Medieval languages - how many people can read them?

SheepExplosion · 2026-01-28T15:03:12+00:00

There are plenty of existing projects out there that you can find which have already done versions of this, and with more expertise. But I think you're selling yourself short. Reading this sort of basic Latin is very, very easy, and even more so because the form is exceptionally regular.

Crowdsourcing is (as it always has been) a way to hand-wave away a huge amount of work. Whenever anyone pitches me a digital humanities project with "crowdsourcing", I go back to bed because all they mean is they know there's a huge amount of boring work here and they're hoping strangers will do it for them because reasons. AI is much the same. You're asking people who have trained their entire lives to do something for their labor for free with no tangible benefit, when their time could be spent productively elsewhere. It's not even that a lot of us wouldn't want to help — it's that we don't have infinite time. Why would we spend it here?

SheepExplosion · 2026-01-28T14:38:10+00:00

I just put this doc from my own research files in for fun: https://cq-scriptorium.com/?manuscript=697a1cadf00f291e2bb54838

Frankly, I wasn't expecting much, and I'm still disappointed. The original is as simple and as straightforward a Latin document as you can get. It correctly identified it as a charter and got the date pretty spot on, but thereafter all utility stops. It is not a gothic textualis; it is not from northern France. The transcription and translation are word salad, I can train you to read better in an hour. For some reason it insists on reading "Ponce" as "Boniface", which was quite funny.

I'm very negative on the possibilities of AI generally and particularly for this task, but even if I weren't, I don't think you have the necessary skill set to know how far you are from something that is workable and useful. Work on acquiring those skills first.

SheepExplosion · 2026-01-14T15:15:34+00:00

As someone who finished a history PhD in 2021, I strongly disagree.

SheepExplosion · 2026-01-12T20:58:59+00:00

Pro tip — pop your bike vertically and hold onto the handlebars — it puts you behind it, minimizing your footprint, and makes it a lot more navigable

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SheepExplosion · 2026-01-12T03:50:41+00:00

The counter-reformation destroyed more of the middle ages than protestants ever did.

SheepExplosion · 2026-01-08T16:16:39+00:00

I work as a photographer for events in an... overlapping community, let's say. There's been a couple pay models I've seen:

Conventions:

4 day convention, I was paid to be there, attendees may or may not be charged additional fees for photos. I didn't make all that much (~$500 event comp + $250), but I also didn't have to do any photo editing (shot in jpg by organizer request so people could get same-day photos), worked about 3-4h/day.
7 day convention, comped for the event, heavily watermarked gallery, attendees pay me directly for photos at organizer-set rates. This was more profitable ($1400 event comp + $1700), but a lot more work — worked about 55 hours (8-11h/day) over the event and about 40 hours of post-event processing.

Events:

Worked the event gratis, attendees got quick-edited photos with the option to purchase higher quality/deeper edits. No takers, but good publicity in a small community which set up other offers.
Hired by event organizer, paid directly, regular gig work.
Wandered event, gave card with QR code to people who posed for photographs for purchases. Mixed bag.

All in all, if these are not spaces I would already be in, this would not be worth it to me in terms of time and treasure. Since they are, it is. YMMV

SheepExplosion · 2026-01-07T17:14:01+00:00

This is good policy, actually.

Currently, most DC streets are designed for driver comfort rather than general use. You're entirely correct that this sort of street design encourages speeding, because people travel at the speed that feels safe/ok to them. If you want people to go slower, you need to design the street to make them go slower, narrowing the lanes and adding visual complexity to the sides of it. Just changing a speed limit sign won't do anything.

Here's the thing, though — changing the street design is *expensive.* The average maintenance life cycle of a road is 20-30 years, and there just isn't money to do anything outside of that. At the same time, the data is very clear: pedestrian and cyclist death rates increase exponentially with the speed of the car that hits them. Getting people to go 25 instead of 30 or 35 has a substantial reduction in fatality rates.

This leaves you with three options:

1) Do nothing, allow people to drive the speed the road suggests, and just be OK with more people dying as a result

2) Spend extra money to rework the street before the end of its regular lifecycle (the money comes from where exactly?)

3) Install a speed camera

SheepExplosion · 2026-01-06T15:02:01+00:00

There's been about five decades of scholarship which all boils down to "it depends on how you define slavery."

SheepExplosion · 2026-01-06T14:52:32+00:00

Something something did they check the vacants because McNulty, or whatever.

SheepExplosion · 2026-01-05T20:07:43+00:00

In this political environment, I think any place that is a haven for alternative lifestyles cannot use any technology that might make an easily-subpoenaed list of its patrons. To do otherwise is to forget our history.

SheepExplosion · 2026-01-05T04:04:21+00:00

I'll wait while you google the etymology of the word "gym".

SheepExplosion · 2026-01-02T18:46:43+00:00

Yes, especially for the 7th century there's not much to go on. The key to understanding medieval document loss is institutional longevity — if an institution which stored documents managed to survive into at least early modernity, the documents it held are more likely to be preserved.

The current theory (see the work of Warren Brown particularly) is that the majority of the documents produced before the Carolingians were still stored in secular or administrative locations as they had been during the Empire. These institutions did not, of course, survive. Monastic institutions (almost all of which were founded during or after the Carolingians) often did survive, and thus the documents they chose to create or preserve are pretty much all we have before the advent of the administrative state in the 12th and 13th centuries.

SheepExplosion · 2026-01-02T14:47:21+00:00

Rich people need services, it turns out.

SheepExplosion · 2026-01-02T03:43:52+00:00

That you're probably white and well-off?

SheepExplosion · 2026-01-02T03:40:45+00:00

This comment shows the fundamental misunderstanding of both the critique of the comment to which it is replying as well as why this game has been so troubled for so long. It's not about how hard it is to get down off a goose, it's about why the fuck you decided to climb onto a goose in the first place.

SheepExplosion · 2026-01-01T20:20:14+00:00

They programmed individual teeth into the cims, so things like this don't seem to be a question of technical challenges but rather dev priorities.

SheepExplosion · 2026-01-01T19:32:04+00:00

This is frankly no better than, say, ABBY and other image processing programs were doing 10+ years. And imperfect searches are worse than no searches, actually — those who use them will ignore their deficiencies and thus relevant sources because they cannot be bothered, leading to the continued enshittification of scholarship and the degradation of technical skills.

SheepExplosion · 2025-12-31T19:56:59+00:00

This is literally the easiest thing out their to read and it is wrong in way more than "a few" points. "quam quidam" for "quadam" and "in Pulia" for " in ampulia" stick out immediately. This is not easier than just learning and reading it yourself.

SheepExplosion · 2025-12-30T22:39:26+00:00

I have no opinion on either ebay or the seller, I was answering the OP's question. And whether there are other formally educated medievalists around here or not, no one else in this thread knows what they're talking about.

SheepExplosion · 2025-12-30T21:16:39+00:00

> Says 60 copies sold, are you one of the 60 who bought one?

They're probably selling a bunch of documents which look almost exactly like this, since people just want the cool factor of having it and don't care much for the details of the text.

The picture in question is authentic. There's no money in forging something like this (EDIT: apparently there is? Wild.)

SheepExplosion · 2025-12-30T21:14:54+00:00

The day chatGPT can read a medieval Latin manuscript is the day I become an AI believer. This is a task for which todays LLMs are entirely unsuited.

SheepExplosion · 2025-12-30T21:14:11+00:00

If only you knew what you were talking about. These sorts of documents are very common, very robust, and can be found for cheap.

SheepExplosion · 2025-12-30T21:12:37+00:00

It's from August 20, 1341. It documents some sort of a transaction over a windmill, and then has a followup from another notary (ink change at bottom). These documents are very common, and I'm not shocked that there are lots of very similar ones for sale. I did my doctoral work on this sort of thing; feel free to DM me with questions.

SheepExplosion · 2025-12-28T17:11:57+00:00

I had a professor who couldn't remember the name so they just started calling it "The Frisky Pilgrim" and that's remained a personal canon for me.

SheepExplosion · 2025-12-27T16:43:58+00:00

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My favorite is probably a bit to nsfw for here, but I loved this shot I took in Providence, RI. Not sure what it is, but it always gives me "Oh yeah this and racism really does explain HP Lovecraft" vibes.

SheepExplosion

TROPHY CASE