the job of the servant (paper) is to pass the message on to the reader. I was struck by the commentary of Sequoia in developing the Cherokee language. The white men had these "magic leaves" that could talk the them somehow. and he perceived it as an important source of their power. He determined to do the same for the Cherokee. It struck me that old writing is very much a three-way conversation, a relaying of information, while modern writing has lost that sense of "magic letters that talk to us" and just write directly to the reader as though they were in conversation, without there being any paper. Deteriorata fucked around with this message at 04:50 on Jun 11, 2017 |
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Jun 11, 2017 04:47
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Jazerus posted:nah read the paper No what I'm getting at is why people would assume that it must have been unusual to read silently on the basis of the offhand mention of him doing it. Consider how, for example, most people today will take off their shoes if they're going to be hanging around the house a long time. You might make note of how your buddy Steve doesn't do this, and people you mention this to now will get that what's kinda weird is that he wears the shoes all the time. Now let's assume your mention of Steve being weird for wearing his shoes all the time gets written down just like that in some famous book, and archaelogists 1000 years later dig it up with somehow a minimal amount of other stuff from today surviving. If they weren't particularly paying attention they might take his wearing of shoes at all to be the unusual thing, and assume the people of the early 21st century usually went barefoot and only wore shoes on special occasions if at all.
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Jun 11, 2017 04:49
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Steven was always kind of an rear end in a top hat.
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Jun 11, 2017 04:57
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Grand Fromage posted:No. Korean does it sometimes but I have never seen spaced Chinese text. They have adopted some punctuation from European languages, so when you see a novel there's formatting but usually everything is just written in a block. Punctuation is optional and used inconsistently. Punctuation is for decadent, immoral capitalist filth  Honestly once I got the hang of it, the lack of spaces in Chinese wasn't a big deal, but the first year was hell. Japanese, on the other hand, is a nightmare for me to read because of the hiragana/katakana not using spaces, and I think it is a cruel joke my family has been playing on me for years. I don't know why saying you should use spaces to separate words when they are spelled out is controversial but my aunt called me stupid for wanting that so 
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Jun 11, 2017 05:07
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The thing most of you sheeple probably don't realize is that the punic wars were actually all about tin
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Jun 11, 2017 13:28
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No blood for olive oil!
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Jun 11, 2017 13:40
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Jazerus posted:nah read the paper I'd heard about all classical readers supposedly reading out loud and this makes a lot more sense; I've started reading rhyming poetry and don't really enjoy it unless I read it out loud, maybe other people can "hear" the rhymes in their head but I can't.
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Jun 11, 2017 14:14
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fantastic in plastic posted:No blood for olive oil! Greek fire can't melt marble columns!
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Jun 11, 2017 14:42
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Jack B Nimble posted:I'd heard about all classical readers supposedly reading out loud and this makes a lot more sense; I've started reading rhyming poetry and don't really enjoy it unless I read it out loud, maybe other people can "hear" the rhymes in their head but I can't. I subvocalize when reading extremely metrical poetry, though I don't need to for reading rhyme..
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Jun 11, 2017 14:52
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fishmech posted:No what I'm getting at is why people would assume that it must have been unusual to read silently on the basis of the offhand mention of him doing it. all normal people take their shoes off when they enter the house
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Jun 11, 2017 15:38
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One of the only surviving "blog posts" from 2017 refers to a "neurotypical", therefore the average 21st century person had autism.
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Jun 11, 2017 17:48
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fantastic in plastic posted:One of the only surviving "blog posts" from 2017 refers to a "neurotypical", therefore the average 21st century person had autism. Now this is the kind of historiography I can get behind
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Jun 11, 2017 17:53
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Readingunspacedenglishisntthathard.Itfeelsofftempothough.Withabitofexperienceitsprobablyaseasyasordinaryenglish.
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Jun 11, 2017 17:59
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Grand Fromage posted:They are, Chinese isn't as bad, but Korean is an alphabet also written without spaces and Japanese has its syllabaries so same problem. Dosearchenginesineastasianlanguagesworkasgoodasforenglish?Imwonderingifourrobotservantswouldhaveahardtimeseparatingthings.
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Jun 11, 2017 18:02
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The Belgian posted:Dosearchenginesineastasianlanguagesworkasgoodasforenglish?Imwonderingifourrobotservantswouldhaveahardtimeseparatingthings. You can google for things without using spaces and it's pretty good at parsing it.
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Jun 11, 2017 18:13
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