The Stoa: a Review for Digital Classics

Several articles collected by CIT:

“Meet the Gamers” By Kurt Squire & Constance Steinkuehler Library Journal.com, April 15, 2005
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/ca516033.html
“In the past, librarians have often been perceived as gatekeepers, arbiters of access to information. The digital cultures now emerging (with the help of technologies such as games) suggest that the days for such an institutional role are numbered.”

“Gaming for Librarians: An Introduction” By Heather Wilson VOYA, February 2005
http://pdfs.voya.com/VO/YA2/VOYA200502YA101.pdf
“[P]eople lament the fact that teens are playing video games and not reading. They are missing the point. Gaming often requires reading, problem-solving, and critical thinking.”

“The Games Children Play” 30-minute video produced by School Matters
http://www.teachers.tv/strandProgramme.do?strandId=6&transmissionProgrammeId=155402&r=47043
Video advocating the use of games in education, featuring interviews with Henry Jenkins, director of comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Jim Gee, professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Video Games and the Future of Learning” By David Williamson Shaffer, Kurt R. Squire, Richard Halverson, and James P. Gee December 2004
http://www.academiccolab.org/resources/gappspaper1.pdf
“[W]e describe an approach to the design of learning environments that builds on the educational properties of games, but deeply grounds them within a theory of learning appropriate for an age marked by the power of new technologies. We argue that to understand the future of learning, we have to look beyond schools to the emerging arena of video games.”

In a public announcement from the NEH:

Austin, University of Texas, Austin (Collaborative Research) $100,000
Project Director: Michael Gagarin
Project Title: The Laws of Ancient Crete
Description: Publication, both in print and online, of the Greek texts of extant laws from ancient Crete, along with translations and commentaries. (12 months)

Charlottesville, University of Virginia (Collaborative Research)
Outright: $80,000, Additional Match: $20,000
Project Director: Bernard Frischer
Project Title: Aquae Urbis Romae: The Waters of the City of Rome
Description: Adding GIS data and expanding a freely accessible and fully interactive inventory of Roman hydraulic infrastructure from the early Christian era through the early modern period. (24 months)

The Eton Greek Software Project offers now an online language tool for anyone who is learning classical Greek. On offer is a variety of programs which allow the user to test their knowledge of grammar and vocabulary (some require a Java-enabled browser or use Flash). This covers material from the course text ‘Reading Greek’ (one of the most popular Greek courses in higher education) as well as from AS level and GCSE syllabi. Tests can be customised to suit the user’s requirements, according to level of difficulty, English to Greek or vice versa, length of time allowed, or types of words required. There is also an accidence tester designed for practising verb conjugation. A copy of the Eton Greek word list (with translations) for AS level is available to download too; this contains key vocabulary which all Greek learners should know. The testers themselves, however, cannot be accessed via the Project’s homepage – the user must first access Eton College’s homepage and then enter the site via ‘Eton in Action’/’Greek Project’.

(Thanks to the Humbul Humanities Hub)

The Department of Theatre, Whitman College, is now hosting the The Virtual Reality Theatre Tour site, offering visual tours of ancient theaters via panoramic views from several points of view. While still a work in progress (not all listed theaters are linked to a tour yet), it already offers a series of theatres, particularly from Asia Minor (Aspendos, Aphrodisias, Bodrum, Ephesus, Hierapolis, Miletus, Pergamon and Priene). The individual tours can be accessed by clicking on the appropriate location on a linked map. Each tour is accompanied by details including: information on the location of the theatre; dates of construction and renovation; dimensions; and brief details of excavations. Plans of the theatres, and in some cases reproductions, are also given, and there is a glossary of relevant architectural terms. QuickTime software is required to view the virtual tours.

(Thanks to Humbul Humanities Hub)

WordPress updated following richly deserved hack of older software. New themes and posts and posters coming soon…

Steven Harnad has a new blog, Open Access Archivangelism: Maximizing Research Impact by Maximizing Research Access at

http://openaccess.eprints.org/

From the new issue of D-Lib magazine:

Funding for Digital Libraries Research: Past and Present
Stephen M. Griffin, National Science Foundation

Digital Libraries: Challenges and Influential Work
William H. Mischo, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Where Do We Go From Here? The Next Decade for Digital Libraries
Clifford Lynch, Coalition for Networked Information

A Viewpoint Analysis of the Digital Library
William A. Arms, Cornell University

Dewey Meets Turing: Librarians, Computer Scientists, and the Digital Libraries Initiative
Andreas Paepcke, Hector Garcia-Molina, and Rebecca Wesley, Stanford University

Border Crossings: Reflections on a Decade of Metadata Consensus Building
Stuart L. Weibel, OCLC Research

David-Artur Daix writes to say that version 1.0.2 of the GreekTranscoder is now available from:

http://www.greektranscoder.org

“The program has been much improved. The Vilnius University encoding in particular is now supported. A complete version history is available on the web site and in the distribution.”

The commons-blog quotes an unsigned opinion piece in the Economist:

Copyright was originally intended to encourage publication by granting publishers a temporary monopoly on works so they could earn a return on their investment. But the internet and new digital technologies have made the publication and distribution of works much easier and cheaper. Publishers should therefore need fewer, not more, property rights to protect their investment. Technology has tipped the balance in favour of the public domain.

A first, useful step would be a drastic reduction of copyright back to its original terms—14 years, renewable once. This should provide media firms plenty of chance to earn profits, and consumers plenty of opportunity to rip, mix, burn their back catalogues without breaking the law. The Supreme Court has somewhat reluctantly clipped the wings of copyright pirates; it is time for Congress to do the same to the copyright incumbents.

Michael Jensen, Presses Have Little to Fear From Google, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 8, 2005. discussing the strategy of National Academies Press (hat tip, Open Access News):

Every new book we published was scanned and made navigable online, free, at the same time it was available for sale. To our delight, we found that page images with searchable text behind them actually seemed to increase sales, not replace them with online reading….For the last few years, I’ve heard (mostly older) scholars and librarians moan, “If they can’t Google it, it doesn’t exist for these kids.” That’s a reality publishers should be loath to deny… If the new digitally driven scholars can Google an essay or book, then they’ll use it for further research. If they can’t, they may well not….I can speak only for myself, not my press, but in general I think that it’s in the best self-interest of scholarly publishers to relax a bit about how we respond to intellectual-property issues raised by digitization plans like Google’s. We need a bit more trust, so that we can take advantage of the new capabilities of a networked society….Google is offering something marvelous, if imperfect; its model is more likely to help more people find library resources and publishers’ works than anything else on the horizon.

Troels Myrup Kristensen, who keeps a nice collection of photographs here, has begun a new blog, “Towards an Archaeology of Iconoclasm,” to track his “thesis-in-progress on early Christian iconoclasm in the fourth century CE.”

Lots of impressive work on display and under discussion at the recent ACH/ALLC in Victoria, as always. Three sessions that particularly caught my attention were

1) VMLA: a system created by Brian Fuchs and others on top of the Digital Lightbox developed some years back here at UK. VLMA lets you browse, compare, and export structured data from online digital archives. For more start with the conference abstract.

2) Diary of Robert Graves 1935-39 and ancillary material: implementation of eXist to publish and allow complex searches of these TEI-encoded diaries. (conference abstract)

3) TAPoR: this “extensible, network-based research environment” has all sorts of flexibility and potential. (conference abstract)

Neil Beagrie, “Plenty of Room at the Bottom? Personal Digital Libraries and Collections” D-Lib Magazine 11.6 (June 2005)

Extract:

The growing abundance of personal data and collection outlined in this article will present numerous challenges to individuals, including: how to physically secure such material sometimes over decades; how to protect privacy; how to organize and extract information and to use it effectively; and for material intended to be shared, how to effectively present and control access by different groups of users.

The shift towards personal collection, and to services aimed at supporting activity from the desktop, will also lead to new forms of shared services, publishers and information banks, and will re-inforce informal social networks and mechanisms of communication.

Informal sharing of such collections by academics has always been important for peers and contemporaries. Arguably their importance for current scholarship is growing along with the power and reach of software tools and communications available to individuals to create, manage, and disseminate them.