The Open Content Alliance

Posted on 2005-10-03 by chuckjones

The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. Content in the OCA archive will be accessible soon through this website and through Yahoo!

The OCA will encourage the greatest possible degree of access to and reuse of collections in the archive, while respecting the content owners and contributors. Contributors to the OCA must agree to the principles set forth in the Call for Participation

Additional note: there are many more links concerning this project at Open Access news.

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IMEROS journal

Posted on 2005-09-29 by ioannisg

Imeros is the official journal of the Foundation of the Hellenic World. The journal mainly deals with issues relating to the use of technology in the fields of cultural heritage, education and so forth. Some of the articles featured in the latest issue (no. 4/2004) are: Virtual Reconstructions in Archaeology and Some Issues for Consideration and The Virtual Reconstruction of the Hellenistic Asclepieion of Messene.

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Project StORe Researcher

Posted on 2005-09-29 by ioannisg

Applications are invited for a researcher to work on the White Rose Consortium (York, Sheffield, Leeds) contribution to this JISC-funded project, led by the University of Edinburgh. The post is based in York and you will be conducting a survey by questionnaire and structured interview of archaeology researchers to determine their current use of digital repositories (Archaeology Data Service and White Rose e-prints repository) and their future requirements.

You will be educated to degree level or with equivalent experience, and have experience of survey methods and academic research. Excellent time management, IT and communication skills are required, with the capacity to work independently and collaboratively. Knowledge of archaeology will be an advantage.

Salary within the range: £19,460 – £21,640 or £22,507 – £29,128 per annum, reduced pro rata. An appointment on the lower scale is anticipated. The hours of work will be 18.75 per week and the post is available for nine months.

For further particulars and details of how to apply, please see our website at: https://www.york.ac.uk/admin/persnl/jobs/ or write to the Personnel Office, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, quoting reference number BH05408.

Closing Date: 12 October 2005

The University of York is committed to diversity and has policies and developmental programmes in place to promote equality of opportunity. It particularly welcomes applications from ethnic minority candidates.

(Advertisement source: https://jobs.ac.uk/jobfiles/HZ176.html)

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Archaeological Atlas of the Aegean

Posted on 2005-09-29 by ioannisg

The Archaeological Atlas of the Aegean is an online atlas of the Aegean, created by the Ministry of the Aegean and the University of Athens, Greece. The Atlas is fully searchable and enables users to locate archaeological sites in mainland Greece, the Aegean islands and Asia Minor. The main features of the Atlas are maps, an index of sites and a time chart.

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Copyfraud

Posted on 2005-09-28 by scaife

Jason Mazzone, “Copyfraud,” Brooklyn Law School, Legal Studies Paper No. 40, August 21, 2005. (Via Peter Suber and Klaus Graf.)

Abstract: Copyright in a work now lasts for seventy years after the death of the author. Critics contend that this period is too prolonged, it stifles creativity, and it undermines the existence of a robust public domain. Whatever the merits of this critique of copyright law, it overlooks a more pervasive and serious problem: copyfraud. Copyfraud refers to falsely claiming a copyright to a public domain work. Copyfraud is everywhere. False copyright notices appear on modern reprints of Shakespeare’s plays, Beethoven piano scores, greeting card versions of Monet’s water lilies, and even the U.S. Constitution. Archives claim blanket copyright to everything in their collections. Vendors of microfilmed versions of historical newspapers assert copyright ownership. These false copyright claims, which are often accompanied by threatened litigation for reproducing a work without the “owner’s” permission, result in users seeking licenses and paying fees to reproduce works that are free for everyone to use. Copyfraud also refers to interference with fair uses of copyrighted works. By leveraging the vague fair use standards contained in the Copyright Act and attendant case law, and by threatening litigation, publishers deter legitimate reproduction of copyrighted works, improperly insisting on licenses and payment of fees. Publishers wrongly contend that nobody may reproduce for any reason any portion of a copyrighted work, without the publisher’s prior approval. These circumstances have produced fraud on an untold scale, with millions of works in the public domain deemed copyrighted, and countless dollars paid out every year in licensing fees to make copies that could be made for free. Copyfraud stifles valid forms of reproduction and undermines free speech. Copyfraud also weakens legitimate intellectual property rights. Congress should amend the Copyright Act to allow private parties to bring civil causes of action for false copyright claims, and to specify as a statutory matter that copying less than five percent of a single copyrighted work is presumptively fair use. In addition, Congress should enhance more generally protection for the public domain, with the creation of a national registry listing public domain works, a symbol to designate those works, and a federal agency charged with securing and promoting the public domain. Failing a congressional response, there may also exist remedies under state law and through the efforts of private parties.

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Support still missing

Posted on 2005-09-28 by scaife

(via Peter Suber) Brock Read, A New Report Bemoans the State of Online Research on American Literature, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 28, 2005 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt:

Whether digitizing out-of-print novels or publishing their own criticism, a growing number of scholars are putting their research on American literature on the Web. But they’re not getting much support from their colleges, according to a new report that also serves as a catalog of online literary research. The report, “A Kaleidoscope of Digital American Literature,” was released on Tuesday by the Digital Library Federation and the Council on Library and Information Resources. It draws on interviews and case studies compiled by Martha L. Brogan, a library consultant who was once the director of collection development for libraries at Indiana University at Bloomington. Ms. Brogan’s study is, first and foremost, a catalog that includes digital collections, bibliographies, oral histories, and other critical material. According to David Seaman, executive director of the Digital Library Foundation, the catalog is unprecedented, chiefly because scholarly projects on the Web pop up in a “disjointed” fashion. The report “provides us, I think for the first time, with a fairly comprehensive, current survey of what’s out there,” Mr. Seaman said, “and that’s half the value of the report.” The other half, he said, comes from Ms. Brogan’s finding that too many book-digitization projects are maintained by scholars as “a labor of love,” without any significant support from their college libraries or English departments. That is a disturbing trend, Mr. Seaman said, because it means that many influential scholarly sites have no agreed-upon standards for presenting material, no consistent source of outside funding, and no plan for what happens if a professor quits or suffers a computer breakdown. Perhaps because of those concerns, many humanities scholars say they have little use for online resources, according to the report. And many young professors are disinclined to conduct digital research projects because online scholarship, which is not often subject to peer review, is seldom considered in promotion and tenure evaluations. “Until the digital age,” Mr. Seaman said, “the model in the humanities was one scholar, one carrel, one book. Compare that to other disciplines, where teams of people have co-authored papers all the time. The rise in a sense of community is still quite new in the humanities, and I think digital scholarship has contributed to that.”

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more on Google Print

Posted on 2005-09-28 by scaife

Tom O’Reilly weighs in on the Authors’ Guild suit against Google in today’s New York Times:

A search engine for books will be revolutionary in its benefits. Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors than copyright infringement, or even outright piracy. While publishers invest in each of their books, they depend on bestsellers to keep afloat. They typically throw their products into the market to see what sticks and cease supporting what doesn’t, so an author has had just one chance to reach readers. Until now.

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Aphrodisias in Late Antiquity Creative Commons License

Posted on 2005-09-28 by Gabriel Bodard

A clarification of the CC license terms from the Inscriptions of Aphrodisias:

ALA 2004 Copyright clarification

The Creative Commons license information applies specifically to the narrative materials of this website: the introduction, commentary, appendices and indices. The photographs and plans are not all owned by us, and so they are subject to the usual restrictions for copyrighted material. The EpiDoc XML files containing the text and editions of the inscriptions may be considered formally exempt from clause 3, No Derivative Works. In fact we keenly encourage scholars to download our XML files and repurpose them to any interesting ends.

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deep access to digitised cultural heritage material

Posted on 2005-09-26 by scaife

Repeated here from the Humanist list by permission of the poster, Mats Dahlström (and note that the Classical Text Services protocol being developed principally by Neel Smith and Christopher Blackwell under the aegis of the Center for Hellenic Studies addresses this very issue of creative adaptation and reuse):

In his “Deep Sharing: A Case for the Federated Digital Library“, EDUCAUSE Review, 38(4) (July-August 2003), p 10-11, David Seaman pleaded for repositories of digitised cultural heritage material,

from which libraries can draw files into local collections for innovative reuse and rearticulation as the needs of local users dictate. (*) it would enable librarians and end-users alike to download “digital master” files as malleable objects for local recombinations, to be enriched with context from librarians or teachers, crafted for specific audiences, and unified in appearance and function. A user could download, combine, search, annotate, and wrap the results into a seamless “digital library mix” for others to experience. (- – -) [A]t present, all you can do is scrutinize that data where it resides, in formats that the creator of the content determined… [Y]ou can have a passive engagement with the content but not an active one. You cannot combine those scattered objects into something new, improved, and shaped for your local needs. (- – -) Libraries create high-quality digital masters for long-term preservation and reuse but then typically expose only one view of a file to the user, in one particular search-and-display software package. This serves one typ of need but underserves others…

The benefits of such deep sharing and deep access are clear, yet we have seen few such efforts from our large, digitising memory institutions (such as archives and libraries). Why is that? I’m thinking particularly of ‘end-users’ seeking digitised cultural heritage material in the public domain, and to what degree they are able to have access not only to delivery formats such as JPEGS or (X)HTML, but to master files (be it image files in tiff etc., or marked up text files in e.g. TEI) of such material, without having to pay extra money for such access. It seems to be such possibilities are scarce at the moment, most digitising memory institutions making only passive display formats accessible to end-users (and a few institutions charging users wanting access to the “heavy” master file material). I understand there are both technical (bandwidth etc), administrative (the quest for control or a tradition to charge for costly colour reproductions) and, most importantly, legal reasons for this: although the original material might be in the public domain, the digitised versions of that material might be considered derivative works deserving copyright protection. This latter argument strikes me however as somewhat awkward. The digitised material, certainly when we talk about image-based strategies, tries to mimic as far as possible the original material – the greater the mimic correspondence is, the better, and the more the digitised version will fulfill its surrogate function and hopefully reduce the handling of the original material. Still it is to be regarded as a new (derivate) work of its own…

Anyway, I would be most grateful for any pointers to collections of digitised cultural heritage material where users actually have free and deep access to “master files” with little or no restrictions as to the re-use of such material for e.g. scholarly purposes.

Yours sincerely,
Mats Dahlstrom
Swedish School of Library and Information Studies

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Digital Classicist: Announcement and Call for Participation

Posted on 2005-09-26 by scaife

Dieser Aufruf zur Beteiligung kann man auch auf deutsch lesen
Cet appel à participation se trouve aussi en français
Questa richiesta di partecipazione e’ disponibile anche in Italiano

We should like to announce the creation of a new project and community, hosted by the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (KCL), applying humanities computing to the study of the ancient world. The Digital Classicist has a pilot web site at https://www.digitalclassicist.org, which, as well as serving as a placeholder for further content, sets out our aims and objectives in a preliminary manner. As you will see, key sections of the website and summaries of articles will, where possible, be translated into the major languages of European scholarship: e.g. English, French, German, Italian, Spanish etc. The project also comprises a discussion list, a Wiki, and a Blog.

The project, which is committed to being ongoing and available in the long term, fills a gap in the current academic environment: there are countless important digital research projects in the classics, including many that offer advice and share tools; there are sites that discuss, host, or list such resources (the Stoa, the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents in Oxford, EAGLE in Rome, to name but a few); but there is no single platform for scholars and interested experts in the international and polyglot community to discuss problems, share experiences, post news and advice, and go to for help on all matters digital and classical. We shall of course work closely with other organisations and projects that are active in these areas (in particular the Stoa, and other subject communities such as the Digital Medievalist, including specialists in archaeological, historical, and geographical technologies), to avoid excessive overlap and maximise co-operation and collaboration.

At this point we especially need members of the international scholarly community to contribute to the project. If you feel you could get involved in an editorial capacity, or you could recommend somebody else to do so, please do get in touch. There is no obligation that editors give up many hours of their time, of course–editorial roles are discussed in a posting at https://tinyurl.com/cpdsu . In addition we should be very grateful if you could suggest other people–especially those in non-Anglophone Europe–who might be interested in participating in this project in any way.

And in any case, please spread the word, join the mailing list and get involved in the discussions as we establish this new project and community.

Best regards,

The Editors
digitalclassicist.org

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Suggestions for better data preservation

Posted on 2005-09-26 by chuckjones

In “Digital Biblical Scholarship: Dust to Dust?” Patrick Durusau reflects on the role professional societies might play in the preservation of orphaned digital resources.

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“serious and irreversible damage”?

Posted on 2005-09-26 by chuckjones

In “Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration” an interesting group of scholars responds to a public letter from the ALPSP (Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers) which strongly condemned the RCUK’s (Research Councils UK) proposed self archiving policy.

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Under my skin…

Posted on 2005-09-23 by scaife

Studying ancient languages seems to be one of the best ways to exercise and strengthen our memories. But sometimes we just seem to hit a wall, for example on the finer points of Denniston’s Greek Particles. At last, the answer has arrived: sub-dermal displays. Be sure to watch the video.

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Three Projects Worthy of Careful Review

Posted on 2005-09-23 by chuckjones

The Alexandria Archive Institute works to build an open, Internet-based, knowledge commons of world cultural heritage. “Dedicated organizations, such as the AAI, are needed to continuously keep pace with developments in scholarship, build and maintain collaborations, and provide needed guidance in data preservation and Web dissemination. We continually build ties with the larger community of “open-knowledgeâ€? initiatives and have launched new collaborations with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, and the Connexions Project”.

ETANA-DL: Managing complex information applications: An archaeology digital library. Funded in part by the National Science Foundation’s ITR program, this “research proposes to develop a digital library (DL) for ancient Near Eastern studies with two archaeological components: DigBase (DB) – a repository and an archive for archaeological data from the Near East and beyond, and DigKit (DK) – a compatible field tool for collecting and recording archaeological data during archaeological surveys and excavations. DB is a model-based, extensible, archaeological componentized DL that will manage complex archaeological information sources based on the client-server paradigm of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). DK is a compatible field tool for collecting, recording and exposing archaeological data in an OAI compliant manner during archaeological surveys and excavations”.

XSTAR: XML System for Textual and Archaeological Research. “The goal of this project is to create a sophisticated Internet-based research environment for specialists in textual and archaeological studies. In particular, XSTAR is intended for archaeologists, philologists, historians, and historical geographers who work with artifacts, documents, and geographical or environmental data. It will not only provide access to detailed, searchable data in each of these areas individually, but will also integrate these diverse lines of evidence as an aid to interdisciplinary research”.

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Comments on podcasting

Posted on 2005-09-22 by scaife

There’s a useful post on “Podcasting and Classics” on the Memento Vivere blog (via rogueclassicism).

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