The Stoa: a Review for Digital Classics

In this morning’s mail bag:

The draft report of the American Council of Learned Societies’ Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Sciences is now available for public comment, at

https://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/acls-ci-public.pdf

The file is about 2.4MB in size. The Commission invites you to contribute to the final version of this report by offering critique, providing examples, proposing ways to improve the draft, or raising issues omitted from the draft. We do not promise to incorporate all suggestions, but we do promise to consider them, and we encourage you to call this request for comments to the attention of others. Comments on the draft may be sent to cybercomments@listserv.acls.org.

The Commission will meet again early in 2006 to discuss public comments and complete their work, so comments should be submitted by December 31st, 2005.

John Unsworth, Chair

ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Science

… do not include Latin, apparently.

From his piece “Books of Revelation” in The Wall Street Journal, October 18, 2005, reproduced at googleblog:

…Imagine the cultural impact of putting tens of millions of previously inaccessible volumes into one vast index, every word of which is searchable by anyone, rich and poor, urban and rural, First World and Third, en toute langue — and all, of course, entirely for free. How many users will find, and then buy, books they never could have discovered any other way? How many out-of-print and backlist titles will find new and renewed sales life? How many future authors will make a living through their words solely because the Internet has made it so much easier for a scattered audience to find them? This egalitarianism of information dispersal is precisely what the Web is best at; precisely what leads to powerful new business models for the creative community; precisely what copyright law is ultimately intended to support; and, together with our partners, precisely what we hope, and expect, to accomplish with Google Print.

Learning Ancient Greek is the interactive, online complement to Cecelia Luschnig’s An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach.

An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach is a traditional beginner’s text, written in a conversational tone, as though between equals of good will and common purpose. Based on a grammar/syntax/vocabulary/reading approach, it provides more support for learners than comparable Latin texts, like Wheelock’s Latin. This extra support is an important learning aid, because Greek is more difficult to learn than Latin, as Latin is much more closely related to many present-day languages. Dr. Luschnig states explicitly that the text is designed for people who already know they want to learn Ancient Greek. Her extensive notes are engaging, give fascinating insights into the Greek mind and culture, and enliven the learning experience for all students.

This website provides additional free support materials for An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach. These materials reinforce the lessons and improve oral and aural competency. They include study guides and audio labs, both with answer keys.

Learning Ancient Greek also contains a free mini-course in Ancient Greek called “Greek Without Pain”.

If it were up to me, I’d vote with the public interest. I sometimes feel that if the increasingly expansive view of copyright asserted today had been around a couple of centuries ago, the Supreme Court would have ruled that lending libraries were illegal. But just as circulating libraries have a social value that far outweighs the minimal intrusion they produce in an author’s ability to control the distribution of her work, the same is true of Google’s project. The technology has changed, but the principle is the same.

At the same time, it’s too bad this has to be decided by the courts. It’s really a job for Congress, after all. Unfortunately, both Republicans and Democrats appear to be so thoroughly bought and paid for by the content industry that it’s pretty much inconceivable they’d do the right thing if it were brought to a vote. So it’s off to court we go, with the hope that existing law will be enough. I hope Google wins.

Amen.

An interesting article in First Monday proposes that a set of descriptive data elements could accompany digital materials to inform potential users of the copyright status of the item. It concludes: “Adding descriptive data elements for copyright status to the metadata created for intellectual works places a burden on the communities that create that metadata. The lack of such descriptive data elements, however, places an even larger burden on those who would like to make use of the works. Today’s massive problem of orphan works (U.S. Copyright Office, August, 2005) arises mainly because information about the initial creation of the work has been lost over time. More particularly, there was no effective means to record that information when it was available. Digital works and analog works that are digitized can be removed from the original context that contains many of the elements that are evidence of the copyright status of a work, such as the provenance of the archive. The provision of descriptive data elements that can be transmitted with the work itself should facilitate subsequent uses of the valuable intellectual content that the work represents. Copyright–related metadata, therefore, should be seen as an essential component of the resource description”.