The Stoa: a Review for Digital Classics

A message from Lisa Cerrato, Managing Editor for the Perseus Project:

The Perseus team would like to invite you to preview our new experimental interface. At this writing, the system and design are basic. The entire text delivery system, thousands of lines of code, has been rewritten, and we now have the essentials of the new system ready for testing.

For a preview, please visit the test site here:
https://test.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/

If you would like to report problems, make suggestions or comments, or provide any general feedback on the new design, please send e-mail to: beta-bugs{AT}perseus.tufts.edu

At this stage, we would appreciate assistance in finding bugs, so provide as much information as possible, including URLs, your system and browser configuration, error messages, and the steps you took prior to discovering the problem. As always, we welcome suggestions for future improvements. Our short term focus is testing what we now have; this is only a first step. We will rely upon the input of dedicated testers as we rebuild, refine, and improve the system.

For comments or problems with the main site, as always, please contact the Perseus webmaster: webmaster{AT}perseus.tufts.edu

Please check our home page for further announcements and links to publications. More news will be forthcoming over the weeks and months ahead.

My preliminary reaction: blindingly fast on lemmatized word searches, e.g. for φέÏ?ει.

“California INDUCE bill bans the Internet.“

There’s a new freeware OS X Unicode keyboard layout for ancient Greek, via VersionTracker. I’ve not yet tried it, but it says you type in TLG Beta Code, and you get Unicode out. Sounds useful for those of us with Beta Code wired into our finger tips.

Update: I see there’s something along the same lines for Windows users: Greek Pad (hat tip to Mark Goodacre).

Interesting Flash presentations at the PBS site:

• What is a Palimpsest?
• Imaging the Palimpsest

Dr. Saul Fisher, who is Associate Program Officer for the Mellon Foundation’s program in Teaching and Technology, made a presentation at the recent MLA in Philadelphia entitled “The Open Source Movement and Higher Education: Consequences for the Humanities.” I found his paper direct and thought-provoking, so I asked Dr. Fisher for permission to post a draft here at the Stoa. He has consented, but asks that I emphasize the DRAFT status of this paper. Readers should also note that his views do not necessarily reflect the official views of the Mellon Foundation. I am sure he would welcome comments; you will find his email address on the paper itself.

By the way, the Association for Computers and the Humanities compiled a guide to the many talks on humanities computing and related subjects at the MLA. (Were there any at all at the APA?)

Culture-hero Lawrence Lessig comments amusingly on the neo-red-baiting practiced by Bill Gates. The episode is giving rise to some terrific new graphics from the Copy Left crowd!

Richard K. Johnson, The Future of Scholarly Communication in the Humanities: Adaptation or Transformation? A presentation at the meeting of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, December 30, 2004. Excerpt:

The most compelling motivation for Congress and NIH to support open public access to NIH-funded research is to demonstrate to taxpayers the return on their investment in doubling the size of NIH is recent years. Perhaps there is a lesson here for the humanities. Expanded public exposure for scholarship in the humanities offers the potential for enhanced political and financial support. By reaching a broader audience beyond specialists in a single field, open global sharing of knowledge also will support interdisciplinary scholarly perspectives….What do these examples [of OA archiving and OA journals in the STM fields] have to do with the humanities? They simply suggest that powerful — if not unstoppable — forces are chipping away at the traditional journal. Will the outcome be adaptation or transformation? I think there will be both. There will be e-journals (and e-books) that look much like what is supplied in print today. But the foundation beneath these, the ways in which they are accessed and used, what they contain, and the profile of users is likely to be transformed. The toughest issues we face today revolve around business models – who pays the tab in a disaggregated environment? Perhaps toughest of all, how is the certification process supported? Publishers and libraries aren’t the only players asking themselves these questions. The costs associated with publishing are the least part of the overall research process. Since academic institutions, funders, and the public are key beneficiaries of research, I think we can expect them to play new, active roles in reshaping scholarly communication in the sciences, the social sciences, and, yes, the humanities.

(from Open Access News)

Today’s trivia quiz: what is the search term in Google’s example of public-access texts in their $150M library scanning project? Answer available here.

Not such a bad thing if Google thinks this is what digital libraries are all about…

(Thanks to Neel Smith for pointing this out.)

The January issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter contains the best summary I’ve seen yet concerning Google’s gigantic library project, with a useful comparative postscript on the one million book digitization effort by Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive.

“We celebrate the Promethean power of our labour and imagination to shape the virtual world.”

Publish or Be Damned is a recent BBC discussion of academic publishing issues, including the Open Access controversy.

Odyssey, a magazine about research at the University of Kentucky, has just published an article about the efforts of CS professor Brent Seales and his team to develop non-destructive methods for extracting information from delicate cultural artefacts. The project is called EDUCE, which stands for Enhanced Digital Unwrapping for Conservation and Exploration. More here.

From one of the Wordherders, extremely unwelcome news:

The Education Department has canceled its annual grant competition for the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education because Congress has earmarked the bulk of the program’s $163.6-million budget for pork-barrel projects.

The program’s budget, set in the spending bill for the 2005 fiscal year that Congress approved last month, contains more than 400 pork-barrel projects ranging in size from $25,000 to $5-million and costing a total of $146.2-million. That leaves only $17.4-million to continue support for existing grants, which means that Fipse program managers will not be able to finance any of the 1,530 preliminary proposals that have already been peer-reviewed.

More here.

Janice Siegel has begun to create several albums of her photographs from various places of interest. So far there’s a collection from the British Museum, starting with a nice series of the Caryatid from the Erechtheion, and also lots from Italy and Berlin. And more to come…

Lots of sources today on Google’s plan to digitize hundreds of terabytes of scholarship in several of the world’s largest research libraries over the next decade:

• Search Engine Watch
• Boston Globe, New York Times, BBC
• Chronicle of Higher Education
• Harvard University Library FAQ

Update: Kevin Drum, blogger-in-residence for the Washington Monthly, offers a pretty good little rant against the anti-Google op-ed in the LA Times by Michael Gorman, president-elect of the American Library Association. Juicy bit: “How can a scholar possibly have such a narrow mind — and a scholar of books, no less? Suggesting that Google should limit itself to reference books and leave everything else alone bespeaks a paucity of both spirit and vision that’s staggering.”

Another uppdate: Three worthwhile pieces in the MSM, one by Geoffrey Nunberg (a linguist at Stanford University), another by Alberto Manguel, and a third by Felicia Lee.