Saturday, July 17, 2010

Cor

"Except the Lord of heaven create new hearts in us, of our selves, we have Cor nullum, no heart; all vanished into Incogitancy. Except the Lord of heaven con-centre our affections, of our selves, we have Cor & Cor, a cloven heart, a divided heart, a heart of Irresolution. Except the Lord of heaven fix our Resolutions, of our selves, we have Cor vagum, a various, a wandering heart; all smoaks and Inconstancie. And all these three are Enemies to that firmness, and fixation of the heart, which God loves, and we seek after."

- John Donne

Part-time this summer, I've been helping to edit and prepare the texts of a number of John Donne's sermons for digital editions. It's been a very interesting and enjoyable task. I've scanned  400 year-old books, edited the scanned images, run the images through OCR (optical character recognition), edited the transcriptions, and turned them into XML documents for web distribution. I've acquired a number of skills I wouldn't have otherwise developed. And, of course, I've had the opportunity to read Donne's sermons. The summer has been good. 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, I love your blog - the art, the commentary, the saints, the excerpts...its inspirational. And John Donne too. That does it, I'm putting you on my blogroll. My blog is called 'hiatus happiness' (still not sure about the name though) its about taking a hiatus from Art; from exhibiting, not from learning, thinking and writing about it - I'm documenting the process if you like. Nothing like taking a step back to get some perspective, so here's cheers to your break from the world of film! Annie

dcornelius said...

Thanks, Annie. I think it's funny that you're an artist. I mean, I know nothing about fine art. I always feel like I'm stumbling about whenever I talk about it or post artwork here. Basically I know what I personally like, but I have no idea why or, most of the time, don't even know what things like impressionism, post-impressionism, etc, even mean. So thank you. I was poking around your site. I also know what it means to need a hiatus. So good luck with yours!