Tuesday 7 December 2010

Nennius and data archiving

Nennius has always been neglected in the history of archiving.

As a monk writing some time in the ninth century he put together a History of the Britons based on the sources he could find, some of which are now lost, and yet shamefacedly confessed in the introduction " ...have undertaken to write down some extracts that the stupidity of the British cast out; for the scholars of the island of Britain had no skill, and set down no record in books. I have therefore made a heap of all that I have found ..."

Whether Nennius existed, whether his History of the Britons was his work or the work of several authors, are open questions.

And what has this to do with me?

Well, I've started a new project on a datset archiving and publication solution, and to accompany the project I've set up a blog as a sort of commonplace book to capture relevant background information. And the blog of course needed a both a name and a url, so, while the name is fairly boring, the url remembers that monk or monks trying to capture what information he could - http://nennius.wordpress.com

No comments: