The Stoa: a Review for Digital Classics

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:

https://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.

A message from José M. Ciordia:

I am the author of “pompilo”, an Spanish blog. I have built a new one (a more serious derivation of the same), writen in English. The aim of the new blog (Pompilos: https://pompilos.org) is to spread a new hypothesis: the nautical origin of Greek architecture and sculpture. It argues that originally the Greek temple (naos) was a boat (naus) overturned and stored upon support walls. A brief “Plan of the book” can be downloaded fron the home page.

GreekTranscoder is a program which converts polytonic Greek characters written using one text encoding into another one. Its primary goal is to allow the conversion of documents using older fonts and encodings into Unicode fonts. However, it also allows converting text between older encodings as well as from Unicode into those obsolete formats.

GreekTranscoder is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Currently GreekTranscoder supports the following legacy encodings:

* Beta Code
* GreekKeys
* Ismini
* LaserGreek
* Paulina Greek
* SGreek
* SPIonic
* SuperGreek
* WinGreek (and Son of WinGreek)

And, of course, GreekTranscoder supports Unicode, using either composed or composing characters. The program lets you choose which option you wish to apply to your Unicode text. It also lets you conform to the TLG usage regarding Unicode “deprecated” codepoints. A Unicode text can be converted into Unicode itself with different conversion settings.

GreekTranscoder is distributed as a Microsoft Word document template.

Martin West has an interesting restoration/translation of Sappho in the TLS.

First the law journals, next the Classics journals?

As of version 1.4.0, Diogenes comes with all additional necessary Perl modules pre-installed. This should make it much more straight-forward to install under OS X.

And by the way, Diogenes is free software: you are encouraged to modify, improve, and redistribute it under the terms of the GNU General Public license.

See Jeff Rydberg-Cox, “The Cultural Heritage Language Technologies Consortium,” D-Lib Magazine 11.5 (May 2005):

1. Introduction

For the past three years, the Cultural Heritage Language Technologies consortium – situated at eight institutions in four countries – has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the European Commission International Digital Libraries program to engage in research about the most effective ways to apply technologies and techniques from the fields of computational linguistics, natural language processing, and information retrieval technologies to challenges faced by students and scholars who are working with texts written in Greek, Latin, and Old Norse. In its broadest terms, our work has focused in four primary areas: 1) providing access to primary source materials that are often rare and fragile, 2) helping readers understand texts written in difficult languages, 3) enabling researchers to conduct new types of scholarship, and 4) preserving digital resources for the future. Our research has produced concrete results in each of these areas…

RtWT

Jeff Rydberg-Cox (University of Missouri-Kansas City) has a new study out in Literary and Linguistic Computing, “Talking About Violence: Clustered Participles in the Speeches of Lysias.”

This paper explores the Greek participle and its use in the works of Lysias. I will argue that in Lysias’ works, narrative descriptions of violence are characterized by the unusually frequent use of the participle. I will further show that the association of high participle density and narratives about violence are a subset of a larger pattern relating to use of the participle in Lysias’ works. In this pattern, Lysias uses unusually large numbers of participles: (1) only within the narrative and argumentative sections of the speeches; (2) to structure the work and mark the conclusion of narrative arcs and lines of argument; (3) in their role as a structuring device, these passages also provide immediacy and momentum to the argument or narrative descriptions of events; and (4) to mark a return in subject matter to the case at hand and to focus the attention of the jury on the question that is before them.

Professor Rydberg-Cox makes use of morphological analysis from the Perseus Digital Library and combines the statistical approach of corpus linguistics with social and cultural studies of Athenian rhetoric “to study the question of stylized language and the narrations of violence in Athenian legal works.”