The Stoa: a Review for Digital Classics

from the mailbag:

Dear Prof. Scaife,

I forward to you as editor of the Stoa Consortium the announcement of the launch of Intute, a free online service that may be of interest to the readers of the Stoa.org blog. Intute publishes reviews of Internet resources useful to the academic community (both staff and students) and includes sections such as ‘Classics’; ‘Archaeology’ and ‘History’. The service replaces Humbul and as its predecessor is managed by a team at the University of Oxford, UK. The service is aimed at the UK academic community but is freely available to everybody. Readers are also invited to submit Web sites for review using the form on the site or, for resources regarding archaeology, emailing me at a_vianello@hotmail.com

A service offered by Intute that may be particularly helpful to lecturers or tutors is MyIntute. It is possible to use it to prepare and distribute (to students or anybody else) lists of reviewed Internet resources that may complement existing bibliographies or easily import them in websites.
Best Regards,

Andrea Vianello

*****
Dr Andrea Vianello MA PhD
Subject reviewer in archaeology
Intute – Oxford University

From the British Library comes an interesting press release:

The British Library’s Chief Executive this week warned of some of the unintended consequences of the widespread adoption of Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems and urged policymakers to balance the rights of content creators with the need to maintain access in the public good. …

(more at https://www.bl.uk/news/2006/pressrelease20060607.html)

The issue is, of course, well known to Stoa blog readers. Particularly interesting, however, is that now libraries are beginning to express concerns too…

In an interesting letter in the New Scientist (22 July 2006, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19125610.300.html), Ted Nelson, ‘inventor’ of the term hypertext, looks back at a project designing a hypertext system at Brown University in the 1960s. He decries the currently existing hypertext model as merely the popularization of what he considered at the time as only the interim solution of said project: ‘That project dumbed down hypertext to one-way, embedded, non-overlapping links. Its broken and deficient model of hypertext became by turns the structure of the NoteCards and HyperCard programs, the World Wide Web, and XML.’ His criticism is particularly harsh towards XML: ‘It is opaque to the laypersons who deserve deep command of electronic literature and media. It gratuitously imposes hierarchy and sequence wherever it can, and is very poor at representing overlap, parallel cross-connection, and other vital non-hierarchical media structures that some people do not wish to recognise.’

“Home of the Classics Discussion List”

The blog : https://www.classics-l.info/ (rss and atom feeds prominently linked)

Noted thereupon: link to an RSS feed for the listserv itself

Aristarchos is a freeware program that allows the user to search for abbreviations commonly used for periodicals, series and monographs in archaeology.

https://www.archeolinks.com/aristarchos.htm