Letters to the Editor
-
On the Long Tail and Today's Kids
Let us reflect on the significance of the "Analytic Bibliography of On-Line Neo-Latin Texts" by Dana F. Sutton. It lists, at present, 24,965 texts in Latin available on the Internet, published in the Renaissance or later, all of which someone has entered and edited. I suspect there are texts here of interest to perhaps 2 people other than their editor. The whole field of Neo-Latin studies is tiny and ultra-specialized. Most Renaissance specialists don't know what goes on inside it.
How many other fields are there like this? How many groups of a few thousand people are there, building human knowledge in fields that no one else cares about?
Will there be a next generation for neo-Latin studies? Absolutely there will. More young people study Latin now than did in my generation. I had to pick it up as a graduate student.
Things will be lost. Yet I feel lucky when I hear young people sing Queen songs. I once had the amazing experience of listening to extensive extracts from Jesus Christ Superstar sung from memory by a Romanian teenager. We are lucky to be of a generation with quite a small generation gap, and it sometimes doesn't seem to exist at all. Our juniors know some of our songs and respect what we know.
I live in Hong Kong and teach at a postsecondary institution. My students are not erudite, about Chinese history and literature any more than Western. But I don't believe they constitute a descent from the past. Their strengths are just elsewhere.