24 August 2007
Fifty two transcripts, and The Schism
Posted by Adrian under About The Show, History, Meta, Religion
It was a slog, but I got there in the end - all existing transcripts of In Our Time have now been added to the wiki. We managed to automate quite a lot of the process, but I still had to do an awful lot of manual editing, during which I saw thousands of intriguing facts and anecdotes. It’s a shame that these ‘lost editions’ (and most of them really aren’t on the In Our Time website) don’t have any recordings available, but the transcripts are the next best thing.
It’s a shame, because they sound utterly fascinating. Right now, I can only guess as to what Mathematics and Storytelling is about, but if the guests are as interesting as the title, it’ll be a great read. As for Cyberspace, which has the following guests:
…the Rev Dr John Polkinghorne, a distinguished scientist, as well as being an ordained priest, a fellow of Queens College Cambridge, and Canon Theologian of Liverpool, he’s spent his scientific career as a theoretical physicist, looking at elementary particles. For him, religion and science are united in their quest for ultimate truth in the universe, and Margaret Wertheim is fascinated alike by religion and science, author of the critically acclaimed, “Pythagoras’s Trousers”, which looked at religions intimate historical connection with physics, today she publishes her latest book, “The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace:A History of Space from Dante to the Internet”.
it wins the ‘Most Categories’ award from me, belonging to Science, Religion and Philosophy. There’s an argument to put it in History and Culture as well, if only to give it the quintuple, but I decided to err on the side of caution for this one.
I suppose it’s inevitable for a programme that’s been on the air as long as it has, but I noticed that In Our Time has covered the same ground a few different times: there are multiple editions about the Brain, Memory, Psychoanalysis, and Consciousness. Sometimes they concern different topics inside the same subject, but sometimes they appear to be about exactly the same things, just with different guests. Very odd.
Another interesting fact is that the first sixty or seventy editions - about two years worth - had only two guests, not three. On the balance, I think three is better; two risks the guests taking up adversarial positions, and also reduces the quality of the anecdotes (having two people waiting to speak inside of one means double the time to think of interesting stuff to say!).
Finally, something completely unrelated to the transcripts: I was listening to The Schism (audio stream/wiki) and discovered that the Eastern Orthodox Church is essentially descended from the Greeks, and for much of the first millennium they looked down on the Roman Catholic Church as being uncultured and inferior; sure, they might not have St. Peter, but they certainly had the language that the Bible was written in!
Given the central place that Rome and the Catholic Church occupies in Christianity now, and indeed for the past thousand years, it was a real surprise to learn that it used to be otherwise.