Electra Atlantis: Digital Approaches to Antiquity

This summer I thought a lot about how ineffective I was in Web Design last year. I think there were many points I was trying to make that some students simply didn’t want to believe. So, I spent some time finding other resources to support some of the ideas I was trying to get across. My hope being that if students see it from various places, they won’t consider it just opinion, but rather see some authority behind it. (Of course, merely my word should be authority enough; but alas, sometimes you need more.) Anyway, one good resource is a Beginner’s Guide from a Seasoned CSS Designer. It says much of the same things that I try to get across in class, but its not me saying it. Sometimes that appears to be the most important thing : |

I forgot to mention that there is yet a third "GeoWeb": the web of data that links to GeoNames, U.S. Census, etc. While running yesterday I started to sketch out a talk tentatively titled "GeoWeb: fact or fiction?" or "GeoWeb: I want to believe" that could be fun to deliver next year.

Drupal/PHP Programmer

The Center for History and New Media is seeking an entry-level Drupal/PHP Programmer to work on digital humanities projects such as the National History Education Clearinghouse. This is a contract-funded, two-year position that is particularly appropriate for someone with a combined interest in technology, and the humanities and social sciences. Knowledge of Drupal and some combination of the following would be particularly helpful: JavaScript, CSS, XML, PHP, MySQL and object-oriented programming. Ability to work in a team is very important.

Apply online for position 10411z at http://jobs.gmu.edu/; then e-mail a resume, salary requirements, and a cover letter describing relevant programming projects and experience to chnm@gmu.edu with subject line “Drupal Programmer.” We will begin considering applications on September 2, 2008, and continue until the position is filled. Applications without a cover letter will not be considered.

Multimedia Developer

The Center for History and New Media is hiring a Multimedia Developer to work on a variety of innovative, Web-based history projects. This grant-funded position is particularly appropriate for someone with a combined interest in technology and history. The successful candidate will be an energetic, well-organized person who takes initiative; works well in a team; and learns new skills quickly. Experience with audio editing, video editing, Final Cut Pro and/or Flash preferred.

Please apply online at http://jobs.gmu.edu for position 10412z, then e-mail a cover letter, resume and links to any prior Web-based multimedia work to chnm@gmu.edu with the subject line “Multimedia Developer.” We will begin considering applications on September 2, 2008, and continue until the position is filled.

About CHNM/GMU

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, which is known for innovative work in digital history, is located in Fairfax, Virginia, 15 miles from Washington, D.C., and is accessible by public transportation. George Mason University is an innovative, entrepreneurial institution with national distinction in a range of academic fields. Enrollment is 30,000, with students studying in over 150 degree programs at campuses in Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun, Prince William and the United Arab Emirates. GMU was recently named the #1 “Up-and-Coming” university by U.S. News & World Report.

... for Darkroom's new album, Some Of These Numbers Mean Something. "9 tracks of guitary synthy goodness". Nothing like some guitary electronica on a friday afternoon. (Not that I am married to one half of darkroom, or anything.....)

A bunch of odds and ends at the end of the week:

• The Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Project got some press this past week in Cyprus Weekly.  While the article doesn't get everything right, the University of North Dakota got some press from it:

  "The Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project, as it is called, is jointly under the direction of Professor William Caraher, University of North Dakota, Professor R. Scott Moore, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Professor David K. Pettegrew, Messiah College, and Dr Maria Hadjicosti. Experts from Europe also assisted in the excavations.

  Maria Hadjicosti said that each participant contributed their own expertise and specialty in evaluating the archaeological excavations and survey."

• Edward L. Ayers, the new President at my alma mater, the University of Richmond, continues to contribute to the field of digital history.  His History Engine has gone live and public and is getting some good press.  This is exactly the kind of collaborative enterprise possible in a Web 2.0 environment and the kind project to which Digital History at the University of North Dakota could someday contribute.
• Luke Lavan's and Axel Gering's Berlin-Kent Ostia Excavations Blog is now being updated.  It will be fascinating to watch their project work to uncover the Late Antique city of Ostia.  Archaeological Project blogs is such a booming field that it might warrant more extensive treatment...
• Finally, a little advertisement for myself.  Brandon Olson, over at Historical Archaeology in the Ancient Mediterranean, deserves a good bit of credit for helping get this book done.  He performed the preliminary edits on nearly all the contributions.  Scott Moore, at Ancient History Ramblings, was a co-editor.  Kostis Kourelis, at Buildings, Objects, Situations, was a contributor as was Sam Fee at Arranged Delirium.  It's the blogosphere in print form!

A recent comment alerted me to the photographs by David White of Brunel’s engineering feats.

He had a camera built to a specification similar to that used by Robert Howlett, Brunel’s photographer who took the famous photo of Brunel standing in front of a backdrop of giant chains from the Great Eastern. He used a lens made just a year after that famous photo was taken, mounted on a box made by a cabinet maker out of mahogany and brass.

White then travelled around the UK taking photos of surviving Brunellian structures, such as Paddington Station and the Tamar Bridge. The resulting photographs are beautiful.

David White has compiled a slideshow with a commentary by him.

His ingenious idea could be applied to so many technologies from the past.

Looks like another great series of talks at the home of our friends on the other side of the beltway, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. I’m going to try to catch at least a couple of these “digital dialogues.”

Thanks to the initiative of our friends at Concordia Publishing House, we are pleased to make available to you two Lutheran lectionaries:

• Lutheran Service Book: One-Year Lectionary
• Lutheran Service Book: Three-Year Lectionary

And they are absolutely free!

If you have one of our base packages that includes the Lectionary Viewer Addin (i.e., any Logos Bible Software 3 base package except for the Original Languages Library), then all you need to do is click the Download button on the Lutheran Lectionaries page or run Libronix Update from the Tools menu in Libronix.

If you have a base package that doesn’t include the Lectionary Viewer Addin, you have two options. You can purchase the Lectionary Viewer Addin for $19.95, or you can upgrade your base package to one of the latest and greatest. Visit our upgrade page to see your options.

If you have an older base package, upgrading is definitely the way to go. There are lots of resources and tools that you’re missing out on. See the 100 New Features in Logos Bible Software 3 and the Top 20 New Features.

Here’s an example of why upgrading is by far the better value. If you upgrade from Bible Study Library (QB) to Bible Study Library (ND), it will cost you only $39.90 (twice the price of the Lectionary Viewer Addin), but you will get—in addition to the Lectionary Viewer Addin—19 new resources, 2 new addins, and 3 new parallel passages! All of that for only $19.95 more!

If you already have the Lectionary Viewer Addin, visit the Lutheran Lectionaries page to get your new lectionaries. If you don’t, go check out your upgrade options.

Related Products:

• The Lectionary Commentary: Theological Exegesis for Sunday's Texts (3 Vols.)
• Lectionary Reflections: Year C
• Preaching from the Lectionary: An Exegetical Commentary

Related Article:

• Creating Your Own Lectionary

My friend Jim send us a link to Uncle Jay Explains - specifically Congressional recesses. I had a good laugh at the film and thought that it might get people thinking about the quality of effort that our government has been giving us lately. I think most people - regardless of political affiliation - would support the position that our government has not been serving us well. The incompetence of the Executive seems obvious, but I also think that the legislative branch has done a poor job as well. And, I don’t buy into the excuse that it’s because of the current split, partisan, office-holders. If you agree, vote in some change. Experience seems over-rated when the quality of the performance is so poor.

As is usual, I get a lot of thoughts from reading articles in The Wired Campus or the Chronicle of Higher Education. What caught my eye today was "'West Wing' Writer Is Working on Movie About Facebook." It seems that Aaron Sorkin is working on a film about Facebook. Other articles, such as one in the Los Angeles Times, confirms that he is working to create such a movie for Sony. I have to wonder, is the Facebook craze gone too far? Or is Hollywood behind the curve?

RSM

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Things you should read: more ****** = you should really *really* read these

*****Jane McGonigal “This Is Not a Game: Immersive Aesthetics & Collective Play.” Digital Arts & Culture 2003 Conference Proceedings.  May 2003 http://www.seanstewart.org/beast/mcgonigal/notagame/paper.pdf

***** Jane McGonigal “Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming.” Ecologies of Play. Ed. Katie Salen. Forthcoming, spring 2008. http://avantgame.com/McGonigal_WhyILoveBees_Feb2007.pdf

***** Adam Martin and Tom Chatfield, editors. IGDA Alternate Reality Games – Special Interest Group – Whitepaper 2006 http://www.igda.org/arg/whitepaper or for continuously updated wiki version of the same, http://www.igda.org/wiki/index.php/Alternate_Reality_Games_SIG/Whitepaper

**** Shannon Drake ‘Breaking the Fourth Wall’ The Escapist Magazine June 27 2006 http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_51/308-Breaking-the-Fourth-Wall

**** Nova ‘Chimaera’ Barlow ‘The making of World Without Oil’ The Escapist Magazine September 18 2007 http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_115/1959-The-Making-of-World-Without-Oil

**** “History” unfiction.com http://www.unfiction.com/history/

*** Penelope Green “Mystery on Fifth Avenue” New York Times June 12 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/garden/12puzzle.htm

*** Jane McGonigal”Massively Collaborative Science.” Op-Ed. Seed Magazine. Special Issue: The Universe in 2008. February 2008. http://avantgame.com/SEED%20Gaming%20Article_JanFeb08.pdf

*** Frank Rose “Secret Websites, Coded Messages: The New World of Immersive Games” Wired Magazine http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/16-01/ff_args

** Shannon Drake ‘Wrapped Inside A Mystery In An Engima: Perplex City Revisited’ The Escapist Magazine February 14 2007 http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/interviews/1232-Wrapped-Inside-A-Mystery-In-An-Engima-Perplex-City-Revisited

** Russ Pitts “Horror 2.0: Lance Weiler’s Cinema ARG” The Escapist Magazine November 12 2007 http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_123/2621-Horror-2-0-Lance-Weiler-s-Cinema-ARG

** Richard Perrin “Art is Resistance” The Escapist Magazine September 18 2007 http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_115/1956-Art-is-Resistance

** Jane McGonigal “Making Alternate Reality the New Business Reality.” Op-Ed. Harvard Business Review. Special Issue: Top 20 Breakthrough Ideas for 2008. February 2008. http://www.harvardbusinessonline.org/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp?ml_subscriber=true&ml_action=get-article&ml_issueid=BR0802&articleID=R0802A&pageNumber=1

* Edward Castronova “ARGs and Utopian Dreams” Terra Nova November 21 2005 http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2005/11/args_and_utopia.html

* Cory Ondrekja “Tombstone Hold’em” Terra Nova October 16 2005 http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2005/10/tombstone_hold_.html

* Clive Thompson “Fun Way to Lose Weight: Turn Dieting Into an RPG” Wired Magazine August 11 2008 http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/commentary/games/2008/08/gamesfrontiers_0811

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) has released the fall schedule for their “digital dialogues” lecture series. There are a number of interesting talks. I wonder if any of these will be podcast?

Since the full schedule is only available as a PDF at the moment, I’m taking the liberty of pasting the contents here:

Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
an applied think tank for the digital humanities
Digital Dialogues Schedule
Tuesdays @12:30-1:45
Fall 2008 in MITH’s Conference Room
B0135 McKeldin Library, U. Maryland

• 9.9 Doug Reside (MITH and Theatre), “The MITHological AXE: Multimedia Metadata Encoding with the Ajax XML Encoder“
• 9.16 Stanley N. Katz (Princeton University), “Digital Humanities 3.0: Where We Have Come From and Where We Are Now?”
• 9.23 Joyce Ray (Institute of Museum and Library Services), “Digital Humanities and the Future of Libraries”
• 9.30 Tom Scheinfeldt and Dave Lester (George Mason University), “Omeka: Easy Web Publishing for Scholarship and Cultural Heritage”
• 10.7 Brent Seales (University of Kentucky), “EDUCE: Enhanced Digital Unwrapping for Conservation and Exploration”
• 10.14 Zachary Whalen (University of Mary Washington), “The Videogame Text”
• 10.21 Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Pomona College), “Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy”
• 10.28 “War (and) Games” (a discussion in conjunction with the ARHU semester on War and Representations of War, facilitated by Matthew Kirschenbaum [English and MITH])
• 11.4 Bethany Nowviskie (University of Virginia), “New World Ordering: Shaping Geospatial Information for Scholarly Use”
• 11.11 Merle Collins (English), Saraka and Nation (film screening and discussion)
• 11.18 Ann Weeks (iSchool and HCIL), “The International Children’s Digital Library: An Introduction for Scholars”
• 11.25 Clifford Lynch (Coalition for Networked Information), title TBA
• 12.2 Elizabeth Bearden (English), “Renaissance Moving Pictures: From Sidney’s Funeral materials to Collaborative, Multimedia Nachleben”
• 12.9 Katie King (Women’s Studies), “Flexible Knowledges, Reenactments, New Media”

All talks are free and open to the public!

University of Maryland
McKeldin Library B0131
College Park, MD 20742

Neil Fraistat, Director
http://www.mith.umd.edu/

tel: 301.405.8927
fax: 301.314.7111
mith@umd.edu

MITH is pleased to announce another great semester of digital humanities talks at the University of Maryland: our fall 2008 Digital Dialogues schedule is now online. We look forward to seeing you this coming Tuesday, when Doug Reside presents on his recent work with AXE, the Ajax XML Encoder.

As always, all talks are free and open to the public.

I'm happy to say that the guidelines for the DFG/NEH Symposia and Workshops Program are now available.  This program, funded by the NEH and the DFG in Germany, is designed to fund joint workshops between American and German scholars and scientists who are working together on digital humanities projects or discussing issues related to the field.  Deadline for applications is November 4, 2008.
 
I should note that this is the second of two joint programs we have with the DFG.  The earlier program is called DFG/NEH Joint Digitization Projects and has a deadline of October 15, 2008.
 
If you are working with (or are considering working with) colleagues in Germany, I urge you to check out these two programs.

As regular readers know, the NEH's Office of Digital Humanities has an ongoing Humanities High Performance Computing (HHPC) Initiative.  I wanted to let you know about two upcoming HHPC-related events. 
 
On Monday, October 6, NEH staff will present at a workshop here in Washington, D.C., entitled "Humanities Applications for the World Community Grid." This full-day workshop will feature IBM computer scientists who will conduct a hands-on session describing how high performance computer systems can be used for humanities research.  [...]

I was thrilled that Sarah Palin made reference to the set designs of the Democratic Convention, particularly "Obama's Greek columns, which are now shipped back to some movie studio." Nice punch, but the truth of the matter is that the Republican convention is just as designed. I haven't been able to focus on any architectural feature worth commenting on. However, I find the constant projection

Grab the whole thing here: http://atlantides.org/batlas/2008-09-04/baids-2008-09-04.tgz

Let me know what problems you find.

README file for Barrington Atlas Identifiers, version published 2008-09-04
This is the first complete release.
Reference URL: http://atlantides.org/batlas

Background: http://horothesia.blogspot.com/search/label/batlasids
New maps covered in this release: 100, 101, 102
List of all maps presently covered: 1-102 (complete)

Major classes of change from prior versions are listed below. Consult individual files named like map22-diff.txt for output files differencing from prior version to this version.

• No changes to previously released IDs.

This posting originated on The Oriental Institute: Fragments for a History of an Institution: A collaborative project intended to focus ideas and thoughts on the history of the Oriental Institute of The University of Chicago, and was first posted there on 2/14/08, and was updated on 2/28/08 and 3/14/08. Since it has now gone beyond the mission of that blog, I'll maintain it here in more neutral territory.

When I was Research Archivist- Bibliographer at the Oriental Institute (1983-2005) I began, in a vague and undirected way, to collect scans of bookplates of scholars of ancient Near Eastern Studies. The primary focus was on those which appeared in volumes in the collections of the Oriental Institute. When the OI History blog began in the winter of 2008, it seemed an appropriate place to illustrate this small collection. When that blog entry appeared, correspondents began to send me information on other bookplates and copies of their own, when they had them. I hope this trend will continue, and I urge those of you who have a personal bookplate, or who have examples of scholar's bookplates in your own books or in books accessible to you will send them along for inclusion in this collection.

The study of the Bookplate, or Exlibris, is an interesting topic. See here, and here, and here, for instance. I suggest in particular, that those of you interested in the subject might like to consult Antike im Exlibris 2 Griechenland im Exlibris, and, Antike im Exlibris. Teil 1, Aegypten im Exlibris. A copy of the latter is in the Research Archives. See also the egyptological (or Egyptomaniacal) bookplates in the collection of Lewis Jaffe at Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie


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This is the very plain bookplate of the collection known as the Director's Library. Traditionally this was the collection housed in the Director's Study. The core of the Director's Library was the collection of James Henry Breasted (see the bookplate below). Much of the Director's Library was absorbed and integrated into the Research Archives in the early 1970's. Almost all of the remainder of it (with the exception of the Director's Study collection of publications of the Oriental Institute) was absorbed by the Research Archives during the directorship of William Sumner when the Study was renovated and restored.


This is the personal bookplate of James Henry Breasted. The design used on the bookplate is the same as that used on Ulric Henry Ellerhusen's tympanum over the doorway to the Oriental Institute (and seen also here and here in architect's models, with a variant design here). I am not sure whether the bookplate or the tympanum design were the original iteration of the idea, but the existence of variants of the tympanum rather suggests that the architectural version was first.

See also The Tympanum within the Arch on the Doorway to the Oriental Institute at The Oriental Institute: Fragments for a History of an Institution.

The bookplates illustrated below are from book in the collections of the Research Archives. Some were acquired through purchase, others by bequest.


Hans Bernhard Ambrosius Abel


Sidney Edward Bouverie Bouverie-Pusey


S. R. Driver and Godfrey Rolles Driver


Ernst Herzfeld
Biographical Sketch of Ernst Emil Herzfeld


Gustave Jéquier
Gustave Jéquier, 1868-1946


Georg [Christian Julius] Möller


Charles Francis Nims


Keith Cedric Seele




Wilhelm Spiegelberg
Wilhelm Spiegelberg (* 25. Juni 1870 in Hannover; † 23. Dezember 1930 in München) war ein deutscher Ägyptologe. Er trat durch seine maßgeblichen Forschungen über demotische Papyri hervor


Walter Wreszinski

and finally...



This bookplate was presented to me when I left the Oriental Institute in June 2005. It was (I think) thought up and designed by Tom Urban, using Mark Garrison's drawing of Persepolis Fortification Seal 1, (Cat.No. 182, pp. 272-274, Pl. 100c-e in Seals on the Persepolis Fortification Tablets, Volume I: Images of Heroic Encounter, by Mark B. Garrison and Margaret Cool Root).

This bookplate doesn't strictly speaking belong in this compilation, because no book in the Research Archives carries it. I guess this means I'll need to make a donation to become legitimate.


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Since the intial posting, I have had several interesting responses, both in the comments on the blog, and offline. The following bookplates have been brought to our attention by correspondents [February 28th 2008]:


James Henry Breasted's bookplate altered to identify books in the collection donated to the Research Archives by Gregory Areshian [Courtesy of Foy Scalf]




Armas Salonen [Courtesy of Bob Whiting]



Silvin Kosak Created by the Slovene painter and sculptor Andrej Ajdic [Courtesy of Silvin Kosak]




Edda Bresciani Scanned from: La tradizione degli ex libris nella provincia di Lucca. 103 esemplari stampati dalla tipografia Biagini di Lucca. Forte dei Marmi 29-30-31 luglio 1994, printed by: Tipografia Biagini, Lucca 1994. [Courtesy of Giuseppe Del Monte]

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Since the revised posting, I have had additional interesting responses. The following have been brought to our attention by correspondents [March 14th 2008]:


Louis Herbert Gray [From a book in the Research Archives. Courtesy of Foy Scalf]

Peter Lacovara [Courtesy of Peter Lacovara]


Herbert Lockwood Willett (1864-1944) [From a book in the Research Archives. Courtesy of Foy Scalf]

[Alan M. May - whose collection is now in the Library of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University]

So, Chrome, the fabled small-footprint open source browser that we all wanted…well I quite liked the idea anyhow, though in my ideal world google would just have partnered with mozilla to make firefox even bigger and better. Or should that be smaller and better?

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m mighty disappointed. I download, I follow instructions, it fails to load it’s own welcome page. Not to be daunted, I load my personalised google home page, I go off and make tea, I come back and eventually it loads. I load my gmail. Correction, I try to load my gmail. I fail. I try to load google reader (see, I’m a company girl). Ifail. I try again today, but still no joy. Now surely, being google, you’d make sure your own pages load? My machine’s not at all old and crumbly, and just runs XP. I guess I’ll try the next release to see if it improves but I do feel disappointed right now.

What I am loving though, is Ubiquity for firefox. I haven’t heard much buzz about it in the geospatial circles, which is a shame because it has some lovely geeky geo bits. Go and watch the video, and if you’re not blown away by the “select a table full of records on a web page and type ‘map this’ to see them all displayed on a map” then you deserve to be kicked of planet geospatial. As far as I can tell, this is a feature in development and only works with Craigs List or something but surely it’s an app worth putting some time into. And, and, you can insert real live maps into emails. Very cool…

Learning how to use it seemlessly in your every day browsing habits takes time (well it does for me anyhow), but the natural language interface has such a lot of potential. Personally, I can’t wait until the translator module learns latin…

Bob Cobbing was a leading Concrete poet working in sound, text and visual media. The sixth anniversary of his passing is on September 29th.

Bob was a great example and help to younger poets. The Writers Forum Press published many hundreds of chapbooks from Bob’s kitchen, using his home printing facilities (usually a photocopier) and a slightly broken stapler. After that, he might give you a beer to toast the publication. The Writers Forum Press published works by such important 20th century figures as John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, and Brion Gysin.

Bob was also an encouragement to some of us, who take a while to get going, as most of his public poetic career came after his fortieth year, his first well-known work being the landmark ‘The ABC in Sound’ of 1964. Always optimistic, he declared on his birthday: “Life begins at 80!”

Bob led Writers Forum workshops for many years, right up to his death in 2002. He was a kind and perceptive voice in the group. Bob had presence.

Writers Forum continues, now in its sixth decade. It is under the care of poets Adrian Clarke and Lawrence Upton who were entrusted with the project by Bob. He is survived by his wife, the artist Jennifer Pike.

Wayne Clements.

I just finished Mark Bauerlein's new book: The Dumbest Generation (New York 2008).  I won't review it here, but it offered an interesting (and perhaps valuable) perspective on the causes and side effects of the growing use of technology in the university classroom.

Bauerlein basically argues that students deep involvement in the New Media -- what he calls Screen Time -- derives in part from the Youth Movement in the 1960s and its rejection of both adult authority and the intellectual traditions of the previous generations.  The ability of the New Media Universe to cater to the individual tastes of the user has merged with the intensely self-centered perspective of most adolescents to shield them from adult culture and to validate their rejection of traditional values.  In the end, this has produced a generation of Americans who lack the skills necessary to be successful in American society largely because their immersion in the world of the internet has allowed them to ignore their teachers, adults, and mentors. To support this, Bauerlein marshals an impressive array of studies that show that despite the advantages provided by access to the "information superhighway" this Dumbest Generation performs no better and in many cases worse than their predecessors. He singles out reading levels for particular scrutiny and agues that the myriad of distractions - from social networking sites, to blogs, to YouTube - detracts from the time that an earlier generation of students dedicated to reading books.  The result is that students' reading levels (and writing levels) have steadily declined as they become more and more immersed in a world of their own making.

Critics counter, of course, that traditional literacy is being replaced with a kind of technological literacy: the ability to navigate the information rich spaces on the internet is a skill that has a much greater relevance in a world where books represent obsolete technology.  Bauerlein frets over this notion, of course, and considers it particularly detrimental in that it empowers students to dig themselves more deeply into their protected world of adolescent delights, rather than the more challenging environment of produced by mentors, teachers, and adults and the accrued weight of traditional knowledge.

Perhaps more troubling is the notion that despite students' rejection of traditional modes of learning (e.g. book reading, standard lecture formats), they have not necessarily developed the kinds of skills necessarily to successfully gather, collate, and process the information that they encounter on the internet.  Sam Fee, at Arranged Delirium posted a link to a well-known 2007 article on InsideHigherEd.com entitled: "Are College Students Techno Idiots?"  This article suggests that most university students use the internet in a superficial way.  Following a set of well trod paths, they rarely venture into unknown territories in search of challenges, but frequent a relatively limited set of places and, in turn, practice and develop a rather limited set of skills. 

For yet another perspective on this, we can consider the debate over whether faculty should use social networking sites to improve their ability to deliver content and capture students attention.  Some students, of course, are appalled that faculty are willing (and able!) to invade their private domains.  Some faculty on the other hand, see this as an important way to challenge and transform the intellectually safe (and sterile in Bauerlein's view) environment of student space on the web.

The various critiques of the value of integrating more "New Media" or Web 2.0 content into university level classes have come back to me this week as I have begun to see the initial results from my experiments with Twitter and a class Wiki.  On the one hand, I've been impressed with the ability of some students to work together to produce high-quality content, particularly on the class Wiki for a 100 (intro) level history course.  On the other hand, the gap between students who are comfortable on the web and those who find basic navigation a challenge is remarkable.  More importantly, perhaps, is whether these applications improve the quality of classroom time and encourage the students to become more deeply invested in the course material.  It is still too early to tell on either of these points, but the tools and concepts that make us the Web 2.0 world are not essentially incompatible with increased student involvement in intellectual life.  The responsibility may fall to faculty in their roles as leaders and mentors to transform student expectations of the internet experience and shepherd them gently toward the places where real learning -- with books, ideas, and intellectual challenges - takes place.

A while back someone sent me a question about how to use the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary to the fullest.

Any good ideas on where I can go to learn how to most effectively use this dictionary in my study process? Is there a way to integrate it into the Bible Word Study selection?

Any help would be appreciated!

I sent this user some tips, but thought this might be worthy of a blog post—especially since it’s back-to-school time and we are currently offering a 30% discount on this wonderful resource. Just use coupon code YALE to save more than $60!

Setting Up Your Keylink Preferences

First, you should set up your keylink preferences. Go to Tools > Options > Keylinks and select “English” from the “Data Type” drop-down menu. Then find the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary in the list of resources in the bottom window and “Promote” it to the top. Prioritize it wherever you’d like. If you want it to be the first resource that Libronix looks to, move it to the top of your list.

This allows you to double-click on any English word and have quick access to the AYBD entry, if there is one. (You’ll need to set AYBD as your first keylink destination or set your keylink preferences to open several keylink destinations at a time.)

This also allows you to see AYBD entries in the Bible Word Study report.

By the way, if you don’t have the updated Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary resource (formerly Anchor Bible Dictionary), you can get it by running the resource auto-update script or by downloading it directly from our FTP server.

Creating a Parallel Resource Association

You may also want to set up a custom parallel resource association of all of your Bible dictionaries and encyclopedias. This allows you to jump from the entry on “Jericho,” for example, in the AYBD to the one in other Bible dictionary like ISBE or the New Bible Dictionary by simply hitting the right arrow key. Make sure the active index is set to “Topics.”

By creating a custom parallel resource association, you get to control which resources Libronix looks to and you get to put them in whatever order you’d like.

Watch the Video!

For more tips, see our training video on Using the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary in Logos Bible Software. It’s embedded below. If you’re reading this in your email inbox or your RSS reader and don’t see the video, visit the blog post to watch it.

To add this resource to your Libronix digital library, visit the product page. And make sure to use coupon code YALE to save 30%!

Back in May I posted about email hoaxes and how I wondered why they could still be effective. Well, there is a new article from InfoWorld that addresses this very issue. Apparently there are a number of people who have actually purchased items through spam mailings. The piece also identifies the eight top email hoaxes. My favorites? Sign a Petition to Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide (ever hear of H2O?).

Today was a very interesting day. This morning I was teaching my medieval history class and somehow found myself talking about East Germany (I often find myself on tangents). This discussion made me feel very old since one of the students mentioned he was only 5 when the Germanys reunited. Nobody else, except for one non-traditional student, remembered East Germany as a country. Then when I returned to my office and checked my email I found a copy of the email message that circulates at the start of each school year that talks about the new freshman class and what they know/don't know. Anyway, needless to say, this left me feeling old. But then when I attended a meeting later in the day, everything switched. A fellow IUP colleague on the committee turned out to be my former high school band teacher from the early 80s. I found myself thinking how weird was it that we were now colleagues at IUP. It also made me feel a little like when you move from the kids' table to the adults' table at Thanksgiving. I also realized that he was not a lot older than me, but that my perception of him back in high school was that he was old man, even though he was only in his 20s. It is amazing how a small change in scenery can change our perception of things.

RSM

We were lucky to be joined this summer by Adam Crymble, a graduate student in history at the University of Western Ontario. And we were doubly lucky since he worked hard to make Zotero compatible with Canadian resources that were not previously compatible. Adam reports the results of his efforts on his blog, which should make Zotero even more attractive to Canadian academics—as well as anyone using the important databases and repositories he worked on. Thanks, Adam!

One of the critiques of traditional archaeological VR is that the decision making process underlying the images is often not transparent.  A notable exception is the Hampson Museum in Wilson, Arkansas. Indeed, they are soliciting comments on their reconstruction:

In this section of the Virtual Hampson Museum you will find a series of images that have been created using the latest computer visualization techniques. The goal of the images is to give you a better sense of what the site might have looked like some 500 years ago. We can never be certain how the village appeared but we have pulled together information from archaeological investigation, traditional sources and historical records. Top down view of the 3D Upper Nodena Village

Please be sure and explore the 3D Visualization FAQ section for more information on how the details of the visualizations were determined.

We hope that these images increase your interest and curiosity about this location and the people of Nodena – who may have been the ancestors of the modern Quapaw. Our ideal goal would be to create an image, that if given to a Nodena Villager would have them say “yes — that is what it looked like.” Of course this goal is impossible but it is an ideal that we keep in mind. Nodena was the home for many people and we hope that these images can begin to provide a sense of the richness and complexity of their lives and engage your interest to learn more about the creators of the amazing objects in the Virtual Hampson Museum.

Please note: These images are the result of a first phase in the work and will be expanded and improved during the next phase from June 2008 to July 2009. We will be adding considerably more “detail” to the images in this process. We invite your suggestions and comments on the current versions.

This is fantastic work. I’ve been trying to develop a completely on-line intro-to-archaeology course, and the Hampson Museum site is definately going to feature!! What’s more, using point-data generated from laser-scanning, 3d models of artefacts are also available for study and download from the site (in a variety of formats).  This neatly solves one problem for my online students, of how do you make online teaching hands-on?

More on this site later when I get down to business exploring it…  (thanks Fred!)

(one thing I’d really like to see in archaeological VR in general: people. dogs. garbage. In my neighbourhood here in Canada, your house just isn’t complete unless you have an abandoned car in the front driveway. I’d like to see the ancient equivalents in these models. This is where game-rendered VR, whether in Second Life or using the Unreal Engine or whatever other system, could really improve the experience of these ancient reconstituted spaces. Over on the Roma Reborn project website, they write: “When, as is generally the case, evidence is completely lacking, the following features have been omitted from the model: interiors of buildings; furniture; statues….. It goes without saying that the human beings, animals, movable objects, etc. present in the city at the time modeled have also been omitted owing to a complete lack of evidence.” No evidence of people eh? What’s the point of archaeology then… That’s why game-rendered VR will, in the long run, trump static VR: the ability to inject life back into these reconstructions. If there is anything at all to the notion that built space has a material effect on the way life is lived within those spaces, then even modern interactions (avatars) within those spaces will generate patterns of interaction that are relevant to understanding ancient life.)

While Scott Moore, Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project's ceramicist and co-director, handles most of the pottery processing in the field, when it gets back to the U.S., I generally work with the processed pottery in its digital form.  This past few weeks we have generated a provisional database containing almost all the pottery collected from 5 years of intensive survey at Pyla-Koustopetria.  This same database will eventually house the pottery from the excavations last year and from earlier excavations conducted at the site in the 1990s.  With our ceramic data in digital form we are able to conduct queries, transfer it to our GIS (Geographic Information Systems) interface, and even produce the basic structure for our publishable catalogue.

With the inclusion of material collected during the 2007 and 2008 survey season we have produced a sufficiently robust dataset to conduct some basic quantitative analysis.  We have over 18,000 artifacts (not a particularly large number from an intensive survey) collected over the course of our standard intensive survey (with another couple thousand generated through various experimental survey procedures).  Of this group about 40% date to the Roman or Late Roman period.  Particularly prevalent in this assemblage of Late Roman material are finewares which account for over 8% of all Late Roman pottery.  Fine wares are useful because they can generally by associated with a particular production center in the Mediterranean and are distinctive enough to have relatively secure chronologies (thanks in large part to the tireless work of John Hayes whose monumental Late Roman Pottery remains the point of departure for almost any analysis of this class of material). 

One of the advantages of our significant assemblage of Late Roman finewares is that we can compare it sites elsewhere on this island.  The locally produced Cypriot Red Slip (CRS) remains the most common type of Late Roman fineware at the site accounting for about 45% of the material on the site and another type of Late Roman fine ware Phocaean Red Slip (PHW) probably produced in Asia Minor, accounted for close to 30% of the assemblage. The most notable feature of the fine ware at our site, however, is that African Red Slip (ARS), a type of Roman fineware imported from North Africa, accounted for close to 20% of the assemblage.  (The other common Late Roman fine ware, Egyptian Red Slip barely appeared at all.  John Hayes has recently suggested that this type of pottery may represent the final phase in Late Roman pottery imports to the island where Egyptian Red Slips imported in the mid-7th century replaced African Red Slip which had become increasingly difficult to procure do to disruptions in Mediterranean trade at the "end of antiquity". (see Hayes "Pottery," in Megaw, Kourion: Excavations in the Episcopal Precinct, 436).  It may be, if this is indeed the case, that our site simply went out of use prior to the period when Egyptian Red Slips were most prevalent). 

The recent publication of the finds from the site of Panayia Ematousa provide an interesting point of comparison.  Panayia-Ematousa is, like Pyla-Koutsopetria, another "ex-urban" site situated 6.5 kilometers north of Kition and probably less then 15 km from Pyla-Koutsopetria.  Unlike our site, Panayia-Ematousa produced very little African Red Slip (only 2% of the Roman Red Slips).  In contrast the most common pottery was Phocaean Ware, followed by Cypriot Red Slip.  The two sites were basically contemporary and seemingly reached their Late Roman peaks in 6th century.  The forms present at both sites (that is the shape of the vessels of the various types) are basically similar.  Panayia-Ematousa likewise produced little Egyptian Red Slip.

The presence of a significant quantity of Phocaean Ware at Panayia-Ematousa argues against the idea that this site was less connected to Mediterranean trade -- after all, Phocaean Ware was imported to the island as well.  In fact, the fine ware from Panayia-Ematousa seems to suggest that, at least for fine table wares, the residents of the site were less interested in the locally produced Cypriot Red Slip which is by far the most common type of Late Roman fine ware on the island. In fact, at other rural and ex-urban sites on the island, Cypriot Red Slip is typically the most common type of Late Roman Pottery.

At present the Late Roman pottery from Kition remains unpublished (although we have heard that its publication is imminent), so it is impossible to compare the material from Panayia-Ematousa and Pyla-Koutsopetria to the closest urban center.  The differences between the two assemblages, at least based on our provisional analysis of our assemblage at Pyla-Koutsopetria, is striking.  It would appear that these two nearby and nearly contemporary sites had very different relationships with the pottery available in the local market.  While matters such as function, wealth, and site size (i.e. size of market) might well influence the kinds of material present, the prevalence of ARS at Pyla-Koutsopetria nevertheless appears to be one of its most striking characteristics.  In fact, we might even suggest that the difference in pottery used by residents of Panayia-Ematousa and Pyla-Koutsopetria reflected differences in how they chose to identify themselves.  This is all the more significant considering that Roman fine wares were the kind of elite, imported goods that likely contributed to opportunities for elite display like dining.

Scott Moore is working on the material from a survey conducted around Athienou some 20 km inland from Kition and our site and this material should cast even more light on the patterns of pottery in southeastern Cyprus during Late Antiquity.

README file for Barrington Atlas Identifiers, version published 2008-09-03
Reference URL: http://atlantides.org/batlas

Background: http://horothesia.blogspot.com/search/label/batlasids
New maps covered in this release: 1, 1a, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 64
List of all maps presently covered: 1-99

Major classes of change from prior versions are listed below. Consult individual files named like map22-diff.txt for output files differencing from prior version to this version.

• No changes to previously released IDs.
• Note that map 64 was erroneously listed as included in previous releases, but was not present. This difficiency is corrected with this release.

MediaWiki is the open source wiki software behind Wikipedia and the lesser known Theopedia, which is now powered by RefTagger. (See an example at http://www.theopedia.com/God.)

A couple of weeks ago I downloaded and installed MediaWiki so I could test it out with RefTagger. It worked very nicely.

Here's one method for setting it up via FTP access to your site's files:

1. Use an FTP program like FileZilla to navigate to the folder where you installed MediaWiki.
2. Open the "skins" folder.
3. Locate the file for the skin you are using. The file for the default skin is MonoBook.php. Save a local copy, and a backup copy too.
4. Open the file in Dreamweaver, WordPad, or your favorite code editor.
5. Find the </body> tag and paste the customizable RefTagger code from the RefTagger page right above it.
6. Save the file and upload it back to your server.

You're done. RefTagger is now transforming your MediaWiki site.

For help with other sites, see the tutorials section on the RefTagger page.

The Wired Campus had an intersting article today - "U. of Maryland Imaging Center Recreates Early Washington." [Note: The article was actuially about UMBC not U. of M.] The article talks about how members of the Imaging Research Center at the University of Maryland Baltimore County are recreating Washington's original landscape digitally. The article describes how "The efforts has precisely located both early buildings and long-lost but critical local features like Tiber Creek, vestiges of which survive today as a sewer under Constitution Avenue." Since the article was so short, I looked for more information and found the UMBC Imaging Center website.

It was quite fascinating to watch and I encourage you to check it out.There is also a nice article about this in the Washington Post.

RSM

As the Center for History and New Media continues to grow, we’re on another hiring spree. Here are our two most recent openings; I’ll post others as they become available. Also remember that there is an opening for a tenure-track job in digital history at CHNM/GMU.

Drupal/PHP Programmer

The Center for History and New Media is seeking an entry-level Drupal/PHP Programmer to work on digital humanities projects such as the National History Education Clearinghouse.

This is a contract-funded, two-year position that is particularly appropriate for someone with a combined interest in technology, and the humanities and social sciences.

Knowledge of Drupal and some combination of the following would be particularly helpful: JavaScript, CSS, XML, PHP, MySQL and object-oriented programming. Ability to work in a team is very important.

Apply online for position 10411z at http://jobs.gmu.edu/; then e-mail a resume, salary requirements, and a cover letter describing relevant programming projects and experience to chnm@gmu.edu with subject line “Drupal Programmer.” We will begin considering applications on September 2, 2008, and continue until the position is filled. Applications without a cover letter will not be considered.

Multimedia Developer

The Center for History and New Media is hiring a Multimedia Developer to work on a variety of innovative, Web-based history projects.

This grant-funded position is particularly appropriate for someone with a combined interest in technology and history. The successful candidate will be an energetic, well-organized person who takes initiative; works well in a team; and learns new skills quickly. Experience with audio editing, video editing, Final Cut Pro and/or Flash preferred.

Please apply online at http://jobs.gmu.edu for position 10412z, then e-mail a cover letter, resume and links to any prior Web-based multimedia work to chnm@gmu.edu with the subject line “Multimedia Developer.” We will begin considering applications on September 2, 2008, and continue until the position is filled.

About CHNM/GMU

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, which is known for innovative work in digital history, is located in Fairfax, Virginia, 15 miles from Washington, D.C., and is accessible by public transportation. George Mason University is an innovative, entrepreneurial institution with national distinction in a range of academic fields. Enrollment is 30,000, with students studying in over 150 degree programs at campuses in Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun, Prince William and the United Arab Emirates. GMU was recently named the #1 “Up-and-Coming” university by U.S. News & World Report.

NITLE, the organization that helps over 150 liberal arts colleges with technology understanding, decisions, and training, has launched a fascinating site with “prediction markets.” The site is similar to Intrade, where you can buy and sell “shares” in financial, political, weather and other subjects, but focusing instead on technology adoption in higher ed and using faux currency. Should be interesting to follow—and participate in.

Views of Wikipedia are decidedly mixed in academia, though perhaps trending slowly from mostly negative to grudgingly positive. But regardless of your view of Wikipedia—or your political persuasion—you can’t help but be impressed with the activity that occurs on the site for current events. (The same holds only slightly less true for non-current events, as Roy Rosenzweig pointed out.)

It’s instructive, for instance, to follow at this moment the collaborative production on the open encyclopedia for the entry on Sarah Palin, John McCain’s pick for Vice President. My best guess is that there are currently around 1,000 edits being made each day, by several hundred people. I actually started tracking this before Palin revealed the pregnancy of her teenage daughter, so the frenzy has probably increased, but here’s the schematic I came up with for the progress of the “Sarah Palin” Wikipedia article.

The graphic below shows every edit from 8am EDT on Sunday, August 31, 2008, to 8am EDT on Monday, September 1, 2008. These 24 hours (on a holiday weekend in the U.S.) produced over 500 edits, many of them quite large. The blocks show individual edits, ranging from a single word to three paragraphs. At the same time these edits were being made, scores of Wikipedians were also debating 80 distinct points for inclusion (or exclusion) from the article. They also added over a hundred footnotes pointing to print, Web, and other non-Wikipedia sources (seen at the end of the graphic, right after the “finished” article).

Every month, OKAPI Spotlight features Open Knowledge news at UC Berkeley and around the world. To contribute, email Lizzy Ha. To receive more frequent updates, join our email listserv. ON CAMPUS Friday Afternoon Seminar on Information Access South Hall 107, Fridays 3-5 pm http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/f08/schedule.html Focused on the theme ‘Information Access,’ The Friday Afternoon Seminar will occur every Friday from [...]

I'm outraged. When I started this blog, I vowed to myself to confine its scope to my professional work and to local matters where I live. But I can't let this pass:

In sum, our investigation concluded that [former U.S. Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales mishandled classified materials regarding two highly sensitive compartmented programs. We found that Gonzales took his classified handwritten notes home and stored them there for an indeterminate period of time. The notes contained operational aspects and other information about the NSA surveillance program that is classified at the TS/SCI level. By regulation, such material must be stored in a Sensitive Compartmented Storage Facility (SCIF). At the time he took these materials home, Gonzales did not have a SCIF at his house. Although Gonzales did have a safe at his residence at this time, we found that he did not use it to store the notes.

We also found that Gonzales improperly stored other highly classified documents about the two compartmented programs in a safe at the Department that was not located in a SCIF. Several employees in the OAG had access to the safe where Gonzales stored the documents even though they lacked the necessary security clearances for this information. We concluded that Gonzales’s mishandling of both the notes and the other classified documents violated Department security requirements and procedures.

You can read the nauseating details via various liberal, elite gay-married terrorist media outlets:

• Carrie Johnson, "Report: Gonzales Mishandled Classified Data," Washington Post (2 September 2008)
  
• Associated Press, via the New York Times: "Report Faults Gonzales on Data" (2 September 2008 -- now that's a soft-pedal title, isn't it?)
• Terry Frieden, "Report: Ex-AG Won't be Charged for Mishandling Secret Papers" CNN (2 September 2008 -- includes a link to PDF of the DOJ Inspector General's report, whence the quote above)
  

I'll skip most of the rest of the ranting and just say this. There are plenty of folks over the years -- hardworking, well-meaning, patriotic folks in government service, the military and working for defense contractors -- who've been investigated, counseled, sanctioned, disciplined, busted, fired and even confined for accidentally mishandling classified information at levels far lower than TS/SCI.

And the Department of Justice decides not to seek prosecution for a man who was too busy (or something) to properly safeguard this stuff according to well-established procedures?

The Art Newspaper has now covered the possibility that the Hispanic Society of America will sell the coins it is withdrawing from the American Numismatic Society. Here's my previous post on the topic.

A couple of things came down the RSS pipe today that seemed well worth a comment.

The first, courtesy of Lisa Spiro, is a nice piece of research which perfectly illustrates the point I made in the Athens Paper: New Media sources (in this case, Wikipedia) look set to increasingly compete with traditional ones, even in academia. Why and what this might mean for the future are things she discusses in a thoughtful and interesting post.

This makes it all the more encouraging that Internet Archaeology are once again using the power of their format to do something interesting. The beauty of a Web resource is that they can mash up their own content to make it easier for users to find just what they want - something particularly valuable in a journal with such a wide remit. In this case they’ve gathered together all their Roman papers, but they say it’s “the first of what we hope to be many themed content pages”. I certainly hope so too But hey, that’s still only broken down by themes that the IA editorial committee find interesting. How about a Tag cloud of keywords? or even (whisper it low) community tagging…?

Oh, and two other niggle