The Stoa: a Review for Digital Classics

from the mailbag this morning:

Dear Member of Classics Department or Classical Organization:

As the academic year approaches, I am writing to inform you about a new computer application, Okus, that is available for studying ancient Greek texts. Okus incorporates new methods for reading ancient Greek, including color-coordination of words based on tense or case and fast morphology parsing / dictionary-entry retrieval.

A demonstration version of this program is available for download at https://p225.com/. At this time Okus is only available on Microsoft Windows (XP and 2000).

Questions or comments will be welcomed. Thank you very much for your time.

Sincerely,

Projects 225

I’m not sure what to make of this line on the Projects 225 website: “due to the text operations this program is written in C++ for the windows OS.”

Thanks to Peter Suber for calling attention to Peter Kirby, Open Access Translation (The OAT Bible), Christian Origins, August 7, 2005. Excerpt:

TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) are popular for Bible translations, so I’ve come up with one. The “Open Access Translation” (OAT) Bible. It would be the first Bible to be translated with a Creative Commons license. The question is–which license? The question is whether we would want the translator to be able to add this to her CV, in which case we would have to go with a “No Derivatives-By Attribution” license, or whether we would want people to be able to modify the Bible for their own purposes. For the Open Scrolls Project, J. Davila suggested that I go with the “No Derivatives-By Attribution” license, and I agreed to this. This way, all the changes to be made to the Bible could be suggested on a single website, where they could be reviewed by the general editor(s) and the editor(s) for the particular biblical book. The main contributors to each book’s translation would get credit and could know that their work would not be mangled. Nonetheless, the translation could be freely copied and printed at no charge if kept intact. In order to make such a translation, three things are necessary, or at least desirable –volunteer translators, open access translation software, and some funding (to pay the general editor? to pay a modicum to all active translators? to promote the project and the result? to legitimate the effort?). Active volunteer translators, and even moreso competent ones and excellent editors for quality control, will be the hardest to come by. Funding, therefore, could be a way to solve that problem. But who would do the funding? The easiest part would be open access translation software –because I would be happy to write it.

from InformationWeek:

IBM plans to make its enterprise search middleware, designed to facilitate searches of unstructured data, available as open-source code. It’s called Unstructured Information Management Architecture, and IBM says more than 15 knowledge-management companies intend to support it as a standard framework.

The company also is wedding the latest iteration of its WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition with UIMA. Its goal is to make enterprise search results more relevant and make it easier to apply third-party analytics software.

UIMA is a software infrastructure layer that supports the search and analysis of disorganized data. Unstructured data–E-mail messages, Word documents, and the like–isn’t easily classified, sorted, or searched.

The open-source move could let software partners add value to unstructured content with analytics applications, says Dana Gardner, principal analyst with consulting firm Interarbor Solutions.

With its DRM’d textbook program, Princeton University demonstrates how not to use educational technology.

Update: Plan now being duly savaged on Slashdot.

Cornell researchers developed a process called X-ray fluorescence imaging to recover faded text on stone by “zapping and mapping” the inscriptions.

The group built a machine that generates X-rays a million times more intense than what the doctor uses to image your bones. An X-ray beam is fired at a stone, scanning back and forth. Atoms on the stone’s surface emit lower-energy fluorescent X-rays, and different wavelength emissions reveal zinc, iron and other elements in the stone.

Historians know that iron chisels were commonly used to inscribe stone, and the letters were usually painted with pigments containing metal oxides and sulfides. So where letters and numbers are no longer visible to the eye, the newfound minerals trace their shapes.

The Scout Report on ETANA (Electronic Tools and Ancient Near Eastern Archives):

A number of interesting digital projects have recently been sponsored by the National Science Foundation, and the Electronic Tools and Ancient Near Eastern Archives (ETANA) is one such project. With the support and primary documents of a number of important institutions, such as the Society of Biblical Literature and Case Western Reserve University, the mission of ETANA is to “develop and maintain a comprehensive Internet site for the student of the ancient Near East.” While the project is still in development, the site’s creators have added numerous helpful resources so far to the archive, including the ETANA Core Texts. In this section, visitors can view digitized texts related to scholarship on the ancient Near East, such as James Breasted’s monumental work, “Ancient Records of Egypt”, along with 171 other key documents. Visitors will also want to take a look at ABZU, which is another database collection that contains items relevant to the study of the ancient Near East that are available online. [KMG]

Technical details here.