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22-year-old Mozart's handwritten notebook unearthed in 'major discovery'

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Re: 22-year-old Mozart's handwritten notebook unearthed in 'major discovery'

#81

Post by spacechild1 »

dcminter wrote: post #65
spacechild1 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole affair was bizarre. At one point Kujau, the author of the fake diaries, ran out of ideas and let Hitler complain about his flatulence. There is also a very funny German movie about it ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schtonk !) The director later said that he intentionally omitted some facts about the real scandal because the audience would find it too far fetched.

I think my favourite aspect of the tale (at least as Harris tells it) is that Kujau was such a bad forger, and the recipients wanted it all to be true so badly that they skipped several opportunities to actually check! I shall see if I can find Schtonk! with subtitles, sounds up my alley.

Yes! Like when Kujau couldn't get the letter A, so he went with "FH" instead of "AH" for the cover initials. Heidemann convinced the people at Stern that it surely stands for "Führer Hitler" :-D

Schtonk! does a really great job at satirizing the Führerkult that was still very much present in large parts of German society.

Re: 22-year-old Mozart's handwritten notebook unearthed in 'major discovery'

#82

Post by coliveira »

Arainach wrote: post #44
rob74 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The composers who didn't have neat handwriting are forgotten today because nobody could read their (musical) notes...

This is simply not true. Look at Beethoven's manuscripts for instance. https://guides.loc.gov/beethoven/manuscripts

That's one of the reasons why he spent several years to write a single symphony.

Re: 22-year-old Mozart's handwritten notebook unearthed in 'major discovery'

#83

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

jfengel wrote: post #73
mmooss wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to say it, but might LLMs transform archival work? Not by replacing researchers, but by inputting everything (or orders of magnitude more than we could previously) and outputting to the researcher a prioritized list of documents / etc to examine?

If you could automate transcription, it would be an enormous boon to researchers. Reading the handwriting would be really hard, and it would be a massive effort to move all that paper. Just handling it is hard; it's not like flipping through mass-manufactured books. But I suspect that you could spend a few million dollars to revolutionize the field.

This is already the case with genealogical sites that have ML OCR creating searchable indices of handwritten documents.

Re: 22-year-old Mozart's handwritten notebook unearthed in 'major discovery'

#85

Post by contingencies »

mpfect wrote: post #5

Turns out "technical debt" also applies to national archives.

I found a copy of the oldest film ever shot in China in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) library in London. The camera had been personally loaned to the French administrator in question by the Lumiere Brothers. The film had been entered in to the catalogue but nobody had looked at it in decades and they didn't have equipment to do so. The university wound up digitizing it with funds donated by the alumni and I was invited on my return from the US to address the alumni association on my research.

Re: 22-year-old Mozart's handwritten notebook unearthed in 'major discovery'

#86

Post by contingencies »

Digory wrote: post #75
mmooss wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to say it, but might LLMs transform archival work? Not by replacing researchers, but by inputting everything (or orders of magnitude more than we could previously) and outputting to the researcher a prioritized list of documents / etc to examine?

I had ChatGPT translate some old, handwritten French legal documents for family history purposes. It was far more accurate than I expected. At scale, with better models, we might have a way to clear out the old archives. Not only could you translate, you could ask it to triage the discoveries. "Would the average person find this noteworthy?"

I have a ton of handwritten German stuff from the 19th century. My grandmother could make a fair stab at it, but nobody left can read it. I've shown modern Germans and they are at a loss. Thanks for your idea, I will give it a look. Any tips on model/method/training?

Re: 22-year-old Mozart's handwritten notebook unearthed in 'major discovery'

#87

Post by datakan »

SoftTalker wrote: post #50
coliveira wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Composers were also handwriting masters. Bach also had incredible handwriting, there's a youtube channel about it.

Schools used to spend a lot of time on penmanship. I visited a high school where they had a wall of notes left by each senior class. In the notes from the 1950s the writing was quite refined and looked very practiced, and notes left by kids in the 2020s looked like 2nd grade printing by comparison. I don't think cursive handwriting is really even taught/required anymore. I can imagine that in the time of Bach or Moza…

Cursive is only useful for fountain pens. It was a sign of its times and is totally pointless and even counterproductive today. I get really sick of people exclaiming how important cursive is today when everyone types and everything is printed.

"Back in my day we taught the kids cursive!!" How many of them used fountain pens? I'm guessing zero. You just wasted their time instead of teaching them something valuable.

Re: 22-year-old Mozart's handwritten notebook unearthed in 'major discovery'

#89

Post by DFHippie »

SoftTalker wrote: post #50
coliveira wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Composers were also handwriting masters. Bach also had incredible handwriting, there's a youtube channel about it.

Schools used to spend a lot of time on penmanship. I visited a high school where they had a wall of notes left by each senior class. In the notes from the 1950s the writing was quite refined and looked very practiced, and notes left by kids in the 2020s looked like 2nd grade printing by comparison. I don't think cursive handwriting is really even taught/required anymore. I can imagine that in the time of Bach or Moza…

In the town where I live there are buildings from a 19th century pipe organ factory. My wife used to work in one of the buildings. The employees had scribbled various names and dates and witticisms on the walls in pencil. Their handwriting was beautiful. I was gratified that no one had thought to beautify the walls after the factory closed. In the loft above there were ancient mechanical drawings of organ parts rolled up and stored on racks, and at the end of the loft was a designer's desk still waiting for him to come back and make more drawings.

Re: 22-year-old Mozart's handwritten notebook unearthed in 'major discovery'

#90

Post by dylan604 »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #37
palmotea wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have it on good authority that it is a handwritten notebook. I'm suspicious. Didn't Mozart use a word processor? I mean, not a PC program, that would be ridiculous, but one of those dedicated stand-alone word processor systems (like Smith-Corona made) that they used in ancient times.

One of my pet peeves is what seems to be an overwhelming desire in writers to always put an adjective in front of every noun. You can never just let it be a "notebook", it has to be some kind of notebook. It's even worse in product naming and advertising. Nothing can be just "vanilla", you have to even put an adjective in front of your adjectives, like "Mexican vanilla". EDIT: s/verb/noun/

But Mexican vanilla is different from Tahitian vanilla which is different from Madagascar. IYKYK and only ignorant people think all vanilla is the same. Saying "just vanilla" shows that ignorance just as someone that says "dirt cheap" has clearly never bought dirt.
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