The Stoa: a Review for Digital Classics

Interesting thoughts in an email from Neel Smith:

Microsoft is selling through Amazon its copyrighted version of the U.S. Constitution. (Honest — there’s no way I could make up stuff this good.)

I gather that the copyright claims are based on their structuring of the text in MS’s own eBook format — that is, they are not claiming copyright on the text of the U.S. Constitution, but on the particular e-edition that they will sell you.

While I find this a ludicrous business proposition, I think there’s a legitimate point here: MS seems to me to imply that a differently structured text (for example, a semantically marked-up, TEI-conformant XML edition) constitutes a distinct and separately copyrightable edition.

The text of the US Consitution is in the public domain, as is any ancient Greek or Latin text, so any new edition of the US Constitution, the Iliad or Herodotus does not pose any of the problems with derivative works.

So I think MS would share my view that it would be a copyright violation to reproduce fully ML West’s Oxford edition of Hesiod (with introduction, apparatus, etc), but it would be legitimate to take Hesiod’s text as printed by West, provide a new electronic structure (e.g., TEI XML) and claim copyright on the new e-edition.

May be the first time I’ve ever found myself on the same side as MS in a question connected to copyright.

from Ralph Mathisen:

The third biennial conference on the topic of “Ancient Studies — New Technology: The World Wide Web and Scholarly Research, Communication, and Publication in Ancient, Byzantine, and Medieval Studies” will be held December 3-5, 2004, at James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA. Topics of particular interest include 1 the digital museum; 2) the digital classroom; 3) the digital scholar; and 4) theoretical issues such as “knowledge representation”. 300-word electronic abstracts dealing with these issues and with other ways in which the WEB can help to promote classical, ancient, Byzantine, and medieval studies may be directed to Ralph Mathisen, Program Chair, at ralphwm@uiuc.edu and ruricius@msn.com (snail-mail: Department of History, 309 Gregory Hall, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801). Deadline for receipt of abstracts is August 31, 2004. Programs for previous conferences may be consulted at https://www.roman- emperors.org/program.htm (2000 Conference) and https://tabula.rutgers.edu/conferences/ancient_studies2002/ conf_program.html (2002 Conference). The website for the upcoming conference is located at https://www.cisat.jmu.edu/asnt3.

https://www.stoa.org/bible/bible.pl

This project was written to facilitate the writing of the dissertation of Michael Jones, a graduate student at the University of Cambridge. All of the material in this database has been available in print form for some time; but there was never an easy way to search through the manuscripts using multiple parameters. There are two options for searching the database: searching passages or searching manuscripts. Pressing ‘Search Passages’ with the desired book (e.g. ‘Luke’), chapter, or verse (or a combination of all of these) typed into the appropriate field will return all manuscripts that contain the particular passage. Likewise, pressing ‘Search Manuscripts’ will return only the manuscripts with the parameters you enter.

For this project Michael adapted the code he had previously written for the CHS project on Homer and the Papyri.

Hat tip to Debra Hamel for the notice of Martialis: the Epigrams of Martial:

This is an insanely ambitious project. On this blog I intend to present the Latin text and an English translation of all the epigrams of the first-century AD poet Marcus Valerius Martialis, better known to the English speaking world as Martial. By my reckoning there are 1565 epigrams together with the five prose prefaces – which at a rate of one a day will take the better part of four-and-a-half years to cover.

By concentrating on one poem a day I hope to encourage readers to make their own observations in the comments section and develop a discussion to which anyone can contribute on matters of translation and interpretation: some books and some poems are rather better served than others by existing translations and exegetical works.

Peter Suber’s Open Access News passes on an encouraging announcement from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ):

The new version of DOAJ now includes records at article level and a search functionality allowing users to search articles in potentially all Open Access Journals. The directory now contains information about more than 1100 open access journals, i.e. quality controlled scientific and scholarly electronic journals that are freely available on the web. As of today 270 of the 1100 journals are searchable on article level and both numbers are growing. Researchers can now search almost 46,000 articles through the Directory of Open Access Journals and be sure to get access to the articles.

In the DOAJ I note the American Journal of Archaeology, Göttinger Forum für Altertumswissenschaft, and Leeds International Classical Studies. Good for them.

Here we go with the Stoa’s new blog. This nifty WordPress system allows the posting of announcements and references to events of interest as we were already doing for years with the front page of the Stoa site, only now in a way that’s — ahem — organized, and searchable, and linkable, and we have RSS feeds, and so forth. Gosh.

If you are looking for one of the links on the old page, look over on the right-hand column, including the pop-up menu at the bottom.

Kevin Glowacki’s new site, The Ancient City of Athens, is a photographic archive of the archaeological and architectural remains of ancient Athens (Greece). It is intended primarily as a resource for students and teachers of classical art & archaeology, civilization, languages, and history as a supplement to their class lectures and reading assignments and as a source of images for use in term papers, projects, and presentations. We also hope that this site will be useful to all who have an interest in archaeological exploration and the recovery, interpretation, and preservation of the past.

Hundreds of photographs, substantial introductions and captions, several contextual essays, bibliographies, links to other free on-line scholarly resources — and the whole thing is covered by a Creative Commons license.

“Ancient Mediterranean Cultural Informatics” is the second issue of Classics@ from Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies, edited by Christopher Blackwell and Ross Scaife.

The Cover Pages site offers a rather substantive overview of this issue: “Delivering Classics Resources with TEI-XML, Open Source, and Creative Commons Licenses” with particular emphasis on the innovative technological program adopted by the Center for Hellenic Studies, the CC licenses, the TEI, and the TextServer protocol.

“Colloquia familiaria: a selection” is a digital archive consisting of several colloquia by Erasmus with introductory essays, interpretive questions, notes, as well as a brief discussion of current standards in electronic publication. Created by Jennifer Nelson, a University of Kentucky graduate student in Classics and Library and Information Science, this publication was intended to serve a number of purposes: first and foremost, we wanted to introduce intermediate Latin students to Erasmus’ colloquia. Beyond that, the goal was to showcase TEI-XML as a text-encoding practice that can increase the likelihood of long-term preservation of digital documents in the humanities, and that can accommodate the high standards of resource description found in library MARC (machine-readable cataloging) records. At present, this collection includes an excerpt from the initial “Formulae,” plus “A Lesson in Manners,” “The Girl with No Interest in Marriage,” “Inns,” and “The Abbot and the Learned Lady”. We do invite submissions, however, as we hope that this archive will continue to grow through the contributions of other Erasmus enthusiasts. This project was completed under the editorial supervision of Jane Phillips and Ross Scaife (Classics, University of Kentucky), with additional technical advising from Joseph B. Miller (Library and Information Science, University of Kentucky). All of these materials reside in a single TEI-conformant XML file whose presentation on the web in HTML format has been effected via TEI-XSL (release 3.0).