… with hundreds of thousands of digital photos.
University of Washington researchers have developed a computer system to combine tourist photos lifted from the Flickr.com photo-sharing site into a 3D digital model. Using advanced techniques, they were able to ‘build’ a model of Rome from photos tagged with Rome or Roma in just 21 hours.
Read an article about it here, and visit the project’s web page here.
Here’s a recent article from the Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader about the activities of the EDUCE project. It sounds like they’re at an exciting and critical point. According to lead researcher and computer science professor Brent Seales:
“We’re starting the serious work now,” Seales said. “In a few weeks, we should know whether we’ll be able to tease out some of the writing. Seeing the text is going to be the trick, but we have some tricks of our own that we think will help.”
The story links to an informative video on YouTube, entitled “Reading the Unreadable,” apparently published in January of this year.
Call for Papers for two sessions at the Forty-Fifth International Congress on Medieval Studies, held annually at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI. Although it is a medieval studies conference, it’s quite broad and includes sessions ranging from the Late Antique through the Renaissance. There is a lot of really fabulous work going on in the digital classics community on both of these topics and it would be wonderful to introduce that work to medievalists who aren’t already aware of it. (Kzoo, as the event is affectionately called, is also a lot of fun. You can’t bring together 3000 medievalists in one small town without a certain amount of merrymaking.)
The Digital Medievalist Community of Practice (https://www.digitalmedievalist.org/) is sponsoring two sessions at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 7-10, 2009 (https://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/). See below for session names and descriptions.
Please send inquiries and abstracts for 20-minute presentations to Peter Robinson at p.m.robinson@bham.ac.uk. Abstracts must be attached to a Participant Information Form, available in both MS Word and PDF formats from the Congress website: https://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF.
Proposals must be submitted by September 15, 2009.
Paper session: The state of the art in handwriting recognition and analysis for medieval documents
Much work has been done towards automated analysis of handwritten documents, with a focus on handwriting recognition, in the last years, and some of the developments seen in OCR and layout recognition systems may be applicable to medieval studies. Further, the increasing interest in sophisticated linkages of text and image might be enhanced by developments in handwriting recognition and analysis. We welcome papers which report on work done or ongoing in these areas, or which seek to establish methodologies.
Paper session: Collaborative tools and environments for medieval scholarship
Many groups around the world are working to develop a new generation of collaborative tools and research environments, with potential wide applicability to medieval studies. This leads to questions about the nature of collaboration itself, and about useful models of collaboration. Reports form the coal face on collaborations which have, or have not, worked are welcome, as are demonstrations of tools and ruminations on the many faces of collaboration.
Again, please send inquiries and abstracts for 20-minute presentations to Peter Robinson at p.m.robinson@bham.ac.uk. Abstracts must be attached to a Participant Information Form, available in both MS Word and PDF formats from the Congress website: https://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF.
This is copied from an announcement I received through the Exlibris listserv, and I thought readers of The Stoa would be interested as well. I’m not a big proponent of Second Life, but I do like seeing how people are coming up with interesting (and potentially useful) ways to use the technology. I feel the same way about Twitter, incidentally.
Colleagues,
Have you heard about virtual worlds? Ever wonder what how they might be used in the world of archives and special collections?
Come find out at Stanford University’s Special Collections and University Archives’ virtual “Open House” in the virtual world Second Life on Friday, July 31st from 9:00 to 11:00a.m. (PST). Drop in anytime during these hours for an overview of our new Virtual Archives which allows scholars to discover and use our primary resources in a virtual environment.
For the first time scholars and the casual passersby can walk Stanford’s closed stacks and browse some of our manuscript collections—a practice not offered in real life. Stanford’s Virtual Archive is a very small but growing subset of our deep storage facility replicated in Second Life. Patrons can open virtual Hollinger boxes and a sampling of scanned documents from the real life box will appear along with a link to that collection’s online finding aid. They can then post their reference questions on the bulletin board which sends email to our Special Collections staff. Stanford’s Virtual Archive provides access to patrons around the world without endangering the collection.
Second Life (SL) is a virtual world where more than 15 million users have created avatars–or online personas–enabling them to explore SL and interact with others from in real time. Reference in SL occurs through in-world text and voice chat as well as our reference bulletin board.
Please join us at our Open House to learn more at the following SLURL address (this is the Second Life location for the Stanford University Special Collections’ Virtual Archive): https://slurl.com/secondlife/Stanford%20University%20Libraries/85/224/33 This address launches the Second Life application from your web browser. For those not already in SL, joining is free at https://secondlife.com/ and we will be happy to help get you acclimated in-world. Look for Sicilia Tiratzo and my colleague in SL, Mollie Mavendorf. We will be on hand to demonstrate the archives site and answer your questions. We look forward to seeing you “in world” on July 31st.
Recently circulated by Joshua Sosin:
Volume 49 (2009) will be the last volume of GRBS printed on paper. Beginning with volume 50, issues will be published quarterly on-line on the GRBS website, on terms of free access. We undertake this transformation in the hope of affording our authors a wider readership; out of concern for the financial state of our libraries; and in the belief that the dissemination of knowledge should be free.
The current process of submission and peer-review of papers will continue unchanged. The on-line format will be identical with our pages as now printed, and so articles will continue to be cited by volume, year, and page numbers.
Our hope is that both authors and readers will judge this new medium to be to their advantage, and that such open access will be of benefit to continuing scholarship on Greece.
– The editors
(I for one think this is great news: we know that online publications are read and cited some orders of magnitude more widely than dead tree volumes; we also know that many academic journals are largely edited, administered, peer-reviewed and proof-read by a volunteer staff of academics who see none of the profit for expensive volumes–so why not cut out the middleman and publish these high-quality products directly to the audience?)
Posted on behalf of Ben Gracy at the University of Denver: an article on an assisted transcription system that uses OCR. It sounds fascinating.
*edit: elsewhere in the article reference is made to “ancient documents and manuscripts”, which indicates that this system has been developed for handwritten materials in addition to printed… although the word “handwritten” itself doesn’t appear in the article.*
Traditional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems give rise to transcription problems and provide results with many errors that need to be edited afterwards. State, however, is a transcription system that integrates a series of tools with which images can be processed in order to remove noise and clean up the original image, the page structure can be detected, the text can be recognised and mistakes can be quickly and easily edited with interactive tools such as an electronic pen applied directly on the text. Andrés Marzal, one of the researchers in the project, explains: “It is a practical solution to the problem of a supervised transcription, since it shortens the most time-consuming phase, that is, editing the automatic transcription so that it is true to the original”.
https://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=59622&CultureCode=en
Gorgias Press is expanding its interest in technology and classics and welcomes book proposals regarding digital classics research, for both monographs (including revised dissertations) and edited collections (based on conference sessions or otherwise). Proposals should be no more than 4 pages pdf and include contact details and a biography of the author(s), an overview of the topic and its importance, a brief description of all chapters, and a summation of how this text will relate to other texts in the field. This is an open call. Please send proposals to submissions@gorgiaspress.com.
Note that we have had to make a change to the programme for the Digital Classicist ICS seminar series.
The correct details are on the Digital Classicist website.
July 24 Leif Isaksen (Southampton)
‘Linking Archaeological Data ‘
July 31 Elton Barker (Oxford) & Leif Isaksen (Southampton)
‘Herodotos Encoded Space-Text-Imaging Archive’
(ie these two papers have been swapped around)
Remenber also that all presentations are podcast along with slides via an RSS feed.
We are now about to hear from the speakers in the fourth in this excellent series. For those of you that are unable to make the seminar itself, we are again recording each event and podcasting it along with slides on the DC website seminar page.
In addition to this we are also featured along with some discussion (and pix where possible) on the arts-humanities.net community blog.
We now have a Twitter hash tag (#digiclass) which means you can follow what’s new there as well. Just put #digiclass in your Twitter search box.
There are a number of sessions and individual papers that will be of interest to Digital Classicists scheduled for the Digital Humanities 2009 conference, next Tuesday-Thursday, June 23-25 at the University of Maryland. There are many, many more than I’m listing here, the complete schedule is online: https://www.mith2.umd.edu/dh09/?page_id=89
Tuesday, June 23
11-12:30
Benjamin Banneker Room
Chair: Dot Porter
Towards an Interpretation Support System for Reading Ancient Documents
Henriette Roued Olsen, Segolene Tarte, Melissa Terras, Michael Brady, Alan Bowman
Image as Markup: Adding Semantics to Manuscript Images
Hugh Cayless
Computer-Aided Palaeography, Present and Future
Peter A. Stokes
2-3:30
Margaret Brent Room
Chair: Patrick Juola
Medieval scribes in parts of speech (paper #3)
Karina van Dalen-Oskam
Benjamin Banneker Room
Chair: Paul Caton
Creating a Composite Cultural Heritage Artifact – the Digital Object
Fenella G. France, Eric F. Hansen, Michael B. Toth
On-site Scanning of 3D Manuscripts
Timothy H. Brom, James Griffioen, W. Brent Seales
The Ghost in the Manuscript: Hyperspectral Text Recovery and Segmentation
Patrick Shiel, John G. Keating, Malte Rehbein,
Juan Ramon Jimenez Room
Chair: Elisabeth Burr
Integrating Images and Text with Common Data and Metadata Standards in the Archimedes Palimpsest (paper #1)
Doug Emery, Michael B. Toth
Wednesday, June 24
11-12:30
Juan Ramon Jimenez Room
Chair: Dino Buzzetti
MAPS: Manuscript map Annotation and Presentation System
Charles van den Heuvel
Manuscript Annotation in Space and Time
Erica Fretwell
The Atlas of Early Printing: Digital History and Book History
Gregory J. Prickman
Thursday, June 25
11:00-12:30
Charles Carroll Room
Digital Classicist: Re-use of Open Source and Open Access Publications in Ancient Studies
Gabriel Bodard, C. W. Blackwell, Tobias Blanke, Tom Elliott, Sean Gillies, Mark Hedges, D. N. Smith
4:00-5:30
Charles Carroll Room
Funding the Digital Humanities
Moderator: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
Discussion with officers from the NEH, Mellon, IMLS, SSHRCC (Canada), NSF, DFG (Germany), AHRC (UK)
Posters
Session #2, 3:30-4:00pm, Tuesday June 23rd
Implementing Greek Morphology
Helma Dik, Richard Whaling
Digital Editions for Corpus Linguistics: Encoding Abbreviations in TEI XML Mark-up
Alpo Honkapohja
There has been a small change to the programme for the Digital Classicist/ICS Work-in-Progress seminar series.
The earlier post has been updated with the full details.
See: https://www.stoa.org/?p=909
Simon
EpiDoc Training Sessions 2009
London 20-24 July
Rome 21-25 September
The EpiDoc community has been developing protocols for the publication of inscriptions, papyri, and other documentary Classical texts in TEI-compliant XML: for details see the community website at https://epidoc.sf.net.
Over the last few years there has been increasing demand for training by scholars wishing to use EpiDoc. We are delighted to be able to announce two training workshops, which will be offered in 2009. Both will be led by Dr Gabriel Bodard. These sessions will benefit scholars working on Greek or Latin documents with an interest in developing skills in the markup, encoding, and exploitation of digital editions. Competence in Greek and/or Latin, and knowledge of the Leiden Conventions will be assumed; no particular computer skills are required.
London session, 20-24 July 2009. This will take place at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London, 26-29 Drury Lane. The cost of attendance will be £50 for students; £100 for employees of universities or other non-profit institutions; £200 for employees of commercial institutions. Those interested in enrolling should apply to Dr Bodard, gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk by 20 June 2009.
We hope to be able to offer some follow-up internships after the session, to enable participants to consolidate their experience under supervision; please let us know if that would be of interest to you.
Rome session, 21-25 September 2009. This will take place at the British School at Rome. Thanks to the generous support of the International Association of Greek and Latin Epigraphy, the British School and Terra Italia Onlus, attendance will be free.
Those interested in enrolling should apply to Dr Silvia Orlandi, silvia.orlandi@uniroma1.it by 30 June 2009.
Practical matters
Both courses will run from Monday to Friday starting at 10:00 am and ending at 16:00 each day.
Participants should bring a wireless-enabled laptop. You should acquire and install a copy of Oxygen *and* either an educational licence ($48) or a 30-day trial licence (free). Don’t worry if you don’t know how to use it!
International Conference
Codicology and Palaeography in the Digital Age
Munich, 3-4 July 2009
The conference will focus on the challenges and consequences of using IT and the internet for codicological and palaeographic research. The authors of some selected articles of an anthology to be published this summer by the Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Editing (IDE) will present and discuss their excellent research results with scholars and experts working on ancient books and manuscripts. The presentations will be given on current issues in the following fields: manuscript catalogues and descriptions, digitization of manuscripts, collaborative systems of research on manuscripts, codicological databases, manuscript catalogues, research based on digital resources, e-learning in palaeography, palaeographic databases (characters, scripts, scribes), (semi-) automatic recognition of scripts and scribes, digital tools for transcriptions, visions and prototypes of other digital tools.
A panel discussion will be held with renowned exponents in the field of codicology and palaeography and contributors of cutting edge research to get an overview of the state of the art as well as to open up new perspectives of codicological and palaeographic research in the “digital age”.
We are very pleased to announce the programme for this summer’s Digital Classicist seminar series.
Digital Classicist/ICS Work in Progress Seminar, Summer 2009
Fridays at 16:30 in STB3/6 (Stewart House), Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU
(NB: July 17th seminar in British Library, 96 Euston Rd, NW1 2DW)
June 5: Bart Van Beek (Leuven)
‘Onomastics and Name-extraction in Graeco-Egyptian Papyri’
June 12: Philip Murgatroyd (Birmingham)
‘Starting out on the Journey to Manzikert: Agent-based modelling and
Mediaeval warfare logistics’
June 19: Mark Hedges & Tobias Blanke (King’s College London)
‘Linking and Querying Ancient Texts: A multi-database case study with epigraphic corpora”
June 26: Marco Büchler & Annette Loos (Leipzig)
‘Textual Re-use of Ancient Greek Texts: A case study on Plato’s works’
July 3: Roger Boyle & Kia Ng (Leeds) *NB: in room:STB 9*
‘Extracting the Hidden: Paper Watermark Location and Identification’
July 10: Cristina Vertan (Hamburg)
‘Teuchos: An Online Knowledge-based Platform for Classical Philology’
July 17: Christine Pappelau (Berlin) *NB: in British Library*
‘Roman Spolia in 3D: High Resolution Leica 3D Laser-scanner meets
ancient building structures’
July 24: Elton Barker (Oxford)
‘Herodotos Encoded Space-Text-Imaging Archive’
July 31: Leif Isaksen (Southampton)
‘Linking Archaeological Data’
August 7: Alexandra Trachsel (Hamburg)
‘An Online Edition of the Fragments of Demetrios of Skepsis’
ALL WELCOME
We are inviting both students and established researchers involved in the application of the digital humanities to the study of the ancient world to come and introduce their work. The focus of this seminar series is the interdisciplinary and collaborative work that results at the interface of expertise in Classics or Archaeology and computer Science.
The seminars will be followed by wine and refreshments.
For more information please contact any of the following:
Gabriel.Bodard@kcl.ac.uk
Stuart.Dunn@kcl.ac.uk
Juan.Garces@bl.uk
Simon.Mahony@kcl.ac.uk
or see the seminar website at
https://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2009.html
The 8th IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2009) will focus particularly on the Arts, Media, and Humanities. According to the conference website (https://campwww.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/ismar09/doku.php?id=ismar09:arts_media_and_humanities_program):
ISMAR and its forerunners IWAR, ISMR and ISAR, have been the premier forums in this vital field since 1998 (https://www.ismar-conf.org). This year, we place particular emphasis on widening the scope of MR/AR toward the areas of arts, entertainment and the humanities. To this end, the “traditional” Science & Technology track will be complemented by an Arts, Media and Humanities track with its unique and separate publication. Both programs will follow ISMAR’s stringent publication requirements with reviews being provided by qualified peers from these respective disciplines.
The focus and scope of this call for participation in the Arts, Media and Humanities track are new and have different topics, reviewers and selection criteria. These will be complemented with Tutorials, Workshops, Demonstrations and Competitions will provide more opportunities for contributions and submissions.
Contact AMH@ismar09.org for further inquiry.
