British Museum site on Ancient Greece

Posted on 2006-10-13 by scaife

from The Scout Report:

5. Ancient Greece [Macromedia Flash Player]

https://www.ancientgreece.co.uk/

Presented with a physical relief map of Greece and its many islands, visitors to the homepage of this site will then be treated to a range of material objects, ranging from masks, urns, and stone tablets. All of these items are part of the British Museum’s vast holdings of materials from ancient Greece, and brought together, they constitute the online website titled “Ancient Greeceâ€?. Previous online collections have presented material from other civilizations, and this assemblage is divided into traditional sections that include geography, time, war, and Athens. While many of the sections follow traditional online collection conventions, there are a number of splendid Flash-enabled features that present a day in the life of the city of Athens, and of course, Plato’s immortal cave. [KMG]

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Alun Salt’s MuGeum Gateway to Ancient Greece

Posted on 2006-10-07 by scaife

What I’m working on is a list of various Greek cities as a reference for the new first years who start lectures in Ancient Greek history this coming week. Hopefully they’ll know where Athens is, but working out which island is Samos can be more difficult. The solution is to use the MuGeum to create Google Earth files, along with Google maps. You can download what I’ve done so far here.

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The Parthenon Frieze

Posted on 2006-10-07 by scaife

from Dorothy King:

Columbia has a great new site about the Parthenon Frieze, where you can click on the plan and see either old photos (pre recent 20th century damage) or drawings based on Carrey and other sources.
The Parthenon Frieze, Columbia University

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Zotero goes live

Posted on 2006-10-06 by scaife

Release notes.

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Senior Research Project Coordinator

Posted on 2006-10-05 by ioannisg

ICT Methods Network Administrative Centre Centre for Computing in the Humanities (18 months contract) Applications are invited for a post in the AHRC ICT Methods Network Administrative Centre (NAC), based at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH), King’s College London. This national initiative promotes and disseminates the use of ICT in UK arts and humanities research, by building a broadly based collaborative network of researchers from all humanities and arts disciplines working on the application of computational methods in research. The Methods Network promotes collaboration and facilitates multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary work via a series of high-profile activities and publications.

The holder of this position will have a broad remit to co-ordinate Methods Network outreach and collaborations, They will also be responsible for the development and management of a broad programme of activities and publications to promote, support and disseminate the use of ICT for effective research in the arts and humanities, and take responsibility for overall supervision of all stages of these activities and publications, including planning, development and implementation. Activities include expert seminars, workshops, conferences and postgraduate training events. All activities and publications will be developed in close consultation with the Manager and Directors of the Methods Network and with staff from a number of participating institutions, in particular the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS).

Applicants should have a degree in a humanities, arts or related discipline, and an interest and expertise in computing in the arts and humanities, as well as expertise in the associated technologies. Experience of working on a collaborative basis in major research projects involving research academics and specialists in applied computing, and experience of managing complex events and activities in an academic context would be an advantage. Flexibility and the ability to work as part of a team are essential, as are excellent communication skills and the ability to plan and implement projects and work to deadlines.

For more information, and a detailed job description, please see: www.methnet.ac.uk/advert/index.html or alternatively see the College’s website at www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs or email strand-recruitment@kcl.ac.uk or fax +44 (0)20 7848 1352. Quote reference number E3/AAV/140/06. Closing date for applications is 31 October 2006. Only candidates shortlisted for interview will be contacted.

Appointment will be made depending on qualifications and experience on ALC3, currently from £32,212 to £34,655 (depending on experience) plus £2,323 London Allowance per annum. nd consideration of on-line media

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20,000 entries for Suda On Line

Posted on 2006-10-04 by scaife

Progress Report (as of October 2, 2006):
Assigned: 20,385
Translated: 20,001
Vetted: 19,998

A message from Managing Editor Bill Hutton to contributors and potential contributors:

Dear contributors to the Suda On-Line:

Yesterday the 20,000th was submitted to the Suda On Line (https://www.stoa.org/sol/). This means we are roughly 2/3 of the way toward having translations of every single entry in our database. Thanks to the work of our editors, particularly the indefatigables, David Whitehead and Catharine Roth, practically all of those 20,000 entries have received at least preliminary editorial review. Considering the fact that this is not anyone’s full-time job, and not even the number-one research/publication project for the vast majority of us, this is not an achievement to be sneezed at. It took us 5 years to get to 10,000 entries (1998-2003), and only three more years to get up to 20,000.

Thank you for helping us reach that goal, and if you have not contributed to the project recently, I hope you will consider doing so and helping us do the last 10,000 entries even more quickly. Remember that you can use the SOL’s facilities to perform word searches on the Greek text of the Suda, thereby finding untranslated entries that interest you. Alternatively, the managing editors will be happy to assign you blocks of random entries that need to be translated. Those of you with “editor” status: we also need you to take a look at entires in your areas of expertise and make any necessary changes.

Please also bring the project to the attention of other people you think might be interested in contributing. Those of you who teach Greek might consider the benefit of having your students work on translating and/or annotating entries. We have had people do that successfully both on the graduate and the undergraduate levels.

If you have questions or need help getting back into SOL, just let us know: sudatores@lsv.uky.edu

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Pleiades Achieves First Major Development Milestone

Posted on 2006-10-04 by Tom Elliott

The staff of the Ancient World Mapping Center’s Pleiades Project is pleased to report that it has met its “Geo Prime” milestone, effective 2 October 2006.

The “Geo Prime” milestone was structured to demonstrate, in a modified version of the Plone Content Management System, basic geographic capabilities needed by the Project. A demonstration version is running on a server supplied by the Stoa Consortium: https://icon.stoa.org/pleiades-staging. The custom software we have developed in order to add these capabilities is being released to the public simultaneously under the rubric “Pleiades Software Release 0.6”

Pleiades is an international research network and associated web portal and content management system devoted to the study of ancient geography. Funding for the creation of this software was provided by a grant from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities.

Continue reading →

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A pitch for ATM-like print-on-demand

Posted on 2006-10-03 by scaife

From Jason Epstein’s NYRB article, Books@Google:

Page’s original conception for Google Book Search seems to have been that books, like the manuals he needed in high school, are data mines which users can search as they search the Web. But most books, unlike manuals, dictionaries, almanacs, cookbooks, scholarly journals, student trots, and so on, cannot be adequately represented by Googling such subjects as Achilles/wrath or Othello/jealousy or Ahab/whales. The Iliad, the plays of Shakespeare, Moby-Dick are themselves information to be read and pondered in their entirety. As digitization and its long tail adjust to the norms of human nature this misconception will cure itself as will the related error that books transmitted electronically will necessarily be read on electronic devices. Only those who have not read the Iliad or Moby-Dick, or Bleak House or Swann’s Way or The Origin of Species, will entertain this improbability. Until human beings themselves evolve as electronic receivers, readers will select such books as these—the embodiment of civilizations—as files from the World Wide Web, whence they will be transmitted either to a personal computer and printed out—a cumbersome procedure resulting in a stack of unbound sheets—or, much more satisfactorily, to a nearby machine not much bigger than an ATM which will automatically print, bind, and trim requested titles on demand that are indistinguishable from factory-made books, to be read as books have been read for centuries.

Meanwhile Google, together with the Gutenberg Project and the Open Content Alliance, and similar programs, has turned a new page in the history of civilizations leaving to us the privilege and the burden of carrying the story further. As part of this effort, On Demand Books, a company in which I have an interest, has installed in the World Bank bookstore in Washington, D.C., an experimental version of a machine such as I have just described, one that receives a digital file and automatically prints and binds on demand a library-quality paperback at low cost, within minutes and with minimal human intervention—an ATM for books. A second experimental machine has been sent to the Alexandrina Library in Egypt and will soon be printing books in Arabic. A newer version will be installed later this year or early next year in the New York Public Library.

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Wikimapia plus GE

Posted on 2006-10-02 by scaife

The new connection between Wikimapia and Google Earth announced on the Google Earth blog looks intriguing:

Wikimapia Does Google Earth!

Wikimapia in Google EarthExciting news! A few months ago one of the most talked about (and most used) Google mapping applications was released under the name Wikimapia. Wikimapia is a tool which lets anyone mark something in the Google Maps satellite/aerial photos with a rectangle and then write about it and/or provide links to Wikipedia. Just like Wikipedia, it lets anyone edit the commentaries / descriptions. The interface is intuitive and clean. As soon as I first saw it, I sent an E-mail suggesting they create a Google Earth network link to show the same information. Well, Matt Jones just wrote to tell me they now have Wikimapia for Google Earth (see his blog entry). Try out the Wikimapia KML network link and you will be able to zoom in and see Wikimapia areas in Google Earth for your current view. The more you zoom in, the more you see. You can click on the placemarks to get a link to the Wikimapia descriptions. I’m so glad they finally decided to support GE as well!

This is just the beginning of the possibilities. I’ve been thinking about new ways Wikimapia could be extended with Google Earth. For example, creating polygons with the rectangles and filling it with varying colors at a low transparency would make it look even better. There’s also some possibilities created with the new GE API (just announced recently by Google) which would allow more interesting integration between Wikimapia and GE.

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First Swedish CC-licensed PhD

Posted on 2006-09-28 by Gabriel Bodard

From the Creative Commons blog:

The first Creative Commons licensed PhD to be defended on 2nd October in Göteborg, Sweden.

The PhD thesis entitled Disruptive Technology: Effects of Technology Regulation on Democracy deals with the negative democratic effects which often arise when attempts are made to regulate the Internet technology.

By studying the attempts to regulate the disruptive effects of Internet technology and the consequences of these regulatory attempts on the IT-based participatory democracy this work shows that the regulation of technology is the regulation of democracy.

The work has been written by Mathias Klang who is Project Lead for Creative Commons Sweden.

The PhD thesis is the first of its kind to be released under a Creative Commons license (Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5) in Sweden.

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New humanities videos from UC Berkeley

Posted on 2006-09-28 by scaife

Among the Arts & Humanities videos just released by the University of California at Berkeley, there is “Ancient Egypt and the Tebtunis Papyri.”

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CFP: A Million Books!

Posted on 2006-09-25 by scaife

Very large digital libraries and the future of the humanities: What do you do with a million books?

With Google Library and the Open Content Alliance, backed by Microsoft and Yahoo, very large collections are beginning to take shape. At one extreme, we may find the best academic library ever created available on-line either for free or priced to reach a mass market. Even if this vision is not fully realized, we need to consider the prospect of having much more material previously available only in print libraries available to a much larger on-line audience. What are the implications for academia and especially for the humanities, as large, industrially produced, lightly structured digital collections present the published record of the past? The Mellon Foundation is supporting a year-long study of this problem.

We are particularly interested in the interaction of core technologies (e.g., converting page images to text, managing multiple languages and especially historical languages, and converting full text to machine actionable data) and humanities domains such as classical, early modern and English language studies. We welcome thoughtful contributions on any key issue: subscription vs. open access and/or open source, personalization and customization, new publications that build upon access to large, stable collections, new groups of contributors building Wikis or other community driven systems; the development of new services (e.g., machine translation, automatic bibliographic databases, dynamically generated timelines and maps). All submissions should consider possible implications for three audiences: those already engaged in a given area of the humanities, academics looking to work with a broader range of primary sources (e.g., using machine translation to explore Renaissance Latin), and members of society as a whole, both in the United States and abroad, who will have unprecedented access to the published record of humanity.

Papers should address one or more of the following audiences: computer and information scientists conducting research with potential application in the humanities; digital librarians, both commercial and academic; funders investing in a digital infrastructure for the humanities; professional academics conducting teaching and research; members of the general public exploring the record of humanity.

Abstracts (up to 800 words) due December 15. (This deadline has been extended to include results from the “Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science:WHAT TO DO WITH A MILLION BOOKS?? (Nov 5-6, 2006: https://dhcs.uchicago.edu/).

Abstracts will be made available for public discussion January 15 with key submissions invited to be developed into full papers due April 1, 2007 for discussion at a workshop at Tufts University, May 22-24, 2007.

For further information, contact millionbook@perseus.tufts.edu.

For further background:

https://www.dlib.org/dlib/march06/03contents.html

https://geryon.perseus.tufts.edu/data/%5Cmillionbooks%5Cmellon-april-2006-final.doc

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New blog for Papyrology news

Posted on 2006-09-25 by scaife

A message from G. Schwendner (Wichita State University):

I am putting up a weblog to keep track of new publications, announcements etc. in papyrology (my field). We see these, for the most part, on the Papy-list, but the archives are resticted to list members, and so its news does not flow very far. Most important, it does not get into the seach engines. Anyway, below is the url; let me know what you think. I have not had the time to reformat the Greek that appears in the tables of contents, but the publishers’ pdf versions are linked, and few, I think, are searching the web for unicode Greek text at this point.

https://papyrology.blogspot.com/

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On-line Companion to the Worlds of Roman Women

Posted on 2006-09-25 by scaife

A message from Judith Lynn Sebesta (University of South Dakota):

Call for Collaborators to The On-line Companion to The Worlds of Roman Women

The On-Line Companion to the Focus Reader, The Worlds of Roman Women,1 expands the book’s wide representation of Latin texts by and about women dating from the earliest periods through the fourth century CE. The medium of a website, moreover, offers the opportunity to integrate visuals to texts, thus enabling users to make connections between language and material culture. The Companion has two major parts.

The Worlds section includes Class, Religion, Childhood, Learning, Marriage, Family, Body, State, Work, and Flirtation. Each World opens to reveal a thematic image of women in this world, a brief essay on this World, a list of on-line texts and hyperlinked images. The glossed on-line texts are hyperlinked as well. For example, the introduction to Gnome Pierinis (Work) Flavian ornatrix is hyperlinked to a Flavian woman’s bust with elaborate hairstyle.

The Instructional section contains: a Guide to Using the Site; an Annotated Bibliography; Activities for Classroom Use; Syllabi and Lesson Plans; and Credits and Contributors. The annotated bibliography is hyperlinked to materials such as downloadable theses, essays, articles, and more.

Future development of the Companion will extend the geographic reach of Companion to all the provinces. We will add essays on aspects of Roman culture and women’s lives.

This point leads to our call for collaborators from all Latin teachers on all levels. “Collaboration” includes suggestions for additional texts; correction, revision and expansion of glosses and vocabulary for readings; evaluation of the grammatical difficulty of a text; sharing of images (that are legally in free-use) and syllabi; submission of glossed texts, classroom activities and annotated bibliographical items; identifying useful links; writing essays for teachers and/or students; and continuing updating of knowledge in the field. To make suggestions or to volunteer as a Companion collaborator, contact either Ann Raia (araia@cnr.edu) or Judith Sebesta (JL.Sebesta@usd.edu).

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British Academy: “copyright is hindering scholarship”

Posted on 2006-09-23 by Gabriel Bodard

British Academy says that copyright is hindering scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.

Baroness Onora O’Neill, the President of the British Academy, chaired the launch event and welcomed the report. “From the national point of view,” she said, “it is timely and provides a helpful contribution to the current debate about whether the UK’s intellectual property framework is fit for purpose. The report shows that the copyright system may in important respects be impeding, rather than stimulating, the production of new ideas and new scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.”

On-line versions of the report and guidelines are available from: https://www.britac.ac.uk/reports/copyright

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