THE OPEN INTERNET. As I will explain below, this Latin sundial project is possible thanks to the content that people have freely shared on the open Internet, and in turn I will be giving back the content that I create, sharing it on the open Internet and hoping to make my discoveries useful to others. A lack of openness, I would argue, is the biggest problem with Janux and its so-called open courses: even if the Janux software did work as promised, I would still find it extremely frustrating to be creating content inside a closed space, content which few people (if any) are likely to see.
To give a more concrete sense of just what openness means to my sundial project, let me explain how the project evolved... and that begins with a clock tower in the town of Conegliano, Italy.
PUBLIC SPACE. Back in what must have been 1998 or so, I was a grad student studying at the University of Siena in Italy. Alberto, one of the other grad students, kindly invited me to come visit him at his home in Conegliano, north of Venice. I had never been to that part of Italy before, and I accepted with pleasure. As we strolled around the town, Alberto pointed out to me the motto on the clock tower of the campanile: VULNERANT OMNES, ULTIMA NECAT (They all wound; the last one kills). He asked me if I got it, and I had to confess that I did not; I had never paid attention to the inscriptions on clocks and sundials before, so the riddling language was new to me. The feminine gender of ultima in Latin is the clue: "they" are the "hours" (Latin horae): VULNERANT OMNES (HORAE), ULTIMA (HORA) NECAT. A "memento mori" message, perfect for a clock. And it is the ultimate public domain: a public monument, there for all to read and learn from... those who know the secret code anyway!
(Photo by pink floyd)
BLOGS AND FREE BOOKS. In the 15 years or so since I saw that clock, I have spent a lot of time studying Latin proverbs and mottoes (see my Latin blog, Bestiaria Latina), and the mottoes found on sundials have been among my special favorites. Like the motto on that clock, the mottoes on sundials are often enigmatic while also expressing profound notions about life and the passage of time. For my Latin Via Proverbs book (free PDF here), I was able to harvest a great many wonderful Latin sundial mottoes from this public domain book: The Book of Sun-dials by Mrs. Alfred Gatty [Margaret Scott Gatty] which you can see presented very nicely in the Celebration of Women Writers project, one of Mark Ockerbloom's Digital Library projects at the University of Pennsylvania.
SOCIAL BOOKMARKING. Fast forward to the Janux History of Science class, 2014. In a video about Stonehenge for the first week, Kerry Magruder, our instructor, discussed various theories of how the ancient builders of Stonehenge might have used the stones to observe the path of the sun in the sky and other celestial phenomena. That got me thinking about sundials, so for the "online resource" assignment during that first week, I collected sundial materials and bookmarked those sundial resources with Diigo. That, I thought, would be a good way to share those resources with others, while also introducing other people in the class to the use of Diigo. Nobody in the class except for the instructor read my post, though, so I did not really accomplish much in terms of the class, but I also published the assignment as a post here in this blog - Week 1 Online Resource: Sundials - where perhaps it might be read by others. Meanwhile, those Diigo links will be useful to me, and possibly to others too, as I continue to develop the sundial project.
BLOGGING SUNDIAL IMAGES. Also during the first week of class, I started blogging about sundial photographs that I found online, searching specifically for images that were labeled for re-use, thanks to all those photographers who make their photos available in this way at Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, and elsewhere on the open Internet. I have eight of these sundial posts so far, and I have now begun to include Latin sundials in the weekly cycle of content that I share in my Bestiaria Latina round-up posts.
PINTEREST BOARDS AND WIDGETS. Finally, to increase the different ways I can share the Latin sundials and my blog posts about them, I created a Pinterest Board of Latin Sundials, and I learned how to create widgets of individual pins which you can see in the sidebar of this blog. Pinterest is a tool that is still pretty new to me, so learning about the pin widgets was a fun discovery. I was able to create pin widgets for all my posts and then randomize them with RotateContent.com, an amazing tool that Randy Hoyt (genius programmer) built many years ago... and it's still going strong! The result of the randomizing widget appears below: if you have javascript enabled, you should see a Pinterest pin widget at random whenever this page reloads. (Want to make your own javascript widget with randomized or date-based content? RotateContent.com awaits you!)
This open process by which existing content is discovered, re-created, and then shared, hopefully to be discovered again (and again and again) stands in sharp contrast to Janux, where all you can do is post something in a discussion board that might (or might not) be seen by someone in the class, and which is then not likely to be seen by anyone ever again. I far prefer to create things and share them on the open Internet, a space where others can find those things, enjoy them, and perhaps even use them to create new content of their own to share. So, while I won't be posting here any more, I will keep adding sundials to my collection... and I'll update my randomizing widget so that as my sundial collection grows, you'll be able to see it growing here too!
