The Stoa: a Review for Digital Classics

The Scout Report today notes that Firefox is now out of beta, below, but they miss what I like the most about it: the ability to set up RSS feeds as live bookmarks right in your toolbar. Great feature for the information-addicted!

New Web browsers are released all the time, but Mozilla’s Firefox is one that is worth taking a closer look at. Firefox’s features include a built in pop-up blocker, a tab-browsing mode that allows users to open several pages in a single window, and integrated Google searching. This latest edition of Firefox includes enhanced security, a redesigned toolbar, and improved compatibility with Internet Explorer.

Sounds like a new blockbuster movie, but it’s a report from the BOAI-forum newsletter:

On November 4th-5th 2004 a very successful Open Access event was held in Italy: thirty-two institutions (31 Italian Universities and 1 research centre) gathered in Messina, Sicily, to sign the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, during the first national workshop on Open Access in Italian Universities, promoted by CRUI (the Council of Rectors of Italian Universities): https://www.aepic.it/conf/index.php?cf=1

On the web site there are several materials about the event: the “Messina Declaration”, the list of signatories, a press release (very soon also in English), the list of participants (over 250, mainly university professors, librarians and IT people). Last but not least, OA presentations (some in English). A national committee worked to achieve this: Benedetta Alosi and Nunzio Femmino’ (and their staff at the University of Messina), Paolo Bellini (Trento), Valentina Comba (Bologna), Patrizia Cotoneschi (Firenze), Antonella De Robbio (Padova), Paola Gargiulo (CASPUR), Ezio Tarantino (Rome), with me (CILEA). Thanks to OSI and SPARC Europe to have supported the event through the participation of Fred Friend, Jean-Claude Guedon and David Prosser.

The impressive amount of signatories (31 out of 77 Italian universities) will have a significant impact on the promotion of Open Access in Italy and probably also abroad. We are confident that the Rectors’ committment will involve our scholarly community. Now there is the necessary support to work at tools and strategies to make OA happen in our country.

Susanna Mornati
Project Leader AEPIC (Academic E-Publishing Infrastructures)
CILEA – Inter-Academic Consortium for ICT
Via R. Sanzio 4, I-20090 SEGRATE (MILANO) – ITALY
mobile +39 348 7090 226, office +39 02 2699 5322
mailto:mornati@cilea.it, https://www.aepic.it/

The ever-resourceful Tom Elliott of the AWMC has put together his own new aggregator of various blogs that focus on Classsics and Classical Archaeology, called Web Watch. Explains Tom:

(1) It only sucks a feed when I tell it to, so even if you update, it won’t catch it until the next time I tell it to go check on you.

(2) Once it’s inhaled a feed and indexed the articles, it rates each article based on the occurrence of pre-defined keywords (mine). All new results are placed in a queue, sorted by rating, in order for me to review. I make a conscious decision about the relevance of each such article to our audience and set a “gloss-or-not-to-gloss” flag. Once I’m done reviewing, I punch a button and it spews out an XML file (containing a TEI div), which waits around for the next time I spin the website, at which time it gets picked up and incorporated.

Professor Elise Garrison has added an essay on male suicides to her study of ancient suicides in Diotima. Now her set of materials includes:

1. Suicide in Classical Mythology: An Essay
   • Part I: Suicidal Females
   • Part II: Suicidal Males
2. Suicidal Females in Greek and Roman Mythology: A Catalogue
3. Suicidal Males in Greek and Roman Mythology: A Catalogue

from dealmac.com:

The December issue of Consumer Reports magazine features Apple’s new iMac G5 on the front cover along with the caption, “Unspectacular results for Intel’s new processor. Plus 59,940 reasons to reconsider Macs. “Inside the issue, Consumer Reports writes, ” In this atmosphere of low expectations, Apple Computer has actually raised its support satisfaction for desktop computers over the past three years to levels well above all competitors, while offering the most reliable desktop hardware. […] Another factor working in Apple’s favor: Macs are vulnerable to few viruses and little spyware because both target mostly Windows-based users. Symantec, maker of Norton AntiVirus, says approximately 60,000 viruses aim at Windows-based PCs, but about 60 target Macs.” Consumer Reports, arguably the most respected consumer ratings publication, recommends the new iMac G5 for “reliability and support.”

Yep.

From David Perry:

A major update to Cardo, a Unicode font designed for scholars, is now available at scholarsfonts.net. Version .98 adds over 1400 new characters, including all the Greek characters proposed for Unicode by the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, variants of Greek letters for epigraphy and numismatics, and all the characters recommended by the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative. This version also supports glyph variants through OpenType features and provides other typographic refinements such as small capitals. Please pass the word to any colleagues who might be interested. Cardo works under Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Version .98 will be in beta testing until January 31, 2005, after which it will be replaced by version 1.0. Please send any corrections or suggestions to me by that date.

from Sebastian Rahtz:

The customization of Knoppix made for the recent TEI members meeting can now be downloaded from https://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/downloads/

This is an ISO CD image, which most burning software will understand. You need a 700 mbyte blank CD.

Usage: burn the CD, pop it in your Intel PC (sorry…) and reboot. It should come back up running Linux, with TEI-useful software and material all working.

The Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, edited by Philip P. Wiener, was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, in 1973-74, and now it’s freely available on-line at The Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia Library. (It has been up for a while but I just noticed, thanks to the Classics in Contemporary Culture blog.)

Anne Mahoney has an interesting new review up of Reviel Netz, The Transformation of Mathematics in the Early Mediterranean World: From Problems to Equations (CUP 2004).

…within the tool-kit of available techniques, classical Greek mathematicians, in general, make a point of choosing a different method from the last person to work on the problem, while late antique and Arab mathematicians, on the whole, look for the general, over-arching principles behind the problem.

As an element of a grant proposal in the works, I just totted up current Stoa Consortium resources available here at UK:

• Over in the Center for Computational Sciences in McVey Hall, we maintain two production servers and two development servers, all running the Linux OS. Our CVS is implemented on one of the development boxes. The other development machine has certain handy tools for working with relational databases (phpMyAdmin, phpPgAdmin, MySiteMaker). One production machine is dedicated to serving images with Gallery software. The main production server offers Apache, PostgreSQL, MySQL, QDDB, Java, Tomcat, and Cocoon, inter alia. Data on our servers receive nightly backup services courtesy of the CCS.
• In our lab in the Patterson Office Tower we have three workstations, including one new dual processor G5 Macintosh with 19″ LCD display, one new dual-booting Linux/Windows XP Dell laptop, and a Macintosh G4 Powerbook laptop. These machines have XML editors, CVS clients, and image editors installed, along with much else.
• We use a simple iSight for videoconferencing with colleagues, and if we need stronger magic, elsewhere on campus we can use a large screen PolyCom or even the Access Grid.
• We have free access to high-end sheet feed scanners and Prime Recognition OCR on campus.

A modest list by comparison with many other digital library shops, perhaps, but OTOH these are all powerful tools that can provide a lot of leverage. If you’ve got a Classics-related Open Access publication in mind, let’s talk.

When Bernie Frischer gave his (terrific) talk on Rome Reborn at Cincy half a year ago I asked him about being able to walk through the Roman forum and get a VR view of their reconstruction keyed to one’s location on the site. Now the BBC reports on something similar in the works for Pompeii.

Pompeii gets digital make-over

The old-fashioned audio tour of historical places could soon be replaced with computer-generated images that bring the site to life.

A European Union-funded project is looking at providing tourists with computer-augmented versions of archaeological attractions.

It would allow visitors a glimpse of life as it was originally lived in places such as Pompeii.

It could pave the way for a new form of cultural tourism.

Combining real and virtual

The technology would allow digital people and other computer-generated elements to be combined with the actual view seen by tourists as they walk around an historical site.

The Lifeplus project is part of the EU’s Information Society Technologies initiative aimed at promoting user-friendly technology and enhancing European cultural heritage.

Engineers and researchers working in the Europe-wide consortium have come up with a prototype augmented-reality system.

It would require the visitor to wear a head-mounted display with a miniature camera and a backpack computer.

The camera captures the view and feeds it to software on the computer where the visitor’s viewpoint is combined with animated virtual elements.

At Pompeii for example, the visitor would not just see the frescos, taverns and villas that have been excavated, but also people going about their daily life.

Augmented reality has been used to create special effects in films such as Troy and Lord of the Rings and in computer gaming.

Bringing past to life

“This technology can now be used for much more than just computer games,” said Professor Nadia Magnenat-Thalman of the Swiss research group MiraLab.

“We are, for the first time, able to run this combination of software processes to create walking, talking people with believable clothing, skin and hair in real-time,” she said.

Unlike virtual reality, which delivers an entirely computer-generated scene to the viewer, the Lifeplus project is about combining digital and real views.

Crucial to the technique is the software that interprets the visitor’s view and provides an accurate match between the real and virtual elements.

The software capable of doing this has been developed by a UK company, 2d3. Andrew Stoddart, chief scientist at 2d3, said that the EU project has been driven by a new desire to bring the past to life.

“The popularity of television documentaries and dramatisations using computer-generated imagery to recreate scenes from ancient history demonstrates the widespread appeal of bringing ancient cultures to life,” he said.

Story from BBC NEWS:

https://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/3954659.stm

Published: 2004/10/31 07:27:18 GMT

© BBC MMIV

From the CHE’s weblog, reporting on Educause 2004:

Former U. of Michigan President Warns of ‘Great Change’ in Higher Education

OCTOBER 20, NOON — Educause 2004 has attracted more than 7,000 people from 43 different countries, scores of colleges, and hundreds of tech companies. The tech talk is thick, the tech knowledge vast, and the tech obsessions are almost a religion for some. So far, all of the attendees appear to be fully human.

And now some of them might be more worried than they were when they stepped off their planes. James J. Duderstadt, the president emeritus of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, opened the conference not with a pep talk but with rather unsettling predictions. He said the future of colleges and universities is more than uncertain in the digital age — it might be downright threatened.

He quoted the business guru Peter Drucker as saying that campuses will be “relics” in 30 years. Mr. Duderstadt also cited Frank Rhodes, the former president of Cornell University, as having said that colleges in the digital age are like dinosaurs looking up at the incoming comet.

Continue reading →

Here’s part of an interesting update on Corinth from the blog of Michael Shanks:

What we are actually doing at Corinth is trying to turn a curve by implementing methodologies now standard in non-classical lands. We have been introducing an electronic archive for current and future finds in the hope that we can find the funds to retro-convert. We have started transcribing old notebooks into electronic form with the idea that several can be posted on the web with illustrative material. We have a growing digital plan of the village and the entire Corinthia incorporating topographic maps, air photos, GIS data and excavation plans. We have replaced baulk-debris with open-area, single-context excavation with excellent results that are helping us to identify gaps in our knowledge and to address old assertions and assumptions. I hope this work will make for a mine of potential new work on old Corinthian material.

Pompeian Households: An On-line Companion hosts materials to accompany Penelope M. Allison, Pompeian Households: An Analysis of the Material Culture (Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, Monograph 42).

It includes detailed documentary information on 30 Pompeian houses and their contents, consisting of 865 rooms and more than 6,000 artifacts.

Work on the XML and XSLT in the underlying Apache Cocoon, and on the Postgresql relational database containing data about rooms, artifacts, and images, was done by Neel Smith with help from Ross Scaife, Katie Lamberto, and William du Cassé.

Herbert Van de Sompel, Sandy Payette, John Erickson, Carl Lagoze, and Simeon Warner, Rethinking Scholarly Communication: Building the System that Scholars Deserve, D-Lib Magazine, September 2004. Excerpt:

There is growing dissatisfaction with the established scholarly communication system. This dissatisfaction is the result of a variety of factors including rapidly rising subscription prices, concerns about copyright, latency between results and their actual publication, and restrictions on what can be published and how it can be disseminated. The result is a global debate on how to remedy the system’s deficiencies, and that debate has inspired concrete initiatives aimed at reforming the process. These are concerned mainly with access issues and seek to alleviate two longstanding problems. The first, known as the “serials crisis,” addresses the often prohibitive prices of journal publications that impede access to scholarly materials. The second, known as the “permissions crisis,” addresses the restrictions on use of publications once access has been obtained. The “Open Access” movement focuses primarily on these two problems with two different strategies. The self-archiving school strives for a scholar’s right to make traditional journal publications freely available in an open repository. The journal-reform school promotes the emergence of new types of journals that are free at the point of use.

While the open availability of the results of scholarly endeavors is indeed of fundamental importance to the future of scholarship, it is only one dimension of how the scholarly communication process can be transformed. As Geneva Henry has observed, opportunities abound in the world of 21st century publishing and the discussion on transforming scholarly communication must move beyond the debate of subscription-based vs. open access publication. […]

Our vision is based on our belief that the future scholarly communication system should closely resemble—and be intertwined with—the scholarly endeavor itself, rather than being its after-thought or annex. We consider in this article the aspects of the established system that constrain the scholarly endeavor. Based on those considerations, we describe the desired technological characteristics of a future system of scholarly communication. We argue for a scholarly communication system composed of an interoperability substrate allowing flexible composition of the value-adding services that up to now have been vertically locked in the journal publication milieu. In this loosely coupled system, the units of scholarly communication (i.e., data, simulations, informal results, preprints, etc.) could follow a variety of scholarly value chains in which each hub provides a service such as registering results, certifying their validity, alerting scholars to new claims and findings, preserving the scholarly record, and ultimately rewarding scholars for their work.

Hat tip to Peter Suber for this one.