New technologies for Euclid’s Elements

Posted on 2006-12-19 by scaife

Greg Crane points out a new paper by Mark J. Schiefsky:

The specific purpose of this paper is to describe a set of new software tools and some of their applications to the study of Euclid’s Elements. More generally, it is intended as a case study to illustrate some of the ways in which recent developments in information technology can open up new perspectives for the study of source materials in the history of mathematics and science. I argue that the creative and judicious use of such technology can make important contributions to historical scholarship, both by making it possible to pursue old questions in new ways and by raising new questions that cannot easily be addressed using traditional means of investigation.

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Threats to Preservation

Posted on 2006-12-19 by scaife

Jill Hurst-Wahl at Digitization 101 lists some Bad Things That Can Happen

  • Media failure
  • Hardware failure
  • Software failure
  • Network failure
  • Obsolescence
  • Natural Disaster
  • Operator error
  • Internal Attack
  • External Attack
  • Organization Failure
  • Economic Failure

and she notes that LOCKSS is one of several possible responses.

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Semantic Web podcasts

Posted on 2006-12-19 by scaife

Keith Alexander at Semantic Humanities is compiling a list of podcasts on the theme of the Semantic Web.

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CAA 2007

Posted on 2006-12-19 by scaife

The Annual Conference of Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA) to be held in Berlin in April is still accepting papers and registrations.

It is the aim of the conference to bring together experts from various disciplines to discuss new developments in computer applications and quantitive methods in archaeology. These include methods and applications of 3D reconstructions, geographic information systems, web data bases, photogrammetry, statistics, and many other subjects. With its interdisciplinary approach the conference will discover different layers of perception, and this is why “layers of perception” is the CAA 2007 conference theme.

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Call for examples from “TEI by Example”

Posted on 2006-12-16 by scaife

The Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies (CTB) https://www.kantl.be/ctb/ of the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature, the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH) https://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/ of King’s College London, and the School for Library, Archive, and Information Studies (SLAIS) https://www.slais.ucl.ac.uk/ of University College London, are involved in the joint project “TEI by Example”.

Featuring freely available online tutorials walking individuals through the different stages in marking up a document in TEI (Text Encoding Initiative https://www.tei-c.org), these online tutorials will provide examples for users of all levels. Examples will be provided of different document types, with varying degrees in the granularity of markup, to provide a useful teaching and reference aid for those involved in the marking up of texts.

Eight tutorial modules will address a wide range of issues in text encoding with TEI:

1. Introduction to text encoding with TEI
2. The TEI header
3. Prose
4. Poetry
5. Drama
6. Manuscript Transcription
7. Scholarly Editing
8. Customizing TEI, ODD, Roma

To build as much as possible on available sources of existing practice in the field and to be able to present a broad view on the wide variety of encoding practices, we warmly welcome you to contribute TEI-encoded examples (either fragments or complete texts) that are applicable to any of these subjects. Examples are preferably encoded as TEI P5 XML texts, but also texts encoded in TEI P4 XML, other XML formats, or other (documented) electronic formats are of interest. Even examples of less-ideal encoding practices are welcome, since the idea of learning by error is a valuable didactic principle. Please do provide some indication of the errors or controversies in such examples when appropriate. After selection and editing, the example fragments will be incorporated in the freely available online deliverables, which will be issued under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license (see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/). All contributors will be credited.

The examples can be sent (preferably compressed in .zip format and with an indication of applicability and credits due) to teibyexample@kantl.be. Please do not hesitate to contact us for any inquiries regarding copyright issues or any more general issues.

Kind regards,

The project team:

Ron Van den Branden, Melissa Terras, Edward Vanhoutte

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Grumentum: latest from Troels Myrup

Posted on 2006-12-16 by scaife

Troels Myrup has added new images to the Stoa Image Gallery:

I’ve added photos from Grumentum in Lucania (Southern Italy) to the Stoa Gallery. Charming place but fairly remote. It’s kind of hard to think that tourists will ever come here in hordes as the local council seems to believe. Recently, a new project has excavated the baths and parts of the forum, shedding new light on the city’s late antique development. The project’s website is currently offline.

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Flash Earth

Posted on 2006-12-16 by scaife

Use Flash Earth to try different mapping sites conveniently to see which has the best imagery for the site in which you are interested.

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Chiron web: collaborative Classics

Posted on 2006-12-03 by scaife

A very welcome announcement in the mail today:

I would like to communicate with you the birth of a new collaborative site, so that you can announce it at www.stoa.org:

Name: Chiron
URL: https://www.chironweb.org/

The site is made by (and for) Spanish teachers of Greek and Latin in Secondary Schools. There are several similar sites (www.culturaclasica.com and others), but the distinctiveness of this one is that it is focused to the easy collaboration that new tools (web 2.0) bring to all of us. We provide, with Creative Commons license (as possible):

– blogs aggregation,
– a list of web resources (in a wiki),
– a social tagger (blinklist),
– a repository of images (flickr),
– some courses in Moodle,
– a Google calendar.

The site was born 2 months ago and ints contents and users are rising. As an example, we have collected more than a thousand images with Creative Commons license ready to download. We are testing a Forum at: https://www.catedu.es/chiron/foro/ were you could see the “making of” of the site for the past two weeks, in Spanish of course.

Perhaps this new site could encourage other teachers to build some similar sites in other countries and languages.

José M. Ciordia
https://www.chironweb.org
https://blog.pompilos.org

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Open Access Pantheon

Posted on 2006-11-28 by scaife

From Neel Smith comes word of The Pantheon Project – The Pilot Project of the Karman Center. Definitely worth a look, with very nice OA policies covering the core project data:

… many questions remain concerning the design, construction, statics, building logistics and the original purpose of this unique monument. The Karman Center’s Pantheon Project aims to resolve these questions with up-to-date technical means, new digital measurings of the entire building and new forms of web-based scientific collaboration … One of the new means of the Pantheon Project for scientific work is a 3D digital data model based on 540,000,000 points (= >9 gigabytes of numerical data) from a laser scanning operation executed in Rome during December 2005. The model not only contains the coordinates of all the points but also the colour value of the surface … The Pantheon Project, as all other future Karman Center projects, focuses on Open Access Scholarship, that is, not only the research results from the Pantheon Project and the Karman Center, but also all the basic data and discussion concerning them will be made freely accessible to all interested scholars for their own use. We also hope to convince archives and other institutions owning historical sources, such as drawings, photographs, prints, rare books, maps, etc., to help us make them available online for research. This would not only help to intensify scholarly work but would at the same time help to preserve the often very delicate or easily damaged originals.

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UK is on board — how about your institution?

Posted on 2006-11-28 by scaife

from Open Access News:

Another provost for FRPAA

Kumble Subbaswamy, Provost of the University of Kentucky, has added his signature to the SPARC list of U.S. university presidents and provosts endorsing open access to publicly-funded research and the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 ( FRPAA). The tally is now up to 131.
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A Directory of Academic Blogs, Wiki Style

Posted on 2006-11-28 by scaife
from the CHE:
How many academic blogs are there? Too many for any one person to keep track of. The popular academic blog Crooked Timber has long maintained a lengthy list of academic blogs. The list had been maintained in part by Henry Farrell, an assistant professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, but the task was starting to seem overwhelming. “I’d come to the conclusion that one person just couldn’t keep track of this anymore,” he said in an interview this week. So why not open up the list and let anyone add to it? That’s just what the gang at Crooked Timber decided to do, using the same wiki software behind Wikipedia. The result is academicblogs.org, which went online in September. Mr. Farrell said he doesn’t know how many blogs are now listed in the ever-growing collection because he hasn’t had time to count. We started to attempt a count ourselves, but we only made it through the first category: humanities. There are about 470 of those. The list is in no way a seal of approval, Mr. Farrell said, adding that he personally disagrees with many of the views expressed in blogs on the list. “The only policing is to make sure that anybody who’s there is an academic,” he said. There are other directories of academic blogs, such as BlogScholar. Do others out there know of other guides to the academic blogosphere worth checking out?–Jeffrey R. Young
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2007 Postdoctoral Fellowship in Scholarly Information Resources for Humanists

Posted on 2006-11-22 by ioannisg

Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR)

Description: The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) is now accepting applications for the 2007 Postdoctoral Fellowship in Scholarly Information Resources for Humanists. Now in its fourth year, the fellowship provides new scholars in the humanities a unique opportunity to develop expertise in the new forms of scholarly research and the information resources that support them, both traditional and digital, that are challenging research institutions. The program offers fellowships to individuals who believe that there are opportunities to develop meaningful linkages between disciplinary scholarship, libraries, archives, and evolving digital tools.

About eight fellowships will be awarded, with fellowships beginning in Summer 2007 and ranging from one to two years in length. The fellowships will pay a salary ($35,000-$50,000) plus benefits at one of the collaborating academic libraries, each of which will serve as a fellowship sponsor. Applicants must have earned their Ph.D.s in disciplines in the humanities within the past five years, or earn them before starting the program. Fellows must be in residence at a sponsoring institution for the duration of the fellowship, and must be able to attend a mandatory two-week seminar at Bryn Mawr College from July 22-August 2, 2007.

Sponsoring institutions for 2007-2008 include: Appalachian College Association Georgia Institute of Technology Lehigh University The Ohio State University Pepperdine University The Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center University of California, Los Angeles University of Virginia Applications must be postmarked by February 16, 2007. Applicants will be notified of their status by April 30, 2007.

For further information, or to download an application, please visit our website. Please direct any questions to Amy Harbur, Program Officer https://www.clir.org/fellowships/postdoc/postdoc.html Contact Info: Amy Harbur, Program Officer Council on Library and Information Resources 1755 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Suite 500 Washington, DC 20036 aharbur@clir.org Expire Date: February 16, 2007

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Pot, meet kettle

Posted on 2006-11-20 by scaife

This one is pretty rich fare! How many times have we all read ludicrously over-reaching claims of copyright protection for books and electronic resources? And these people want to point fingers at the faculty for not understanding the law?
For more on this general topic see Jason Mazzone, “Copyfraud,” Brooklyn Law School, Legal Studies Paper No. 40, August 21, 2005.

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ePhilology: when the books talk to their readers

Posted on 2006-11-15 by scaife

Curious about where classics might go in a digital world? See the preprint of a new article about ePhilology (by Gregory Crane, David Bamman, and Alison Babeu of the Perseus Project at Tufts University) that will appear in The Blackwell Companion to Digital Literary Studies.

From the introduction: “The term ePhilology implicitly states that, while our strategic goal may remain the scientia totius antiquitatis, the practices whereby we pursue this strategic goal must evolve into something qualitatively different from the practices of the past.”

Continue reading →

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Classics in the Million Book Library

Posted on 2006-11-15 by Gabriel Bodard

After the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science, a group met at the University of Chicago as a part of a Mellon-funded project, centered at Tufts University, to explore the question, “What do you do with a million books?”

Today this working group issued a statement, now available in pdf and doc formats.

This position paper is intended as a starting point for an open public discussion that attracts multiple voices and perspectives. It will be particularly helpful if such discussion takes place on the Digital Classicist list, to which anyone interested my subscribe.

A call for scholarly papers on this topic due December 15 is available here. A final workshop will take place at Tufts University, May 22-24, 2007.

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