Pantes anthropoi tou eidenai oregontai phusei. semeion d' he ton aistheseon agapesis: kai gar choris tes chreias agapontai d' hautas... ("Everyone by nature desires to have knowledge. A sign of this is our love of the senses; aside from their usefulness we love them for themselves..." --Aristotle, Metaphysics I.1) (Illustration: Athens in the nineteenth century, from an old engraving)
WELCOME TO MINERVA SYSTEMS |
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Welcome to Minerva Systems, an enterprise created by Dr. Cora Angier Sowa. It is a product of the author's longtime search for connections between the aesthetic and the technological. It is also devoted to examining the continuity of influence of Greek and Roman Classical civilization, and to exploring how ancient insights can be applied to today's world. Athena -- the Roman Minerva -- was, we remember, the patroness both of intellectual wisdom and of crafts and technology. This site presents a selection of writings by the author on some interconnected topics: Classical literature, computers and humanities, myths of machines, music, movies, architecture, and technology, and the aesthetic appreciation of the marvels of the built environment. |
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Athena - the Roman Minerva - was goddess of both intellectual wisdom and technical crafts. Accompanied by her owl, she was also protector of the city of Athens. |
NEW!
(Click on the titles to read them.) |
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While my professional career is in Greek and Latin Classics and in computers (interests that I combine in the field of digital humanities), I am also a lifelong railfan. I grew up in a house above the old Los Angeles Subway tunnel and trainyards, my father was a cost analyst for the Southern Pacific, and my grandfather was a civil engineer specializing in railroad bridges. I now live in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, overlooking the Hudson River and the historic tracks of the former New York Central, now Metro North and Amtrak. On the Web page called "Railroad History of Cora Angier Sowa,", I display some of my collection of rail photos, with commentary about them. A follow-on to this Web page, called "Engineers (Civil, Electrical, and Mechanical) in the Family," adds archival material about other family members' contributions to the history of engineering. |
 Click HERE to read my "Railroad History." |
QUOTATIONS OF THE MONTH |
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Every month there will be a new classical or other quotation in this space, appropriate to the season or to current events. Previous quotations (beginning in September, 2004) are archived in "Archived Quotations of the Month". An index to all of these quotations is now located at the head of the Archived Quotations page. Translations are my own, except where otherwise noted. Do you have a suggestion for a future Quotation of the Month? If so, send me your suggestions. |
 What is today's conversation about? |
THE QUOTATIONS FOR BOTH AUGUST AND JULY APPEAR BELOW |
Quotation for August 2010: On a summer day, the bees collect honey and stock their hives (Vergil's Fourth Georgic) |
Insects of the order Hymenoptera, including wasps and bees. In the upper left corner is a worker bee of the species Apis mellifica, or Common Hive Bee. (Illustration: plate from A.W. Kappel and W. Egmont Kirby, Beetles, Butterflies, Moths, and Other Insects, 1893.)
The bees of summer
Vergil's Georgics ("Agricultural Matters"), completed in 30 B.C., consist of four books of didactic poetry, describing the essentials of Mediterranean farming. Their composition came between his early pastoral Eclogues and his epic Aeneid. Book I is about crop-raising, Book II about trees and vines, Book III about cattle, and Book III about bee-keeping. The name is Greek; Geôrgiká is from gê "earth" and ergon "work." The poems were "inspired by" Hesiod's Works and Days (Erga kai Hêmerai). But in both content and style, Vergil's poems are different from the aphorisms of the curmudgeonly old Greek poet's "Old Farmer's Almanac." Vergil's sources included the Greek natural historians and scientists, such as Aristotle, Eratosthenes, and Aratus, the Latin agricultural treatises of Cato and Varro, and Lucretius' scientific epic De Rerum Natura, as well as his own experiences growing up on a farm. They are a mixture of practical know-how (e.g. how to build a plow), observations of nature, anecdotes (some more dramatic than others, like his description of the effect of the plague on farm animals), and mythology (e.g. Aristaeus' reconstitution of his lost bees — see below). Throughout, Vergil shows his habitual empathy for all things great and small. These qualities can be found in this month's quotation, describing the bees' bedtime.
Vergil the farm boy
Vergil was born in Andes, near Mantua, in a region of northern Italy that was then part of Cisalpine Gaul. Only later, under Caesar, did his province receive Roman citizenship. He was educated at Cremona and Mediolanum (Milan), and later in Rome. His father worked a small farm, which was seized and confiscated in 41 B.C. when Antony was taking farms for redistribution to his soldiers after the Battle of Philippi. (Today, we call this seizing by "eminent domain," the taking of one owner's property to give to another owner for a supposed "public good," an evil that is still with us thanks to a Supreme Court ruling.) Vergil appealed, apparently successfully, to Octavian (the future Emperor Augustus) for an exception for his farm, an incident which he fictionalized in his First Eclogue, where Tityrus keeps his farm, but Meliboeus loses his. Augustus, of course, eventually became Vergil's patron. For the remainder of his life, Vergil lived in Rome and Naples, where, working at his usual slow pace, he spent seven years writing his Georgics.
How to tuck your bees into bed
The Fourth Georgic is about bee-keeping. Much of it is practical, like the advice on where to situate your hives, what kind of trees, rocks, flowers, and running water to provide, how to keep the birds away, and so forth. A conflict between opposing swarms, however, is depicted as a mock-heroic battle. Some of the "facts" described are "old wives' tales" (today we would call such beliefs "urban myths"). For example, he tells how to produce new bees by pulverizing a calf carcass, with skin intact, and leaving it to rot, covered in thyme and other herbs, causing new bees to appear by spontaneous generation. The technique, he says, was first used by the mythical Aristaeus, who lost his bees when cursed for accidentally causing the death of Eurydice. (There is a fascinating account of such beliefs in spontaneus generation of various (usually lower) forms of life, some believed in up to quite recent times, in Eugene S. McCartney, "Spontaneous Generation and Kindred Notions in Antiquity", in Transactions of the American Philological Association Vol. 51 (1920), pp. 101-115, available on the Web.) This month's quotation is closer to reality, concerning the method of persuading bees to go to their hives after a summer day collecting nectar. Sprinkling or "medicating" their resting places (medicatis sedibus) with their favorite herbs, together with the sound of cymbals, will induce them, like pampered children, to "on their own" (ipsae) "tuck themselves into their little cradles" (sese in cunabula condent).
Here, in Latin and English, is Vergil's description of the bees' warm-weather awakening and sleep. Note the reference to "The Mother" (Matris), the Great Mother, Cybele, the Anatolian goddess whose worship included the clashing of cymbals.
Vergil,Georgic 4, vv. 51-66
quod superest, ubi pulsam hiemem Sol aureus egit
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Vergil's bees in summerFurthermore, when the golden Sun, dispelling winter
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An Italian peasant plays his flute, overlooking a lazy river. (Illustration: painting by Hans Thoma, 1891, from Thoma: Des Meisters Gemälde in 874 Abbildungen, Stuttgart, 1909).
Quotation for July 2010: We have the IPad and Kindle, but what "tablets" did Homer's heroes use? (Bellerophon's cryptic message in the Iliad) |
A tablet from Mycenae in Linear B, listing men employed as bakers. (Illustration from Ventris and Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek, 1959).
From Linear B to the IPad
Tablets! The latest buzz in communications is a portable, rectangular electronic device on which you can read books, magazines, and newspapers, and (on some, at least) exchange pictures, view movies, and play games. Apple's IPad competes with Amazon's Kindle, and Research in Motion, maker of the Blackberry, has announced it will soon market its own version of the tablet. (Who said literacy was dead!) The hand-held, flat, usually rectangular surface is the latest manifestation of one of the oldest objects for communication, expression, and record-keeping. In antiquity, tablets ranged from clay slabs stamped in cuneiform to wooden tablets coated with wax, that could be "erased" and used over and over. Two (or more) of the latter could be fastened together to form a diptuchon deltion or double-folded tablet, precursor of the modern book. Herodotus describes how Demaratus used one of these "books" to send a secret message telling the Spartans that Xerxes was about to invade. He scraped the wax off the surfaces of the tablets, wrote the message on the wood beneath, then replaced the wax, to simulate blank tablets. Only when the wax was removed could the message be read (Herod. 7.239). Even Homer's heroes, it seems, had some form of tablet for recording information. Our quotation of the month is Homer's only apparent mention, in the Iliad, of the use of a tablet bearing some kind of communication.
Breaking news! The Trojan War was real!
It was not so long ago that there was this mental image of Homer, the great poet, sitting at a desk writing his magnificent Iliad and Odyssey, weaving together fictional folk tales of made-up heroes in lands as unreal as Hogwarts Academy. In a little more than one hundred years, this all changed. Homer didn't have writing, but Agamemnon did (sort of). While many scholars and gifted amateurs, in archaeology and philology, have contributed to this field, three insights stand out:
- Mycenae and Troy were real historic places, and the heroes and heroines of the Iliad and Odyssey were undoubtedly (at least based on) real people. Heinrich Schliemann, aided by his Greek wife Sophia, discovered the site of ancient Troy, which he began excavating in 1868. He went on to identify and excavate Mycenae and at the time of his death was about to dig at Knossos, the capital of Minos, later excavated by Sir Arthur Evans.
- Homer didn't "write" his poems at all, but composed them "orally," on the spot
(but someone who could write wrote them down).
The "Homeric Question" of the true authorship of the Homeric poems had raged for
decades (was there one author or many?). Milman Parry's study of South Slavic
traditional poetic composition, begun in 1933, and comparisons with the formulaic
nature of the Homeric poems left no doubt (at least for most people) that the
ancient epic poems were living things, which the bards, like jazz musicians,
recomposed during each "set," making them longer or shorter, depending on the
interests of the audience. Some time, probably in the eighth century B.C.,
someone took down the transcript of a performance (or performances), and
they began to take on the "stuffed and mounted" aspect that they have today.
The music that accompanied them was lost long ago.
Parry died young, but his work was continued by
Albert Lord, who published The Singer of Tales in 1959.
My own contributions to the study of oral poetry in Hesiod
and the Homeric Hymns are available on this Web site:
"Verbal Patterns in Hesiod's Theogony",
Selected Excerpts from the book Traditional Themes and the Homeric Hymns,
"Thought Clusters in Early Greek Oral Poetry". - Agamemnon, Nestor, Odysseus, and the other Homeric kings did have writing (at least their accountants did). It was long believed that the Greeks did not have writing until they adapted the Phoenician alphabet in the ninth or eighth century B.C. But at Mycenae, Knossos, and at Pylos (Nestor's city), many clay tablets were found with strange forms of writing, known as "Linear A" and "Linear B." Linear A, only partially deciphered, is apparently a non-Greek "Minoan" language. The cryptographic and code-breaking activities of many persons, leading up to the decipherment of Linear B, involving matrices of matching sounds and word endings, cannot be detailed here, but it was Michael Ventris who "broke the code" in 1952, proving that Linear B was Greek, written in a syllabary where each character represents not a simple letter but an entire syllable. No poetry or other literature has been found in Linear B, only records of commodities, military supplies, personnel—the workings of palace bureaucracy. Ventris, too, died young, but his work was published in Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek, 1959. A typical tablet from Mycenae is illustrated above.
The Homeric poems themselves, though in their final composition the product of a culture that had writing, and describing a society that had writing, nowhere mention writing, except in one unusual passage in Iliad Book 6, in the story of Bellerophon, whose death warrant was contained in the "baneful symbols" of a "folded tablet." Was this an anachronism from Homer's own time, or an echo of a remembrance from the time of Homer's heroes?
Bellerophon, Anteia, and Pegasus
In Iliad Book 6, the Lycian Glaucus is telling Diomedes his ancestry, which includes the hero Bellerophon. Beautiful and manly, Bellerophon caught the eye of Anteia, the wife of Argive king Proetus (in some versions, she is called Sthenoboea), who wanted to make love to him. He refused, and she took revenge by telling her husband that Bellerophon had tried to seduce her. (If this sounds familiar, the same story was told of Hippolytus and Phaedra.) Proetus does not kill Bellerophon, but sends him to Anteia's father, the king of Lycia, carrying a "folded tablet" (pinaki ptuktô) bearing "baneful symbols" (sêmata lugra), which turn out to be a request that the king of Lycia kill Bellerophon. He doesn't kill him, either, but sends him on various suicide missions (which he instead accomplishes), including killing the Chimaera, a monster one third lion, one third snake, one third goat (chimaira); the "glorious" Solymoi; and the Amazons. (In some versions, Bellerophon accomplishes his tasks mounted on the winged horse Pegasus. Sources include Hesiod (Theogony 325), who also gives the Chimaera three heads, one for each of her species.) Since Bellerophon seems unkillable, the king of Lycia decides that he is the offspring of a god and gives him his daughter in marriage and a big estate. Later however, he became "hated of all the gods" and was killed by them. In some versions, the reason was that he tried to fly Pegasus up to heaven.
Below is the story of Bellerophon and Anteia from Iliad Book 6.
Anteia's plot against BellerophonThe wife of Proetus, lovely Anteia, was mad for Bellerophon, — Iliad, Book 6, vv. 160-186 |
Bellerophon and Pegasus. (Illustration from Seyffert's A Dictionary of Classical Antiquities, 1899.)
Archived QuotationsEarlier quotations, appropriate to current situations as indicated, are available in the page of "Archived Quotations." The index of all archived quotations, formerly in this space, having grown very large, has now been moved to the head of the Quotations page itself. |
MINERVA participation in the Chicago Colloquia on Digital Humanities: 2010 Colloquium announced |
The fifth Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities will be held at Northwestern University, pictured above. (Photo by C.A. Sowa.)
ANNOUNCING THE FIFTH CHICAGO COLLOQUIUM ON DIGITAL HUMANITIES AND COMPUTER SCIENCE
The fifth Chicago DHCS Colloquium will be held November 21-22 at Northwestern University. We have received the following information:
The fifth annual Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science (DHCS) will be held at Northwestern University on November 21-22, 2010 (Sunday-Monday).
The tag line for this year's colloquium is "Working with Digital Data: Collaborate, Curate, Analyze, Annotate." This does not exclude a whole lot. Quality will always trump category, but we will be particularly interested in papers or poster sessions about annotation, scholarly crowdsourcing, and challenges of human/computer interaction. How to create better texts from OCR may be a problem in which new forms of human/computer interaction hold particular promise.
We would welcome submissions from corpus linguists and would have a special interest in papers or poster sessions that address the ways in which the tools, resources, and findings of corpus linguistics are relevant to other disciplines in the humanities.
The deadline for submissions is August 31, with notification by September 17.
For information about registration and submissions, visit the DHCS Web site at their new address: "http://chicagocolloquium.org". Information about all previous Colloquia (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009) can now also be accessed from there.
Previous DHCS Colloquia and MINERVA offerings:Previous Colloquia, which MINERVA attended, were held at the University of Chicago (2006), Northwestern University (2007), again at the University of Chicago (2008), and at the Illinois Institute of Technology (2009). For the complete programs, go to the DHCS Web site. Click on the buttons on the right to read the MINERVA presentations. 2006The theme of the first Colloquium (2006)was "What to do with a Million books," posing the problem that, now that all the world's libraries have been put in digital form, what do we do with them? MINERVA Systems presented a demonstration showing the capabilities of MINERVA as a set of tools for carrying out a project to study a work of literature, using digital methods. 2007The emphasis of the second Colloquium (2007) was on using digital materials in a collaborative environment, and on discerning what studies are better undertaken by using digitized versions of materials such as images and text than by using the original non-digitized sources. The MINERVA demonstration for 2007 highlighted new additions to the Systems Analysis Tutorial/Project Planner, which aid the user in steps to planning and carrying out a project in an organized way. These techniques are adapted from the commercial and scientific fields, where teams of persons who may be working in distant locations must coordinate their efforts. 2008The theme of the third Colloquium (2008) was "'Making Sense'- an exploration of how meaning is created and apprehended at the transition of the digital and the analog." "Sense-making" is a field concerned with finding meaning in vaguely defined material. As usual, this third Colloquium brought together a terrific group of diverse scholars and students working in different areas of computer applications. These included not only literary and sociological studies, but such inventive applications as a study of different musical genres (country, gospel, blues, hip hop, heavy metal, etc.) to see which body parts (head, heart, hand, etc.) are mentioned most often, and three-dimensional recreations of archaeological and historic sites, including a study of pedestrian traffic patterns in an ancient Turkish town destroyed by Cyrus the Great. Minerva Systems submitted a paper to the third Colloquium, "A Bridge Across the Culture Gap: Build Your Own Project Using the Minerva System for Study of Literary Texts", which was given as a handout to all who were interested. Additions to the MINERVA System emphasized the need to serve "the great unserved middle," between the Luddites and the Rocket Scientists, of scholars and students, who would like to be introduced to elements of logical analysis and computerized methods. 2009The theme of the fourth Colloquium (2009) was "Critical Computing", seeking to explore how productive research collaborations between computer scientists and humanists can be most effective.
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Read the MINERVA demos and handouts from the 2006, 2007, and 2008 Colloquia.Click on the buttons below to see the coomplete MINERVA handouts.
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The Reliance Building, at State and Washington Streets in Chicago, January, 2008. (Photo by C.A. Sowa.) The Reliance Building, like the MINERVA System, was built on principles of modularity and extensibility.The Reliance Building, an incredible little jewel in the middle of Chicago's Loop, was not all built at once. When the developer acquired the site in 1882, it was occupied by a five-story building. The leases on the lower two floors expired in 1890, those on the top three in 1894. So, as the first leases expired, the architects Daniel H. Burnham and John Wellborn Root demolished the first two floors, and, jacking up the top three storeys, replaced the demolished floors with the first two floors of the new building. When the remaining leases expired, the top floors of the old building were demolished, and replaced with new floors, designed by Charles Atwood, Root having died. The number of floors eventually grew to fifteen, made of identical structural modules and clad in graceful terracotta, giving the building the perfect proportions that it has today, somewhat overwhelmed, unfortunately, by the gigantism of the surrounding modern buildings.
Today, the Reliance Building, after years of neglect (shabby but still showing her noble "bones"), has been reborn as a boutique hotel, called the Burnham, with an excellent restaurant, the Atwood, on its ground floor, the names being chosen as an homage to its architects.
The Chicago River, from the Michigan Avenue Bridge, January, 2008. (Photo by C.A. Sowa.)
THE MINERVA SYSTEM FOR STUDY OF LITERARY TEXTS, INTRODUCED A IN SELF-STUDY CD The Loom of Minerva: An Introduction to Computer Projects for the Literary Scholar |
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Read about it!
My thanks to all those who have reviewed and used my self-study CD course on using computers and quantitative methods in the study of literature, The Loom of Minerva: An Introduction to Computer Projects for the Literary Scholar, and my thanks to those who continue to give me comments.
You can read Chapter 1, "A Guide to the Labyrinth: The Problem and Its Solution" on this Web site. (Note: this chapter now describes a greater variety of ways to structure a project, e.g., top-down, bottom-up, etc. It will continue to be revised.) You can also see images from two demonstrations of the MINERVA System, from 2006 (emphasizing individual applications programs), given at the First Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities at the University of Chicago and 2007 (emphasizing new project planning programs) given at the Second Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities at the Northwestern University.
The MINERVA System
The MINERVA System for Study of Literary Texts is a set of tools, some automated, some not automated, for planning and carrying out a project in literary study. Methods of Systems Analysis, borrowed from the scientific and commercial world, are adapted to the study of literature. This methodology emphasizes the use of diagramming techniques and modular design, offering a way to construct a project as a set of units or modules that can be worked on separately and moved around without disturbing the whole. A project is defined as an enterprise that has a goal and an organized way of achieving that goal.
The Loom of Minerva combines the methods of Systems Analysis with the insights of traditional belles-lettres literary criticism. All analysis takes as its point of departure the value of the piece of literature itself to the critic and the reader, as well as the historic, social, or aesthetic qualities attached to it. These alone confer significance on any work of scholarship. Examples grow directly from study of various works of literature, from Vergil to Coleridge to Baudelaire to Victor Hugo to Edna St. Vincent Millay and Gertrude Stein, and works of criticism from Sainte-Beuve to Swinburne to Gertrude Stein (criticizing her own work).
Emphasis is placed on analyzing the language of criticism itself, analyzing exactly what we mean by such terms as "beautiful," "ugly," "pompous," "like a spring garden," etc. By defining our terms with an exactness that can be quantified, we learn to give precision to our thoughts, whether using a computer or not.
What is in The Loom of Minerva
The CD contains both a set of narrative chapters and a set of programs, called the MINERVA System for Study of Literary Texts. The narrative chapters explain and amplify the programs, and the programs illustrate the chapters. The programs are provided in both executable form and source code, to satisfy both non-programmer scholars and programmers who want to play with the code.
- The programs.
The programs are in two groups, The Tutorial in Systems Analysis and the MINERVA Program Suite. The Tutorial in Systems Analysis takes the student through the steps to plan and design a project, beginning with the Selection of a Topic, going through the activities of drawing hierarchical and flow charts, and continuing to the final Evaluation of Results. The screens are interactive, so that the student can practice designing his or her own project.
The MINERVA Program Suite is an interactive suite of programs designed for use by scholars and critics of literature. These programs, which can be used with texts of English, Classical, or other literatures, currently contains sixteen programs: eight to perform different types of literary analysis, and eight "OwlData" programs that the scholar can use to create or adapt data for the analytical programs. Currently available are programs to make concordances, search for words and cooccurring words, do statistical studies, perform cluster analysis, and compose original paragraphs. Developed in modular fashion, MINERVA is intended to be expandable, so that in the future more modules can be added to do more things. The latest to be developed is a program to perform cluster analysis based on the program described in Sowa and Sowa "Thought Clusters in Early Greek Oral Poetry."
- The narrative chapters
The narrative chapters can be read like a book, or they can be entered directly from the programs by clicking on links on the screens.
The first four text chapters of The Loom of Minerva introduce the MINERVA System. They demonstrate the steps for planning and developing a project, and provide many literary examples for using the programs. Historical chapters of The Loom of Minerva analyze projects past and present, that have used computers and other mechanical devices in the study of literature (including the Eureka Machine for composing Latin hexameters). Also described are works of literature that were inspired by machines, like the short story "Moxon's Master" by Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), in which a chess-playing robot murders its inventor. Four final chapters of the book are for techies only: a programming manual of Visual Basic, using literary examples, for those gung-ho readers who want to understand the arcana behind the MINERVA programs included with the book.
MINERVA stands for Model INteractive Engine for Recognizing Verbal Artifice.
Advantages of the MINERVA System
The MINERVA programs do not require the use of data that is in a proprietary format. They use plain ASCII text, such as that downloaded from the Internet. The OwlData programs can be used to put downloaded or scanned text in the correct format for the MINERVA programs. The mathematics and statistics used are fairly elementary, such as can be understood as an introduction to basic concepts of what the computer and quantified methods can do. The programs are open-source, as they are intended to be extensible.
For more information:
If you are interested in finding out more about the Loom of Minerva or the MINERVA System, contact me at casowa@aol.com.
Historical chapters of The Loom of Minerva describe projects using the computer in the study of literature, including the author's Traditional Themes and the Homeric Hymns (see below). One of the thematic elements analyzed is "Maidens Dancing and Picking Flowers." |
A VICTORIAN COMPUTER LIVES AGAIN!WATCH A REPLICA OF CHARLES BABBAGE'S ENGINE IN ACTION |
Reconstruction of one of Babbage's engines at the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California. Click on the picture to watch it in action. (Photo by J.F. Sowa).
Charles Babbage's Difference Engine and Analytical Engine
Charles Babbage, prolific Victorian inventor, is most famous for two of his inventions, the Difference Engine (1812) and the Analytical Engine (1833), which are perhaps the truest forerunners of the modern computer. The Difference Engine, a mechanical device of rotating gears, was designed to automatically generate mathemetical tables. It was called the Difference Engine because it was based on the principle of computing the differences between successive values of an expression, then the difference between the differences. Versions of the Difference Engine were eventually built and used, but Babbage himself dropped work on it to pursue his real dream, the Analytical Engine. The Analytical Engine was, or would have been, the first "real" computer, capable of performing any kind of mathematical operation, and able to be "programmed," that is, to perform a sequence of operations without human intervention, and to choose, when necessary, between alternative paths of action. It was to be powered by steam, and programs were to be entered into the machine by means of punched cards, an idea borrowed from the then-new Jacquard power looms. Babbage, sad to say, was never able to complete the Analytical Engine.
Ada, Lady Lovelace, "the world's first programmer"
Babbage's collaborator on his Engines was one of history's most remarkable women, Ada, Lady Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron. These lines from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage are thought to be addressed to her:
Is thy face like thy mother's, my fair child, |
A gifted mathematician in her own right, Ada worked with Babbage until her untimely death in 1852 at the age of 36. In 1842, the Italian engineer Luigi F. Menabrea published a description, in French, of Babbage's Analytical Engine. Lady Lovelace translated Menabrea's article into English, expanding it with commentary so extensive that her "Notes upon the Memoir" are virtually an original work. She provides detailed directions for using the machine to calculate answers to mathematical problems, leading modern writers to call her "the world's first programmer." Her words relate computing to other artistic endeavors:
We may say most aptly that [Babbage's] Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.
A Babbage Engine in London and California
In 1985, the Science Museum in London set out to build a working Difference Engine No. 2, based on Babbage's original designs. It was completed in 2002, and is on public display at the Science Museum. An identical Engine, completed in 2008, is presently on loan to the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California, where it is on display until May, 2009. Read more about this recreated machine at the Computer History Museum Web site.
Click here or on the picture below to watch the Babbage engine in action, in a video taken by John F. Sowa.
Reconstruction of one of Babbage's engines, detail view. Click on the picture to watch it in action. (Photo by J.F. Sowa).
Read about the 1845 Eureka Machine for Composing Hexameter Latin Verse
Another Victorian machine which could be called an early special-purpose
computer was the Eureka machine designed by John Clark in 1845 for automatically
composing Latin hexameter poetry. It still survives, in a museum in Somerset,
England. Click here to read about it.
TRADITIONAL THEMES AND THE HOMERIC HYMNS IS AGAIN IN PRINT. SELECTIONS AVAILABLE FOR FREE READING ON THIS SITE |
One of the mythic themes analyzed in Traditional Themes and the Homeric Hymns is the Epiphany of a God. |
Book: Traditional Themes and the Homeric Hymns
Cora Angier Sowa is the author of Traditional Themes and the Homeric Hymns published by Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, Wauconda, IL (1984).
The book, out of print for a while, is again available by "on-demand" production. Contact the publisher for information.
New selections are available on this Web site for free reading. You can read Chapters 1 ("Introduction") and 10 ("Conclusion: the Place of the Hymns in the Ancient Greek Oral Tradition"), Appendix I ("Outlines of Themes Identified in the Hymns"). You can also see diagrams of the themes as they appear in the Hymns.
Article: "Thought Clusters in Early Greek Oral Poetry"
An article, by Cora Angier Sowa and John Sowa, describes in detail the quantitative and mathematical methods used on the computer to identify thematic elements in Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns. Material from this study was later integrated into into the more comprehensive Traditional Themes and the Homeric Hymns. Click on "Thought Clusters in Early Greek Oral Poetry". A version of the CLUMP cluster analysis program used to identify thematic repetitions is now also being integrated into the MINERVA suite of programs in the self-study CD The Loom of Minerva.
"Verbal Patterns in Hesiod's Theogony" |
In orally composed poetry like Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days, there was no written text (the alphabet being barely known at the time, around 750 B.C.). The bard, like a jazz musician, recomposed his story each time (to a melody now lost to us), using stock phrases or "formulas" and repeated scenes. Since the story was enjoyed not by reading but by hearing it, there were no punctuation marks or chapter headings to tell listeners where they were in the narrative or its episodes. The skilled singer used, instead, repeated words and phrases to serve as "oral punctuation" to articulate the story and provide emphasis for important themes and concepts.
Reissued here is my article Verbal Patterns in Hesiod's Theogony, which explores the use of verbal repetition in Hesiod's tale of the origins of the gods.
The Eureka Machine for Composing Hexameter Latin Verses (1845) |
We think of computers as being very modern, although calculating machines and computer-like devices have been around for a long time. In particular, we think of using such a machine to do such non-scientific tasks as composing poetry as a modern concept. But in 1845, John Clark built the Eureka Machine for Composing Hexameter Latin Verse. It still exists in a museum in England. Read about the Eureka Machine and read the original description of it from the Illustrated London News of July, 1845.
There is more about early computers and their mechanical ancestors in the self-study CD The Loom of Minerva: An Introduction to Computer Projects for the Literary Scholar, described above.
Ships named Minerva |
Classically named ships have a long tradition. Illustration: "The PHOENIX and the ROSE, engaged by the ENEMY'S FIRE SHIPS & GALLEYS, on the 16th Augt 1776. Engraved from the Original Picture by D. Serres, from a Sketch of Sir James Wallace's." Lithograph by G. Hayward for D.T. Valentine's Manual 1776. |
"Minerva" has long been a popular name for ships. There are cruise ships named "Minerva," including Greek vessels whose owners chose that name as a synonym for their own city patroness Athena. Warships named "Minerva" have graced the navies of Europe from the time of Nelson and Napoleon to the present, whether British "Minerva" or French "Minerve."
It is an interesting choice, considering that Athena, with her gift of the olive, defeated Poseidon, lord of the sea, with his gift of the horse, in the contest to be patron deity of Athens. (See the depiction of Athena and Poseidon below.)
The name "Minerva" for a British warship belongs in the splendid tradition of naming vessels after names from Classical history and mythology. Along with names like "Invincible," "Audacious," "Irresistible," "Insolent," "Victory," and "Dreadnought," we find "Gorgon," "Phoenix," "Achilles," "Apollo," "Dryad," "Endymion," "Hector," "Helicon," "Medusa," "Meleager," and, famously, "Arethusa." The most famous ship named for the Sicilian nymph Arethusa was known for her victory over the French "Belle Poulle" in 1778. Training ships for over a century inherited the name, one after the other.
A frigate "Minerva" participated in the Battle of Cape St. Vincent against the navy of Napoleon on February 14, 1797. The marine painter Thomas Buttersworth (the elder) painted a portrait of "Minerva" in 1810, and the "Minerva" Pub in Hull, England (built in 1831) uses the frigate's symbol, the owl, on its sign. Of course, some ships have been named "Athena" and "Poseidon," too; there was a movie about such a ship called The Poseidon Adventure.
There is a further connection between ships and this Minerva Systems site. In the self-study CD The Loom of Minerva (described above), an analysis of Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is used as a case study to demonstrate methods of Systems Analysis and computer techniques.
A feminist note on the gender of ships: Because of the living qualities of ships, I like to refer to a ship as "she" rather than "it." While some may compare a vessel to a woman because of the supposedly capricious nature of both (although there seems nothing wrong with an occasional playful moment), I think that this view overlooks other qualities. Ships, like women, are beautiful, swift, intelligent, and powerful. I am glad to acclaim them as my sisters!
"Attack on Sidon by Commodore Charles Napier." The battle took place in September, 1840. Sir Charles Napier was a lineal descendant of John Napier, inventor of Napierian logarithms, whose mathematical insights led to the invention of the slide rule, itself an ancestor of the modern computer. |
Signed vase painting by the Athenian potter/painter Amasis (6th cent.
B.C.), depicting Athena and Poseidon. The two figures are labeled
ATHENAIA and POSEIDON. The inscription down the middle reads
AMASIS MEPOIESEN ("Amasis made me"). Amasis may well have been
African. (Illustration from a lithograph by Kaeppelin et Cie., ca. 1840.
The actual vase is in the Cabinet des Médailles, Bibliothèque
Nationale de France, Paris.)
Myths of landmarks: Pennsylvania Station and Times Square as centers of the universe, the World Trade Center as a Mythic Place |
The World Trade Center was a sacred place long before it was blown up by terrorists. Lower Manhattan was the sacred land of the Lenape Indians, who made their community and buried their dead there. The modern World Trade Center, with its iconic double-towered shape (a nation's gateway, a cosmic tuning-fork?) was a symbol to the world of universal aspirations and longings. As a center of communications (with its towering antenna) and of transportation (as a hub of rail transportation) it had the mana or spiritual power of the crossroads, the traditional meeting place watched over by the gods of trade. |
Essays and reviews on building and architecture
Among the selections on this site is the previously published "Holy Places", a study of myths of landmarks. In addition, there is an epilogue to that essay, on "The World Trade Center as a Mythic Place". This piece continues the author's interest in relating ancient ideas to things that we care about in the modern world.
You can also read two of the author's previously published book reviews on architecture, on Alison Sky and Michelle Stone's Unbuilt America and Albert Mehrabian's Public Places and Private Spaces.
About the Author |
The author is an aficionado of many kinds of transportation, including railroads, ships, and airplanes. Here I am "at the wheel" of the ferryboat Eureka (rebuilt in 1923 from the 1890 freight-car ferry Ukiah) at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. |
Cora Angier Sowa has combined humanities and technology for many years. She has a BA in Latin and an MA in Classics from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a PhD in Classical Philology from Harvard University. She spent a year studying archaeology at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. She taught Greek and Roman literature and history at Mt. Holyoke, Vassar, and Brooklyn Colleges. For a number of years, she was a programmer/analyst at Chemical (now Chase) Bank in New York. She has taught classes in computers and humanities at the College of Staten Island and at St. John's University in Queens, New York. She served twice on the Committee on Computer Activities of the American Philological Association, once as chairperson of the committee. She was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship (for study in Greece) and of a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies (for work on computers and ancient Greek literature).
In addition to the book Traditional Themes and the Homeric Hymns (described above), Dr. Sowa has published articles and reviews on Classics and on the mythology of architecture and motion pictures. A harp player, she is also on the board of trustees of the International Percy Grainger Society , an organization dedicated to preserving the home and archives in White Plains, New York of Percy Grainger -- composer, piano virtuoso, collector of folk songs, and inventor of an early mechanical music synthesizer. Dr. Sowa is Webmaster for the Grainger web site. Dr. Sowa now lives in Croton-on-Hudson NY, and in New York City, with her husband, Dr. John F. Sowa, an expert in Artificial Intelligence and computer design, and several cats.
The author plays the harp for an appreciative audience (handsome cat-about-town Feliz Sowa). |
All selections on this site, unless otherwise identified, are copyright by Cora Angier Sowa.
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