Leipzig Open Fragmentary Texts Series (LOFTS)

Posted on 2013-12-16 by gfranzini

The Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig is pleased to announce a new effort within the Open Philology Project: the Leipzig Open Fragmentary Texts Series (LOFTS).

The Leipzig Open Fragmentary Texts Series is a new effort to establish open editions of ancient works that survive only through quotations and text re-uses in later texts (i.e., those pieces of information that humanists call “fragments”).

As a first step in this process, the Humboldt Chair announces the Digital Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum (DFHG) Project, whose goal is to produce a digital edition of the five volumes of Karl Müller’s Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum (FHG) (1841-1870), which is the first big collection of fragments of Greek historians ever realized.

For further information, please visit the project website at: https://www.dh.uni-leipzig.de/wo/open-philology-project/the-leipzig-open-fragmentary-texts-series-lofts/

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Volunteers with excellent Latin sought

Posted on 2013-12-08 by Gabriel Bodard

Ostrakon from Bu Njem

A few volunteers have started gathering for an interesting project, and it occurs to me that others may like to join us. This might be especially appropriate to someone with excellent Latin, a love for the subject, but no current involvement with the classics, and some spare time on their hands. A retired Latin teacher might fit the bill, or someone who completed an advanced classics degree some years ago, but now works in an unrelated field and misses working with ancient texts. Current students and scholars are also more than welcome to participate.

The Papyri.info site includes some 52,000 transcribed texts, of which about 2,000 in Latin, very few translated into English or any other modern language. The collaborative editing tool SoSOL (deployed at papyri.info/editor) allows users to add to or improve existing editions of papyrological texts, for example by adding new translations.

If you think you might like to take part in this exercise, take a look for instance at O. Bu Njem, a corpus of 150 ostraka from the Roman military base at Golas in Libya. The Latin texts (often fragmentary) are already transcribed; do you think you could produce an English translation of a few of these texts, which will be credited to you? Would you like a brief introduction to the SoSOL interface to enable you to add the translations yourself (pending approval by the editorial board)?

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Publishing Text for a Digital Age

Posted on 2013-12-06 by gfranzini

March 27-30, 2014
Tufts University
Medford MA
perseus_neh (at) tufts.edu
https://sites.tufts.edu/digitalagetext/2014-workshop/

Call for contributions!

As a follow-on to Working with Text in a Digital Age, an NEH-funded Institute for Advanced Technologies in the Digital Humanities and in collaboration with the Open Philology Project at the University of Leipzig, Tufts University announces a two-day workshop on publishing textual data that is available under an open license, that is structured for machine analysis as well as human inspection, and that is in a format that can be preserved over time. The purpose of this workshop is to establish specific guidelines for digital publications that publish and/or annotate textual sources from the human record. The registration for the workshop will be free but space will be limited. Some support for travel and expenses will be available. We particularly encourage contributions from students and early-career researchers.

Textual data can include digital versions of traditional critical editions and translations but such data also includes annotations that make traditional tasks (such as looking up or quoting a primary source) machine-actionable, annotations that may build upon print antecedents (e.g., dynamic indexes of places that can be used to generate maps and geospatial visualizations), and annotations that are only feasible in a digital space (such as alignments between source text and translation or exhaustive markup of morphology, syntax, and other linguistic features).

Contributions can be of two kinds:

  1. Collections of textual data that conform to existing guidelines listed below. These collections must include a narrative description of their contents, how they were produced and what audiences and purposes they were designed to serve.
  2. Contributions about formats for publication. These contributions must contain sufficient data to illustrate their advantages and to allow third parties to develop new materials.

All textual data must be submitted under a Creative Commons license. Where documents reflect a particular point of view by a particular author and where the original expression should for that reason not be changed, they may be distributed under a CC-BY-ND license. All other contributions must be distributed under a CC-BY-SA license. Most publications may contain data represented under both categories: the introduction to an edition or a data set, reflecting the reasons why one or more authors made a particular set of decisions, can be distributed under a CC-BY-ND license. All data sets (such as geospatial annotation, morphosyntactic analyses, reconstructed texts with textual notes, diplomatic editions, translations) should be published under a CC-BY-SA license.

Contributors should submit abstracts of up to 500 words to EasyChair. We particularly welcome abstracts that describe data already available under a Creative Commons license. 

Dates:

January 1, 2014:  Submissions are due. Please submit via EasyChair.

January 20, 2014:  Notification.

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DCSB 2013/2014: programme now online

Posted on 2013-10-07 by mromanello

We are glad to announce to the community that this year’s #DigiClass Berlin seminar programme has now been published:

All seminars will be video recorded and the videos, as well as the slides, will be available from the programme page.

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Digital Humanities in new lecture series on history and pubs

Posted on 2013-08-21 by Gabriel Bodard

A new lecture series on history of beer/wine/pubs is starting in London, and the inaugural paper, 18:00 on August 28th,  is from Digital Humanities scholar Harvey Quamen explaining why databases, prosopography and digital mapping are useful for the scholar of the history of brewing (an argument that can of course be extended to all modern history, and for that matter ancient). From the original announcement:

Three major questions—all difficult to answer—prompt this talk:

  1. what caused the sudden demise of porter around 1820?
  2. how did the style called India Pale Ale spread so rapidly?
  3. can we locate the historical London breweries?

Although surrounded in some mystery, these questions might be answerable using some techniques from the digital humanities. In particular, building a database of historical recipes will help us understand the movement and growth of beer styles (especially as those styles moved through homebrewing) and we can begin to track master-apprenticeship relationships with the use of propopographies, databases that serve as “collective biographies” of groups of people. Finally, using historical maps (like the Agas map digitized at the Map of Early Modern London project), we might begin to reconstruct the historical distribution of beer around the capital.

The series will focus on archaeology and history, so more future papers may be of more direct interest to the #DigiClass community too.

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Postdoc Research Fellowship in Trier, Germany

Posted on 2013-08-21 by Gabriel Bodard

Seems like two out of three jobs we see advertized in Digital Humanities these days are in Germany (even not counting the recent mass recruitment at Greg Crane’s new shop in Leipzig!), which is both great news for everyone in this field, and a little bit sobering for those us seeing many of our best students and colleagues heading off that way.

The latest announcement comes from Trier (via Laura Löser on the MARKUP list), of a one year DH postdoctoral position at the Kompetenzzentrum there. See https://kompetenzzentrum.uni-trier.de/files/6713/7596/2062/Ausschreibung_Postdoktorandenstipendium.pdf for the full details. Note the closing date is in about three weeks time.

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Digital Classicist London Videocasts

Posted on 2013-08-16 by Gabriel Bodard

The videocasts for all the 2013 Digital Classicist London summer seminars are now available online at the Seminar Programme page. Each presentation is available as a downloadable or streamable video (MP4), or, for those who prefer audio, as MP3. Slideshows have also been made available in PDF format, although these are generally included in the video as well. Users can receive updates to the series, including videos from the London, Berlin, and occasional other seminars, by subscribing to the Seminar RSS Feed, or following @Stoaorg on Twitter.

Many thanks to our excellent videographer Wilma Stefani for filming and editing the videos, and to all our speakers for permission to share their presentations and slides.

(Thanks also to Christina Kamposiori, Simona Stoyanova and Valeria Vitale who helped with the organization and management of the seminars every week.)

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Getty Joins Open Content Movement

Posted on 2013-08-15 by Gabriel Bodard

The Getty Museum and research institute have just announced the launch of their Open Content Program, under which they intend to publish as many of their digital resources as they are legally able. In the first instance, they are release high quality digital images of all the public domain works in their collections: 4,600 photographs so far, including a few hundred of their classical sculptures, vases, and other artefacts. (A search for “Greek” within the open content images returns 261 results, and “Roman” 231.)

There is no specific common license attached to these images, but the text says they are re-usable “for any purpose” and without restriction; the objects are in the public domain, and the Getty does not assert copyright on the photographs. (I’ve only found a small number of photographs of inscriptions so far, but I’ll keep hunting!) And I very much hope many more images get added to this collection as the copyright status of further objects is resolved.

I look forward to hearing about innovative, open, and unrestricted projects, mashups, and publications that arise from this.

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Last call for abstracts: Leipzig eHumanities seminar

Posted on 2013-08-08 by Gabriel Bodard

The Leipzig eHumanities Seminar established a forum for the discussion of digital methods applied within the Humanities. Topics include text mining, machine learning, network analysis, time series, sentiment analysis, agent-based modelling, or efficient visualization of massive and humanities relevant data.

The seminars take place every Wednesday afternoon (3:15 PM – 4:45 PM) from October until end of January at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science in Leipzig, Germany. All accepted papers will be published in an online volume. Furthermore, a small budget for travel cost reimbursements is available.

Abstracts of no more than 1000 words should be sent by August, 15th, 2013 to seminar@e-humanities.net. Notifications and program announcements will be sent by the end of August.

Continue reading →

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EpiDoc Latest Release (8.17)

Posted on 2013-08-08 by Tom Elliott

Scott Vanderbilt has just announced the latest release of the EpiDoc Guidelines, Schema, and Example Stylesheets.

Details are available on the Latest Release page of the EpiDoc wiki at SourceForge.

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Digital Humanities conferences, 1989-2013

Posted on 2013-07-17 by Gabriel Bodard

It’s recently been announced that the DH conference in 2015 will be held at the University of Sydney, the first time it has ever been held outside the axis of North America and northern Europe. It’s been as far south as Tempe Arizona and as far east as Oulu, Finland; I’ve plotted this little Google Map to show the distribution, which is simultaneously impressive within its borders, and staggeringly insular from a global perspective.

View DH footprint in a larger map

I hope this means that in 2015 we’ll see more South- and East- Asian and southern African as well as antipodean scholars able to attend the conference for the first time. In the name of ADHO’s current policies of greater inclusiveness, I applaud this extension of our borders.

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Leipzig eHumanities Seminar

Posted on 2013-07-11 by Tom Elliott

Posted by Marco Büchler to the Digital Classicist List:

The Leipzig eHumanities Seminar establishes a new forum for the discussion of digital methods applied within the Humanities. Topics include text mining, machine learning, network analysis, time series, sentiment analysis, agent-based modelling, or efficient visualization of massive and humanities relevant data.

The seminars take place every Wednesday afternoon (3:15 PM – 4:45 PM) from October until end of January at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science in Leipzig, Germany. All accepted papers will be published in an online volume. Furthermore, a small budget for travel cost reimbursements is available.

Abstracts of no more than 1000 words should be sent by August, 15th, 2013 to seminar@e-humanities.net. Notifications and program announcements will be sent by the end of August.

If you have any questions please contact at seminar@e-humanities.net.

Seminar board (in alphabetical order):

  • Marco Büchler (Natural Language Processing Group),
  • Elisabeth Burr (Digital Romance Linguistics),
  • Gregory Crane (Digital Classics, Digital Libraries),
  • Klaus-Peter Fähnrich (Super Computing Centre),
  • Christian Fandrych (German as a Foreign Language Group),
  • Sabine Griese (Medieval German Studies);
  • Gerhard Heyer (Natural Language Processing),
  • Gerik Scheuermann (Visualisation Group),
  • Ulrich Johannes Schneider (Cultural Studies, University Library).
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Job: lecturer in Digital Humanities, Leuven

Posted on 2013-06-22 by Gabriel Bodard

A full-time, tenure-track, academic post (research and teaching) in the digital humanities has been advertised at KU Leuven. From the jobsite:

We are looking for a candidate with a PhD in one of the Arts Faculty’s fields of cultural scholarship (history, literature, fine arts, musicology, archaeology, area studies) or in Digital Humanities and whose research shows substantial expertise in the application of digital techniques.. The candidate is expected to further develop a prominent profile in the interdisciplinary field of Digital Humanities. The research focus must be methodological, with an emphasis on data-analysis and the visualisation of large corpora using qualitative methods and meaning investigation. The candidate actively keeps up with international developments in digital media and technologies. The candidate is required to apply for research funding in the area of Digital Humanities, notably but not exclusively in the Horizon 2020 framework, in cooperation with diverse research units in the Arts Faculty. The candidate is expected to publish in internationally recognised Digital Humanities journals as first author, and to contribute to mainstream journals in various Arts Faculty disciplines as co-author.

Full details and instructions for applying at: https://icts.kuleuven.be/apps/jobsite/vacatures/52493650?lang=en

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Perseus Catalog Released

Posted on 2013-06-21 by Tom Elliott

From Lisa Cerrato via the Digital Classicist List:

The Perseus Digital Library is pleased to announce the 1.0 Release of the Perseus Catalog.

The Perseus Catalog is an attempt to provide systematic catalog access to at least one online edition of every major Greek and Latin author (both surviving and fragmentary) from antiquity to 600 CE. Still a work in progress, the catalog currently includes 3,679 individual works (2,522 Greek and 1,247 Latin), with over 11,000 links to online versions of these works (6,419 in Google Books, 5,098 to the Internet Archive, 593 to the Hathi Trust). The Perseus interface now includes links to the Perseus Catalog from the main navigation bar, and also from within the majority of texts in the Greco-Roman collection.

The metadata contained within the catalog has utilized the MODS and MADS standards developed by the Library of Congress as well as the Canonical Text Services and CTS-URN protocols developed by the Homer Multitext Project.  The Perseus catalog interface uses the open source Blacklight Project interface and Apache Solr. Stable, linkable canonical URIs have been provided for all textgroups, works, editions and translations in the Catalog for both HTML and ATOM output formats. The ATOM output format provides access to the source CTS, MODS and MADS metadata for the catalog records. Subsequent releases will make all catalog data available as RDF triples.

Other major plans for the future of the catalog include not only the addition of more authors and works as well as links to online versions but also to open up the catalog to contributions from users. Currently the catalog does not include any user contribution or social features other than standard email contact information but the goal is to soon support the creation of user accounts and the contribution of recommendations, corrections and or new metadata.

The Perseus Catalog blog features documentation, a user guide, and contact information as well as comments from Editor-in-Chief Gregory Crane on the history and purpose of the catalog.

The Perseus Digital Library Team
contact: perseus_catalog@tufts.edu

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CFP: Digital Classicist Berlin

Posted on 2013-06-20 by Tom Elliott

Proposals with abstracts for the winter 2013/2014 Digital Classicst Seminar Berlin are due September 1, 2013. See the full Digital Classicist Berlin call for papers for instructions.

Posted in Call for papers, General | Leave a comment