The Stoa: a Review for Digital Classics

Peter Gainsford has produced a handy comparison of programs fluent in TLG betacode format.

The Suda On Line, our networked collaborative editing program for Byzantine lexicography, reached an important milestone this week:

Progress Report (as of May 6, 2005)
Assigned: 17,108 Translated: 16,752 Vetted: 16,752

For the first time, all translated entries have also received at least one pass by an editor (in many cases, multiple passes). Congratulations in particular to David Whitehead and Catharine Roth, who are mostly responsible for bringing the database to such a state of refinement.

There are over 30,000 entries in all, so more volunteers are welcome to participate!

Google’s effort to digitize scholarly libraries is starting to bear fruit. Try “Melian Dialogue,” for instance, or “Erechtheum.”

More here.

Update: Klaus Graf kindly points out my error in the posting above: “Google Print is a cooperation with publishers, Google Library with libraries. See also https://wiki.netbib.de/coma/GooglePrint.” Thanks Klaus, you are right.

The TEI Wiki is up and running.

Thanks to Neel Smith for alerting me to James Boyle: Deconstructing Stupidity.

Sample:

Thomas Macaulay told us copyright law is a tax on readers for the benefit of writers, a tax that shouldn’t last a day longer than necessary. What do we do? We extend the copyright term repeatedly on both sides of the Atlantic. The US goes from fourteen years to the author’s life plus seventy years. We extend protection retrospectively to dead authors, perhaps in the hope they will write from their tombs.

Since only about 4 per cent of copyrighted works more than 20 years old are commercially available, this locks up 96 per cent of 20th century culture to benefit 4 per cent. The harm to the public is huge, the benefit to authors, tiny. In any other field, the officials responsible would be fired. Not here.

It is as if we had signed an international stupidity pact, one that required us to ignore the evidence, to hand out new rights without asking for the simplest assessment of need. If the stakes were trivial, no one would care. But intellectual property (IP) is important. These are the ground rules of the information society. Mistakes hurt us. They have costs to free speech, competition, innovation, and science. Why are we making them?

Peter Robinson:

Several digital scholarly editions have indeed used these [TEI] guidelines profitably, so it must be said that in terms of their immediate aim—to provide encodings which would support such editions—the guidelines were and are successful. But in terms of another aim, to provide a system which any reasonably competent humanities scholar can use (which, eventually, is the only aim that matters), the guidelines are a failure. One has only to see the look of dismay on a scholar’s face when encountering their full horror for the first time to know this. One may contemplate, with equanimity, every complexity of Byzantine medieval military history but be quite defeated by the unfamiliar vocabulary of the mysteriously interconnected universe which is the TEI. All scholars bring the same two questions: where do I start? and where do I find what I need? But the answers each time are different, and even those expert in the TEI may struggle to find them—while engaging in intense theological disputes over the correct interpretation. Little wonder then that scholars choose to find other things to do—or to make print editions.

A substantive and interesting article on digitizing the world’s libraries here, including comments from various luminaries. This one caught my eye:

“I chafe at the presumption that once you digitize, there is nothing left to do,â€? says Donald Waters, a former director of the Digital Library Federation who now oversees the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s extensive philanthropic investments in projects to enhance scholarly communication. “There is an enormous amount to do, and digitizing is just scratching the surface.â€?

I found the article by Peter Robinson in the inaugural issue of The Digital Medievalist (a new peer-reviewed on-line journal for technology and medieval studies) particularly useful: “Our goal must be to ensure that any scholar able to make an edition in one medium should be able to make an edition in the other. Further, that an edition in either medium should be equally assured of appropriate distribution: just as once a library has bought a print edition it can be used by any member of the library for years to come, so too should it be for electronic editions.”

Guyda ARMSTRONG and Vika ZAFRIN, Towards the electronic Esposizioni: the challenges of the online commentary

Arianna CIULA, Digital palaeography: using the digital representation of medieval script to support palaeographic analysis

Hoyt N. DUGGAN with a contribution by Eugene W. LYMAN, A Progress Report on The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive

Jonathan GREEN, Opening the Illustrated Incunable Short Title Catalog on CD-ROM: an end-user’s approach to an essential database

Kevin KIERNAN, The source of the Napier fragment of Alfred’s Boethius

Peter ROBINSON, Current issues in making digital editions of medieval texts or, do electronic scholarly editions have a future?

Kathryn WYMER, Why Universal Accessibility Should Matter to the Digital Medievalist

Amazon offers a clickable concordance and text stats for I am Charlotte Simmons.

The Organizing Committee invites you to attend the CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI4) from 20th-22nd October 2005. This fourth workshop in the series, which began life as the Open Archives Initiative Workshop in 2001, is a forum for technical issues associated with scholarly communication.

Details are found on the conference web site https://cern.ch/oai4 where registration will open from 2nd May 2005.

For the first time, a call for contributions is being made. Submissions are welcome from 2nd until 31st May 2005. Contributions to the technical session on Thursday 20 October will deal with the latest in computing and information technology that can be used in scholarly communication or that has been specifically designed for such use. For the Friday, 21 October sessions, we invite contributions on innovative applications of OAI technologies to scholarly communication and issues connected with managing repositories and the relationships with publishers. For the session on Saturday morning, we invite contributions on how OAI technologies can be used to enhance the distribution of primary scientific data.

Brent Seales had me tag along with him to Oxford and London last week (so we could discuss this process with various people), and we took a few pictures, which I’ve now posted for anyone’s arbitrary use in www.stoa.org. There are a few shots of the papyrology lab at Oxford (we happened to be there on one of the days when the BYU guys were doing their MSI work that’s much in the news right now), the Ashmolean Museum, the British Library, and the British Museum (including quite a few shots of the Elgin Marbles).

Alun Salt, commenting on why we in the humanities don’t have the functional equivalent of Arxiv in place yet:

[T]echnophobia is an endearing character quirk in the Arts rather than a sign of academic incompetence. I don’t think it’s a long term problem. Researchers who are more interested in spreading their ideas than supporting established structures will have greater influence on successive generations and there will be a move to open access publishing, because researchers who ignore it will be ignored.

RTWT

Steven Harnad reports on the BOAI list that

The University of Kansas has become the first US University to adopt a university-wide open-access self-archiving policy. The policy is registered and described at:

https://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php

Other universities and research institutions are encouraged to follow suit:

https://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php

The University of Kansas OA policy is the culmination of many years of relentless effort on the part of the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, David E. Shulenburger:

https://www.arl.org/arl/proceedings/133/shulenburger.html

Peter Suber has more on this story:

In a March 25 memorandum explaining the resolution, Provost David Shulenburger urged Kansas faculty to deposit their research output in the institutional repository, ScholarWorks. Excerpt: ‘KU ScholarWorks, a digital repository, is now available as a convenient site in which to place your published work, working papers, datasets, and other original material. Items placed in KU ScholarWorks will be archived permanently and will be available to search engines like Google and Google Scholar. Many studies demonstrate that articles that are available electronically are cited in other publications at four or more times the frequency of works that are not available electronically. It is in your interest and the University’s to populate KU ScholarWorks with a complete set of KU faculty’s scholarly output.’ Shulenburger also suggests language to use in a copyright transfer agreement to reserve the right to deposit work in ScholarWorks.

The Stoa Image Gallery at www.stoa.org is available again on a newer, better box after a week of machine failures.

The Columbia University Senate unanimously passed the following resolution April 1:

WHEREAS the Senate is empowered by University statutes §23 c and e to “work for the advancement of academic freedom… [and] initiate and review policies to govern the University’s relations with outside agencies for research, instruction, and related purposes,” and

WHEREAS the principle of open access to the fruits of scholarly research is increasingly being adopted and pursued by universities and in the scholarly community at large, and

WHEREAS Columbia University continues to be in the forefront of open-access endeavors, through its advocacy activities and its digital library programs, and

WHEREAS technological, legal and economic barriers continue to be erected to obstruct or limit open access, and

WHEREAS the availability of the fruits of scholarly endeavor ought to reflect the conditions of cooperative endeavor and common resources under which scholarly work is produced,

Therefore BE IT RESOLVED

1. That the Senate put on record its support for the principle of open access to the fruits of scholarly research;

2. That the Senate urge the University to advance new models for scholarly publishing that will promote open access, helping to reshape the marketplace in which scholarly ideas circulate, in a way that is consistent with standards of peer review and scholarly excellence;

3. That the Senate urge the University to monitor and resist efforts to impose digital rights management regimes and technologies that obstruct or limit open access, except as necessary to secure rights of privacy;

4. That the Senate urge the scholars of Columbia University to play a part in these open-access endeavors in their various capacities as authors, readers, editors, referees, and members of scientific boards and learned associations etc., a) by encouraging and collaborating with publishers’ efforts to advance open access, b) by retaining intellectual property rights in their own work where this will help it become more widely available, and c) by remaining alert to efforts by publishers to impose barriers on access to the fruits of scholarly research.

(Hat tip to Peter Suber.)