Diamond Synchrotron used to read ancient texts

Posted on 2007-09-16 by Gabriel Bodard

(Spotted by Gregg Schwender and seen in a Diamond Lab press release.)

The ultra-powerful I22 Non-crystalline Diffraction beamline (as best as I understand it an application of the laser particle accellerator that produces highly concentrated pure light for scanning at nanoscopic resolutions) is being applied to the reading of damaged parchment and other ancient and at-risk documents. The synchrotron can analyse the condition of collagen in paper or vellum and determine the patterns of any potentially corrosive ink; this is particularly valuable in cases of very fragile texts, such as those partially eaten away by iron gall ink, or ancient dessicated manuscripts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I first heard about this story–albeit in very vague terms–at a party last night, and I have to say that my first reaction was disbelief. I assumed that the speaker (neither a digital humanist nor a manuscript scholar) had misunderstood or misrepresented the story of a particle accellerator the size of four football pitches being used to read the Dead Sea Scrolls. Surely the expense involved would just never be spent on something as niche as manuscript studies? (Not to mention that I know excellent results are already being achieved using standard medical imaging technology.) I apologise to my nameless source for my lack of faith. I guess I need reminding occasionally that even people with big and expensive fish to fry can share our obsession with digital and humanistic concerns.

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In mediis tutissimus ibis

Posted on 2007-09-14 by scaife

Even if it’s true that “People just want to see what’s real,” surely there are times when one needs to step back from technology’s bleeding edge.

Posted in Standards | 1 Comment

JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grants

Posted on 2007-09-14 by scaife

NEH Program Officer Jason Rhody sends the following announcement:

As part of its Digital Humanities Initiative, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in the United States is joining with the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the United Kingdom to offer support for digitization projects in the humanities. These grants provide funding for one year of development in any of the following areas:

  • new digitization projects and pilot projects,
  • the addition of important materials to existing digitization projects, or
  • the development of infrastructure (either technical “middleware,” tools, or knowledge-sharing) to support U.S.-England digitization work.

Collaboration between U.S. and English institutions is a key requirement for this grant category. Awards range from $100,000 to $240,000 (approximately £50,000 to £120,000) for a one-year period, with projects starting from April 2008 for up to 12 months. The receipt deadline for applications is November 29, 2007.

For further information, review the full guidelines on the NEH website:

https://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/JISC.html

For further information about NEH’s Digital Humanities Initiative, please see:

https://www.neh.gov/grants/digitalhumanities.html

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Stanford Humanities Center – Digital Humanities Fellowship

Posted on 2007-09-11 by chuckjones

The Stanford Humanities Center seeks to award one Digital Humanities Fellowship for the academic year 2008-2009 to a junior or senior scholar.

The Digital Humanities Fellowship reflects the Stanford Humanities Center’s commitment to supporting new directions in humanities research. The fellowship is intended for humanities scholars whose research methods are critically shaped by information technology. Projects should be oriented to producing new research outcomes rather than focusing primarily on the creation of archives or software. Appropriate projects will approach significant questions in humanistic study with the aid of new research tools or methodologies.

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E-Science, Imaging Technology and Ancient Documents

Posted on 2007-09-01 by smahony

Updated version of the Oxford e-science posts with the corrected deadline forwarded to me by Marilyn Deegan:

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

FACULTY OF CLASSICS

Sub-Faculty of Ancient History

E-Science, Imaging Technology and Ancient Documents

Applications are invited for two posts for which funding has been secured through the AHRC-EPSRC-JISC Arts and Humanities E-Science initiative to support research on the application of Information Technology to ancient documents. Both posts are attached to a project which will develop a networked software system that can support the imaging, documentation, and interpretation of damaged texts from the ancient world, principally Greek and Latin papyri, inscriptions and writing tablets. The work will be conducted under the supervision of Professors Alan Bowman FBA, Sir Michael Brady FRS FREng (University of Oxford) and Dr. Melissa Terras (University College London).

1. A Doctoral Studentship for a period of 4 years from 1 January, 2008. The studentship will be held in the Faculty of Classics (Sub-Faculty of Ancient History) and supported at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents and the Oxford E-Research Centre. The Studentship award covers both the cost of tuition fees at Home/EU rates and a maintenance grant. To be eligible for a full award, the student must have been ordinarily resident in the UK for a period of 3 years before the start of the award.

2. A postdoctoral Research Assistantship for a period of 3 years from 1 January, 2008. The post will be held in the Faculty of Classics (Sub-Faculty of Ancient History) and supported at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents and the Oxford E-Research Centre. The salary will be in the range of £26,666 – £31,840 p.a. Applicants must have expertise in programming and Informatics and an interest in the application of imaging technology and signal-processing to manuscripts and documents.

The deadline for receipt of applications is 21 September 2007. Further details about both posts, the project, the qualifications required and the method of application are available from Ms Ghislaine Rowe, Graduate Studies Administrator, Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St Giles’ , Oxford OX1 3LU (01865 288397, ghislaine.rowe@classics.ox.ac.uk). It is hoped that interviews will be held and the appointments made on 11 October.

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Virtual London shelved as OS refuse to license data to Google

Posted on 2007-08-29 by Gabriel Bodard

Seen in last week’s New Scientist:

A 3D software model of London containing over 3 million buildings in photorealistic detail is now unlikely to reach the public because of a dispute between a UK government agency and Google.

The full article requires subscription, but the long and short of it is that Google wanted to incorporate the Ordnance Survey-derived data from the Centre for Advanced Spatial Awareness (at UCL) into Google Earth, and were negotiating for a one-off license fee to cover the rights. However, the British agency Ordnance Survey refused to license their data on anything but a license that required payments based on the number of users. Some mapping and visualisation experts fear that this is more significant than a simple failure of two commercial entities to reach an agreement.

Timothy Foresman, director-general of the fifth International Symposium on Digital Earth in San Francisco in June, fears that OS’s decision could set a precedent: “The OS model is a dinosaur,” he says. “If the UK community doesn’t band together and make this a cause célèbre, then they will find the road is blocked as further uses [of the OS data] become known.”

Posted in Projects | 1 Comment

2nd Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science

Posted on 2007-08-25 by hughcayless

From Martin Mueller at Northwestern (full disclosure: I’ll be a speaker):

The program for the Second Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science has now been set, and you can see it at https://dhcs.northwestern.edu/index.html.

The Colloquium will take place on Sunday and Monday, October 21-22, 2007 at Northwestern University. This is an event jointly sponsored by the Illinois Institute for Technology, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago. Registration is free, and you are cordially invited to attend.

Information about logistics will appear shortly on the web site. You may also contact the conference coordinator, Nathan Mead (n-mead2 at northwestern dot edu).

There still is room for poster sessions, and we will be delighted to receive and review submissions on a rolling basis. Please send them to dhcs-submissions at listhost.uchicago.edu.

The theme of this year’s colloquium is “Exploring the scholarly query potential of high quality text and image archives in a collaborative environment.” The presentations range widely across cultures and technologies. There are digital surrogates of Mesopotamian cylinder seals and of 3,000 clay statuettes from a Chinese Buddhist temple that make you see things you could not easily see “in the flesh.” How to find readable and manipulable representations of the symbols that appear in Isaac Newton’s alchemical writings. How to explore the “countless links” that are at the heart of the Orlando Project about Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present. How to make the history of North Carolina speak in different ways when the print records (a massive work of late nineteenth century scholarship) are translated into a digital medium.

A special session on Monday will explore the different ways in which quite similar technologies of text mining support different goals in legal, literary, and business analysis, and it will ask what these different approaches can learn from each other.

The keynote speakers, Matt Kirschenbaum (The Remaking of Reading) and Lew Lancaster (Beyond 2-D Text/Plan: The Chinese Buddhist in 3-D) nicely define the range of topics. Ray Siemens will sum it all up.

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outsourcing

Posted on 2007-08-24 by scaife

Why I gave up on my university’s email years ago:

Along with the neat-o peripheral gizmos like messaging, calendars, and collaboration tools, the outsourced systems are more stable, have better spam filters, and provide much more storage space than the typical university’s in-house system.

Seemed like a no-brainer…  (Colleges Outsource E-mail to Big Players, U.S.News & World Report)

Posted in Tools | 3 Comments

Sounds familiar!

Posted on 2007-08-22 by scaife

from Scott Jaschik, Publishing and Values, Inside Higher Ed, August 22, 2007:

A number of outside observers believe that the tensions visible in anthropology this week are challenging other disciplines, too. “At the most fundamental level, we’ve got a lot of these scholarly societies facing a set of frankly difficult decisions,” said Clifford A. Lynch, executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information, a collection of scholarly, computing and library groups. “They’ve got missions that often speak very broadly to disseminating and advancing knowledge in their discipline. They’ve got a membership that in some disciplines is increasingly convinced that the way to do that is more openness in publication and more innovation in publication, but these societies have got sort of addicted to these revenue streams from their publication programs over the last few decades, and are trying to figure out if they want to make the transition to a new model and — if so — how do they navigate the transition.”

(hat tip – Peter Suber)

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The Metrics of Social Scholarship

Posted on 2007-08-22 by scaife

from Laura Cohen’s Library 2.0: An Academic’s Perspective:

I thoroughly enjoyed Michael Jensen’s piece, The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority, published in The Chronicle on June 15. This is one of the best articles I’ve read about metrics that can be applied to social scholarship.

Jensen, Director of Web Communications at the National Academies, anticipates a future in which several activities of scholarship, many of which utilize the tools of Web 2.0, will define the future of scholarly authority. He calls this “Authority 3.0.” He comes up with seventeen possible metrics. It’s a great read.

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Keyboard shortcuts

Posted on 2007-08-22 by scaife

From liquidicity, keyboard shortcuts for about every character key available on a Mac.

Posted in Tools | 1 Comment

E-Science, Imaging Technology and Ancient Documents

Posted on 2007-08-22 by smahony

See and forwarded from Classicists mailing list

————————————————–

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

FACULTY OF CLASSICS

Sub-Faculty of Ancient History

E-Science, Imaging Technology and
Ancient Documents

Applications are invited for two posts for which funding has been secured through the AHRC-EPSRC-JISC Arts and Humanities E-Science initiative to support research on the application of Information Technology to ancient documents. Both posts are attached to a project which will develop a networked software system that can support the imaging, documentation, and interpretation of damaged texts from the ancient world, principally Greek and Latin papyri, inscriptions and writing tablets. The work will be conducted under the supervision of Professors Alan Bowman FBA, Sir Michael Brady FRS FREng (University of Oxford) and and Dr. Melissa Terras (University College London).

1. A Doctoral Studentship for a period of 4 years from 1 January, 2008. The studentship will be held in the Faculty of Classics (Sub-Faculty of Ancient History) and supported at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents and the Oxford E-Research Centre. The Studentship award covers both the cost of tuition fees at Home/EU rates and a maintenance grant. To be eligible for a full award, the student must have been ordinarily resident in the UK for a period of 3 years before the start of the award.

2. A postdoctoral Research Assistantship for a period of 3 years from 1 January, 2008. The post will be held in the Faculty of Classics (Sub-Faculty of Ancient History) and supported at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents and the Oxford E-Research Centre. The salary will be in the range of £26,666 – £31,840 p.a. Applicants must have expertise in programming and Informatics and an interest in the application of imaging technology and signal-processing to manuscripts and documents.

The deadline for receipt of applications is 21 September 2007. Further details about both posts, the project, the qualifications required and the method of application are available from Ms Ghislaine Rowe, Graduate Studies Administrator, Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St Giles’ , Oxford OX1 3LU (01865 288397, ghislaine.rowe@classics.ox.ac.uk). It is hoped that interviews will be held and the appointments made on 11 October.

Professor Alan Bowman
Camden Professor of Ancient History
Brasenose College,
Oxford OX1 4AJ
+44 (0)1865 277874

Director, Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents
The Stelios Ioannou School for Research in Classical and Byzantine Studies
66 St Giles’
Oxford OX1 3LU
+44 (0)1865 610227

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Moving toward greater usefulness…

Posted on 2007-08-20 by scaife

from Inside Google Book Search:

Today we launched a new feature for Book Search to help more people access the world’s great public domain works. Whenever you find an out-of-copyright book in our index, you’ll see a “View plain text” link, which lets anyone access the text layer of the book. As Dr. T.V. Raman explains on the main Google blog, this opens the book to adaptive technologies such as screen readers and Braille display, allowing visually impaired users to read these books just as easily as users with sight.

This is an exciting step for us in our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. To learn more about Google’s efforts to make books and other digitized content more accessible to everyone, check out Dr. Raman’s full post.

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Who edits Wikipedia?

Posted on 2007-08-18 by Gabriel Bodard

A very interesting site has been doing the rounds of news and blogs lately, which allows users to trace anonymous edits of Wikipedia articles by comparing to the public record of registered IP addresses. The WikiScanner is itself neutral as to the kind of searches one may carry out–it merely accesses and mashes-up information from two publicly available sources–but many of the most public implementations (such as those collected by Wired magazine) have been political, moral, or salacious. So, for example, users with an IP address registered to the office of a given religious organisation might be shown to have “anonymously” edited the Wikipedia entry on that religion, whitewashed crimes or scandals, or slandered rival groups or individuals of their own organisation. (All this by way of example only–actual instances you can look up for yourself.)

This is not only an interesting and imaginative example of a mashup, but also a potentially very useful control on one of the biggest threats to Wikipedia’s much-vaunted “neutral point of view”–namely the ability of wealthy corporations or individuals to hire lobbyists and PR agencies to clean up their profile on the web. More transparency means more accountability means more reliable information. Potentially. Effectively this tool removes the ability to edit completely anonymously, without raising the bar to entry in the Wiki community by requiring registration and identification.

I’ve yet to find any interesting academic examples of biased “anonymous” edits–and I guess they’d be hard to pin down because the range of IPs registered to a university would typically include lab workstations and other machines accessible by a large number of people. I’m sure something interesting will turn up, however. Keep looking.

Posted in Open Source, Tools | Leave a comment

More on openness and Google Books

Posted on 2007-08-17 by scaife

As a follow-up to Dan Cohen/s post yesterday in which he lamented the lack of an API to Google’s book digitization efforts, there’s further discussion today, in the form of an interview of Brewster Kahle by Andrew Richard Albanese, Scan this book!  Library Journal, August 17, 2007:

The Library of Congress also announced it is going to work with the Open Content Alliance. That’s what it takes. It takes guts on the part of our leadership to keep librarians first-class members of this information world, not just in a service role of feeding the machine and then checking out at the end of the day because everything’s going to be handled by some great search engine in the sky. No. It should be handled by us. We have the tools to build this open world right now. We can invest in ourselves, in the traditions that we come from. This is a choice.

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