Open Source Critical Editions workshop

Posted on 2006-09-21 by Gabriel Bodard

A workshop on Open Source Critical Editions will be held on Friday 22nd September in King’s College London. The workshop is co-organised by the AHRC ICT Methods Network, the Perseus Project, and the Digital Classicist. The workshop programme is available online, and we have also made the text of positioning papers available in full. Responses may also be posted in the Wiki, and discussion will continue beyond the workshop itself either here or on the Digital Classicist mailing list.

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Oral Tradition

Posted on 2006-09-21 by scaife

Via rogueclassicism comes the news that The Center for Studies in Oral Tradition now offers universal, free access to its academic journal.

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Zotero – the next generation research tool

Posted on 2006-09-19 by scaife

Dan Cohen has new blog posts about the Zotero project, which among other things has just landed substantial new support from Mellon.  For interesting details of where things stand, read Dan’s blog; meanwhile here’s a summary of what Zotero can do:

  • captures citation information you want from a web page automatically, without typing or cutting and pasting on your part, and saves this information directly into the correct fields (e.g., author, title, etc.) of your Zotero library
  • lets you store—beyond citations—PDFs, files, images, links, and whole web pages
  • allows you to easily take notes on the research materials you capture
  • makes it easy to organize your research materials in multiple ways, such as folders, saved searches (smart folders), and tags
  • offers fast, as-you-type search through your materials so that you can quickly find that source that you only vaguely remember
  • lets you export formatted citations to your paper, article, book, or website
  • has an easy-to-use, modern interface that simplifies all of your research tasks, with “where has that been?” features such as autosaving your notes as you type
  • runs right in your web browser and is a platform for new forms of digital research that can be extended with other web tools and services
  • is free and open source
  • has a name that is loosely based on the Albanian (yes, Albanian) word zotëroj, meaning “to acquire, to master,” as in learning

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Call for Collaboration/Latin Treebank

Posted on 2006-09-19 by scaife

A message received yesterday from David Bamman at Perseus:

The Perseus Project has recently received a planning grant from the NSF to investigate the costs and labor involved in constructing a multimillion-word Latin treebank, along with its potential value for the linguistics and Classics community. While our initial efforts under this grant will focus on syntactically annotating excerpts from Golden Age authors (Caesar, Cicero, Vergil) and the Vulgate, a future multimillion-word corpus would be comprised of writings from the pre- Classical period up through the Early Modern era. To date we’ve annotated a total of 12,000 words in a style that’s predominantly informed by two sources: the dependency grammar used by the Prague Dependency Treebank (itself based on Mel’cuk 1988), and the Latin grammar of Pinkster 1990.

While treebanks provide valuable training data for computational tasks such as grammar induction and automatic syntactic parsing, they also have the potential to be used in traditional research areas that Classicists in particular are poised to exploit. Large collections of syntactically parsed sentences have the potential to revolutionize lexicography and philology, as they provide the immediate context for a word’s use along with its typical syntactic arguments (this lets us chart, for example, how the meaning of a verb changes as its predominant arguments change). Treebanks enable large-scale research into structurally-based rhetorical devices particularly of interest to Classicists (such as hyperbaton) and they provide the raw data for research in historical linguistics (such as the move in Latin from classical SOV word order to romance SVO).

The eventual Latin treebank will be openly available to the public; we should, therefore, come to a consensus on how it should be built. To that end we encourage input from the linguistics and Classics community on the treebank design (including the syntactic representation of Latin) and welcome contributions by annotators (for which limited funding is available).  Interested collaborators should contact David Bamman (David.Bamman@tufts.edu) at the Perseus Project.

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A pre-order special for Unicode 5.0

Posted on 2006-09-18 by scaife

The Unicode(R) Consortium announces that pre-orders of Version 5.0 of the Unicode Standard can be made now through the Unicode Consortium’s website. As a special introductory offer, The Unicode Guide — the handy tri-fold developer’s reference guide — will be included with the Version 5.0 book at a combined price of $40.00 for both. This offer will expire on October 15, 2006.

To pre-order, go to: https://www.unicode.org/book/bookform.html
For further details on the book, go to:
https://www.unicode.org/book/aboutbook.html

The new version defines 1,369 new characters, including additional mathematical and linguistic symbols, and characters needed for Greek, Hebrew, Kannada, and for minority language support. Five new scripts are added in 5.0: Balinese, N’Ko, Phags-pa, Phoenician, and Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform.

Besides defining new characters, Unicode Standard 5.0 now contains the Unicode Standard Annexes, and includes significantly updated figures, tables, definitions, and tables.

The text itself provides better guidance on the handling of combining characters, Unicode strings, variation selectors, line breaking, and segmentation. This latest version is the basis for Unicode security mechanisms, the Unicode collation algorithm, the locale data provided by the Common Locale Data Repository, and support for Unicode in regular expressions. Improved expression of the Unicode encoding model makes it much clearer how to represent Unicode text in UTF-8 and other encoding forms. Character properties have been systematized and greatly extended to help with Unicode text processing. This new version is a major update which supersedes and obsoletes all previous versions of the standard.

Unicode is required by modern standards as XML and is widely supported in computer systems. Windows Vista runs on Unicode 5.0 and Google, Yahoo!, and ICU all have plans to upgrade to it.

The book is smaller and lighter than Unicode 4.0.
Publication details: Hardback, 1472 pages, $59.99 (list price)

For ordering questions, contact:
Magda Danish, Sr. Administrative Director, The Unicode Consortium
650-693-3921
magda@unicode.org

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Graduate work in digital humanities and new media

Posted on 2006-09-18 by scaife

Stéfan Sinclair has produced a handy list.

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Wikipedia and human freedom

Posted on 2006-09-11 by scaife

From The Observer:

The founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia written by its users, has defied the Chinese government by refusing to bow to censorship of politically sensitive entries. Jimmy Wales, one of the 100 most influential people in the world according to Time magazine, challenged other internet companies, including Google, to justify their claim that they could do more good than harm by co-operating with Beijing.

Wikipedia, a hugely popular reference tool in the West, has been banned from China since last October. Whereas Google, Microsoft and Yahoo went into the country accepting some restrictions on their online content, Wales believes it must be all or nothing for Wikipedia.

His stand comes as Irrepressible.info, a joint campaign by The Observer and Amnesty International for free speech on the web, continues with the support of more than 37,000 people around the world. The campaign calls on governments to stop persecuting political bloggers and on IT companies to stop complying with these repressive regimes.

Wales said censorship was ‘ antithetical to the philosophy of Wikipedia. We occupy a position in the culture that I wish Google would take up, which is that we stand for the freedom for information, and for us to compromise I think would send very much the wrong signal: that there’s no one left on the planet who’s willing to say “You know what? We’re not going to give up.”‘

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Whose side are they on, anyway?

Posted on 2006-09-11 by scaife

Timidity and obsequiousness watch; or, Peter Suber nails it:

Universities take industry word for copyright law

By Peter Suber

Cory Doctorow, USC Copyright rules are flawed, Daily Trojan, September 11, 2006. Excerpt:

As students were returning to the USC campus for the 2006-2007 year, they were sent an ominous memo on “Copyright Compliance,” signed by Michael Pearce, USC deputy chief information officer and Michael L. Jackson, vice president for Student Affairs. This extraordinary document set out a bizarre, nonlegal view of copyright’s intent and the university’s purpose, and made it clear that in its authors’ views, scholarship takes a backseat to copyright….

The memo’s purpose was to warn the student body from using peer-to-peer programs and other file-sharing tools. They did so not to warn them against using these tools to infringe copyright, but rather to warn them against using them at all on pain of losing their Internet access. The memo equates file sharing with infringement.

But this is a narrow and inaccurate view of P2P. P2P systems are the largest libraries of human creativity ever assembled. Even Grokster, the system shut down by the Supreme Court in a highly publicized case last year, was found by the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals to have more noninfringing documents than were held in the world’s largest library collections – millions, tens of millions of works that were lawful to search and download.

P2P is a collection of material that might have reduced an earlier generation of scholars to tears. As a science-fiction writer, I’ve grown up with grandiose predictions about the future, but no jet-pack futurist was so audacious as to imagine a repository of knowledge as rich and potent as P2P….

Why would USC trumpet this one-sided, extremist view of copyright? Isn’t the university’s purpose to promote scholarship? Shouldn’t a university be aggressively defending scholarship against organizations like the Recording Industry Association of America, whose indiscriminate enforcers send sloppy takedown notices to university profs named “Usher” whose lecture audio files called “usher.mp3” are mistaken for songs by the artist Usher?

The answer is that, according to the memo, “USC’s purpose is to promote and foster the creation and lawful use of intellectual property.”

It’s hard to imagine a more shocking statement in an official university communique. If this statement were true, then the measure of USC’s success would be the number of patents filed and the number of copyrights registered rather than the amount of original research undertaken, the number of diplomas granted, the volume of citations in scholarly journals…

Comment. Cory is right and the problem extends far beyond USC. Universities routinely accept propaganda from the copyright industry as an accurate statement of copyright law. This causes two kinds of harm. First, universities needlessly shrink the scope of fair use and retreat from permissible (i.e. licensed) copying and redistribution, both for entertainment and for scholarship. Second, they abdicate their responsibility to understand the actual rules and teach them to students.

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Nabonidus Archaeological Data Management Software

Posted on 2006-09-10 by ioannisg

Nabonidus is a web application designed for Archaeological Excavation data storage, sharing, manipulation and analysis. According to its creators, Nabonidus aims to revolutionize the way archaeologists collect, analyze and interpret excavation data. More specifically it offers:

Simple data collection — all excavation data can be stored simply and easily in the Nabonidus database which can be accessed at anytime from anywhere in the world with an internet connection.

Complete data privacy — all data is stored securely and excavations can mark their data as public or private as they see fit. Immediate results — Nabonidus gives meaningful statistical feedback immediately upon entering data for your dig.

Cross excavation analysis — Nabonidus’ powerful search engine allows easy cross excavation analysis.

Simple dig configuration — Nabonidus allows you total control over what data your excavation needs to record and how private or public you would like that data to be.

And best of all…It’s free! — Nabonidus is free to any excavation run by a University, charitable or not-for-profit organisation. Commercial excavations will need to pay the a yearly subscription fee. Please go the Register page to sign up. You can be adding contextual data to your excavation within 5 minutes.

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Will a patent on sliced bread be next?

Posted on 2006-09-05 by scaife

I had to laugh (along with some others, I see) at Microsoft patent application # 20060195313, filed 31 August 2006:

Method and system for selecting and conjugating a verb

Abstract: A verb conjugating system allows a user to input a form of a verb and display the verb forms. The verb conjugating system allows the user to input the infinitive form or non-infinitive forms of a verb. When a user inputs a non-infinitive form of a verb, the verb conjugating system identifies a corresponding base form of the verb. The verb conjugating system then uses the base form to retrieve and display the verb forms for the verb. The verb conjugating system may highlight the non-infinitive form of the verb within the displayed verb forms to assist the user in locating the verb form of interest.

Isn’t this just what the Perseus DL has been providing for more than fiften years now?

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On avoiding death-by-PowerPoint

Posted on 2006-08-31 by scaife

Just enountered this engaging blog: Presentation Zen.

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Google Book Search grants some PDF downloads

Posted on 2006-08-30 by scaife

from ars technica:

Google went ahead and did it. Books no longer in copyright are now available for download from the Google Book Search site. If you’re looking for something tasty, might we recommend an early English translation of Montaigne’s provocative essay “On Some Verses of Virgil”? (Hint: the naughtiest bits are in the Latin epigrams, the worst of which aren’t even translated).

There’s plenty of precendent for this sort of thing. Project Gutenberg provides access to 19,000 classic books, but in a text-only format. The Christian Classics Ethereal Library offers both text and PDF versions of a massive collection of source material, but only one one particular topic. There’s also the Perseus Project, which offers ancient and Renaissance texts. Google could top all of these projects by providing fully-searchable versions of a much wider selection of books, many of which can also be downloaded as PDFs that are ready to print.

While this only applies to older books, it’s still a great way of democratizing access to the world’s knowledge (in English, at any rate), and it can’t raise any objections from publishers. Books which were before available only on the shelves of large academic libraries are now available to anyone with a Web connection and some curiosity. Scienta vincit omnia!

But not everyone is thrilled with the results so far. From Planet PDF:

There’s no doubt Google needs to be applauded for the idea, but the execution (i.e. the books they’ve produced) could definitely do with some work. The PDF books are difficult to download, large in size, of such low resolution they’re difficult to read, unsearchable, and do not allow the user to copy text from them. It’s left me wondering what Google expects people to do with the books.

And more critique here.

Posted in General, Open Source, Projects, Publications | 3 Comments

Interesting announcement by the NEH today

Posted on 2006-08-29 by scaife

Part of a message that came around entitled 2006 Changes to Collaborative Research and Scholarly Editions Guidelines:

“In keeping with the goals of the NEH Digital Humanities Initiative (see CURRENT SPECIAL INITIATIVES below), the Scholarly Editions Program requires that applicants employ digital technology in the preparation, management, and online publication of all critical and documentary editions. Projects that include TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) conformant transcription and offer free online access are encouraged and will be given preference.”

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EDUCE funded by NSF

Posted on 2006-08-29 by scaife

The National Science Foundation has just announced a three-year award for a total of $1.2m to the team of Brent Seales (PI), Joseph Gray (co-PI), James Griffioen (co-PI), and Ross Scaife (co-PI) for EDUCE: Enhanced Digital Unwrapping for Conservation and Exploration.

ABSTRACT

This proposal is to develop a hardware and software system for the virtual unwrapping and visualization of ancient texts. The overall purpose is to capture in digital form fragile 3D texts, such as ancient papyrus and scrolls of other materials using a custom built, portable, multi-power CT scanning device and then to virtually “unroll” the scroll using image algorithms, rendering a digital facsimile that exposes and makes legible inscriptions and other markings on the artifact, all in a non-invasive process. Preliminary work has demonstrated proof of concept. The project is intensely interdisciplinary, requiring expertise in multiple domains. The project is complex and presents significant intellectual and technical challenges to information technology research, materials research, engineering and the social sciences. The potential broader impacts of the project are significant and immediately useful across a large set of scholarly applications and institutional practices. Successful implementation of the described system will enable non-invasive, non-destructive examination of fragile texts and artifacts which contain a wealth of information, allowing holders to share the intellectual content of precious assets with individuals and other institutions.

We’ve begun a new site for dissemination of information about the project here.

Posted in General, Grants | 3 Comments

Chris Francese reading Latin aloud

Posted on 2006-08-29 by scaife

Chris Francese has posted some well-made readings of Latin poetry on a server at Dickinson College.

(hat-tip Rogueclassicism)

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