The Charm of a List: From the Sumerians to Computerised Data Processing

214 Pages·2009·3.391 MB·English

The Charm of a List

The Charm of a List:
From the Sumerians
to Computerised Data Processing
Edited by
Lucie Doležalová
The Charm of a List: From the Sumerians to Computerised Data Processing,
Edited by Lucie Doležalová
This book first published 2009
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2009 by Lucie Doležalová and contributors
Cover image Design by Petr Doležal, using images from the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library
(Stift Kremsmünster, codex Cremifamensis no. 153 and 167, HMML project no. 142 and 156).
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-0237-9, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0237-6
TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures............................................................................................vii

Acknowledgements....................................................................................ix
The Potential and Limitations of Studying Lists (Introduction)
Lucie Doležalová (Prague).........................................................................1

Time in Lists and Lists in Time
Ivan M. Havel (Prague)...............................................................................9

A Science of Lists? Medieval Jewish Philosophers as List Makers
Tamás Visi (Olomouc)...............................................................................12
Lists in the Service of Legitimation in Central European Sources
János M. Bak (Budapest)...........................................................................34

Codex to Catacomb:
Uses and Functions of the Bishops’ List in Fourth-Century Rome
Marianne Sághy (Budapest)......................................................................46
The Catalogues of the Virtues in Hagiographic Texts:
Between Topics and History
Monique Goullet (Paris)...........................................................................66

Ad hoc Lists of Bernard Itier (1163-1225),
Librarian of St. Martial de Limoges
Lucie Doležalová (Prague).......................................................................80
Lists of Capital Sins in Late Medieval Hungary:
Medieval Traditions and Humanistic Principles
Farkas Gábor Kiss (Budapest).................................................................100

Lists of Emotions in Historical Context
Gyula Laczházi (Budapest).....................................................................116
vi Table of Contents

On Five Versified Mnemonic Catalogues of Popes, Emperors,
and Polish Kings from the Turn of the 15th and 16th Century
Rafa(cid:225) Wójcik (Pozna(cid:276))............................................................................127
Towards a Missionary Geography:
The Lists of Moldavian Catholic Parishes from the 17th and 18th
Centuries in the Correspondence of the Propaganda Fide
Missionaries
Rafael-Dorian Chelaru (Bucharest).........................................................139

The Stories Inventories Tell
Gerhard Jaritz (Krems and Budapest)......................................................160

Slot Machines, Graphs, and Radar Screens:
Prototyping List-based Literary Research Tools
Piotr Michura (Cracow and Edmonton)..................................................167

The Table of Contexts: A Dynamic Browsing Tool for Digitally
Encoded Texts
Stan Ruecker (Edmonton)........................................................................178
Contributors.............................................................................................190
Index........................................................................................................195
LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1: Devils in hell torturing the perpetrators of each deadly sin
(reproduced from: Werb(cid:280)czy, Decem divinorum…, D2v-3r)

Fig. 2: Detail of the description of the passions in Johannes Pósaházi’s
Philosophia naturalis

Fig. 3: Geographical model of Catholic parishes in Moldavia

Fig. 4: Physical map of Moldavia (17th-18th centuries)

Fig. 5: A part of the repetition graph

Fig. 6: A part of the repetition graph zoomed in

Fig. 7: A repetition graph

Fig. 8: The wall-sized display of the slot machine design

Fig. 9: The DialR design with a series of radar screens across the bottom
and a set of transparent sheets in the main area

Fig. 10: A sketch of a table of contexts for the narrative volumes to be
added to Orlando Project

Fig. 11a-c: Sketches of three panels from top to bottom. In the first panel,
a tagging expert chooses and renames (if necessary) a subset of all the
XML tags from the document(s) that will be used to structure the dynamic
table of contents. Those tags subsequently appear in the second panel in a
tag cloud, where the size of the item relates to its frequency of occurrence.
The third panel displays a table of contexts, with tags selected using the
tag cloud in green. Design by Milena Radzikowska

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This volume is based on papers delivered during a workshop entitled
The Potential and Limitations of a List held at the Center for Theoretical
Study in Prague, Czech Republic, November 6-8, 2007. The workshop and
the English language proofreading of this book received the kind support
of the Grant Agency of the Academy of the Sciences of the Czech
Republic as part of junior research grant no. KJB801970701 and from the
International Visegrad Fund as part of standard grant no. 12111. We are
much indebted to these institutions.
The Center for Theoretical Study is to be thanked for offering a pleas-
ant and inspiring environment during the workshop. Numerous most
useful corrections, remarks and suggestions were kindly provided by
Professor Peter Stotz from the Zurich University. Professor Francesco
Stella from the University of Siena and Greti Dinkova-Bruun from the
Pontifical Istitute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto also helped with the
text. Further gratitude goes to the Center for Medieval Studies in Bergen,
which offered a month-long visiting research fellowship to the editor so
that the book could be prepared in peace. Special thanks for help in this
process goes to Else Mundal and Jonas Wellendorf. English language
proofreading and copy-editing were carried out by Judith Rasson from the
Department of Medieval Studies at the Central European University in
Budapest.
The cover was designed by Petr Doležal with the use of images from
two fifteenth-century manuscripts from Stift Kremsmünster (Ms. 153 and
167). We are much grateful to the Kremsmünster monastery library and to
the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (who owns copyright for the
images, stored under project no. 142 and 156) for granting us free
copyright for this use.
All the contributors are thanked for their patience and cooperation
during the preparation of this volume. We hope very much that the present
book succeeds in offering a new and inspiring set of approaches to a topic
which has, as we believe and tried to show, a great deal to offer.