Autocat thread on Bible and oral tradition
Last Thursday on AUTOCAT, a mailing list about cataloguing, Tim “Mr. LibraryThing” Spalding asked, apropos of some discush about the Bible,
Bonus question: Many books have been written about Q, the putative source for the shared sections of Matthew and Luke. What’s the FRBR model there?
Wikipedia today defines the Q document as “a postulated lost textual source for the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke. It is a theoretical collection of Jesus’ sayings, written in Greek.”
This started an interesting chain of discussion, unfortunately difficult to read in the AUTOCAT archives because of thread breakage. Gene Feig responded:
Don’t get me on “Q”. It is definitely a “putative source.” It is treated as though it were a document. For me, that is questionable, not matter how much “research” is done. It may have been an oral tradition. Which brings me to this point: Is FRBR assuming a textual culture? An awful lot of ancient literature was oral in nature, at least at first. A good instance of this is Homer. Some classical critics think that the Iliad and Odyssey were separate oral traditions, collected by someone that we have called Homer.
My quibble with FRBR is on issues like these and the library-ish assumption behind them—that the world can be “carved at the joints” in Plato’s words. Any FRBRized understanding of something like the Alexander Romance—a top-10 world-culture book, if almost unread today—is going to be a big fib.
Then John F. Myers joined the discussion and changed the subject line and I think from then on you won’t find it hard to follow.
Remember that FRBR is meant to model the requirements for bibliographic records as used in catalogs, not to model the entirety of the literary universe or literary tradition.
It is less a matter of FRBR assuming a textual culture than perhaps a reliance on recorded culture. The item entity in FRBR is clearly necessitates something recorded, whether the nature of that recording be bytes, analog waveforms, or pigments in the shape of words or images…. In this context, oral accounts are not well addressed, as are any live performance. But to return to my first point, we don’t have actual oral accounts or live performances in our collections that need representation in our catalogs — they fall outside the scope of the model. (We may have recordings of such, but that’s a different thing.)
The FRBR model does seem somewhat extensible though, as we move up the IMEW hierarchy…. I do think that the work and expression entities are sufficiently conceptual in nature to encompass oral tradition.
And then later Hal Caine said, and I quote just a paragraph:
FRBR really begs several questions, and at a time when an increasing part of library resources are not located in the library and in cases merely licensed under restrictions, I find it hard distinguish “manifestation” (a.k.a “edition” in older terms — one kind of edition) and “item” in any useful way. Downloading a temporary copy of something from a server is not a condition that FRBR describes without stretching the definitions so far that they lose their shape. Likewise categorizing a serial as a “work” in the same category as Shakespeare’s Hamlet or the Gospel of John, or the film “Master and Commander” is intellectually nonsensical.
Go poke around the archives, or check your AUTOCAT inbox, because it’s an interesting thread. Related article: “Folklore Requirements for Bibliographic Records: Oral Traditions and FRBR,” by Yann Nicolas, Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 39:3/4 (2005).
I wondered about something related after reading Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, by Bart D. Ehrman. I enjoyed the book very much, especially for its discussion of textual criticism and how ancient manuscripts are examined and compared in an attempt to get back as close as possible to the source documents before all the hand-copying started. How could FRBR handle all of that? It’s written down, it’s recorded, so FRBR should be able to handle it. I think it could, and FRBRization could be a useful tool to help scholars in this field, but it would be an enormous amount of work. Perhaps it would fit in to systems already in place by people in this area, though.
Thanks to Tim Spalding for pointing out the thread.