HyperEssays

HyperEssays HyperEssays is a project to create a modern and accessible online edition of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne.

hyperessays.net was offline briefly this morning (US EST) but it’s up and running again now. 😮‍💨

Back to reading, translating, annotating, coding, transcribing, copyediting, learning, and just having fun with the Essays.

HyperEssays HyperEssays is a project to create a modern and accessible online edition of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne.

Let it be said that this is after a year of web traffic dominated by AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, etc.) scraping and indexing every byte of hyperessays.net.

They ought to know what the original text is and says by now.

“Upon review, the passage I gave you … was incorrect and not an authentic transcription from Montaigne’s Essais. I did not fabricate it deliberately, but I mistakenly generated a reconstructed text based on paraphrases rather than directly sourcing the original.”

🙄

ChatGPT - Quote Attribution Inquiry Shared via ChatGPT

LLMs making stuff up, Montaigne edition:

chatgpt.com/share/687bc2...

To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die - The Essays of Michel de Montaigne Death is nothing to worry about!

“I was born between eleven and noon on the last day of February 1533 (as we reckon nowadays, with the year starting in January).“

“Je nasquis entre unze heures et midy le dernier jour de Febvrier, 1533. comme nous contons à cette heure, commençant l’an en Janvier.”

hyperessays.net/essays/to-ph...

HyperEssays HyperEssays is a project to create a modern and accessible online edition of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne.

Happy birthday to us! 🎉🎂

HyperEssays turns 5 today.

Still working on it.
Still making progress.

hyperessays.net

HyperEssays HyperEssays is a project to create a modern and accessible online edition of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne.

Happy birthday to us! 🎉🎂

HyperEssays turns 5 today.

Still working on it.
Still making progress.

hyperessays.net

On Cannibals - The Essays of Michel de Montaigne Full text and PDF of Montaigne’s most famous essay about the Tupinambas of Brazil and what Europeans know about savagery.

Exactly!

hyperessays.net/essays/on-ca...

New job:

Assistant Professor of Early Modern European History

University of California - Los Angeles

https://www.h-net.org/jobs/job_display.php?id=67827

By Various Ways We Arrive at the Same End - The Essays of Michel de Montaigne Pity may elicit compassion and sympathy from us but so can defiance and resolve.

That sounds pretty interesting!

The Gaza connection reminded of Alexander’s siege of Gaza which Montaigne puzzles over in “By Various Ways We Arrive at the Same End.” Why such cruelty from someone who should know better?

Good question, Michel.

hyperessays.net/essays/by-va...

I use what sounds like a mix of both for HyperEssays: list of structs in TEI files—my source of truth—are split into discrete lists to support efficient, full-text querying online.

Definitely related to db fields, as you note (if I understand you correctly).

Absolutely yes.

I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with and share.

Screenshot of a MacOS app. It shows a list of words (from John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s “Of Experience”) with their associated normalized forms and lemmas. It also displays information about this chapter’s TEI file: its location, its last update date, etc.

The second, Leonor, is a TEI file and lexicon manager.

It is still a work in progress and developed only with HyperEssays in mind at this point. But it has already made copy editing, updating, and working with its lexicons much faster and easier.

Citato, a bibliography editor and reference manager for Mac Citato is a bibliography editor and reference manager for Mac, software to help you organize and format citations. It is capable of formatting books, articles, book chapters and more in APA, Chicago, ...

Let it be said that I also worked on two related software projects in 2023.

The first is Citato, a reference manager developed for HyperEssays which you can purchase on the App Store.

citato.app

Top chapter views. 1: To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die (6549 views). 2: On Sorrow (5862 views). 3: On Friendship (2871 views). Out of 105466 chapter requests, 61670 were for the contemporary edition of the Essays. Chapters in Middle French got 27,565 views.

Top searches. 1: “marble-hearted” (30 searches). 2: “mingle-mangles” (29 searches). 3: “Pyrrho” (25 searches). HyperEssays users searched for 2,022 unique words in 2023. Recurring search terms were often connected to social media posts.

Top downloads. 1: Of Idleness (561 PDFs). 2: Of Friendship (538 PDFs). 3: On Solitude (437 PDFs). HyperEssays hosts 542 chapter PDFs which were downloaded 8449 times this year.

A Year of Words. In 2023, HyperEssays added 48131 lemmas to its 11 lexicons. These are used to populate 1479628 indexable TEI W elements across 434 chapter files. [The slide shows examples of JSON-encoded lexicon entries showing lemma, normalized form, and original printed form of two words.]

It’s mid-December and I know what you’re thinking: Time for another end-of-year recap.

So here’s one you didn’t know you needed: HyperEssays 2023 Wrapped!

World Philosophy Day 16 November

Happy World Philosophy Day, everyone!

www.unesco.org/en/days/phil...

A list of words, in JSON format, showing one of them with a “notation” attribute set to “florio-ism.”

Some words are more special than others. ;)

#florioism

Digital Florentine Codex The Getty Research Institute provides global access to the Florentine Codex, considered the most important manuscript of early colonial Mexico

Yesterday something quite remarkable happened:

The Florentine Codex, an Encyclopedia of Aztec culture in 12 volumes finished in 1569, was posted in a digital version with beautiful images and translation. Everyone with an interest in history should check it out.

florentinecodex.getty.edu

“Conversations with People who Read Montaigne” continues Monday, Nov. 27, at 1:00 PM (EST), with Jeff Persels (French lit., University of S. Carolina)

More info and registration at as.nyu.edu/research-cen...

« Conversations with People who Read Montaigne », a series hosted by Phillip John Usher (NYU). For more details on the series, including future dates, past r... Conversations with People who Read Montaigne, Episode 4: Frank Lestringant and Phillip John Usher

Lestringant’s answers to Usher’s Montaigne Questionnaire:

1. First contact with the Essays:
youtu.be/10QCtkOL8pI?...

2. Favorite chapter(s):
youtu.be/10QCtkOL8pI?...

3. Why read the Essays today?
youtu.be/10QCtkOL8pI?...

4. Book/article recommendation(s):
youtu.be/10QCtkOL8pI?...

Lestringant touches on Montaigne’s “laicization of history,” the construction of “Des Coches” (a legal mind’s denunciation of European savagery built around nausea/“écœurement”), and where Montaigne fits, or doesn’t, in post-/anticolonialism.

« Conversations with People who Read Montaigne », a series hosted by Phillip John Usher (NYU). For more details on the series, including future dates, past r... Conversations with People who Read Montaigne, Episode 4: Frank Lestringant and Phillip John Usher

Phillip John Usher’s latest installment of “Conversations with People who Read Montaigne,” in French, is on YouTube:

youtu.be/10QCtkOL8pI?...

Frank Lestringant talks about ”Des Coches” and Montaigne’s place in 16th cent. discussions of the colonization of the “New World.”

Phillip John Usher’s next guest on “Conversations with People Who Read Montaigne” will be Cathy Yandell (French/Francophone Studies, Carleton College) on Monday, Oct. 30.

Registration info: as.nyu.edu/research-cen...

(The URL says “--frank-lestringant” but is for Yandell’s talk.)

Phillip John Usher’s next guest on “Conversations with People Who Read Montaigne” will be Cathy Yandell (French/Francophone Studies, Carleton College) on Monday, Oct. 30.

Registration info: as.nyu.edu/research-cen...

(The URL says “--frank-lestringant” but is for Yandell’s talk.)

What Do I Know? | Pushkin Press A selection of Michel de Montaigne’s most profound, searching essays, in a new translation and stunning hardback edition featuring an introduction by Yiyun Li ‘I myself am the subject of my book��...

The book includes no notes, index, or bibliography but serves, in the words of Yiyun Li who wrote a short intro to the collection, as “a fine introduction for readers who are just about to discover Montaigne.”

pushkinpress.com/books/what-d...

“Essential” might be a stretch for this particular collection (#marketing) but we’re always happy to see new translations of the Essays in print.

The book is organized in three sections: “Montaigne on Montaigne” (I.2, I.7, I.8, I.9, I.19), “On the Pursuit of Reason” (I.18, I.27, I.38, I.39, I.47, II.2), and “On Governance and Governors” (I.31, I.42, I.44, I.57, III.6).

Pushkin Press just released a new collection of 16 “essential essays” by Michel de Montaigne, newly translated into English by David Coward.

HyperEssays HyperEssays is a project to create a modern and accessible online version of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne.

It’s a forever work-in-progress but HyperEssays might qualify for your list. :)

hyperessays.net

Phillip John Usher’s series of “Conversations with People Who Read Montaigne,” is soon to resume with its next guest, Frank Lestringant, on Sept. 25th at 1:00 PM (EST). 📅

For more information (and registration, when the time comes?) visit wp.nyu.edu/artsampscien...