 of the ramp angle."
Ferencz Letter to the New York Times: Murder or Self-Defense?
Legal experts disagree on whether assassination of political adversaries is illegal murder or permissible self-defense. While international violence remains unchecked by clearer laws and effective legal institutions designed to discourage such violence, innocent victims will continue to be killed.
The international criminal court now being formed at the United Nations, despite opposition by the United States, aims to deter such crimes against humanity. The new court will build on the hopes espoused by the United States at the Nuremberg war crimes trials that looked to international law to maintain peace and security for all. To stop unrestrained violence, let us never forget that law is always better than war.
If you prefer your evenings to be snazzy with a dash of melody, head straight to Comedy Store to catch up Weirdass Comedy’s Alien Chutney. Featuring comedian and actor Vir Das, drummer Sid Coutto, guitarist Warren Mendosa and Kaizad Gherda on the keyboard, the stand-up act will feature 18 songs that tickle your funny bone.
The brainchild of Das, Alien Chutney is credited to be the only comedy rock-band to have performed at all the three venues — Delhi, Bangalore and Pune during the Bacardi NH7 Weekender 2012.
(Clockwise from bottom left) Alien Chutney crew members — Kaizad Gherda, Sid Coutto, Vir Das and Warren Mendosa
“Alien Chutney is India’s first comedy-rock band,” says Das. The crew members promise jokes, humour, stupid lyrics — an out-and-out lethal combination promising to take the audience to a new high.
“The music gets funny with the band’s original compositions on a range of subjects such as the difference between Delhi and Mumbai girls, a blues song about village men, a punk song about funkalicious pakodas, Parsi love songs, tributes to Himesh, death metal songs, pop songs and the tadka song when a boy falls in love with his bhajiwali. The line-up of acts won’t let you slack through the performance for even a second,” says Das.
Kavi Shastri, the co-founder of Weirdass Comedy, says, “The group revises its acts each time keeping contemporary issues in mind. We get repeat audiences who want to check out and enjoy the new additions.”
“If the songs don’t crack you up, the band’s constant interaction with the crowd definitely will. As an act, Alien Chutney is edgy, catchy, raunchy and above all, pure entertainment,” promises Das.This review addresses the ‘CELT – Corpus of Electronic texts’ archive, developed and housed at University College Cork, Ireland. CELT is a digital humanities archive – and arguably a scholarly platform – comprising 1600 documents. An account of its piecemeal historical evolution, spanning the emergence of the Digital Humanities in Ireland, is given in this review. It contextualises the range of content (documents, editions, works), for the most part digital representations based on TEI, pertaining to the study of the Irish language and Celtic civilisation and culture, collected together in CELT – as it stood in April 2017.
1‘CELT – Corpus of Electronic texts’ bills itself as “the Free Digital Humanities Resource for Irish history, literature and politics”. It comprises 1601 documents, cumulatively a corpus of 18 million words. The visual design is somewhat dated – an abundance of institutional and funding logos on the homepage certainly jar visually – however utility and functionality, in both technical and scholarly terms, remain the prime means to judge any electronic or digital academic resource. In that sense the legacy of the CELT project, born online in 1997, almost pre-historic in Digital Humanities (DH) terms in Ireland, should be considered as indicative of the project’s worth as CELT reaches 20 years of age. Initially conceived of by Prof Donnchadh Ó Corráin of University College Cork, CELT’s first director and driving force, the ‘People’ section outlines individuals central to the project’s undertaking and the ‘Contact’ section gives details of key editorial and managerial personnel. The homepage is equipped with a custom Google search interface. The CELT project banner is girded by eleven self-explanatory section headings (Fig. 1).
2The ‘About’ section provides a clear and useful summary of CELT, explaining “Texts are accompanied by introductions, background information, graphics, translations where possible, and scholarly bibliographies”1. The ‘News’ section usefully highlights recently ingested works, which fittingly focus on the city of Cork and the Munster region which UCC, CELT’s host institution, serves. Many of the printed texts have local relevance or are linked to the research interests of those active in the relevant Departments and Schools of UCC. The focus is on medieval and early modern works in English and Gaelic (Irish), dealing with or pertaining to Celtic literature and culture. A range of Latin texts concerning early Christian literature and a smattering of texts in European languages (emanating from the notable Germanic interest in, and influence on, Celtic philology from the late nineteenth century) sit alongside a range of editions pertaining to the evolution of the Irish language(s), its study and lexicographical developments. Various ephemera, such as a PDF scanned edition Music in Ireland: a symposium (1952) edited by Aloys Fleischman, are present. However, for the most part CELT comprises scholarly editions, based on TEI, of major works pertaining to the study of the Irish language and Celtic civilisation and culture.
3The FAQ section is a model of the genre, clearly and often humorously written. Rapidly dealing with general and specific queries likely to be frequently directed towards the platform, so clearly presented and useful it may well have been refined out of a ‘top tasks’ analysis of target users. The FAQs are useful to the unknowledgeable and the initiated, both professionally and technically, and are a credit to CELT’s editors and managers.
4Selecting two works by non-scientific ‘random’ clicking, the Lebor na Cert (The book of Rights) and Críchad an Chaoilli (The ancient territory of Fermoy), of which this reviewer has no familiarity or professional knowledge, served as a useful introduction to CELT. Selecting the former serves up a useful home/starting screen (Fig. 2).
5The eleven section headings usefully straddle every page. The left-hand side pane details self-evident scholarly, legal / copyright, technical and editorial information about the specific work being viewed, in turn presented in the main frame which is anchored in the bottom right hand side. Conversely, selecting Críchad an Chaoilli delivers a leaner page, tailored to indicate the necessary information (Fig. 3).
6Both works contain extensive bibliographic information, useful to contextualise the edition, its origins, and individuals associated with its editing and publication. Here, the rigour of the CELT methodology, drawing on that intrinsic to the study of the ancient and medieval world, is on full display. Exhaustive detail is given regarding sources, encoding, editorial practices and decisions (hyphenation, translation and transliteration, editing and normalisation –technically and editorially). Usefully any relevant revision history of the specific digital work being viewed is clearly presented.
8The manner in which CELT is platform-agnostic is worthy of significant praise.3 This seems to have been a deliberate decision, and should be lauded; many other Irish Digital Humanities projects, lavishly funded and undertaken after CELT was established, have fallen by the wayside after failing to adequately consider their long-term utility and survival or absorb the obvious lesson CELT presented to them.
9The relative simplicity, in terms of design and functionality, of the CELT platform means that any contemporary OS or web browser can display its contents (this reviewer used Safari 10.1 on Mac OS X 10.11.6). This is to the great credit of the project’s engineers and managers. Texts are presented in frames and are conversely available, as SGML/XML, for FTP download, instructions for which are given in the FAQ section4. For non-technical or specialised users the FAQs kindly explain how to access, view and download texts.
10Organisationally, although slightly non-intuitive, the schema developed is robust and clear, if a little idiosyncratic. The ‘Published’ section breaks down texts into linguistically and thematically organised sections, above an exhaustive table broken down firstly by thematic section and then alphabetically by the title of the text, with appropriate links to HTML, XML and SGML for each text. Accessibility is dealt with variably at both collection level – sometimes discussed in explanatory introductions regarding specific sub-collections or works / editions – and more fully across the FAQs.
11The ‘Captured’ section lists texts by language: Hiberno-English, French, Irish, Latin, Translated, indicative of CELTS’s medieval focus. The first category, broken down by century, contains an extensive collection of the printed works of James Connolly (1868–1916), the socialist and revolutionary, and Patrick Pearse (1879–1916), writer and revolutionary, both central protagonists in the Irish 1916 rising. Furthermore, this section has a range of works and editions by nationalist historian and activist Dorothy Macardle (1889–1958). Out of copyright, these