Dear Readers,
You may wonder why I have decided to post my Neuromorphosis story, when it has little to do with my work as an anachronist. It is because unlike most other things I have written, it describes what it is like to wake up at the University of Constantinople for the first time.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
Friday, July 31, 2009
Thursday, July 30, 2009
More of "The Neuromorphosis"
Dear Readers,
As promised, I have decided to offer more stories from my work in life and from my translation works. Here is more of "The Neuromorphosis", which I adapted from Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis."
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
As promised, I have decided to offer more stories from my work in life and from my translation works. Here is more of "The Neuromorphosis", which I adapted from Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis."
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
Horus turned to look out the window at the dull weather. He heard drops of rain strike the pane, which made him feel quite sad.
"How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense," he thought, but he could not fall back asleep, as he was used to roosting upright, but for some reason he no longer found this comfortable. He tried it a hundred times, and shut his eyes so that he wouldn't have to look at his awkward, bent, fleshy legs. He only stopped when he lost his balance and fell out of bed.
"Oh, God", he thought, "What will this do to my social standing? I can no longer fly as I used to!” He felt a slight itch up on his belly and pushed himself slowly up on his back towards the headboard so that he could lift his head better. He found where the itch was, and saw that it was covered with lots of little brown hairs which puzzled him. When he tried to feel the place with one of his legs he drew it quickly back because as soon as he touched it a cold shudder overcame him.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
On Zeitgeist
Dear Readers,
I think that the best way to describe what it is that I do is that I coagulate zeitgeist into a linguistically digestible form. We take raw data, we translate it, and then we squeeze it for meaning until we can say something about the era that it came from.
Or until we can say too much.
But one way or the other, what we are really trying to get at is the idea of what it felt like to live in the society of interest. Part of this is to really feel th text, to become part of its gestalt, and to completely immerse yourself within it. Another part is to completely immerse yourself in people. That's what zeitgeist really is; "crowdsourced" personality, and to study it we have to do something like collecting little snippets of everything and then trying to stitch them together.
I say all of this because in my quest to relate the experience of our department, I realise I've made a major ommission. We live our lives reading stories and understanding them. Reading my letters may get across what I am like, or some part of the feeling of my profession. Reading my stories, and the stories I translate, will give you the real experience. Expect to see more of them.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
I think that the best way to describe what it is that I do is that I coagulate zeitgeist into a linguistically digestible form. We take raw data, we translate it, and then we squeeze it for meaning until we can say something about the era that it came from.
Or until we can say too much.
But one way or the other, what we are really trying to get at is the idea of what it felt like to live in the society of interest. Part of this is to really feel th text, to become part of its gestalt, and to completely immerse yourself within it. Another part is to completely immerse yourself in people. That's what zeitgeist really is; "crowdsourced" personality, and to study it we have to do something like collecting little snippets of everything and then trying to stitch them together.
I say all of this because in my quest to relate the experience of our department, I realise I've made a major ommission. We live our lives reading stories and understanding them. Reading my letters may get across what I am like, or some part of the feeling of my profession. Reading my stories, and the stories I translate, will give you the real experience. Expect to see more of them.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Freedoms
Dear Readers,
I wrote a long-winded piece about geopolitical movements and how you exist on a precipice between freedom and authoritarianism at all times through your era.
Instead I will say this:
Ideas live forever. And we keep them safe.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
I wrote a long-winded piece about geopolitical movements and how you exist on a precipice between freedom and authoritarianism at all times through your era.
Instead I will say this:
Ideas live forever. And we keep them safe.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
Monday, July 27, 2009
Awakenings
Dear Readers,
Your weekend is almost at an end, and so I feel somewhat like a tender rumination on some strange topic.
I think what I will talk about is awakening here at the University. Everyone's awakening is slightly different, and we have to calibrate it based on the background culture that they died in. It's tricky, you know. An insufficiently progressive mind from a sufficiently backwards era can react very strongly, and negatively, to sudden awakening in the wrong era. Likewise, belief systems seem to have a strong effect on how people cope with it. The very religious are often quite distraught to find that they are not in the heaven they expected. Sorry, atheists, the surprise at finding anything at all doesn't mix well with you either. Agnostics, with low expectations, tend to be the easiest. Most everyone adjusts eventually anyway.
Unfortunately, life at the University isn't really an afterlife at all. What came before is only a copy, really, as well as what comes after. We are not quite who our memories tell us we are, or at least my friends who work on quantum philosophy tell me that we are not. It is a question that consumes some of our more isolated cohort here at the University, and one that I muse on when I am not translating a work or writing some piece.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
Your weekend is almost at an end, and so I feel somewhat like a tender rumination on some strange topic.
I think what I will talk about is awakening here at the University. Everyone's awakening is slightly different, and we have to calibrate it based on the background culture that they died in. It's tricky, you know. An insufficiently progressive mind from a sufficiently backwards era can react very strongly, and negatively, to sudden awakening in the wrong era. Likewise, belief systems seem to have a strong effect on how people cope with it. The very religious are often quite distraught to find that they are not in the heaven they expected. Sorry, atheists, the surprise at finding anything at all doesn't mix well with you either. Agnostics, with low expectations, tend to be the easiest. Most everyone adjusts eventually anyway.
Unfortunately, life at the University isn't really an afterlife at all. What came before is only a copy, really, as well as what comes after. We are not quite who our memories tell us we are, or at least my friends who work on quantum philosophy tell me that we are not. It is a question that consumes some of our more isolated cohort here at the University, and one that I muse on when I am not translating a work or writing some piece.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
Sunday, July 26, 2009
On Academic Presses
Dear Readers,
No doubt some of you are convinced I am fictional, given my references to unknown times and places, and my cheerful comfort with the idea of divergent time and a University that for your intents and purposes lost all importance between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Of course, this is not true. It is difficult to say I am a "real" person, given the manner by which I and my fellow faculty were conducted to the University of Constantinople, but it is easy to say that I am in fact real.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to convince peer-reviewed presses of the truth in my research. Recently, a fine fellow I found over on twitter (unmodern) posted an excellent list of time-normal contemp academic presses with twitter accounts. Perhaps I can use this strategy to ingratiate the Department's publications upon them. Or, of course, there is always the option of publishing my work in your time as if it were fictional. In that case, time would vindicate the truth of our augury.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
No doubt some of you are convinced I am fictional, given my references to unknown times and places, and my cheerful comfort with the idea of divergent time and a University that for your intents and purposes lost all importance between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Of course, this is not true. It is difficult to say I am a "real" person, given the manner by which I and my fellow faculty were conducted to the University of Constantinople, but it is easy to say that I am in fact real.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to convince peer-reviewed presses of the truth in my research. Recently, a fine fellow I found over on twitter (unmodern) posted an excellent list of time-normal contemp academic presses with twitter accounts. Perhaps I can use this strategy to ingratiate the Department's publications upon them. Or, of course, there is always the option of publishing my work in your time as if it were fictional. In that case, time would vindicate the truth of our augury.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Friday Seminar Series: Continuity
Dear Readers,
As is my custom on (your) Fridays, I have prepared a summary of one of my CHRN/AUG 100 lectures. This week, we'll talk about "Continuity." This one is a little bit shorter than most, because there is typically a discussion component to this class.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
Continuity
Last time, we talked about how to analyze sources, how to understand them in context, and how to take questionable sources and still obtain information from them. Continuity is a related topic. Now normally, "continuity" just means a consistent, unbroken quality of something. In the context of Anachronism, continuity means establishing such a connected, unbroken story.
The information that we get from the Augury Department comes in bursts, as we've talked about before. That's because augurs have a challenging job; the machinery, even when it's in its best repair, gives them short bursts of unconnected data. It is to their credit that they even manage to figure out what data is contemporaneous at all.
It falls to the anachronist, therefore, to figure out the order to the contemporaneous packages of data that he or she is given by the augur. This is one of the trickiest--and most controversial--parts of our work. If I have two data sets, it takes painstaking analysis to be certain that they are even from the same time stream, let alone to propose an order in which the records were produced. With the neo-Aegean work I have done lately, this comes through with special clarity. Those records speak of gods and men, and are the entertainment writings of a dark age maritime society. Likewise, many records from Earth's Ancient Greek period are entertainments from a dark age maritime society. An anachronist not paying sufficiently close attention might place a neo-Aegean dataset into the era and time stream of one of Earth's Ancient Greek societies, and not even realise his mistake until after publication. An embarassing situation, to be sure.
So how do we get around these kinds of pitfalls? The first and easiest way is to treat each dataset as if it is independent of every other dataset. Come up with names, unique identifiers, characteristics, and analyze everything in a vaccuum first. But do not stay in that vaccuum! Once you are sure that you understand the ins and outs of your original dataset, you have found the clues for the next step. These are subtle things, things about the past and future of your dataset. News articles are rare in the world of the anachronist, as only certain periods kept records of that quality. But there are still hints; past wars, past events. From those references, you stitch the pieces together.
There are pitfalls here too. It's important to remember that what you're saying is only a possible association. There is a lot of time out there, my students, and not all of it is interconnected. To say that one thing happened before another might not just be wrong, in that they happened simultaneously or in the reverse order, but might be wrong in that they are from completely divergent time streams! So, at first we speak only of potential "association" between datasets. The clever anachronist makes correlations and reveals those to the world. This is the second step of establishing a continuity: the construction of a map of correlations between your various sets of data.
The last step is to actually add an order to these events. To be able to do this is often a once-in-a-career event. It requires not only correlations, but correlations of events that can only have a cause-effect relationship. The simplest example is one where you have an account of a battle at a certain place in a certain time, then a record which makes reference to that battle, and to its outcome. Then you know that the battle was a branch point in the timestream in the first dataset, and the second dataset is the branch where a specific outcome occurred. Of course, it's much more complicated than that, but the example should show you the principle.
To re-cap, the steps are as follows:
1) Establish the data with reference to itself (internal consistency)
2) Establish correlations with other data sets (correlation)
3) Establish causality arguments (causality)
Remember those steps!
The final point I will make is that you have to be careful not to let your time-normal memories interfere with your work in establishing a continuity. The time-normal person you were is not the person you are, and those memories may be faulty, or the differences between your time stream and your data's time stream may be too subtle for you to notice. If you fall into that trap, then you're already lost, and this seminar was pointless for you. So watch out!
As is my custom on (your) Fridays, I have prepared a summary of one of my CHRN/AUG 100 lectures. This week, we'll talk about "Continuity." This one is a little bit shorter than most, because there is typically a discussion component to this class.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
Continuity
Last time, we talked about how to analyze sources, how to understand them in context, and how to take questionable sources and still obtain information from them. Continuity is a related topic. Now normally, "continuity" just means a consistent, unbroken quality of something. In the context of Anachronism, continuity means establishing such a connected, unbroken story.
The information that we get from the Augury Department comes in bursts, as we've talked about before. That's because augurs have a challenging job; the machinery, even when it's in its best repair, gives them short bursts of unconnected data. It is to their credit that they even manage to figure out what data is contemporaneous at all.
It falls to the anachronist, therefore, to figure out the order to the contemporaneous packages of data that he or she is given by the augur. This is one of the trickiest--and most controversial--parts of our work. If I have two data sets, it takes painstaking analysis to be certain that they are even from the same time stream, let alone to propose an order in which the records were produced. With the neo-Aegean work I have done lately, this comes through with special clarity. Those records speak of gods and men, and are the entertainment writings of a dark age maritime society. Likewise, many records from Earth's Ancient Greek period are entertainments from a dark age maritime society. An anachronist not paying sufficiently close attention might place a neo-Aegean dataset into the era and time stream of one of Earth's Ancient Greek societies, and not even realise his mistake until after publication. An embarassing situation, to be sure.
So how do we get around these kinds of pitfalls? The first and easiest way is to treat each dataset as if it is independent of every other dataset. Come up with names, unique identifiers, characteristics, and analyze everything in a vaccuum first. But do not stay in that vaccuum! Once you are sure that you understand the ins and outs of your original dataset, you have found the clues for the next step. These are subtle things, things about the past and future of your dataset. News articles are rare in the world of the anachronist, as only certain periods kept records of that quality. But there are still hints; past wars, past events. From those references, you stitch the pieces together.
There are pitfalls here too. It's important to remember that what you're saying is only a possible association. There is a lot of time out there, my students, and not all of it is interconnected. To say that one thing happened before another might not just be wrong, in that they happened simultaneously or in the reverse order, but might be wrong in that they are from completely divergent time streams! So, at first we speak only of potential "association" between datasets. The clever anachronist makes correlations and reveals those to the world. This is the second step of establishing a continuity: the construction of a map of correlations between your various sets of data.
The last step is to actually add an order to these events. To be able to do this is often a once-in-a-career event. It requires not only correlations, but correlations of events that can only have a cause-effect relationship. The simplest example is one where you have an account of a battle at a certain place in a certain time, then a record which makes reference to that battle, and to its outcome. Then you know that the battle was a branch point in the timestream in the first dataset, and the second dataset is the branch where a specific outcome occurred. Of course, it's much more complicated than that, but the example should show you the principle.
To re-cap, the steps are as follows:
1) Establish the data with reference to itself (internal consistency)
2) Establish correlations with other data sets (correlation)
3) Establish causality arguments (causality)
Remember those steps!
The final point I will make is that you have to be careful not to let your time-normal memories interfere with your work in establishing a continuity. The time-normal person you were is not the person you are, and those memories may be faulty, or the differences between your time stream and your data's time stream may be too subtle for you to notice. If you fall into that trap, then you're already lost, and this seminar was pointless for you. So watch out!
Friday, July 24, 2009
One of My Writings from My Life
Dear Readers,
In a fit of amusement, the Augury Department today presented me with something I recognized immediately: a short story that I wrote during my time-normal life. Unable to read my native language, they presented it unaware of this fact, but we had a good laugh over it once I saw the transcript. It is only a fragment, but it goes like this:
When I wrote this, I believe it was for some form of creative writing assignment, with the prompt that it must be an homage to some literary great, but with a fantastical twist. As you can see, I picked Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, but added something of Egyptian myth, as well as something else. Given the mythic undertones in my recent work on the neo-Aegean data, I could not resist sharing this fragment with you. Perhaps I shall reconstruct the full story for you sometime in the future.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
In a fit of amusement, the Augury Department today presented me with something I recognized immediately: a short story that I wrote during my time-normal life. Unable to read my native language, they presented it unaware of this fact, but we had a good laugh over it once I saw the transcript. It is only a fragment, but it goes like this:
One morning, when Horus woke from centuries of troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his fleshy back, and if he lifted his feathered head, he could see his belly, slightly domed and also covered in hair. His legs, pitifully thin compared with his once powerful frame, would have made him laugh if he saw them on someone else.
"What's happened to me?" he thought. It was no dream. His room, and its four familiar sandstone walls, stood around him as always. On the table, laid out, he could see his ankh, staff, and crown--Horus was a nobleman--and above it hung a picture that he recently took from an illustrated magazine and housed in a fine gilded frame. It showed a lady, her scales glinting in the sunlight, her upper arms clad in fur, and her lower two arms clasped around her tail.
When I wrote this, I believe it was for some form of creative writing assignment, with the prompt that it must be an homage to some literary great, but with a fantastical twist. As you can see, I picked Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, but added something of Egyptian myth, as well as something else. Given the mythic undertones in my recent work on the neo-Aegean data, I could not resist sharing this fragment with you. Perhaps I shall reconstruct the full story for you sometime in the future.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
A Primer on Neo-Aegean Society
Dear Readers,
My working life right now is consumed by study of these stories and myths from the neo-Aegean culture, and so in coming days you may expect to find more materials from that data set. Therefore, I thought you might like to hear a little of what we know so far.
Much remains unclear about this society. We can tell that it will be (I use the tense appropriate to your era) polytheistic and somewhat naive of science. Likewise, we're aware that it will not be on Earth, where your culture resides. From these details, I am willing to surmise that it will also have very different moral norms from the culture that you live in.
I place the dating for neo-Aegean culture more than a millennium into your future. This is not a precise figure, but it does give you a rough idea of how different their society will be. Furthermore, what evidence we have so far gives strong indication that their lifestyle and beliefs have roots in your Ancient Greek society. The University takes great interest in this, of course, because our Empire's forbears were Hellenistic, and so we may have found a resurgence of our ancestors, long in your future, around a distant star. I find this very exciting. The biggest question about them is: Why?
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
My working life right now is consumed by study of these stories and myths from the neo-Aegean culture, and so in coming days you may expect to find more materials from that data set. Therefore, I thought you might like to hear a little of what we know so far.
Much remains unclear about this society. We can tell that it will be (I use the tense appropriate to your era) polytheistic and somewhat naive of science. Likewise, we're aware that it will not be on Earth, where your culture resides. From these details, I am willing to surmise that it will also have very different moral norms from the culture that you live in.
I place the dating for neo-Aegean culture more than a millennium into your future. This is not a precise figure, but it does give you a rough idea of how different their society will be. Furthermore, what evidence we have so far gives strong indication that their lifestyle and beliefs have roots in your Ancient Greek society. The University takes great interest in this, of course, because our Empire's forbears were Hellenistic, and so we may have found a resurgence of our ancestors, long in your future, around a distant star. I find this very exciting. The biggest question about them is: Why?
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
My Fellow Faculty
Dear Readers,
I have decided that you might enjoy descriptions of my colleagues who are also full faculty in the Department of Anachronism. Our full faculty are among the best and brightest, taken from across history and for the study of humanity throughout time. Without further ado:
Dr. John Skylar, Flavius Petrus Sabbatius Iustinianus Memorial Professor of Anachronism: Well, this is me. For now I believe it is more prudent to avoid revealing details of my life.
Dr. George Sphrantzes, Gaius Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus Memorial Professor of Classical Anachronism: Dr. Sphrantzes is an "original," and comes to us shortly after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in your timeline. In time-normal life, he was a famous chronicler of the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire, and he and I both agree that his vilification of our Provost, Loukas Notaras, the last mega doux of the Empire, has held back his career at the University. I try to help out Sphrantzes wherever possible. Thankfully, his tenure, and our President, protect him.
Dr. Amelia Earhart, Professor: Dr. Earhart is one of the "newest" additions to our staff. She made quick strides to advance her education on arrival, and is an indispensible asset. Her unique understanding of adventures and adventurers leaves her especially well-suited to studies of periods of human expansion and exploration. As soon as another named chair opens, Dr. Earhart is destined for it.
Sir Francis Bacon, Professor: In life, Sir Bacon was the pioneer of what you would think of as "modern" science. He created the idea of rigorous experimentation, and his philosophies of truth laid the groundwork for your "modern" investigational science. At the University, he stays up to date on the evolution of philosophy after his death in an unfortunate chicken-freezing incident. He also examines different schema of philosophy from other time streams, and is our resident expert on source criticism and types of evidence.
Dr. Francesco Petrarca, aka Petrarch, Professor: Petrarch is a very singular human being, and our faculty here is augmented beyond description by his presence. His humanist philosophies helped to pull your time stream from the Middle Ages, and he was the first to refer to that period as a "dark age." He lived on the very edge of that age, before your world resurged in the Rennaisance. At the University, he busies himself with understanding the causes of dark ages and rennaisance-like events.
One of our main problems at the University is advancing female faculty; it has thus far been difficult to convince some of the other faculty from less accepting eras that a more egalitarian approach is prudent. Hopefully we will be able to remedy this situation.
And so, my friends, those are my closest colleagues and our Department's shining stars. I hope you enjoyed reading about them.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
I have decided that you might enjoy descriptions of my colleagues who are also full faculty in the Department of Anachronism. Our full faculty are among the best and brightest, taken from across history and for the study of humanity throughout time. Without further ado:
Dr. John Skylar, Flavius Petrus Sabbatius Iustinianus Memorial Professor of Anachronism: Well, this is me. For now I believe it is more prudent to avoid revealing details of my life.
Dr. George Sphrantzes, Gaius Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus Memorial Professor of Classical Anachronism: Dr. Sphrantzes is an "original," and comes to us shortly after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in your timeline. In time-normal life, he was a famous chronicler of the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire, and he and I both agree that his vilification of our Provost, Loukas Notaras, the last mega doux of the Empire, has held back his career at the University. I try to help out Sphrantzes wherever possible. Thankfully, his tenure, and our President, protect him.
Dr. Amelia Earhart, Professor: Dr. Earhart is one of the "newest" additions to our staff. She made quick strides to advance her education on arrival, and is an indispensible asset. Her unique understanding of adventures and adventurers leaves her especially well-suited to studies of periods of human expansion and exploration. As soon as another named chair opens, Dr. Earhart is destined for it.
Sir Francis Bacon, Professor: In life, Sir Bacon was the pioneer of what you would think of as "modern" science. He created the idea of rigorous experimentation, and his philosophies of truth laid the groundwork for your "modern" investigational science. At the University, he stays up to date on the evolution of philosophy after his death in an unfortunate chicken-freezing incident. He also examines different schema of philosophy from other time streams, and is our resident expert on source criticism and types of evidence.
Dr. Francesco Petrarca, aka Petrarch, Professor: Petrarch is a very singular human being, and our faculty here is augmented beyond description by his presence. His humanist philosophies helped to pull your time stream from the Middle Ages, and he was the first to refer to that period as a "dark age." He lived on the very edge of that age, before your world resurged in the Rennaisance. At the University, he busies himself with understanding the causes of dark ages and rennaisance-like events.
One of our main problems at the University is advancing female faculty; it has thus far been difficult to convince some of the other faculty from less accepting eras that a more egalitarian approach is prudent. Hopefully we will be able to remedy this situation.
And so, my friends, those are my closest colleagues and our Department's shining stars. I hope you enjoyed reading about them.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
Monday, July 20, 2009
Cross-cultural Evidence!
Dear Readers,
I report to you with excitement about the neo-Aegean data! I have found some references which indicate you are direct precursors of this society. It is truly beyond incredible to me that I can tell you something that may be in store for you. Of course, we've screened everything so no one may use it for their gain. And remember, just because the augur sees it, does not mean it shall definitely be so. Caveat emptor.
Below is a fragment of what seems to be a record of an oral story, from that data set. You will see immediately why I theorize that it originates from your culture.
"[beginning of tale is truncated] it was then that Mr. Bennett stared flatly at Heracles and said, "Sir, if your intentions toward my daughter are untoward in the least, you may find me capable of more than sitting in chairs and offering pithy comments."
Now, children, you know that gods, even demigods, do not often take well to criticism. However, in this case, Heracles respected Mr. Bennett as the worried father, and calmed his temper. He smiled widely, and gods'-fire could be seen arcing off of his teeth, "Mr. Bennett, I assure you that if anything ill should come to your daughter as a result of my advances, I will repay every damage to your family with an entire constellation of stars. I will work any labor you ask."
Mrs. Bennett giggled with delight, but the god could see that her husband was still less than pleased."
The manuscript ends there, however I suspect that somewhere in the rest of the data, I will find the end to this story. As soon as I can, I shall communicate it to you.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantintople
I report to you with excitement about the neo-Aegean data! I have found some references which indicate you are direct precursors of this society. It is truly beyond incredible to me that I can tell you something that may be in store for you. Of course, we've screened everything so no one may use it for their gain. And remember, just because the augur sees it, does not mean it shall definitely be so. Caveat emptor.
Below is a fragment of what seems to be a record of an oral story, from that data set. You will see immediately why I theorize that it originates from your culture.
"[beginning of tale is truncated] it was then that Mr. Bennett stared flatly at Heracles and said, "Sir, if your intentions toward my daughter are untoward in the least, you may find me capable of more than sitting in chairs and offering pithy comments."
Now, children, you know that gods, even demigods, do not often take well to criticism. However, in this case, Heracles respected Mr. Bennett as the worried father, and calmed his temper. He smiled widely, and gods'-fire could be seen arcing off of his teeth, "Mr. Bennett, I assure you that if anything ill should come to your daughter as a result of my advances, I will repay every damage to your family with an entire constellation of stars. I will work any labor you ask."
Mrs. Bennett giggled with delight, but the god could see that her husband was still less than pleased."
The manuscript ends there, however I suspect that somewhere in the rest of the data, I will find the end to this story. As soon as I can, I shall communicate it to you.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantintople
Sunday, July 19, 2009
My Work of Late
Dear Readers,
I thought it might interest you to have an idea of the two projects I have going right now. They are exciting, and you are bound to see some fragments of them appear here over the next couple of weeks.
The first relates to a civilization you will not be familiar with: the neo-Aegeans. Our knowledge of their culture is very limited, but it seems they are a future offshoot of your timeline. Their culture will be rich and vibrant, as will their technology. Still, their understanding of that technology will be quite a bit more limited than the brief oasis of enlightened thought that you and your contemporaries enjoy. From their time, the augurs collected a wide variety of stories and myths meant as entertainment. The first of these, in translation, should appear here soon. Professor Petrarch, who is an expert on Dark Ages, is collaborating with me on this project.
My second major research area relates to a timeline that soon diverges from yours, and so to provide too many details would be untoward. Suffice it to say that it is a diary from a 21st century New York City in severe disarray. The diary follows an investment banker as he struggles to survive in a world that changes every moment. I may show you snippets of it from time to time, but I must be careful not to divulge too much. This project is more limited, and so it is a solo effort.
I hope this brings you a deeper understanding of the complexities of our work. It is an exciting thing, to look from my point of view and see what has been, could have been, and yet might be. I endeavor to impart this feeling onto you.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
I thought it might interest you to have an idea of the two projects I have going right now. They are exciting, and you are bound to see some fragments of them appear here over the next couple of weeks.
The first relates to a civilization you will not be familiar with: the neo-Aegeans. Our knowledge of their culture is very limited, but it seems they are a future offshoot of your timeline. Their culture will be rich and vibrant, as will their technology. Still, their understanding of that technology will be quite a bit more limited than the brief oasis of enlightened thought that you and your contemporaries enjoy. From their time, the augurs collected a wide variety of stories and myths meant as entertainment. The first of these, in translation, should appear here soon. Professor Petrarch, who is an expert on Dark Ages, is collaborating with me on this project.
My second major research area relates to a timeline that soon diverges from yours, and so to provide too many details would be untoward. Suffice it to say that it is a diary from a 21st century New York City in severe disarray. The diary follows an investment banker as he struggles to survive in a world that changes every moment. I may show you snippets of it from time to time, but I must be careful not to divulge too much. This project is more limited, and so it is a solo effort.
I hope this brings you a deeper understanding of the complexities of our work. It is an exciting thing, to look from my point of view and see what has been, could have been, and yet might be. I endeavor to impart this feeling onto you.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
Friday, July 17, 2009
Friday Seminar Series: Source Types
Dear Readers,
I have decided to begin a series of (your) Friday "seminars" on our operations in the Department of Anachronism. These seminars will be summaries of several of my CHRN/AUG 100 lecture materials, designed for a more general audience. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy writing them. The first of these, below, is on the different sorts of sources we obtain from the Department of Augury.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
Source Types and Source Criticism
Introduction
In the course of anachronistic analysis, we find ourselves lonely spelunkers in vast caverns of augury data. While it is easy for the bewildered student of anachronism to view their augury collaborators as brutal taskmasters who drown us constantly in floods of arcane information, the seasoned researcher learns to value and appreciate this deluge of source material. The bridge between being lost in the signal and learning to be a commander of your data is built through an accurate understanding of source types and through appropriate source criticism. No one can even make their first steps in anachronism without a clear understanding of these concepts.
Types of Sources
Augury in its current form provides us with records in three major categories of media:
Due to the wide variety of technologies used for record-keeping across past and future time streams, I keep these categories as vague as possible. Fundamentally for our purposes, there is little difference between an audio recording originally on a compact disc when compared with a cassette tape or eight-track, in those time streams where the latter survived.
For each source type, different approaches to source criticism need to be taken.
Fact and Fiction
This topic is real "meat" of this seminar. Augury collects information without regard to its meaning, use, or truth. While this generates a lot of so-called "noise," it also gives us valuable information about the cultural context for our most valuable sources. Many innovative anachronists have surfed on waves of receipts and tax registers to important conclusions--and often, doctoral theses--about their specific eras of interest. Do not disregard a source merely because you do not like it! Even text from discarded food packaging can be useful in our pursuits.
More to the point, even fictional sources are useful. Take, for example, Dante's Inferno, from the early fourteenth century of the University's native time stream. It is unlikely that anyone will ever mistake this for a factual source, though there is some debate as to how Dante himself viewed it. Given energetic and timeline constraints, we cannot merely pluck Dante from his native time and ask him these questions. Instead, we have to use his fictional source and context clues within to determine how the author intended his work be received. This is one element of source criticism.
Another element involves differentiating fact from fiction when there is an ambiguous case. Consider, for instance, the 20th century American time stream film The Ten Commandments. Equal parts religious visual record and audio record, we have never obtained a full copy of it. Did the American contemporaries truly believe that Charlton Heston was the savior of the Hebrews, and that his blessed rifle brought them to freedom? Essentially the question is, "Does this record represent history, or historical fiction, to its contemporaries?" Debate on this particular source, especially on the breaks in its audio, continues, and it is possible that we will not know the full answer until our Augurs have retrieved a full, unbroken copy of the film.
Now, of course, the previous example, if we knew the answer to our questions, would not tell us anything about Egyptians, but instead about 20th century American conceptions of the past. We can simply use Augury to determine that the ancient Egyptians lacked firearms technology, for example, or to establish historicity for the claims of miracles. Knowing how the contemporaries of a source viewed it, however, tells us what is valued by their culture. If The Ten Commandments is a rousing historical piece, then it tells us of the 20th century Americans' love of their right to bear arms and their love of religion. Even though there are mild variations within the 20th century American time stream, we can still say that across individual veins of that time stream, some reflection of these feelings were true.
If the source is fictional, it becomes a significantly more complicated matter. Is the source then comedic? Heroic? The anachronist must use his or her best judgment combined with strong, specific source evidence in order to determine the answers to these questions. That is something that cannot be taught in only a few words. The judgment necessary is something cultivated over the course of an anachronist's entire career, honed and sharpened only with experience and learning by example. Hopefully this brief introduction gives you an understanding of the tricky situations that we encounter in our studies of time in and out of context.
I have decided to begin a series of (your) Friday "seminars" on our operations in the Department of Anachronism. These seminars will be summaries of several of my CHRN/AUG 100 lecture materials, designed for a more general audience. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy writing them. The first of these, below, is on the different sorts of sources we obtain from the Department of Augury.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
Source Types and Source Criticism
Introduction
In the course of anachronistic analysis, we find ourselves lonely spelunkers in vast caverns of augury data. While it is easy for the bewildered student of anachronism to view their augury collaborators as brutal taskmasters who drown us constantly in floods of arcane information, the seasoned researcher learns to value and appreciate this deluge of source material. The bridge between being lost in the signal and learning to be a commander of your data is built through an accurate understanding of source types and through appropriate source criticism. No one can even make their first steps in anachronism without a clear understanding of these concepts.
Types of Sources
Augury in its current form provides us with records in three major categories of media:
- Audio
- Visual
- Written/Printed
Due to the wide variety of technologies used for record-keeping across past and future time streams, I keep these categories as vague as possible. Fundamentally for our purposes, there is little difference between an audio recording originally on a compact disc when compared with a cassette tape or eight-track, in those time streams where the latter survived.
For each source type, different approaches to source criticism need to be taken.
Fact and Fiction
This topic is real "meat" of this seminar. Augury collects information without regard to its meaning, use, or truth. While this generates a lot of so-called "noise," it also gives us valuable information about the cultural context for our most valuable sources. Many innovative anachronists have surfed on waves of receipts and tax registers to important conclusions--and often, doctoral theses--about their specific eras of interest. Do not disregard a source merely because you do not like it! Even text from discarded food packaging can be useful in our pursuits.
More to the point, even fictional sources are useful. Take, for example, Dante's Inferno, from the early fourteenth century of the University's native time stream. It is unlikely that anyone will ever mistake this for a factual source, though there is some debate as to how Dante himself viewed it. Given energetic and timeline constraints, we cannot merely pluck Dante from his native time and ask him these questions. Instead, we have to use his fictional source and context clues within to determine how the author intended his work be received. This is one element of source criticism.
Another element involves differentiating fact from fiction when there is an ambiguous case. Consider, for instance, the 20th century American time stream film The Ten Commandments. Equal parts religious visual record and audio record, we have never obtained a full copy of it. Did the American contemporaries truly believe that Charlton Heston was the savior of the Hebrews, and that his blessed rifle brought them to freedom? Essentially the question is, "Does this record represent history, or historical fiction, to its contemporaries?" Debate on this particular source, especially on the breaks in its audio, continues, and it is possible that we will not know the full answer until our Augurs have retrieved a full, unbroken copy of the film.
Now, of course, the previous example, if we knew the answer to our questions, would not tell us anything about Egyptians, but instead about 20th century American conceptions of the past. We can simply use Augury to determine that the ancient Egyptians lacked firearms technology, for example, or to establish historicity for the claims of miracles. Knowing how the contemporaries of a source viewed it, however, tells us what is valued by their culture. If The Ten Commandments is a rousing historical piece, then it tells us of the 20th century Americans' love of their right to bear arms and their love of religion. Even though there are mild variations within the 20th century American time stream, we can still say that across individual veins of that time stream, some reflection of these feelings were true.
If the source is fictional, it becomes a significantly more complicated matter. Is the source then comedic? Heroic? The anachronist must use his or her best judgment combined with strong, specific source evidence in order to determine the answers to these questions. That is something that cannot be taught in only a few words. The judgment necessary is something cultivated over the course of an anachronist's entire career, honed and sharpened only with experience and learning by example. Hopefully this brief introduction gives you an understanding of the tricky situations that we encounter in our studies of time in and out of context.
2009 Earth-normal Distance Course Offerings
Dear Students,
Without further delay, here are the courses offered for you and your contemporaries for this semester. Remember, enrollment in our distance education offerings is by invitation only. I receive too many messages asking where prospective students can find an application. If you are to be offered admission, no application is necessary. You will know.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
CHRN/AUG 100 Introduction to Anachronistic Studies. Central to University operations and research is the collection of data from across various eras and timelines. While the Department of Augury has made great strides with data quality, it still remains that Anachronists are needed to interpret any information collected. The course will cover the basics of data collection, as well as the pitfalls of different types of source material. Special focus will be placed on the differentiation of contemporary fact from fiction. Instructors: Skylar, Bacon Prerequisites: None.
CHRN/AUG 129 Before the Fall. Typically, our augury data becomes more difficult to collect and interpret during times of major social upheaval. This problem has led to analysis techniques wherein Anachronists must look at information from even centuries prior to a noisy period in order to determine the causes of upheaval. This course focuses on the techniques necessary to identify key markers of social change and to correlate them to “noisy” data. The final three weeks of the course applies the techniques learned in a case study of one of the collapse scenarios of Earth’s Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire. Instructor: Sphrantzes Prerequisites: CHRN/AUG 100 and permission from Provost Notaras. Students must not be late Byzantine contemporaries. Enrollment limited to 10 students.
CHRN 136 Exploration. Human exploration is a common motif across many of the different eras we study in the Department of Anachronism. This course focuses on general patterns of exploration and different cultural and economic patterns that lay the groundwork for eras of exploration. Most of the course deals with Earth-based exploration, though some attention will be given to other planetary systems. Instructor: Earhart. Prerequisites: CHRN/AUG 100 or instructor’s permission. Enrollment is limited to 50 students.
CHRN/AUG 205 Truth from Time Streams. Augury provides us with data that is spaced out across different times and timelines, often with little contextual information to allow us to identify the time, timeline, or location that events take place. This course focuses on teaching students the context clues necessary to glean these facts from snippets of augury data. Special attention is also devoted to determining the difference between necessary and contingent truths in different eras and timelines. Instructor: Bacon Prerequisites: CHRN/AUG 100. Familiarity with materialist, positivist, pragmatist, and postmodern philosophy is recommended.
CHRN 226 Dark Ages. Augury allows us to know the difference between the two types of Dark Ages; ones where records were lost or decayed, and those where records were never kept. This course explores, through specific context examples, cultural markers of certain types of Dark Ages, and how we can correlate later data from a given time stream to determine if our period of interest will be viewed as a Dark Age by the progeny of its contemporaries. The course involves an independent study component, led by Dr. Skylar, with focus on the neo-Aegean Dark Age. Instructor: Petrarch. Prerequisites: CHRN/AUG 100, CHRN/AUG 205
Without further delay, here are the courses offered for you and your contemporaries for this semester. Remember, enrollment in our distance education offerings is by invitation only. I receive too many messages asking where prospective students can find an application. If you are to be offered admission, no application is necessary. You will know.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
CHRN/AUG 100 Introduction to Anachronistic Studies. Central to University operations and research is the collection of data from across various eras and timelines. While the Department of Augury has made great strides with data quality, it still remains that Anachronists are needed to interpret any information collected. The course will cover the basics of data collection, as well as the pitfalls of different types of source material. Special focus will be placed on the differentiation of contemporary fact from fiction. Instructors: Skylar, Bacon Prerequisites: None.
CHRN/AUG 129 Before the Fall. Typically, our augury data becomes more difficult to collect and interpret during times of major social upheaval. This problem has led to analysis techniques wherein Anachronists must look at information from even centuries prior to a noisy period in order to determine the causes of upheaval. This course focuses on the techniques necessary to identify key markers of social change and to correlate them to “noisy” data. The final three weeks of the course applies the techniques learned in a case study of one of the collapse scenarios of Earth’s Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire. Instructor: Sphrantzes Prerequisites: CHRN/AUG 100 and permission from Provost Notaras. Students must not be late Byzantine contemporaries. Enrollment limited to 10 students.
CHRN 136 Exploration. Human exploration is a common motif across many of the different eras we study in the Department of Anachronism. This course focuses on general patterns of exploration and different cultural and economic patterns that lay the groundwork for eras of exploration. Most of the course deals with Earth-based exploration, though some attention will be given to other planetary systems. Instructor: Earhart. Prerequisites: CHRN/AUG 100 or instructor’s permission. Enrollment is limited to 50 students.
CHRN/AUG 205 Truth from Time Streams. Augury provides us with data that is spaced out across different times and timelines, often with little contextual information to allow us to identify the time, timeline, or location that events take place. This course focuses on teaching students the context clues necessary to glean these facts from snippets of augury data. Special attention is also devoted to determining the difference between necessary and contingent truths in different eras and timelines. Instructor: Bacon Prerequisites: CHRN/AUG 100. Familiarity with materialist, positivist, pragmatist, and postmodern philosophy is recommended.
CHRN 226 Dark Ages. Augury allows us to know the difference between the two types of Dark Ages; ones where records were lost or decayed, and those where records were never kept. This course explores, through specific context examples, cultural markers of certain types of Dark Ages, and how we can correlate later data from a given time stream to determine if our period of interest will be viewed as a Dark Age by the progeny of its contemporaries. The course involves an independent study component, led by Dr. Skylar, with focus on the neo-Aegean Dark Age. Instructor: Petrarch. Prerequisites: CHRN/AUG 100, CHRN/AUG 205
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Courselist will be delayed
Dear Students,
Unfortunately due to an ongoing dispute that really should have been solved in the time-normal fifteenth century, the release of the Department's course list will be delayed relative to the full University of Constantinople catalog. I apologize for this, and I assure you that problems such as this will not plague our time-normal distance education program in the future. Hopefully the aforementioned list will appear here during the next window for communication to your era.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
Unfortunately due to an ongoing dispute that really should have been solved in the time-normal fifteenth century, the release of the Department's course list will be delayed relative to the full University of Constantinople catalog. I apologize for this, and I assure you that problems such as this will not plague our time-normal distance education program in the future. Hopefully the aforementioned list will appear here during the next window for communication to your era.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
New Developments
The Department of Anachronism has elected, by unanimous faculty vote, to begin reporting on our activities to various worlds at large.
Each time period will be contacted via a different, appropriate method. This venue was considered ideal for you and your contemporaries.
Check back for updates on the Department's ongoing projects, provided exclusively to you by our Chairman, Dr. John Skylar.
Each time period will be contacted via a different, appropriate method. This venue was considered ideal for you and your contemporaries.
Check back for updates on the Department's ongoing projects, provided exclusively to you by our Chairman, Dr. John Skylar.
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