The text uses the words "culture", "human history", and "the world/our world". But reading the list of sources included, it seems to mean "the English culture" of US + UK. That's a bit of a shame IMHO.
It's a bit unfortunate that they use the word "human" so expansively when the scope is so limited, it's true. But it's a new project, so let's give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that that's meant to reflect the project's aspirations. Even if the reality, after only a few short months, doesn't quite achieve it. Tech culture is supposed to value iteration, and accept that things won't necessarily get it all right on the very first try.
A more constructive way to make sure other cultures are reflected would be to say, "Hey, this is a great idea. But looks like you're only covering Anglophone sources right now. Can we help by contributing additional sources?"
Picking on the word human just seems nit-picky, like someone's not woke enough to use a more inclusive term.
A little bit like how the final stage of Major League Baseball's playoffs are called the World Series, even though 29 of the teams are based in the USA and the 30th plays in a stadium ~25km outside the USA. I imagine that is at least a little bit irritating to professional baseball players from elsewhere in the world.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=467571...
Could they have made a better list? Certainly, and perhaps even they would acknowledge it. Of course we can nitpick - I agree with almost none of the selections related to software. But I think "done" is better than "perfect".
[1] - Murasaki Shikibu (Japan), Fyodor Dostoevsky (Russia), Chinua Achebe (Nigeria), Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Salman Rushdie (India), Nadine Gordimer (South Africa), Ben Okri (Nigeria), Arundhati Roy (India), Umberto Eco (Italy), Haruki Murakami (Japan), Roberto Bolaño (Chile), Stanislaw Lem (Poland), Jung Chang (China)
Including texts in Finnish and Hungarian almost ensures that parts of the archive will be lost 1000 years from now. Even if those languages are alive in 1000 years, the likelihood that interpreting period Finnish and Hungarian from 2020 will be possible is far smaller than the likelihood that interpreting period English from 2020 will be possible.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43521/beowulf-old-eng...
The only ones that maintain any significant population that can use them are those that are liturgical languages (e.g. Latin, Hebrew, Classical Greek, Classical Arabic, Sanscrit, ...)
Even if diversity of language is a principle that you adopt while creating this, not every single item in the database can be a Rosetta Stone-style snapshot of the state of human language in 2020.
If a text is lost because it's only written in Hungarian, it means the Hungarian language is lost. And that means not enough texts written in it were kept.
See the problem ?
Keeping as much linguistic data as possible is beneficial. Intentionally curtailing is criminal.
> Being trained as a historian, the idea of throwing away original texts in favour of translations because they're not in « the right language » is hurting my soul.
> If a text is lost because it's only written in Hungarian, it means the Hungarian language is lost. And that means not enough texts written in it were kept.
Yeah, exactly. The GP has it bass ackwards. If you have concerns like the GP about intelligibility, then include both the original and the translation. That way even if Finnish and Hungarian go extinct and the archive is recovered, those parallel texts can be used to recover the Finnish and Hungarian languages themselves.
And I'm sure someone who is reading this is questioning the value of even preserving the Finnish and Hungarian languages when you've already captured the "knowledge" in English. All I have to say to that is future linguists will probably be very frustrated with losing two non-Indo-European languages to study, just like we're frustrated that we can't read Etruscan writings anymore.
Can we kill this fucking meme? The fact that you spent $150k to be told to read books is irrelevant.
English translations are more likely to be unencumbered by copyright, and US copyright is often shorter (or more specific) than in other countries which can apply separately to translations. You can see this on https://babel.hathitrust.org/ where English translations are available but, say, Spanish editions are only available for search—you can't read them.
And because there are a lot more scholars using English, English translations tend to be more numerous and higher quality and more available than the original language. You see this a lot on Project Gutenberg where there's a super polished English translation and a non-existent or crappy original-language transcription.
For example, can you get a Spanish copy of "One Hundred Years Of Solitude" for this without legal issue? Maybe Harper Perennial was willing to cooperate with their English edition and others weren't? I don't think things are as obvious and straightforward as we like them to be.
I've run into all of this while "remastering" old Spanish works. English dominates culture, and not in a bad way. The only reason some new editions/transcriptions of old non-English works exist is because an English-speaking scholar was interested in it or a professor remastered an illegible edition to teach his Spanish language class. And now it's the only version of that work that's not behind a paywall. And you'll have to re-transcribe a messy scan of a book from the 17th century if you want a digital copy in the original language.
Anyways, has Github stated why it's English-only? Did they not have a good reason or are we just guessing that they didn't know that other languages are important (like we, HNers, people of culture, know)?
But i have a problem with the lack of representation of great books and cultural achievements/standards that are not anglo-centric at all.
I miss a lot of great works of the human kind.
This is so important that they should have specialized people to curate that list and not just get "the list of great books that are on the top of your head when you only have an average capacity to do so".
Where is Cervantes, James Joyce, Kafka, Rimbaud, Pessoa, Homer, Goethe, Proust, Shelley, Voltaire, etc..?
It doesn't need to be that much inclusive of course, but it would be cool if it was a small window to the broader human soul instead of a subjective perspective that seems to be missing a lot of the common ground that helped to shape the civilization the way it is.
Context like this matters.
However my IRC client may still be useful by then
Relevant xkcd : https://xkcd.com/1782/
Every week I have to unsubscribe from the seventy channels and direct message groups I got involuntarily joined to.
If IRC could handle unreliable connections better I think it would absolutely trump Slack.