The Stoa: a Review for Digital Classics

The National Endowment for the Humanities announces the November 1, 2004 receipt deadline for applications for Collaborative Research Grants. NEH Collaborative Research Grants provide support for a team of two or more scholars to pursue original research that significantly adds to knowledge and understanding in the humanities. Eligible projects include, but are not limited to, interpretive work in the humanities; conferences on topics of major importance in the humanities that will benefit ongoing research; archaeology projects that interpret and communicate the results of fieldwork; translations into English of works that provide insight into the history, literature, philosophy, and artistic achievements of other cultures; and research that uses the knowledge, methods, and perspectives of the humanities to enhance understanding of science, technology, and medicine. The tenure period is from one year to three years, the earliest beginning date is July 2005, and awards normally range from $25,000 to $100,000 per year. For application materials and information, please go to http ://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/collaborative.html

The Audio-Visual Survey for Classics, published every other year in Classical World, is now available at the Stoa.

Neil Beagrie, British Library, in an interesting interview:

In the right conditions papyrus or paper can survive by accident or through benign neglect for centuries or in the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls for thousands of years. It takes hundreds of years for languages and handwriting to evolve to the point where only a few specialists can read them. In contrast, digital information will never survive and remain accessible by accident: it requires ongoing active management… As the volumes, heterogeneity, and complexity of digital information grows this requirement for active management becomes more challenging and more critical to a wider range of organisations… The threat is very real and insidious and will eat away at the future of our cultural heritage, knowledge economies, and information society if we fail to address it.

Tom Elliott over at the Ancient World Mapping Center announces a redesign of the site. Crisp and clean.

Ten days after it was begun, the Stoa Image Gallery at www.stoa.org offers 1023 publicly available images in 5 top-level albums (49 albums total).

Coverage includes:

Nashville Parthenon (83 new images)

Greece (Athens, Piraeus, sites on Crete and in the Cyclades)

Italy (Rome, Paestum, Anzio, Herculaneum, Pompeii)

England  (Chesters, Vindolanda, Bignor, Lullingstone, Rockbourne,
Silchester, Reading Museum, Littlecote, Dover, Pevensey, Chadworth,
Bath)

Tunisia (Carthage, Bardo Museum, Sousse Museum, Dougga, Thuburbo Majus, El Jem)

Turkey (Istanbul, Troy, Ephesus, Hierapolis, Miletos, Didyma,
Pergamum, Antakaya)

There are over 130 digital photographs in Stephen Arnold’s new album on the Stoa Image Gallery, including a great many North African mosaics. And he’s got a lot more on the way. Stephen’s image of the Vergil Mosiac in the Bardo Museum is the best I’ve seen online; you can click on this picture for a larger size:

APA Vice President Barbara McManus sends along some thoughts on the current state of affairs at the APA regarding electronic publication.

Although the American Philological Association was a very early leader in the publication of “machine-readable” texts and has supported the development of electronic editions of a number of research tools in Classics, the association has not really addressed the issue of electronic publication of scholarship in the field. In fact, the long-standing APA Committee on Non-Print Publications has languished in a state of suspended animation for the last several years–still on the books, but with no members and no mandate. I was therefore very pleased to see how many candidates in the upcoming election of APA officers and committee members brought up this issue in their statements (9 candidates for 6 different positions); one even referred readers to the online papers of the panel on Electronic Publication and the Classics Profession that Ross Scaife and I organized for the 2004 APA convention. This is a positive sign that e-publication will attain more prominence on the association’s agenda and, I think, a tribute to grass-roots pressure from classicists and others in humanities disciplines. One of my last actions as Vice-President for Professional Matters will be to propose formation of a subcommittee with members from several APA divisions to actively address the issue.

I was somewhat troubled by one element in several of the candidates’ statements, reflecting the opinion that electronic editions of research tools have made access “democratic” or “available to all.” People at large research universities tend to forget that subscription-only services like the online edition of L’Année philologique or Project Muse are not available to scholars at the hundreds of smaller institutions that cannot afford such specialized services. When e-publication does get on the APA agenda, it is crucial that Open Access has a prominent place in the discussion, and I hope that continued grass-roots pressure from classicists will ensure that this does happen.

Barbara F. McManus

It’s wonderful to see Barbara supporting OA so forthrightly. Alas, the APA (and a fortiori CAMWS) still appear to me to be some distance away from coming to terms with this topic effectively. Nonetheless, it seems likely that the field of Classics is eventually subject to the same trends and phenomena as affect modern society generally: the internet ultimately routes around and thereby makes obsolete organizations and institutions (including much of the creaky apparatus of traditional 19th and 20th c. academic publication) that don’t always adequately serve people’s needs for information and communication. It’s just not a completely linear process (or easy).

Today we announce availability of the new Stoa Image Gallery, an Open Access repository for digital images and video related to Classics, Classical Archaeology, and the classical tradition. We have implemented this project on a dedicated server running Gallery image-management software, at https://www.stoa.org/. For much more information about the nature of this new site, please see its introductory page. Note that the Gallery includes an RSS feed (though I’m not sure it’s working very well yet). Anyone with Classics-related images to archive and publish is welcome to an account on www.stoa.org — don’t be shy!

UBIQUITY: So should everybody in the world have his or her own blog?

ITO: A lot of it has to do with what the definition of a blog is, but to generalize what a blog is, you might think of it as a content management system for micro content and standardized syndication, filtering format and notification format. That includes everything from how to post pictures from PhotoShop, to Alzheimer’s patients talking to their families, to all kinds of things. If everyone is interested in sharing content with others, I think that everyone will end up, in some way, becoming a blogger, and part of what could be called the consumer publishing movement. A lot of it has to do with the fact that our computers and our phones are becoming so much more powerful that you can create and edit content, and you can post it and share it.

UBIQUITY: So it’s not just for pundits.

ITO: No. The people who are leading the way are people who like to have opinions and share opinions, and talk. But at the end of the day I think that everyone has something to say. Blogging is for everyone.

Ryan Gabbard has recently begun a new and interesting collaborative project:

The goal of the Open Audiobooks Project is for volunteers to work together to create audio books of public domain texts for people to freely download, distribute, and modify. While the results will probably not be a match for books read by professional readers, we hope they will nonetheless be enjoyable and useful.

The inspiration for this project was when a bunch of bloggers got together and made an audio book of Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture in just a few days by having different people record different chapters.

…Our pilot project is to create an audiobook for Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, since most people like it and it is divided into small chapters convenient for reading.

From the CHE:

A glance at the July issue of The Americas: The scholar’s role in building online-resource collections

Scholars should embrace the chance to work with archivists to build online research centers, which can provide “resources that would be impossible or extremely expensive to assemble and make universally accessible by any other means,” says Rolena Adorno, a professor of Spanish at Yale University.

Ms. Adorno helped prepare a digital facsimile edition of an important manuscript from the early 1600s, El Primer Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno, by the Andean native Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, as part of a project by the Royal Library of Denmark’s rare-books department to make its most precious documents available electronically.

The scholar’s role in such a project is essential, Ms. Adorno says, if the result is to be useful to other scholars. In compiling a list of the nearly 400 illustrations in Guaman Poma’s manuscript, for instance, a technician could have transcribed a list of titles and captions, but only a scholar familiar with the work could provide a descriptive menu to help other scholars more quickly identify illustrations tied to particular themes.

Electronic-resource collections can give unprecedented access to texts, she says, not only by making available documents that are rare and fragile, but by allowing scholars to reorganize texts and put them in context with related materials that are also available in digital form.

Such online collections will not replace traditional books and libraries, she says, but will enhance their usefulness. Digital resources, she writes, “can be as effective in advancing historical scholarship as the efforts of scholars, librarians, technicians, and institutions are prepared and willing to make them.”

The article, “The Archive and the Internet,” is available to subscribers of Project Muse. Information about the journal is available at https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/the_americas/

–Kellie Bartlett

According to BBC: Call for freely available science, a Science and Technology Committee of the British House of Commons wants:

publicly funded research to be made freely available online by means of archived digital information banks [and urges]
the government to consider allocating funds to universities and other organisations to create online repositories where their research can be stored, and viewed by the public free of charge.

Update: Full coverage of this issue (including reaction and comment) can be found at Open Access News.

In a recent post to Sogdian-L, John Hill announced the on-line availability of the first draft of his annotated translation of the Weilue, a 3rd century CE Chinese text that, among other things, preserves unique information about maritime routes to the Roman Empire. Like his earlier translation, The Western Regions according to the Hou Hanshu (now in a second edition, 2003), Hill offers his translation freely to all:

You are most welcome to download it or use it as you wish.

Most of the other texts available in the Historical Texts section of the Silk Road site are e-prints of out-of-copyright editions (sometimes updated or annotated), with the exception of Nicholas Sims-Williams’ translation of certain ancient Sogdian letters. Some of these texts bear copyright statements. The site as a whole makes copyright claims on behalf of itself and/or the individual authors, permitting “non-profit educational use” and web-linking, but prohibiting download or copying “of materials for re-distribution and in particular for any profit-generating enterprise.” No formal document license is invoked.

To what degree can such a ‘do-it-yourself’ approach to copyright and licensing terminology, which at present we also follow at the Ancient World Mapping Center, be seen to be adequate on the net? In light of the relative ease of this approach, what are the benefits and advantages (or pitfalls?) of employing a formal, ‘open’ license endorsed by one or another scholarly or ‘open’ publication bodies?

Peter Heslin writes that he has updated Diogenes, his freeware (GPL) tool for searching and browsing the databases of ancient texts, primarily in Latin and Greek, that are published by the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and the Packard Humanities Institute. Here’s the entry in his changelog:

v. 1.3 Long-delayed bug-fix release. The interface to the Perseus morphological parser must have changed at some point, because words with a chi, xi, or psi had broken. Fixed handling of browsing of non-numerical targets (eg. biographies). Fixed encoding of web pages, so cutting and pasting has a better chance of working. A few other small fixes. Began using Darcs for source control. (13-Jul-04)

In addition he has added a feature I’d requested recently, more ubiquitous display of basic TLG Canon metadata when browsing texts. Thanks Peter!

Worth reading, I think, is Graham Lampa’s “Imagining the Blogosphere: An Introduction to the Imagined Community of Instant Publishing” but I do wonder about the level of historical perspective in comments like this:

The low-cost appeal of instant publishing promotes a democratic feeling that permeates the blogosphere, but when one critically considers global Internet access and usage, it is clear that the community represents a relatively small number of global elites who have the luxury of time, talent, and expendable wealth. In this way the blogosphere parallels ancient Athens, with a system of enlightened democracy that was nonetheless restricted to the wealthy few. While there are no formal mechanisms barring entry into the blogosphere, the mere luxury of Internet access remains out of reach for the vast majority of global citizens. Although many blogging services may be free, the substantial amount of capital and operating costs needed to simply access the Internet are insurmountable obstacles to many in the developing world.

Setting aside the characterization of ancient Athens, I wonder whether this emphasis on elitism isn’t more than a little overstated. The barriers to expressing oneself on a global scale have surely never been lower in human history, and that goes even for determined people in developing countries — I’m thinking of personal anecdotes I’ve heard from friends about street kids in Africa finding ways to check their Yahoo email accounts.