Digital Roman Trials (UCL, Feb 19, 2016)

Workshop: Roman Republican Trials: a Digital Edition

Venue: Skutch Room, Gordon House, University College London
Date: Friday 19th February 2016, 2-6.30pm

This workshop will explores different dimensions of Roman Republican trials, which are emerging from a current research project aimed at the creation (alongside of a printed monograph) of a digital database of all Republican trials, both public and private.

Traditionally, Roman trials have been perceived as generated by personal motives or as part of political factionalism in the elite’s struggle for power. More recently, however, trials have been read as loci where disputes about real contemporary concerns took place and new venues for future conduct were explored. As historical analysis of the Roman political system has widened, trials and forensic rhetoric have taken centre stage as moments of ideological formation. Attended not only by those involved in the trial but also their friends, supporters, and random bystanders, trials have also constituted loci for the formation of public opinion as well as the exercise of public pressure beyond formal institutions. Within this context, this digital reference work aims at providing a user-friendly research tool which will enable to provide a quick and comprehensive answer to questions, such as, for example, how often the same advocates and witnesses appeared together, or the comparative frequency of over time of which crimes were prosecuted, as well as investigating issues of daily life, such as debts, property, and obligations.

Following Michael Alexander’s Trials of the late Roman Republic successful model, the database will contain all essential information concerning the trial (date, charge, etc.) in a user-friendly format. There will be a commentary containing case summaries, discussion of the thorniest historical and legal issues, the explanation of how certain conclusions have been reached), and direct links to related ancient sources The structure of the database will allow for continuing expansion and updating.

Programme

2.00 Introduction

Chair: Valentina Arena
2.15 Federico Russo (University of Vienna, Austria)
‘The ambitus in Mid-Republican Rome: Legislative measures and Historiographical Reflection’

Chair: Andrea Raggi
2.55 Tracy Deline (MacEwan University, Canada)
‘Vestal Virgins on Trial’

Chair: Simon Corcoran
3.35 Kirsten Jahn (University of Magdeburg, Germany)
‘A difficult inheritance – one or two trials against Pompey?’

4.15 coffee break

4.30 Chiara d’ Aloja (University of Bari, Italy)
‘The political significance of Cornelius trial and definition of maiestas’

Chair: Gabriel Bodard
5.10 Alice Borgna (University of Piemonte Orientale, Italy)
‘Let’s go digital: Classics and Digital Humanities, some case-studies’

5.50 Michael Sperberg-McQueen (Black Mesa Technologies LLC, USA)
‘Technical challenges of TLRR2: infrastructure on a shoe-string for a distributed project’

6.30 drinks

All welcome!

For information please contact Valentina Arena (v.arena@ucl.ac.uk)

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CFP, People of the Ancient World (Cluj-Napoca, October 2016)

Call for papers: People of the Ancient World
International Conference
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, 13–15 October 2016

Population studies for the Ancient World have always been an appealing research field. From demographic reconstructions to onomastical researches and from networks analyses to prosopography and familial micro-history, ancient people are a constant and continuous source of inspiration.Today, more than ever, by employing digital methods and online resources, the study of ancient people is evolving greatly, in new and exciting directions.

As part of the project Romans 1by1, the Centre for Roman Studies of the University of Cluj-Napoca organizes a 3-day conference focused on the population(s) of the ancient world. Our aim is tobring together scholars interested in the research of ancient population froma variety of fields, dealing with the matter from different perspectives. We support any subject related to ancient population and encourage all approaches, inviting proposals for an inter-disciplinary conference. Although our focus will be on the Graeco-Roman world, our interest is not restricted to this area.

We are especially, but not exclusively, interested in:

  1. Theories and methodologies of population research for the ancient world
  2. Onomastics, naming practices and name interpretation
  3. Network studies and groups’ reconstruction
  4. Differences in the research of the elites and the non-elites. Work and labour in the ancient world
  5. Ancient population databases: present work, future directions
  6. Social interaction between the local population and foreigners

Abstracts (max. 300 words) for 15-20 minutes presentations can be submitted at the conference address, romans1by1@gmail.com, until 15th of June2016. Notification of acceptance will be given by1st of July 2016. We strongly encourage submissions from post-graduate and post-doctoral researchers.

The official language of the conference will be English, but in special cases
we can also accept presentations in other languages.

For further information, please use the same address: romans1by1@gmail.com.

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Call for Papers: 2016 Göttingen Dialog in Digital Humanities

The Göttingen Dialog in Digital Humanities has established a forum for the discussion of digital methods applied to all areas of the Humanities and Social Sciences, including Classics, Philosophy, History, Literature, Law, Languages, Archaeology and more. The initiative is organized by the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities (GCDH).

The dialogs will take place every Monday from April 11th until early July 2016 in the form of 90-minute seminars. Presentations will be 45 minutes long and delivered in English, followed by 45 minutes of discussion and student participation. Seminar content should be of interest to humanists, digital humanists, librarians and computer scientists. Furthermore, we proudly announce that Prof. Dr. Stefan Gradmann (KU Leuven) will be giving the opening keynote on April 11th.

We invite submissions of abstracts describing research which employs digital methods, resources or technologies in an innovative way in order to enable a better or new understanding of the humanities, both in the past and present. We also encourage contributions describing ‘work-in-progress’. Themes may include – but are not limited to –  text mining, machine learning, network analysis, time series, sentiment analysis, agent-based modelling, lexical and conceptual resources for DH, or efficient visualization of big and humanities-relevant data.

For more information please visit: http://etrap.gcdh.de/call-for-papers-2016-gottingen-dialog-in-digital-humanities/

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Casaubon-Kaibel reference converter for the Deipnosophists of Athenaeus of Naucratis

The Casaubon-Kaibel reference converter is a tool for finding concordances between the numerations used in the two editions of the 15 books of the Deipnosophists of Athenaeus of Naucratis by Isaac Casaubon and Georg Kaibel.

By inserting at least one of the two references (by Casaubon or by Kaibel), you get the corresponding reference with links to the relevant pages in the two editions.

Casaubon reference system – Isaac Casaubon (1597)
After the reference to the book number, this system includes an arabic numeral referring to the page of the edition of Casaubon followed by a letter (a-f) corresponding to the subdivision of the page into sections of about ten lines of text (e.g., 12.530d).

Kaibel reference system – Georg Kaibel (1887-1890)
In this system each book is logically divided into paragraphs corresponding to units of sense and the paragraphs are referred to with arabic numerals whose numeration starts again at the beginning of each book (e.g., 12.40).

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SunoikisisDC 2016 Planning Seminar

SunoikisisDC is an international consortium of Digital Classics programs developed by the Alexander von Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig in collaboration with the Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies and Perseids.

SunoikisisDC offers a teaching program focused on the application of digital technologies to the study of Greek and Latin. Master students of both the humanities and computer science are welcome to join the courses online and work together by contributing to digital classics projects in a collaborative environment. Planning seminars and courses are organized by the Alexander von Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig in collaboration with the Center for Hellenic Studies and Perseids.

On December 16-17, 2015 Faculty members of SunoikisisDC will meet at the University of Leipzig for the SunoikisisDC 2016 Planning Seminar. On this occasion they will present their teaching activities and work together on the syllabus for the new SunoikisisDC course that will be offered in the Spring 2016:

Wednesday, December 16

09:00-09:15: Introduction (Monica Berti, University of Leipzig)
09:15-10:00: Presentation (Gregory R. Crane, Tufts University & University of Leipzig)
10:00-10:45: Sunoikisis at the Center for Hellenic Studies (Kenny Morrell, Center for Hellenic Studies)
10:45-11:00: Coffee Break
11:00-11:30: Sunoikisis Digital Classics (Monica Berti, University of Leipzig)
11:30-12:00: The Digital Hill (Marcel Mernitz, University of Leipzig)
12:00-12:30: The Digital Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum (Tariq Yousef, University of Leipzig)
12:30-13:00: Discussion

13:00-14:30: Break for lunch and informal meetings

14:30-15:00: Treebanking (Giuseppe G.A. Celano and Anastasia Mellano, University of Leipzig)
15:00-15:30: Database of Mycenaean at the University of Oslo (Federico Aurora, University of Olso)
15:30-16:00: Digital Classics in Croatia (Neven Jovanović, University of Zagreb)
16:00-16:15: Coffee break
16:15-16:45: Digital Classics in Lyon (Michèle Brunet, Laboratoire HISOMA, Lyon)
16:45-17:15: Digital Classics in Paris (Aurélien Berra, Université Paris Ouest)
17:15-17:45: Digital Classics in Brazil (Anise D’Orange Ferreira, Universidade Estadual Paulista, Câmpus de Araraquara)
17:45-18:15: Digital Classics in Freiburg (Stylianos Chronopoulos, University of Freiburg)
18:15-18:45: Discussion

Thursday, December 17

09:00-09:30: Student training and interdisciplinary approaches at the ICS London (Gabriel Bodard, Institute of Classical Studies, London)
09:30-10:00: Digital Classics in Florida (Eleni Bozia, University of Florida)
10:00-10:30: Digital Classics in Finland (Marja Vierros, University of Helsinki)
10:30-10:45: Coffee break
10:45-11:15: Digital Classics in Bulgaria (Dimitar Illiev, University of Sofia)
11:15-11:45: Reading Thucydides in Persian (Maryam Foradi, University of Leipzig)
11:45-12:15: Aristotle in Arabic (Mohammad J. Esmaeili, University of Teheran)
12:15-12:45: Digital Classics in Egypt (Usama A. Gad, Ain Shams University, Cairo)
12:45-13:15: Discussion

13:15-15:00: Break for lunch and informal meetings

15:00-15:30: Digital Classics at Tufts University (Marie-Claire Beaulieu, Tufts University)
15:30-16:30: Perseids (Tim Buckingham, Tufts University)
16:30-16:45: Coffee break
16:45-19:00: SunoikisisDC Syllabus

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Teach the Teachers, Leipzig April 18–19, 2016

First Teach the Teachers Workshop

Teach the Teachers, Leipzig April 18–19th, 2016

The Perseids Project, in collaboration with the Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig and the Department of Classics at Tufts University is calling for participants in the first Teach the Teachers workshop. The two-day workshop aims to present and develop lesson plans and syllabi including digital methods for the high school and university Humanities curriculum. Registration for the workshop will be free and financial support for travel and lodging will be provided. We are looking for participants who teach at the High School or Secondary school level, as well as PhD candidates and Graduate Students.

The workshop will contain seminars on how to use the tools available via Perseids, in particular the Alpheios Alignment editor and the Arethusa Treebank editor. These seminars will include comprehensive guidelines so that any user at any level of digital literacy will be able to use the tools to their full potential. This will include, but is not limited too:

  • Use of translation alignments for non-language students
  • Use of treebank annotations to assess understanding of grammar and morpho-syntax
  • Use of the gold standard review functionality and the board review systems of Perseids
  • The Perseids Social network annotation workflow
  • Assessment strategies for digital assignments

The purpose of this workshop is to facilitate the exchange of new ideas for the implementation of the Perseids Platform in the classroom. During the two-day workshop we will produce resources for digital projects in a classroom setting. We will incorporate these resources into a growing collection of shared resources which will help future educators integrate the Perseids to their classroom practice. Those resources may include:

  • Syllabi for high school and college level courses.
  • Lesson plans for in-class digital projects.
  • collaborative, inter-institutional workflows and project plans

Contributors should submit statements of up to 500-700 words. Submissions will be accepted until January 8th. Send submissions in the form of a pdf to teachtheteachers2016@gmail.com. Statements can include:

  • Plans or ideas for the implementation of digital tools in the classroom
  • Description of experience or interest in digital methods
  • Other experience involving the use of digital tools in an educational setting
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Open Call for Papers: Digital Approaches and the Ancient World

Digital Approaches and the Ancient World
A themed issue of the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies

Editors:
Gabriel Bodard (University of London) gabriel.bodard@sas.ac.uk
Yanne Broux (KU Leuven) yanne.broux@arts.kuleuven.be
Ségolène Tarte (University of Oxford) segolene.tarte@oerc.ox.ac.uk

Call for papers:

We invite colleagues all around the world and at all stages of their careers to submit papers on the topic of “Digital Approaches and the Ancient World” to a themed issue of the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies. The topic is to be construed as widely as possible, to include not only the history, archaeology, language, literature and thought of the ancient and late antique Mediterranean world, but also of antiquity more widely, potentially including, for example, South and East Asian, Sub-Saharan African or Pre-Columbian American history. Digital approaches may also vary widely, to include methodologies from the digital humanities and information studies, quantitative methods from the hard sciences, or other innovative and transdisciplinary themes.

Papers will be fully peer reviewed and selected for inclusion based not only on their research quality and significance, but especially on their ability to engage profoundly both with classics/history academic readers, and scholars from digital or informatic disciplines. We are keen to see papers that clearly lay out their disciplinary and interdisciplinary methodological approaches, and present and interpret the full range of scholarly and practical outcomes of their research.

We encourage the use of and direct reference to open online datasets in your papers. BICS is not currently an open access publication, but self-archiving of pre-press papers is permitted, and the editors believe in the transparency and accountability that comes with basing scientific work on open data.

To submit an article to this themed issue, please send your full paper of 4,000–8,000 words in Microsoft Word doc, docx or rtf format, to <gabriel.bodard@sas.ac.uk>, along with a 150 word abstract, by January 31, 2016. You do not need to follow BICS style for the initial submission, but please note that the final version of accepted articles will need to be formatted to adhere to our style guide (http://www.icls.sas.ac.uk/sites/default/files/files/STYLE-V15.pdf).

If you have any questions about this issue, please feel free to contact any of the editors informally.

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Digital Classics Workshop, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, March 28-April 1, 2016

EpiDoc and Digital Classics Workshop
Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj Napoca, Romania
March 28 – April 1, 2016

The Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca is offering a week-long training workshop on digital encoding of inscriptions and other ancient texts, taught by Gabriel Bodard, Simona Stoyanova (London) and Polina Yordanova (Sofia). There will be no charge for the training, but participants should arrange their own travel and accommodation.

The workshop will cover an introduction to the principles of XML, EpiDoc encoding of inscriptions and papyri, the use of editing tools such as the Papyrological Editor (papyri.info), morpho-syntactic treebanking, and the encoding of people and places in ancient texts through the SNAP and Pelagios projects.

Participants are not expected to have any technical skills at the start of the workshop, but should bring a WiFi-enabled laptop and be prepared to install some free software before arriving. A good knowledge of ancient history, Greek, Latin or other ancient languages, and epigraphy, papyrology or related disciplines will be assumed.

To apply for a place in this workshop, please email <radavarga@gmail.com>, with a short description of your relevant background and any projects you are working on or planning, by midnight, January 3, 2016.

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Treebanking Ancient Greek in High School: what my students learned, what I learned

Treebanking methodology has proven to be successful in the linguistic analysis of ancient Greek and Latin texts, and it has aroused a continuously increasing interest over the last few years. It is certainly one of the most exciting innovations in the field of Classics. Now it is time to see if it can also play a role in improving traditional education, leading didactics into the digital world.

In spring 2015, I was following a training in the Italian High School “Liceo Classico Socrate”, where I was allowed to lead a little experiment. The school has a solid tradition in Classical education, focused on Greek and Latin culture and language, so it was the ideal environment to test the potential impact of digital tools on the students’ learning process. The theoretical premise for this attempt was that the methodology of translating ancient Greek in Italian High School is similar to the process of dependency treebanking. The traditional method has a strong linguistic attitude: it requires complete analysis of the text divided into single sentences, according to a specific hierarchical structure, and the assignment of morphological and syntactic values to every single element according to traditional grammars. These tasks are performed with very limited use of the dictionary; then, a complete translation follows this established order, in order to ensure an easier conversion of the sentence into the new language. Treebanking seems to reproduce this process closely, but providing an alternative, aesthetically enjoyable and visually useful interface.

The experiment was performed with 22 students of 14 years of age, who were beginners in ancient Greek. These young cavies were involved in a four-days workshop of Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank, which took place in the School’s Informatics Lab. Their regular teacher was an additional and enthusiastic participant.

Continue reading

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CfP: Computer-Aided Processing of Intertextuality in Ancient Languages

Call for Contribution: Special Issue on Computer-Aided Processing of Intertextuality in Ancient Languages

“Europe’s future is digital”. This was the headline of a speech given at the Hannover exhibition in April 2015 by Günther Oettinger, EU-Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society. While businesses and industries have already made major advances in digital ecosystems, the digital transformation of texts stretching over a period of more than two millennia is far from complete. On the one hand, mass digitisation leads to an “information overload” of digitally available data; on the other, the “information poverty” embodied by the loss of books and the fragmentary state of ancient texts form an incomplete and biased view of our past. In a digital ecosystem, this coexistence of data overload and poverty adds considerable complexity to scholarly research.

With this special issue on Computer-Aided Processing of Intertextuality in Ancient Languages, the HiSoMA lab in Lyon,
France, and the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities in Germany, aim to create a collection of papers that discuss the state-of-the-art on intertextuality, linguistic preprocessing and the preservation of scholarly research results specifically applied to corpora in ancient languages and for which few online resources exist (Ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, Ethiopic, etc.).

Relevant topics include:

  • Methods for the detection of intertexts and text reuse, manual (e.g. crowd-sourcing) or automatic (e.g. algorithms);
  • Infrastructure for the preservation of digital texts and quotations between different text passages; Linguistic preprocessing and data normalisation, such as lemmatisation of historical languages, root stemming, normalisation of variants, etc.;
  • Visualisation of intertextuality and text reuse;
  • Creation of, and research on, stemmata.

The special issue will be published by the Journal on Data Mining and Digital Humanities (http://jdmdh.episciences.org/), an online open access journal that will release the issue shortly after its submission in order to elicit feedback from readers while concurrently supervising the standard peer review process.

Interested authors are asked to:

  1. send a title, an author list and a one page (or shorter) abstract specifying the type of contribution (full paper or project presentation) to Laurence Mellerin [laurence.mellerin(at)mom(dot)fr] and Marco Büchler [mbuechler(at)gcdh(dot)de] by October 31st.
  2. send a paper (long: up to 40 pages OR short: 2 to 4 pages illustrating the scope and research of the project), following the guidelines of JDMDH by January 31st 2016.

For further questions, do not hesitate to contact Laurence and Marco.

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Digital Classics Training: Structuring and visualising data

Digital Classics Workshop:
Structuring and visualising data

Thursday November 5, 10:30 – 17:30
Institute of Classical Studies
Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

 

51_357ba541-ff3d-4ad1-8884-72279ac0b1e0The Institute of Classical Studies is offering a one-day training workshop for postgraduate students and researchers on structuring and visualising historical data. The workshop will offer a basic introduction to issues around tabular data, database design and linked open data, and tools for visualisation for both presentational and analytical purposes. Participants will gain hands-on experience of creating database tables (in Google Spreadsheets), cleaning and enhancing their data, and building visualisations based on it using a variety of free sites and tools. We shall suggest and discuss how these methods can be applicable to your research.

No previous digital experience is required, but participants should bring their own laptop and have an account on Google Drive and be prepared to download some free software in advance of the workshop. The workshop will be taught by Silke Vanbeselaere (KU Leuven) and Gabriel Bodard (ICS). This workshop has been made possible by the generous support of the LAHP and AHRC.

Registration is free.
To book a place on the workshop, please contact
Valerie James (valerie.james@sas.ac.uk)

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Call for Participation: Text reuse workshop at DH Estonia 2015

Text Reuse Workshop at DH Estonia 2015
21 October 2015

Hosted by the Estonian Literary Museum, Tartu, Estonia.
Organised by: Dr. Marco Büchler, Emily Franzini, Greta Franzini and Maria Moritz (eTRAP Early Career Research Group).

The Conference on translingual and transcultural digital humanities [http://www.folklore.ee/dh/en/events/dh_conference_estonia_2015/] is hosting a one-day Text Reuse Workshop for participants interested in learning more about semi-automatic detection of text reuse in digital textual corpora. The workshop builds on eTRAP’s research activities, some of which deploy Marco Büchler’s TRACER tool. TRACER is a suite of algorithms aimed at investigating text reuse in multifarious corpora, be those prose, poetry, in Arabic or Estonian. TRACER provides researchers with statistical information about the texts under investigation and its integrated reuse visualiser, the TRACER Debugger, displays occurrences of text reuse in a more readable format for further study.
This workshop seeks to teach participants to independently understand, use and run the TRACER tool on their own data-sets.

Eligibility & requirements
If you’re interested in exploring text reuse between two or multiple texts (in the same language) and would like to learn how to do it semi-automatically, this workshop is for you.
In order to provide everyone with adequate (technical) assistance, the workshop can only accommodate 10 participants.
To apply to the workshop, please send your CV and motivation letter to etrap-applications(at)gcdh(dot)de by September 2015.

For more information, please visit: http://etrap.gcdh.de/?p=1152

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Workshop: 3D Cultural Heritage and Landscape

Digital Classics Workshop
3D approaches to cultural heritage and landscape

Thursday, September 24
Institute of Classical Studies
Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

The Institute of Classical Studies is offering a training workshop for postgraduate students and researchers on the use of 3D approaches in the study of cultural heritage artefacts and landscapes. The workshop will offer a basic introduction to the principles behind 3D imaging, modelling and representation of terrain and elevation, and how these can be used in research as well as visualisation. It will also give participants hands-on experience using simple and free software packages to produce complete 3D models and visualisations, with methods easily transferable to their own research.

No previous digital experience is required, but participants should bring a laptop and a digital camera or smartphone and be prepared to install some free software in advance of the workshop. This workshop has been made possible by the generous support of the LAHP and AHRC.

Registration is free.
To book a place on the workshop, please contact Valerie James (valerie.james@sas.ac.uk)

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Digital Classics workshop: Approaches to ancient texts

Tuesday 7th July
Institute of Classical Studies
Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

The Institute of Classical Studies will be running a one-day workshop on digital approaches to ancient texts for postgraduate students, on Tuesday 7th July. The workshop will focus on the application of digital methods to classical textual studies, and will include an introduction to text encoding and citation. It is aimed at students interested in (but not limited to) classical literature, epigraphy and papyrology. We will be exploring the tools and methods available for encoding ancient texts, including an introduction to the EpiDoc guidelines, as well as the process of digital citation of primary texts and their metadata. No previous digital experience is necessary, but participants will need to bring a laptop with them.

Registration is free. To book a place on the workshop, please contact Valerie James (valerie.james@sas.ac.uk).

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Digital Classicist London live-casts

For the first time this year, the Digital Classicist London seminars will be live-cast via the Web, so colleagues who are unable to make it to the events themselves at 16:30 (British Summer Time) on a Friday afternoon, can watch and listen along at the DCLS YouTube channel at:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIamtu1Z62wL5XRk2mE8HKw

Or watch the edited video which will appear in the same page a few days later.

For those who need a reminder, the seminars run every Friday afternoon in June – August, and this year’s programme can be found at:

http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2015.html

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