facing pages as responses: a Curl e-book alternative for Le Messager européen

In 1987 POL published a book in which the first chapter has many blank pages.

This is not due to illustrations, litigation or censorship: the text on the left-hand (even-numbered) pages from 16 through 70 (with the interesting exceptions of pages 15 and 72) are those of Heidegger as "interviewed" by Der Spiegel.

The right-hand pages (odd-numbered) 17 through 71 (and including 72), are the responses by Jan Patočka.

I will try to present this in a Curl format if I am able to obtain permission.

The book, Le Messager européen, is prefaced by Alain Finkielkraut.

My Curl e-book version would have alternative or even multiple responses - perhaps keyed to topics.

Pages which immediately suggest themselves for the right-pages are those of Hugo Ott or Victor Farias.

But there are also the pages of dissent: those of the Heideggerian faithful, the inspired, the devoted and the merely sympathetic.

Curl markup: marginal glosses for Galileo's Starry Messenger

Over at http://phil.aule-browser.com/ there is now a link to a Curl markup of Galileo's Starry Messenger (or Sidereal Messenger or Sidereus Nuncius) of 1610.

The onerous task was restoring the marginal glosses. When the text of a volume at Wellesley College was scanned into Google Books, the resulting PDF is quite readable but slow to load and includes a text by Kepler.  When text is extracted from the PDF, the result is a terrible mess due to the scanning of the marginalia.

The glosses are now restored using Curl markup with a custom definition of a text procedure {gloss } but they are not yet located in the margins next to the related text: they are in the margin immediately before the text.

Links to a few of the most significant glosses are at the top of the first page

The Curl runtime browser plugin (the Surge RTE) is required to view Galileo's text.  The illustrations will be restored at a later date.

Marginalia and Text: glosses, scholia and annotations

I was struck yesterday by a publisher's decision to place the chapter titles on each page of a hardcover book in the margins - running vertically.  While this permits both margins and a few more lines per page, it almost prevents marginal notes. Running lines along the margins are still fine.  Are they trying to impede handy scanning of books (marginal text plays havoc with rapid electronic scanning of text by-the-page.)

What has become less common is a summation of each paragraph or section in the margin (often in a smaller font) as scholia or glosses.  Somewhat comparable are the Table of Contents with glosses such as found in Art and Its Objects by Wollheim.

Enabling annotation in e-book readers with a virtual keyboard are one thing: being able to assign a text to students with selectable levels of annotation is another. For some ebook readers, text highlighting may suffice.

Moodle has realized the importance of notes/journaling and replaced its limited journal module with its blog module.

Philosophy texts in HTML versus Curl

Over at phil.aule-browser.com I have placed an exerpt from Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition side-by-side with an exerpt from Martin Heidegger's "Die Frage nach der Technik" which I find in the GA edition of Vortraege u. Aufsaetze.

This opposition is unsatisfactory is so very many respects: first, the lack of context. Secondly, the lack of immediate links to the contexts of the exerpts, not to mention translations.  And why this selection?  The parallel citations of Heisenberg are far more striking - suggesting to me that, although the volume is listed as in Arendt's personal library at the time of her death, she may have relied on the Heidegger citations.

Repeatedly, at critical junctures in essays by Arendt, I find turns of phrase which strike me immediately as both regrettable and Heideggerian.  Time and again her polemical tone is his - the same chord, if you will.

That he cites no one for his great insights in his quote has a frightful parallel in Arendt (compare Jaspers earliest letters to her as a student.)

Two related posts elsewhere are

• balderdash-in-arendt-human-condition
• hubris-and-nested-markup-for-text-in.html

More detailed presentations of philosophy text can be found at phil.aule-browser.com

Philosophy text in Curl markup

Over at aule-browser.com I have placed a German translation from 1909 of Henri Bergson's "Introduction à la Métaphysique" as "Einführung in die Metaphysik"

I will add a header page in HTML to select the viewing options for the text as Curl (http://www.curl.com/) markup.

Options should include pagination of translation, pagination of original, German italics, selected French equivalents and other links, comments and annotations as alternatives to the "plain text".

The same title was used by Heidegger in 1935 and the German version of the Bergson essay is interesting to compare and contrast to the pivotal Heidegger text.

I have not yet determined whether the German translation was in Heidegger's personal library.

I have tried to moot some of the issues related to markup over at http://eclectic-pencil.blogspot.com/2010/05/hubris-and-nested-markup-for-text-in.html

Curl International to merge with Sumisho (SCS)

A news item in Japanese at http://curlap.com/ reports that at their April 28, 2010 annual meeting, Sumisho Computer Systems Corporation (SCS) announced that Curl International their wholly owned subsidiary, would merge into SCS.

Curl Corporation and Curl International were formed in 2004 following the Sumisho acquisition of the MIT spin-off Curl.

While tech journalists have been noting the issues between Apple and Adobe over the use of Flash, there tends to be little mention in the press of Curl as an alternative to Flash + HTML + Javascript + CSS.

Curl was developed at MIT as a web content language and is now used almost exclusively by Japanese corporate clients of Sumisho. An exception is the widespread use of Curl by corporate clients of Paisley, now owned by Reuters.

In 2009, Curl Corporation in Cambridge MA had relocated from the square at MIT to few blocks away and then had down-sized further late in the year. Curl Corporation should be unaffected by the merger.

Curl 7.0 was the last release of the Curl environment; several open-source Curl projects are hosted at sourceforge.net and code.google. SCS's focus on corporate needs may help boost work on the Curl external library project which would help site-specific web browsers in wrapping Apple WebKit, for example.

As an alternative to HTML + Javascript + CSS, the notable requirement for Curl, like Flash, Air or Silverlight, is the Curl runtime environment - either for desktop or as a web browser plugin. Curl had not developed a server-side solution and had failed to protect their trademark (Curl is often confused with haxx.se cURL.)

In the USA the corporate office of SCS in New York.