Web-based Research Tools for Mediterranean Archaeology

Posted on 2008-01-04 by Tom Elliott

Workshop at the 2008 annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in Chicago

Sunday, 6 January 2008, 9:00 a.m. – noon, Water Tower, Bronze Level, West Tower, Hyatt Regency Hotel

Moderators: Rebecca K. Schindler and Pedar Foss, DePauw University

In recent years several powerful web-based research tools for Mediterranean archaeology have emerged; this workshop brings together researchers who are building and/or maintaining them. Having examined each other’s projects beforehand, presenters demonstrate their own projects, assess their functionality and usefulness, and discuss future needs and possibilities.

The projects range from macro-scale (country- or Mediterranean-wide metadata) to micro-scale (specific sites and artifact types). Two initiatives are on-line databases for archaeological fieldwork: Foss and Schindler demonstrate MAGIS, and inventory of survey projects across Europe and the Mediterranean; Fentress demonstrates the Fasti OnLine, which records excavations in Italy and several neighboring countries. Both projects employ web-based GIS to allow spatial and database searches. With the release of Google Earth and Google Maps, GIS functionality for tracking landscapes has become widely available to mainstream, not just specialist, users. Savage offers the Jordan Archaeological Database and Information System (JADIS) as a case-study of how Google-GIS functionality may be employed in archaeological research.

Numerous archaeological projects use the web to present and collect data (to varying degrees of detail). Watkinson and Hartzler demonstrate the Agora Excavations on-line, an example of how the web can clearly present a complex, long-excavated site through its organization of artifacts, documentary materials, and visual interfaces. Heath then gives a close-up look at the on-line study collection of ceramics from Ilion; what is the potential for Web-based reference collections to enhance the study of ceramic production and distribution?

ArchAtlas, presented by Harlan and Wilkinson, and the Pleiades Project, presented by Elliott, both seek to link geo-spatial and archaeological data through on-line collaborations. These projects raise issues of interoperability and shared datasets. ArchAtlas aims to be a hub for interpretive cartographic visualization of archaeological problems and data; Pleiades is developing an atlas of ancient sites. Finally, Chavez from the Perseus Project considers the challenges of accessibility, sustainability, and viability in the ever-changing world of technology — how do we ensure that these projects are still usable 20 years from now, and what new resources can we imagine developing?

These projects are representative of the types of on-line initiatives for Mediterranean archaeology in current development. Their tools enable the compilation and dissemination of large amounts of information that can lead to interesting new questions about the Mediterranean world. This is a critical time to step back, assess the resources, and consider future needs and desires.

Panelists:

  • Pedar Foss (DePauw University)
  • Elizabeth Fentress (International Association for Classical Archaeology)
  • Stephen Savage (Arizona State University)
  • Bruce Hartzler and Charles Watkinson (American School of Classical Studies at Athens)
  • Sebastian Heath (American Numismatic Society)
  • Tom Elliott (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
  • Debi Harlan (Oxford University)
  • Toby Wilkinson (British Institute at Ankara)
  • Robert Chavez (Tufts University)
Posted in Conferences, Projects | 1 Comment

Seminar: Critical Editions in the 21st Century

Posted on 2008-01-03 by Tom Elliott

Friday, 4 January 2008, 1:30 – 4:30 p.m., Burnham, Hyatt Regency, Chicago

Cynthia Damon, organizer

advanced registration required

Greek and Latin texts in editions that harness technological advances for scholarly desiderata will serve us well in our work and in our endeavor to make classical antiquity accessible beyond our ranks. This seminar will consider what such editions might look like in a variety of textual traditions: verse vs. prose, literary vs. technical, individual vs. collective authorship, unique vs. multiple transmission, etc. Pragmatic considerations such as collaboration, funding, intellectual property rights, and the degree to which the academy values such infrastructure-building ventures will also be addressed, and projects already under way will be scrutinized as potential models.

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Digital Demosthenes: Using New Technology for Teaching and Learning Latin and Greek

Posted on 2008-01-03 by Tom Elliott

Saturday, January 5th, noon – 1:30 p.m., Grand Ballroom B, Hyatt Regency, Chicago (APA Annual Meeting 2008)

Roundtable discussion group; joint APA/AIA session
Moderators: Andrew Reinhard (Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, Inc.) and Jennifer Sheridan Moss (Wayne State University)

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The Future is Now? Digital Library Projects and Scholarship and Teaching in the Classics

Posted on 2008-01-03 by Tom Elliott

Saturday, January 5th, 8:30-11:00 a.m., Crystal Ballroom C, Hyatt Regency, Chicago (APA Annual Meeting 2008)

Sponsored by the APA Committee on Publications

Donald Mastronarde, Chair

Thanks to digitization projects by both the commercial and the open-access sectors, the long-predicted transition from books and paper to digital formats for resources and information used in research and teaching may at last be occurring. This panel brings together speakers who represent classics and classical archaeology, libraries, and open-content organizations to address issues of coverage, quality, and accessibility of digital materials, to assess the trends indicated by current and planned projects, and to identify the tools needed to take advantage of the new digital riches and to allow new scholarly questions to be asked and effectively pursued.

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Digital Curation of Cultural Heritage

Posted on 2007-12-17 by Tom Elliott

By way of various email lists and blogs, we learn of the call for papers for CIDOC 2008 Athens, “The Digital Curation of Cultural Heritage”:

Digital curation emerged as an important new concept in the theory and management of cultural information.

It covers all of the actions needed to maintain digitised and born-digital cultural objects and data, going beyond digital preservation to encompass their utilisation in the context of their entire life cycle, from acquisition and appraisal to exhibition, learning and commercial exploitation.

The focus of CIDOC 2008 on the digital curation of cultural heritage will allow curators, collection managers, documentalists, archivists and museum information specialists to explore a broad range of theoretical, methodological, professional practice and technological issues related to the appraisal, digitisation, management, representation, access and use of digital cultural assets, such as those increasigly becoming part of museum information systems and digital archives.

A core emphasis of the meeting will be to understand and re-contextualise the know-how and history of established curatorial practice in museums, and memory institutions, in general, in the new field of digital cultural heritage; to review and discuss the applicability of standards- and good practice-related work in the context of managing digital cultural information; and to identify and explore the issues, methods and challenges involved with the development of new genres and contexts of virtual exhibition, e-learning and technology-enhanced services for scholarship and research.

More: https://www.cidoc2008.gr

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Technology Collaboration Awards

Posted on 2007-12-15 by scaife

An announcement from Mellow (via the CHE):

Five universities were among the 10 winners of the Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration, announced this week. They will share $650,000 in prize money for “leadership in the collaborative development of open-source software tools with application to scholarship in the arts and humanities.” The university winners were:

  • Duke University for the OpenCroquet open-source 3-D virtual worlds environment
  • Open Polytechnic of New Zealand for several projects, including the New Zealand Open Source Virtual Learning Environment
  • Middlebury College for the Segue interactive-learning management system
  • University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana for two projects: the Firefox Accessibility Extension and the OpenEAI enterprise application integration project
  • University of Toronto for the ATutor learning content-management system.

Other winners included the American Museum of the Moving Image for a collections-management system, and the Participatory Culture Foundation for the Miro media player. The winners were announced at the fall task-force meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information, and awards were presented by the World Wide Web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee. –Josh Fischman

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Long-term data preservation

Posted on 2007-12-14 by Gabriel Bodard

There was an article in New Scientist last week on plans for permanent data preservation for the scientific data. The argument in the sciences seems to be that all data should be preserved, as some of it will be from experiments that are unrepeatable (in particular Earth observations, astronomy, particle accelerators, and other highly expensive projects that can produce petabytes of data). It is a common observation that any problems we have in the humanities, the sciences have in spades and will solve for us, but what is interesting here is that the big funding being thrown at this problem by the likes of the NSF, ESF, and the Alliance for Permanent Access is considered news. This is a recognised problem, and the sciences don’t have the solution yet… Grid and Supercomputing technologies are still developing.

(Interestingly, I have heard the argument made in the humanities that on the contrary, most data is a waste of space and should be thrown away because it will just make it more difficult for future researchers to find the important stuff among all the crap. Even in the context of archaeology, where one would have thought practitioners would be sensitive to the fragile nature of the materials and artefacts that we study, there is a school of thought that says our data–outside of actual publications–are just not important enough to preserve in the long term. Surely in the Googleverse finding what you want in a vast quantity of information is a problem with better solutions than throwing out stuff that you don’t think important and therefore cannot imagine anyone else finding interesting.)

Another important aspect of the preservation article is the observation that:

Even if the raw data survives, it is useless without the background information that gives it meaning.

We have made this argument often in Digital Humanities venues: raw data is not enough, we also need the software, the processing instructions, the script, presentation, search, and/or transformation scenarios that make this data meaningful for our interpretations and publications. This is in technical terms the equivalent of documenting experimental methodology to make sure that research results can be replicated, but it also as essential and providing binary data and documenting the format so that this data can be interpreted as structured text (say).

It’s good to see that this is a documented issue and that large resources are being thrown at it. We shall watch their progress with great interest.

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Tinctoris Updates

Posted on 2007-12-11 by scaife

Ron Woodley of the Birmingham Conservatoire at Birmingham City University has updated his site on the Renaissance music theorist Tinctoris published here on the Stoa:

Two new treatise texts by Tinctoris are added, relating to technical aspects of late medieval mensural notation: (1) the Tractatus alterationum; and (2) the Liber imperfectionum notarum musicalium. For each of these a newly edited Latin text is provided, along with the first English translations to be published. The complex music examples in both treatises are presented in original notation embedded in the Latin texts, using special fonts designed by the editor to be historically and typographically more accurate than those of other commercially available notation packages. The examples of the Tractatus alterationum have been transcribed into conventional modern notation, within the translation texts, and technical commentary notes are presented which explicate the notational intricacies discussed. Similar transcriptions and commentary notes for the Liber imperfectionum will be available in due course. This update to the site also makes available archive versions in PDF format of two journal articles on Tinctoris published by Ron Woodley in Early Music History in the 1980s, which discuss other historical material related to Tinctoris’s life; these sit alongside more recent articles and papers on the theorist that have been mounted on the site to provide further context to the theorist’s output and reception.

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Beacon

Posted on 2007-12-03 by scaife

Just awful.  More here:

…the bottom line is that Facebook is materially misrepresenting the privacy impact of their Beacon program, and presenting users with the appearance of control over their information when in fact they have almost none.

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Kindle

Posted on 2007-11-19 by scaife

Can Amazon succeed where others have found little traction so far?  I already spend so much time reading freely available materials (journal articles, blogs, magazines, reviews) with my trusty Macbook Pro that I feel no need at all for a special-purpose e-text reader.

Posted in General, Tools | 1 Comment

Cultural Heritage and Open Access Licenses

Posted on 2007-11-17 by Gabriel Bodard

The Eduserv Foundation has released a report on the use of Creative Commons, Creative Archive, and other open access licenses in the area of British heritage, ‘Snapshot study on the use of open content licences in the UK cultural heritage sector‘. This report (itself made available under a CC-BY license), which collected data from over 100 institutions, seem to indicate that most institutions make data available online, usually for free, but that many have not considered the implications of using an explicit license for this material.

My own experience backs this up: several times in the last year people have approached me either at the Digital Classicist or the Current Epigraphy weblog asking if we could host a ‘free’ publication for them (some even used the words “public domain” to describe their work). I can’t remember a single case of someone who even knew what I meant when I asked if they had considered using a Creative Commons license, or some other way to make explicit what people could or couldn’t do with their material.

I think it is important to make clear to people why this sort of licensing matters. To select only one argument, making it clear that all users are free to recirculate an online text increases the chance that this text will be picked up and archived, not only by individuals and projects, but by large institutions such as Google, the Internet Archive, and the national and international repositories and libraries that are going to be the custodians of all our publications that do not have print manifestations to help them survive the next server meltdown.

The Eduserv report both rings a note of optimism, as a significant number of good licenses are in use, and reminds us that there is still work to be done raising awareness of the licensing issue. This survey and the ongoing work that will arise from it have their part to play in helping to raise the profile of these issues.

(Seen in Creative Commons blog.)

Posted in Open Source, Publications, Rights | 3 Comments

Perseus code goes Open Source!

Posted on 2007-11-13 by scaife

From Greg Crane comes the much-anticipated word that all of the hopper code and much of the content in Perseus is now officially open sourced:

November 9, 2007: o *Install Perseus 4.0 on your computer*:

All of the source code for the Perseus Java Hopper and much of the content in Perseus is now available under an open source license. You can download the code, compile it, and run it on your own system. This requires more labor and a certain level of expertise for which we can only provide minimal support. However, since it will be running on your own machine, it can be much faster than our website, especially during peak usage times. You also have the option to install only certain collections or texts on your version, making it as specialized as you wish. Also, if you want to use a different system to make the content available, you can do so within the terms of the Creative Commons https://creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-sa/3.0/us license. This is the first step in open sourcing the code: you can modify the code as much as you want, but at this time, we cannot integrate your changes back into our system. That is our ultimate goal, so keep a look out for that!

Download source code here
https://sourceforge.net/projects/perseus-hopper

Download text data here
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/%7Ersingh04/

Posted in General, Open Source, Projects, Tools | 13 Comments

“loathed by every professor I know”

Posted on 2007-11-05 by scaife

You got that right, brother.  Amen!

Posted in General | 1 Comment

Aristotle and the internet

Posted on 2007-10-31 by scaife

From Tim Madigan, “Aristotle’s Email – Or, Friendship In The Cyber Age” (Philosophy Now):

Often discussions of personal relationships in the Cyber Age dwell upon the negative ­– the superficial connections, the dangers of identity theft, and information overload. Aristotle does warn us that, at least where friendships of the good are concerned, there are limitations to just how many it is feasible to handle. He writes, “To be a friend to many people in the way of the perfect friendship is not possible.”

Still, it seems to me that email has made it possible for friendships of all three categories [for utility, pleasure, the good] to thrive and prosper in ways Aristotle could never have anticipated. Of course nothing beats personal proximity, but in our highly mobile society this is often not feasible. Email has given new opportunities for continuing friendly ties from a distance.

Dour old Arthur Schopenhauer once sarcastically wrote that if you really want to know how you feel about a person, take note of the impression an unexpected letter from him makes on you when you see it on your doormat. I would amend this by saying that an unexpected email from a friend from the past can brighten up one’s day tremendously. As Aristotle reiterated more than once, we humans are social creatures. Email has added to the social realities of our lives.

Posted in General | 2 Comments

Open Library

Posted on 2007-10-27 by scaife

Adding this grandiose Open Library system to the Internet Archive strikes me as simply brilliant. In this case “fully open” is defined as “a product of the people: letting them create and curate its catalog, contribute to its content, participate in its governance, and have full, free access to its data. In an era where library data and Internet databases are being run by money-seeking companies behind closed doors, it’s more important than ever to be open.”

But simply building a new database wasn’t enough. We needed to build a new wiki to take advantage of it. So we built Infogami. Infogami is a cleaner, simpler wiki. But unlike other wikis, it has the flexibility to handle different classes of data. Most wikis only let you store unstructured pages — big blocks of text. Infogami lets you store semistructured data…

Each infogami page (i.e. something with a URL) has an associated type. Each type contains a schema that states what fields can be used with it and what format those fields are in. Those are used to generate view and edit templates which can then be further customized as a particular type requires.

The result, as you can see on the Open Library site, is that one wiki contains pages that represent books, pages that represent authors, and pages that are simply wiki pages, each with their own distinct look and edit templates and set of data.

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