Open Access and Citation Impact

Posted on 2010-11-17 by Gabriel Bodard

A recent study published in the Public Library of Science has tested the relationship between Open Access self-archiving of peer-reviewed articles and improved citation impact.

See: Gargouri Y et al. ‘Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research’ PLoS ONE 5(10)

The correlation between publications that are freely available online and high citation metrics has been established many times before and is unarguable, but some have questioned (in what strikes me as a stretch of reasoning) whether this correlation can be taken to imply causation. (In other words, they argue, “Yeah but, maybe those open access papers are cited more because people would only upload their really good papers to the Web that would be cited a lot anyway!”) Harnad and co. demonstrate pretty conclusively using controlled and tested methods that both voluntarily self-archived papers, and those that are required by funding bodies or institutions to be openly archived, have the same beneficial impact on citation, *and* that this benefit is proportionally even greater for the most high-impact publications.

Like I say, we kind of knew this, but we now have a scientific publication we can cite to demonstrate it even to the skeptics.

Posted in Open Source, Publications | Leave a comment

Rethinking the Humanities and advancing civilization in a violent world

Posted on 2010-11-09 by gregcrane

As we consider whether or not the Humanities serve a public good and warrant public support, we cannot emphasize enough that ideas are a matter of life and death. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Kabul and Kandahar were almost as remote from New York as the Moon is today. But in the first year of the twenty-first century, we saw that the most remote and geo-politically weak space on earth could strike the centers of global power. Pressing issues such as the anxiety over oil and Israel may be in the foreground, but these are largely accelerants to a deeper intellectual encounter, a war of ideas that have evolved over thousands of years, across thousands of miles, and within thousands of languages.

We need better ways to understand the cultures that drive economic and political systems upon which our biological lives depend. First, we need to understand the connections, often surprising, that bind superficially distinct cultures. Kandahar was in fact founded by Alexander the Great —  one Alexandria among several in his empire. The great translation movement centered in Baghdad from c. 800 to 1000 CE made more Greek Science, Medicine, and Philosophy available in Arabic than has been translated into any modern language since. A second translation movement, with strong centers in Spain and Sicily, amade Arabic scholarship available in Latin – Aristotle re-emerged in the West because Muslim scholars had not only translated his work but had gone far beyond the Greek starting points and provided foundations on which Christian thinkers could build. Western Europe built upon a foundation forged in Greek and Arabic. As Dimitri Gutas, an expert on Greek and Arabic points out, the dense cultural network of which the Europe is a part extends – and has extended for thousands of years — at least until India.

Continue reading →

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Digital Humanities in Computer Science

Posted on 2010-11-03 by gregcrane

Digital Humanities in the Computer Science Department at Tufts University
PLEASE CIRCULATE

Computer Science has played a critical role in many areas of inquiry, but nowhere are the potential implications greater than in the Humanities. We are transforming the ways in which we can relate to the past and understand the relationship of that past to the world in which we live. We need a new generation of researchers who can develop new methods from the computational sciences to advance the intellectual life of humanity.

The presence of the Perseus Project (https://www.perseus.tufts.edu) at Tufts since 1992 has allowed Tufts play a significant role in the emerging field of Digital Humanities. The Tufts Department of Computer Science (https://www.cs.tufts.edu/) now provides unique opportunities for emerging researchers with an interest in the Digital Humanities to develop those interests within the department of Computer Science, combining rigorous course work with opportunities to develop projects relevant to various areas within the humanities. Tufts can support a wide range of backgrounds and career goals.

Undergraduates at Tufts and elsewhere with an interest in Digital Humanities are encouraged to combine either a major or a minor in Computer Science with another area of the Humanities. Such a combination will provide a foundation for undergraduate research projects of tangible value.

Students who have a strong humanities background and wish to develop a rigorous foundation in Computer Science for subsequent Digital Humanities work are encouraged to consider the Post-Baccalaureate Minor Program in Computer Science (https://www.cs.tufts.edu/academics/cs_minor_grad). The Post-Bac CS Minor will enable students either to pursue subsequent graduate work in Computer Science or lay the foundations for Digital Humanities research within a graduate program in the humanities.

More advanced students may consider the Master’s Program in Computer Science. This can either lead to a Phd program in Computer Science or an area within the Humanities but it can also prepare students for work developing the digital infrastructures within libraries, cultural institutions, and major media.

The Tufts Phd Program in Computer Science provides a framework in which students with a strong background in some area of the Humanities can develop research and teaching agendas that bridge the gap between Computer Science and areas within the Humanities. A Phd in Computer Science at Tufts can give you a unique position in revolutionizing the intellectual life of humanity. More information will become available with an update on https://www.cs.tufts.edu. For more information, students can contact digitalhumanities@cs.tufts.edu.

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Digital Papyrology

Posted on 2010-10-26 by jds15

The following is a lightly edited version of a talk that I delivered at the 26th Congress of the International Association of Papyrologists, 19 August 2010, in Geneva (program), posted here upon nudging of G. Bodard.

Colleagues. It is a great honor and a privilege to be able to speak with you today. An honor and a privilege that, I hasten to add, I did not seek, but which a number of our colleagues insisted some months back the members of this research team must try to live up to. If I approach this distinguished body with some trepidation it is perhaps because my training as an epigraphist has conditioned me to a tone less attuned to collegiality than that which informs the papyrologists’ discipline. I should add also that am here not to present my own work, but the fruits of a team whose members are in Heidelberg, London, New York, North Carolina, Alabama, and Kentucky, and who have been working heroically for more than three years now.

I shall aim to speak for no more than 40 minutes so that we may at least start discussions, which I know the rest of the team and I will be more than happy to carry on via email, Skype, phone, and separate face to face meetings. I will add also that, since the matters arising from this talk are highly technical in nature, we shall be more than happy to field questions as a team (I and my colleagues Rodney Ast, James Cowey, Tom Elliott, and Paul Heilporn) and in any of the languages within our competence.

First some background. I don’t need to tell you very much about the history of the Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri. It was founded in 1983, as a collaboration between William Willis and John Oates of Duke University, and the Packard Humanities Institute. A decade and a half later, around the time, as it happens, that APIS was also starting, the DDbDP decided to migrate from the old CD platform and to the web. John in particular was committed to making the data available for free, to anyone who wanted access. The Perseus Project, from Tufts University, very kindly agreed to host the new online DDbDP, to develop a search interface, to convert the data from old Beta code to a markup language called SGML–all at no cost to us. The DDbDP added a few thousand texts after switching from the Packard CD ROM to Perseus. But the landscape changed dramatically from this point onward, and the DDbDP began to fall behind. The end of the CD ROM meant the end of regular revenues to support data entry and proofreading. And of course, ongoing development of the search interface was not without cost to Perseus, whose generous efforts on our behalf were, as I mention, unremunerated. Within a few years the DDbDP was behind in data entry and the search interface was not able to grow and mature in the ways that papyrologists wanted.

Continue reading →

Posted in EpiDoc, Prepress, Tools | 3 Comments

Database/Web Position at the American Numismatic Society

Posted on 2010-10-25 by sebheath

The American Numismatic Society seeks to hire an entry-level Database and Web Services Developer to oversee the ongoing development of its curatorial database and related resources as tools for internal collections management, scholarly research and public outreach. We particularly seek candidates with experience in the practice of Digital Humanities. Funding is available for a two-year position, with possibility of renewal.

The ANS is the United States’ premier institution for the study of coins of all periods and cultures. Currently, the collection of over 700,000 objects is available on the web. It is an essential resource used by both specialists and members of the general public while conducting numismatic research.

We seek an individual who can work with existing staff further to develop our internal FileMaker databases and public website, specifically as it enables access to the collection and related materials. Initial responsibilities will include: close collaboration with curatorial and collection management staff to develop and implement a series of effective interfaces for the public collection database; collaboration with archival staff in the introduction of a management system for EAD finding aids.

Applicants should have a record of technical competence and innovation in a humanities environment as well as excellent communication and organizational skills. The ANS’ public website relies entirely on open source software so that familiarity with current trends in web technologies is essential. Some experience with FileMaker is preferred but this is not a requirement. The successful candidate is likely to have training in scholarly research.

ANS offers a competitive salary and superior benefit package, which includes generous vacation, medical, dental, and retirement plans. For more information about the ANS visit: https://www.numismatics.org .

The Search Committee will begin reviewing applications on November 12, 2010. Applications consisting of a cover letter, resumé, and the names of three referees should be sent to: position@numismatics.org .

Employment at the American Numismatic Society is dependent on a successful background check. The American Numismatic Society is an equal-opportunity, affirmative-action employer.

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CLIR/Tufts Survey of Digital Classics available for comment

Posted on 2010-10-25 by dporter

Via Humanist:

Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2010 12:09:47 -0400
From: Gregory Crane
Subject: CLIR/Tufts Survey of Digital Classics available for comment

Infrastructure for Humanities Scholarship

https://www.clir.org/activities/details/infrastructure.html

CLIR and Tufts University are engaging scholars and academic librarians in examining the services and digital objects classicists have developed, the future needs of the discipline, and the roles of libraries and other curatorial institutions in fostering the infrastructure on which the core intellectual activities of classics and many other disciplines depend. We envision a set of shared service layered over a distributed storage architecture that is seamless to end users, allows multiple contributors, and leverages institutional resources and facilities. Much of this architecture exists at individual projects and institutions; the challenge is to identify the suite of shared services to be developed.

Continue reading →

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What is Web 2.0?

Posted on 2010-10-25 by Gabriel Bodard

This blog post is the introduction to a lecture on Publishing and Web 2.0 I am delivering to students on the Digital Humanities MA, and is partly intended as a venue for online discussion in the comments section. All are welcome to join in the discussion.

When I posted the question, “What is Web 2.0?” on Twitter at the weekend, the first reply was from @espenore, who wrote:

A buzzword 10 years ago 🙂

Leading me to muse:

Does this mean that 2004’s “Web 2.0” is 2010’s “The Web”?

More seriously, most online definitions of Web 2.0 focus on the dynamic nature of Web content:

“The second generation of the World Wide Web, especially the movement away from static webpages to dynamic and shareable content and social networking”
(Wiktionary)

and

“Web 2.0 does not refer to any specific change in the technology of the Internet, but rather the behavior of how people use the Internet”
(Twinity)

and

“Le web 2.0 se caractérise principalement par la prise de pouvoir des internautes”
(Novaterra)

The idea that the Web is not controlled by a top-down, monolithic publishing industry, but an organic, uncontrolled, intelligent network authored and edited by all users is a powerful one. (On of the nicest descriptions of this is The Machine is Us/ing Us .) There is a lot of monolithic content on the Web, of course, and this is sometimes among the more professional and reliable material out there, but almost every web search returns pages from Wikipedia and blogs high in the results list.

It has become the norm to see the Web as a place to post content, to add comments, to correct errors and omissions (or introduce errors and misinformation). Obviously, this is no longer about new technology or tools; all this dynamic functionality has been around for a long time (in Internet terms) and is both the norm and visible on the vast majority of the Web, so the rhetoric of “version 2.0” is broken. Rather it is a subset of the kind of activity that takes place on the Web: leaving comments rather than just reading news; editing rather than just reading Wikipedia; reviewing rather than just buying books; even searching the Web with cookies enabled.

In this lecture we’re going to discuss the implications of this dynamic and semantic Web on publishing, and especially academic output. We’ll look at a few examples of blogs (The Stoa Consortium, AH Net, DH Now), wikis (Digiclass, Academic Publishing, Uncyclopedia), and talk about the kinds of scholarly activities that are appropriate to publishing in these media.

Watch the comments to see how convincing this all turned out to be.

(My slides for this class are available as an Open Access Google presentation.)

Posted in seminar, Teaching | 15 Comments

DH PhD studentship at the Open University

Posted on 2010-10-14 by Gabriel Bodard

Forwarded for Elton Barker, who would be happy to answer any queries:

One full-time, three year PhD studentship available from 1 January 2011
Interdisciplinary PhD Studentship in Digital Humanities
Open University – Faculty of Arts
Based in Milton Keynes

Digital Humanities at The Open University is a rapidly growing area of research. The proposed studentship is aimed at exploring the application of geographical concepts to research in the Arts and Humanities, and the ways in which they are represented, in the digital medium. We would welcome applications from candidates with an appropriate research proposal in any discipline studied in The Open University Faculty of Arts, ie Art History, Classical Studies, English, History, Music, Philosophy and Religious Studies.

Projects which will benefit from supervision across traditional disciplinary boundaries are particularly encouraged. Also encouraged are proposals with links to one of our existing research groups or collaborative projects.

For FURTHER PARTICULARS go to: https://www3.open.ac.uk/employment/job-details.asp?id=5367

Further details of Digital Humanities-related research at The Open University can be found at https://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/digital-humanities/index.shtml

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Justifying the Humanities

Posted on 2010-10-12 by Gabriel Bodard

On the day when the Browne Report proposes cutting all government funding for teaching in the Arts and Humanities in the name of making the British university sector “more competitive”, there has of course been much online discussion (notably on Twitter) of how to (and indeed whether we should have to) justify the arts and humanities in a shrinking academic economy. Several important opinion pieces have been cited:

For my part, the answer is very simply that the reason society should value a strong Arts and Humanities culture is not because of any measurable “value” in economic terms (although cases can and are being made for that), but because a civilized society benefits from having a large number of educated citizens with as varied backgrounds as possible who are able to (and in the habit of) critically examine an arbitrary statement or text.

I’m willing to concede that society gets very little (if any) measurable gain from my study of the role of marginalized women in Ancient Greek narratives of magic. But the fact that I spent so much time studying anything that closely makes me better able to critique the rhetoric of a politician, or to analyze the social impact of a controversial television programme (and I’m no scholar of political science or media studies, both of whom have important roles to play there). In short, my liberal arts education has made me a better citizen, and the students I have been involved in the teaching of likewise.

Others can and have made better cases than this, and I hope will continue to do so, in the comments here and elsewhere. This may not be an especially convincing argument for politicians, but it is, in my opinion, the truth.

Posted in General | 5 Comments

Citation in Digital Scholarship: A Conversation

Posted on 2010-10-04 by sebheath

I’m writing to bring readers’ attention to a series of pages that is coming together on the Digital Classicist wiki under the rubric “Citation in digital scholarship” (category). I take responsibility/blame for initiating the project, but it has already benefitted from input by Matteo Romanello (author of CRefEx) and from comments by my colleagues at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. You’ll also see the influence of the Canonical Text Services.

A slight preview of what you’ll find there and of where this all might go:

  1. The goal is to provide a robust and simple convention for indicating that citations are present. How robust? How simple? At a bare minimum, just wrap a citation in ‘<a class=”citation” href=”https://example.org”>…</a>’. That will distinguish intellectually significant citations from other links (such as to a home page for the hosting project). I cribbed the  ‘class=”citation”‘ string from Matteo’s articles cited at the bottom of the wiki page. Please also consider adding a ‘title’ and ‘lang’ attribute as described.
  2. We are also interested in encouraging convergence on best practices for communicating information about the entities being cited and about the nature of the citation itself:
    1. There is a page “Citations with added RDFa” that suggests conventions for using RDFa to add markup. It encourages use of Dublin Core terms.
    2. Matteo has begun a page “Citations with CTS and Microformats“. CTS, developed by Neel Smith and Chris Blackwell, is important by way of its potential to provide stable URIs to well-known texts.

    Merging these conventions is of ongoing interest. And they do illustrate that one goal is to converge on best practices that are extendable and not in unnecessary conflict with existing work.

  3. While it isn’t represented on the wiki yet, I intend to start a javascript library that will identify citations in a page (e.g. jQuery’s “$(‘.citation’)” ) in order to present information about, along with options for following, a particular citation. Or to list and map all the dc:Location’s cited in a text. Etc.
  4. Closing the loop: this work overlaps with a meeting held by the ISAW Digital Projects Team in NYC last week. The preliminary result is a tool for managing URIs in a shared bibliographic infrastructure. This is one example of an entity that can produce embeddable markup conforming to the ‘class=”citation”‘ convention. Such markup would be consumable by the planned js library. Any project that produces stable URIs can have an “Embed a link to here.” (vel sim) widget that produces conforming html for authors to re-use.

I’m grateful to Gabriel Bodard for letting me use the Digital Classicist wiki to start these pages and for encouraging me to summarize here. The effort is inspired by the observation that a little bit of common documentation, sharing, and tool building can lead to big wins for users and developers, as well as to greater interoperability for our citation practices going forward.

Comments here are very welcome.

Posted in Standards, Tools | 2 Comments

Digital Papyrology Position at NYU

Posted on 2010-09-13 by Tom Elliott

New York University
Programmer/Analyst

New York University’s Division of the Libraries seeks a Programmer/Analyst to work on the “Papyrological Navigator” (https://papyri.info) and associated systems. Papyri.info is a web-based research portal that provides scholars worldwide with the ability to search, browse and collaboratively edit texts, transcriptions, images and metadata relating to ancient texts on papyri, pottery fragments and other material. The incumbent will work closely with the Project Coordinator and with scholars involved in the project at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, Duke University, the University of Kentucky and the University of Heidelberg, as well as with NYU Digital Library Technology staff.

The incumbent’s initial responsibilities will include: close collaboration with project team members to enhance and extend a robust production environment at NYU for the ongoing ingest and processing of new and updated text transcriptions, metadata and digital images; performing both analysis and programming of any required changes or enhancements to current PN applications.

Candidates should have the following skills:

  • Bachelor’s degree in computer or information science and 3 years of relevant experience or equivalent combination
  • Must include experience developing web applications using Java
  • Demonstrated knowledge of Java, Javascript, Tomcat, Saxon, Lucene, Apache, SQL, XML, XSLT
  • Experience with metadata standards (e.g. TEI, EpiDoc)
  • Experience working in Unix/Linux environments
  • Preferred: Experience with Apache Solr, RDF triple stores (e.g. Mulgara), Clojure
  • Preferred: Experience designing, building, and deploying distributed systems
  • Preferred: Experience working with non-Roman Unicode-based textual data (esp. Greek)
  • Excellent communication and analytical skills

Applicants should submit resume and cover letter, which reflects how applicant’s education and experience match the job requirements.

NYU offers a competitive salary and superior benefit package, which includes tuition benefits for self and eligible family members, generous vacation, medical, dental, and retirement plans. For more information about working at NYU visit our website at: www.nyucareers.com.

To apply:

To apply for this position online, visit
https://www.nyucareers.com/applicants/Central?quickFind=52507

NYU is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer.

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(Prepress) Digital Epigraphy and Lexicographical and Onomastic Markup

Posted on 2010-09-09 by Gabriel Bodard

[Note: this is part of a paper written after a conference on Digital Lexicography at the University of Cambridge in 2002, and was scheduled to appear in the print publication of the proceedings. As the publication never took place, and the paper is now rather too out of date to publish by traditional means without a lot more work, I’m posting here under a Creative Commons Attribution license that part of it (a little more than a third of the length) that might still be of some small interest. No significant changes have been made to this material since 2003 (e.g. code examples use TEI P4).]

Introduction

In this paper I discuss the digital markup of epigraphic texts, using the Aphrodisias in Late Antiquity 2004 electronic publication as an example corpus. I shall consider some of the uses to which the original electronic source code can be put, which includes the compiling of (or contributing to) indices and databases external to the original, limited project. Such external uses might include an onomastic database, a gazetteer of place names, or a digital lexicon, to suggest only three.

Continue reading →

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Three-year IT position: digitization of the Berlin papyrus collection

Posted on 2010-09-08 by Tom Elliott

Seen in a post, on various lists, by Fabian Reiter:

Liebe Kollegen,

im Rahmen des von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft geförderten
Digitalisierungsprojektes der Berliner Papyrussammlung ist für 3 Jahre
die Stelle eines Fachinformatikers zu besetzen, vgl. die Ausschreibung
unter den folgenden Adresse:

https://hv.spk-berlin.de/deutsch/beruf_karriere/freie_stellen/museum/AeMP2-2010.pdf
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Digital Classics Bibliography

Posted on 2010-09-06 by mromanello

As part of my PhD in Digital Humanities I’m working on a literature review of  publications related to the theme “Classics and Computers”.

I’m looking specifically at general surveys, studies and discussions about the history of the relationship between classics and computers, a disciplinary field that has recently emerged as Digital Classics.

However, as Tom Elliott pointed me out Alison Babeu (Perseus project) has recently published on CiteULike a much broader bibliography as “as part of an IMLS-funded planning project that’s looking a digital infrastructure needs for Classics (Perseus and CLIR are the co-recipients of the grant)”.

For the time being, in order to allow anyone with any interest in this to contribute I created a group on Zotero called digitalclassics. The group is open (i.e. my authorisation is not needed to join) so please join it and start contributing your entries to the list. I’m thinking in particular of publications that I have unintentionally neglected and/or publications in other languages that I was not aware of.

Currently, the entries in the Zotero Library are divided into two main categories: general studies and applications, where the latter is meant to host publications concerning specific applications Digital Classics-related. More subcategories may be added as long as we go further or members of the list can even add new ones by themselves.As soon as the bibliography will reach a reasonably stable shape I will update the page I have already created on the DigitalClassicist wiki.

I want to thank in advance the DigitalClassicist community for the support they have shown me on the list and for the entries they have started already contributing.

Posted in Publications, Tools | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

CFP: 14. Kongress für Griechische und Lateinische Epigraphik 2012 in Berlin

Posted on 2010-09-01 by dporter

Posted on behalf of Marcus Dohnicht.

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,
liebe Kolleginnen und Kollegen,

der 14. Internationale Kongress für Griechische und Lateinische Epigraphik wird auf Einladung der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in Verbindung mit dem Deutschen Archäologischen Institut vom 27. bis zum 31. August 2012 in Berlin stattfinden. Die Internetseite des Kongresses ist unter

https://www.congressus2012.de

zu erreichen. Über den jeweils neuesten Stand der Kongressvorbereitung wird mit einem Newsletter informiert werden. Bitte melden Sie uns unter

https://www.congressus2012.de/de/newsletter.html

dass Sie den Newsletter erhalten wollen; auf diese Weise erhalten wir auch ihre neueste E-Mail Adresse. Die Anmeldung für den Newsletter ist noch keine Anmeldung zum Kongress.

Wir wären Ihnen sehr dankbar, wenn Sie diese E-Mail an alle Interessenten und Institutionen weiterleiten würden, besonders an jüngere Kollegen und solche, die über keinen eigenen E-Mail-Anschluß verfügen. Falls diese uns entsprechend schreiben, werden wir ihnen die Informationen auf normalem postalischem Weg zusenden.

Wir bitten um Entschuldigung, falls Sie diese E-Mail mehrfach erhalten sollten.

In der Hoffnung, dass sehr viele von Ihnen unserer Einladung nachkommen, mit freundlichen Grüßen
Werner Eck

Posted in Conferences | 1 Comment