Category Archives: Tech

Continuing Coverage of the Revolution

I saw this on the Chant Cafe this morning: The Simple English Propers music project—for the Kindle.

I can’t offer a review yet because I haven’t bought it quite yet though I fully intend to and will report back once I have. What I want to call your attention to is the technological shift in communicating content.

Usable music publishing in the electronic space opens up all kinds of amazing possibilities for recovering and disseminating church music. Doubly so for music that does not have a copyright or where copyright makes no sense (like with most chant whether Gregorian or Anglican…) The issue is not whether this can be done or will be done. The question is who will do it and will they do it well.

Media and Meaning

Over at Seven Whole Days, Scott Gunn has posted a very interesting reflection on the church in the age of social media.

There’s no question that social media has already had an enormous impact on the shape of the global religious landscape and will continue to do so. In fact, I’d attribute most of the church splits and schisms over the last decade as being driven either in part or completely by social movements fostered and enable by new media. As far as I’m concerned, the Episcopal split and the formation of the ACNA would not have happened if blogs and blog networks had not been able to focus opposition to 815 and gain/create a critical mass willing to leave.

On the other hand, I know I personally have met and been nurtured by a wonderful group of people—some I knew or have come to know offline, others not—through social media interactions, most notably  this blog.

I just want to make two quick points.

First, from a systems-perspective, the problem of our age is not access to data. We have too much of it. We’re completely awash in information. Some of it is useful and important—some of it less so.The problem of our age is the analysis and organization of data into useful—and comprehensible—chunks.This is one of the broad functions of social media. No-one can sift through all of the news/information/books/essays/thoughts/etc. out there. It’s simply not possible. What social media does is, essentially, to serve as a crowd-sourced filtration and data organization device. Our friends and acquaintances access some bits and post or pass on what seems most meaningful to them. Social circles feed and amplify certain themes, stories, and concepts. We’ve got to use this tool but at the same time be very aware of the shadow-side of this strength: it’s really easy to get caught up in your own echo-chamber where all you hear are the kinds of stories, news,and statistics that reinforce what you already think and believe. As more and more of us rely more and more on the internet for our news and locus of critical reflection, we must also be intentional about cultivating friends and acquaintance who can challenge us enough to keep us from being locked into a simple and simplistic way of thinking and processing.

Second, when social media gets discussed, it usually means Facebook and Twitter. I think it’s fair to say that there has been a certain decrease in blog activity over the last several years—especially since the rise of Facebook. But I must strenuously protest: blogs have their place!! There are two things that blogs do better than Facebook. The first is the retention of a surface anonymity. Anonymity online is a source of liberation. It enables us to say and do things we can’t with a name attached. Yeah, I know—that can be a Bad Thing, and trolls will always be with us… Nevertheless, sometimes people need anonymity to provide a critical space for their own growth and reflection. Some of my favorite bloggers either are or were anonymous. I was semi-anonymous for a while myself. I don’t think it’s always a problem, and find it healthy for those just growing their wings.

The second thing that blogs can do that Facebook can’t is to provide a forum for the thoughtful essay. The essay genre is perfect for blogs. Facebook, not so much. If we are going to engage in thoughtful, compelling reflection, we need more space to develop a substantive body of thought than Facebook and Twitter provide. The best route is, of course, integration: using Facebook and Twitter to circulate pull-quotes that lead readers into the blog. (Not I do this myself, of course, but I still think it’s the best way to go…) In the article referenced above, Scott+ linked to a Reflections edition focused entirely on New Media. As I scanned the table of contents, I didn’t recognize the name of one person as a long-standing blogger of note. To me, that’s a serious oversight. You have people writing on the new media—but you leave out one of the central platforms? Hello?

A New Publishing Model?

I’ve got a couple of writing projects I’ve been working on that may be developing into books. Bits and pieces of these have appeared here on the blog in various forms. One is a practical guide to the liturgical year, the other is a text on liturgical/lectionary spirituality. I pitched the first to Church Publishing a little while back; they said that they were interested but that the timing wasn’t right. Of course, now we hear that there’s been a great deal of change at Church Publishing including a significant reduction of staff and therefore capability.

What does this bode for liturgical works for an Anglican audience? I don’t know for sure.

If I had to guess, however, it would indicate that the chance of being published through Church Publishing is shrinking. Furthermore, I’d imagine that they’re more likely to pick up works that are in line with the national church’s liturgical direction as exemplified by Enriching Our Worship. Material like mine with plenteous references to earlier times and other church traditions (e.g. the Missals…) may not be what they’ll be interested in publishing.

Where, then, to go? Will LTP start picking up the slack? Or is it time to look for a new model?

I’ve been following with interest the Simple English Propers Project as reported by Chant Cafe, NLM, and the CMAA. They just completed a fund-raising campaign which raised money for the completion of the project; the resulting work will, if I understand it rightly, be distributed freely on-line and for the cost of printing at Lulu. This was acheived through the use of digital micro-patronage–collections of $5, $10, $20 and, I’d assume, some larger donations that when pooled made it a viable project.

Now, there’s a certain cachet lacking in that it’s not produced by an official press. For the purpose of, say, a typical academic resume, a self-published work of this sort would have the credibility of—well—a blog posting. And the resulting work may lack something in not having the eye of an experienced editor looking it over. On the other hand…it works. It’s a means for circulating ideas, and particularly ideas that lack the financial viability need in the modern publishing market.

I’ve been thinking a bit about the patronage idea recently. I’d actually been considering making a standing announcement that I’d be willing to code a traditional calendar version of the breviary that would accept the use of pre/non-Vatican II lectionaries like the American or English ’28 versions or even the classical prayer book forms that don’t work with the current post-Vatican II scheme if I could get a patron, parish, or group of parishes to underwrite it. But that hadn’t bubbled to the putting-it-into-practice phase.

So here’s the thing: traditional print publishers are having a hard time. This is bad for niche writing and publishing. Nevertheless, there’s still interest in niche materials. Patronage, particularly in the form of digital micro-patronage, may represent a way forward for the production of work for which an author/editor deserves compensation but which can then be freely/cheaply circulated.

Thoughts?

 

Web Thinking

Posting has been light due to the usual excuses—too many commitments, too little time. One of the current commitments is my appointment to the Communications Committee of our parish. The first order of business is quite clear: build an effective web page and get our Facebook presence to where it ought to be!

As a result, I’ve been thinking a bit about church websites. I find myself in what I believe to be a fairly typical situation. I’m a volunteer with some good technical knowledge but with a limited amount of time, no budget, and the clear sense that someone other than me (or perhaps in addition to me) will be needed to enter material into the site. Furthermore, related to cost constraints, the site is being hosted by the diocese. Inquiries to the web guy at the diocese concerning the space we’re allowed and whether there is any MySQL support have not been answered. So here’s where we are:

  • There is a space for us on a server (bonus!).
  • It’s safest to assume no MySQL support (bummer). This means that the usual content management systems (CMS) apps like Drupal or Joomla are not an option.
  • Since the server is running at least PHP5, there is native SQLite support which means that I can use a light-weight database (bonus!). I don’t think I’ll try a custom CMS just based on time and possible server demands, but if there are some basic dbase uses, I can leverage it.
  • Diocesan support seems limited: I asked about a set of recommendations or best-practices from the guy at the offices and, again, no response (bummer).
  • I know some great folks who’ve been through this exercise before (bonus!)—if the diocese can’t come up with or circulate a set of best practices, maybe we can.

Anybody have some thoughts they want to kick out, sites to link to or other suggestions?

 

Change

Things are changing info-wise. For those of you who actually visit my site and look at my page you’ll notice it’s in flux (again). I decided I just couldn’t live with the font combos any more… Those of you who read by rss feed won’t have noticed a thing, of course, but I’ve got a question for y’all: what rss reader do you use and why?

I learned today that my old stand-by bloglines is going belly-up and I need to find a new aggregator. I’m playing with Google reader but am confused by it at the moment–I’m still used to the Bloglines paradigm. Are there any aggregators out there that let you easily view comments?

As I mess with things the blogroll will be changing. It seems like I’ve been using and pruning it less and less recently and it no longer reflects what’s in my feed-reader. It’s due for an overhaul.

Astounding Moments through Modern Technology

I was doing some random reading around in Anglican liturgical texts contained in the Google Books archives. I came across this little gem. It is to be filed under: “Holy Crap! How totally random was that!”

Just after the title page in Vincent’s Chant-Book Companion to the Book of Common Prayer (1880) is a scrawled note by Harvard Library’s processing department when they received this particular volume on May 24, 1939. It reads “Estate of Rev. Charles Hutchins”…

As in, the Rev. Charles Hutchins who edited the Church Hymnal and, in 1897 produced the official authorized-by-General-Convention Church Psalter. Now I’m going to have to go back and look at Hutchin’s chant choices in a whole new light!

AKMA on the Open Source Textbook

AKMA writes today on the Open Source Textbook. This is an idea whose time has definitely come.

I don’t know about you, but I sometimes find myself wondering strange thoughts like, “Hmm. You know, one of these days I should buy a Qur’an and maybe a decent scholarly introduction to it just to read through it for myself… I wonder what version and introduction scholars of religion use?” Occasionally these thoughts makes it all the way into a Google box which then tends to devolve in aimless search and eventual wish-list maintenance at Amazon.

I don’t believe in any of my wild-hare moments that I’ve seen a basic wiki from the American Academy of Religion that covers that topic—but wouldn’t that make sense?

Closer to home, I’ve written the occasional piece here, often in response to requests from folks like Tony or Brandon on a basic plan of study for the Apocrypha & Pseudepigrapha or Basic Homiletics for Medievalists. And those things are fine for the readership here, but if somebody googles in, they have no idea if I know what I’m talking about or if I’m just spouting off.

AKMA is absolutely right about the textbook, but here’s my suggestion. It takes a hell of a lot of work to get a textbook up and going as he notes (and I concur having survived a couple from the research assistant side!), so why not utilize a practical intermediary step? Begin with a wiki. Have a general plan for what kinds of things you’d like to see, then start gathering bits—pieces like mine above. Or a quickie intro to who Gregory the Great was, what he wrote and why he matters. Or an overview on arguments over Gospel Chronology. Host the site at an identifiable location with its own built-in credentials. Like the Disseminary. Gather together people to contribute material. Encourage Graduate faculty to have their students send in some of their seminar prep assignments which, if they’re like mine, often consisted of an overview of a classic work or studied a particular angle of a classic problem. Once the very specific articles come in, more general pieces can be written that link to them and give an order, framework, and context to these snapshots. From those contributors, start gathering an informal editorial board. Then, as the project (hopefully) picks up steam, look at what’s there, what’s getting accessed, what works and start constructing the textbook from these pieces.

A place positioned like the Disseminary has the advantage of being able to go in two key directions: it can speak to academics and the university/seminary setting but also can occupy an identifiably confessional theological position (confessional in the broad sense…). It can provide a trustworthy resource for clergy and interested laypeople who want an informed opinion coming from a known theological position. (Would this represent two different resources or two portals that draw from roughly the same material but with different points of entry? Who knows…)

So that’s my proposal. Definitely open source textbooks. But let’s start with wiki that can be used as a stepping stone.

Programming Kalendars

Back when I first got serious about coding the Breviary—I guess it’s been a couple of years now—I talked to Fr. Chris about it and we discovered that we’d been doing some parallel development.

One of the first issues to tackle is how to figure out what “today” is liturgically. Both Fr. Chris and I approached it the same way. That is, we take “today’s” date as given to us either by the server or the local computer then a) run it through an algorithm to determine where you are in the temporal cycle, then b) compare it to a table to determine if there’s something sanctoral going on.

What I kept running up against was the problem of transference. There are certain circumstances when a feast must be moved from its original date. For instance, Major Feasts that fall in Holy Week and the Octave of Easter are transferred by order of occurrence into the Second Week of Easter (cf. BCP, p. 17). Too, Major Feasts that fall on Sundays outside of green seasons must be transferred; major feasts in green seasons may be transferred.

At one point, for the sake of moving forward, I threw up my hands and said enough… It seemed easier to simply create a table for the year and to work everything out ahead of time. This saved me the trouble of coding transference. What it created was:

  • more moving parts. Currently I have a kalendar code that must correspond to the same code in the collect table and the lectionary table. Some of the recent Scripture reading issues (like the one that occurred today…) was the result of a perfectly normal and legal kalendar code that didn’t synch up with the lectionary code (though it did with the collect code…).
  • setting aside a block of time at the right time to work out a year’s worth of dates. And ends of years tend to be busy times. I’m clear through the end of 2010, but if it goes further…?
  • A restriction to the dates that I have a coded table for. This is less an issue with the St Bede’s Breviary than some historical projects I have in mind. For instance—what if I wanted to know what liturgy was appointed for February 18th in 892? There’s no way I’m going to code tables for thousand year spans!!

As a result, I’m rethinking my decision. This won’t happen immediately—it may not happen for quite a while, actually—but I think the issue can be broken down more logically than I was considering before. So what would this look like?:

  • Get the date
  • Run the temporal algorithm and determine where we are in the year
  • Now–different pie (sets of kalendrical rules not pastries) have different rules for privileged octaves and when transferences happen. So, this is where each kalendar system will have to have its own algorithm. Within those, however, things may not be so bad. For instance for the ’79 BCP all I should have to do is add in a three step process:
    • Is today the Monday after Easter 2? If no, keep going, if yes, then see if we need St Joseph, the Annunciation,  St Mark, or SS Phillip & James.
    • Is today the Tuesday after Easter 2? If no, keep going, if yes, see if we need the Annunciation.
    • Is today a Monday not in a Green season? If no, keep going, if yes, see if yesterday was a major feast
  • Now check today in the Sanctoral cycle to see if anything needs to be celebrated.

I think there may be some real benefits to this approach—I’ll keep thinking about it…