Electra Atlantis: Digital Approaches to Antiquity

VADS (Visual Arts Data Service) has just announced that a stunning collection of posters by Tom Eckersley has been digitised and made available on their website. This is exciting news for anyone interested in twentieth-century poster design…

Gillette Poster c. 1940-1949, designed by Tom Eckersley © Gillette 

Eckersley is one of the foremost poster designers and graphic communicators of the last century. He used simple designs, often resembling collage, and the collection reflects the range of his work from propoganda posters to his post-war posters. Eckersley’s bold, graphic statements coupled with memorable slogans and unique use of colour, were seen promoting some of the most iconic of British institutions such as London Transport, General Post Office, The Ministry of Information and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA).

Annual dinner and social evening, couple, poster designed by Tom Eckersley, c1980-1989 © University of the Arts London

Eckersley was also a teacher of poster arts and established the first graphic design course in Britain at the London College of Printing (now London College of Communication (LCC), part of University of the Arts London). Eckersley retained copies of many of his posters throughout his career, which were then donated to LCC. The digital archive that has been made available on VADS is based on Eckersley’s own collection, which is now held in the state-of-the-art Archives and Special Collections Centre of the University of the Arts London - appropriately enough based at Eckersley’s own college of LCC.

Tom, Mills, and I take up the much-debated issue of whether and how digital work should count toward promotion and tenure on this episode of the podcast. We also examine the significance of university presses putting their books on Amazon’s Kindle device, and the release of better copyright records. [Subscribe to this podcast.]

Happy 4th of July!

Commentaries are our best-selling category of books. We have thousands of volumes of commentaries available, and we are adding more on Community Pricing and Pre-Pub all the time. It’s hard to keep up with all of them, so I thought I’d highlight some of the recent ones:

• Wesleyan Bible Commentary (7 Vols.)
• Augsburg Commentary on the New Testament (15 Vols.)
• Exegetical Summaries Series (24 Vols.)
• The Greek Testament by Henry Alford (8 Vols.)
• Elicott’s Commentaries on Paul’s Epistles (6 Vols.)
• Analytical Bible Expositor Collection (3 Vols.)
• The Numerical Bible (7 Vols.)
• Crossway Classic Commentary Collection Upgrade (11 Vols.)
• John Darby's Synopsis of the Books of the Bible (5 Vols.)
• The Annotated Bible (9 Vols.)
• Exploring the Bible Commentary Collection (7 Vols.)
• Opening Up Commentary Collection (24 Vols.)
• Charles Hodge Commentary Collection (4 Vols.)
• Preacher’s Homiletic Commentary (38 Vols.)
• Lenski's Commentary on the New Testament (12 Vols.)
• The Expositor’s Bible (6 Vols.)
• Eerdmans Critical Commentary Series (4 Vols.)
• Socio-Rhetorical Commentary Series (8 Vols.)
• Walk! Messianic Jewish Devotional Commentary Collection (5 Vols.)

Also, check out our newly updated Commentary Product Guide, which should now be a nearly exhaustive list of multi-volume commentaries available for Libronix.

Still waiting for your favorite commentaries to make their way to Libronix? Let us know!

I came across this lovely perspective on the content visitors create with museums:

We didn't start out asking people to leave their work, but it always happened. Now, we build it into the consideration of the activities that will be offered in the space. It isn't really like the formal artist-displaying-work model that is in evidence throughout the museum…the work is typically anonymous and individual pieces aren't highlighted.

When you walk into the space during the last month or so of an exhibition you experience the visitor-created artwork as a single, room-sized installation first, and only later do you focus on individual pieces. I think it is closer in some ways to the urge behind street art…the sort of private joy to be had from making something great and then leaving it behind for others to discover. I sometimes see visitors coming back to find something that they left behind a month or two before, not to reclaim it, just to see where it is now.

From the post 'Show your work' at the Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog.

It's talking about work created during physical visits to a museum rather than virtual visits but I think I noticed it because there's been a spurt of discussion about user-generated content and visitor participation on museum websites on the MCG mailing list following a workshop at the London Museums Hub on 'Understanding collections use and online access across the London Hub'.

A study presented at the event found an apparent lack of interest from museum website visitors in user-generated content, but in discussion at the event it appeared that the findings might have been different if the questions had been asked differently (with examples of some possible outcomes from UGC, perhaps 'would you like museum collections to be more discoverable because other visitors had tagged them with everyday words you'd use' rather than 'would you like opportunities to comment or upload content'), or if the focus groups hadn't been recruited from people who were physically visiting a museum and who were therefore fairly traditional museum-goers.

This lead to some interesting discussion about the differing reactions to the idea of opinions from other visitors versus real-life stories from other visitors; and of the idea that sometimes the value in user-created content lives with the person who contributes rather than those who read their contributions lately. This last idea was also raised at the User-generated content session at Museums and the Web in Montreal, my notes are here. I think the role of authority and trust and the influence of the context (type of museum or collection, user goal) need to be teased out into a more sophisticated model for analysing user-generated content in the cultural heritage sector.

There's a lot of research into user-generated content, participation and social software going on in the UK at the moment, it'd be great if there was somewhere that results, and ideally the raw data too, could be shared. Perhaps the MCG site?

I was thinking about this issue while driving through the Sonoran desert today, and I can't resist the opportunity to post from Navojoa, Sonora! When will I have another opportunity like this?

Back when I was Book Review Editor for Latin American Antiquity, the editorial board was interested in having more detailed and explicit guidelines about whether or not to publish articles that may describe or analyze looted or unprovenienced objects. The SAA (publisher of LAA) is pretty strict about this, in contrast to journals such as Mexicon, who regularly put a photograph of a pretty object from a private collection (almost certainly looted) on their cover, and who have no qualms about publishing looted objects

The LAA board asked for a volunteer to draft some guidelines on publishing questionable objects, and since I regularly teach this topic in seminars I offered to do put together the first draft. What I did was take the ideas of Alison Wylie and put them into a checklist kind of format. I submitted my draft, and the board promptly forgot all about it. But I think these issues are important and should be discussed more widely. So here are the guidelines I put together:

Notes on the publication of unprovenienced objects.

Michael E. Smith, Revised draft, 10/4/2006 LAA-LootedObjects-REV.doc

These are some of the considerations that can be taken into account in evaluating whether to publish objects without secure archaeological provenience. This list supplements the SAA’s Principles of Archaeological Ethics and Editorial Policy by providing concrete examples to help editors and reviewers evaluate individual cases. They are based on the general approach to the use of questionable data described by Wylie (1995, 1996).

Under each category, options are listed in a rough rank order, from good at the top (no barriers to publishing) to bad (there should be serious reservations about publishing the object).

A. Initial Rcovery of the Object

• Excavated or collected though documented legitimate archaeological methods.
• Excavated or collected through poorly documented or undocumented legitimate archaeological methods.
• Obtained through unknown methods.
• Obtained through looting.
• Obtained through illicit sale or theft from a legitimate archaeological collection.

B. Transport to Another Country

• Exported with valid government permission
• Permanent export permit
• Temporary export permit
• Exported without valid government permission:
• Date of the export (in relation to laws and international conventions) ?
• Exported by a scholar or official
• Exported by a dealer or collector

C. Present Location

• Federal or state government facility (in whatever country)
• University or college
• Major public museum
• Small private museum (is the object likely to be deaccessioned ?)
• Private collection
• Commercial art dealer/gallery

D. Public Knowledge of the Object

• Has been published fully
• Located in a public facility
• Its existence is mentioned in a publication
• Never been published

Some text from Wylie 1996:179

The burden is on individual researchers “to justify their weighing of benefits and costs in quite concrete and local terms. For example, those who endorse the publication of looted data will bear the burden of demonstrating, with reference to specific contexts of practice, not only that they are operating within the law and that the data they would salvage offer insights which cannot be gained by any other means, but also that their use of these data does not, in fact, put archaeological resources at greater risk of destructive exploitation than they already face.”

Wylie, Alison

1995 Archaeology and the Antiquities Market: The Use of "Looted" Data. In Ethics in American Archaeology: Challenges for the 1990s, edited by Mark J. Lynott, and Alison Wylie, pp. 17-21. Society for American Archaeology, Washington, DC.

1996 Ethical Dilemmas in Archaeological Practice: Looting, Repatriation, Stewardship, and the (Trans)formation of Disciplinary Identity. Perspectives on Science 4:154-194.

This morning I received an email with the news that William T. Sanders had died. Thirty-four years ago, I was an undergraduate doing archaeological survey under Bill Sanders in the Basin of Mexico. This was my first archaeological fieldwork experience, and it set the scene for my entire career. I would like to think that what I learned from Bill has been responsible for some part of whatever success I have had as an archaeologist. The fact that I am writing this from Toluca, Mexico, is due in part to my love of central Mexican archaeology, something I picked up from Bill 34 years ago this summer.

Sanders was a tireless fieldworker. He excavated and surveyed in many parts of Mesoamerica. His dedication in the field and his insights into the archaeological record made a lasting impression on me. When doing fieldwork, I still sometimes wonder what would Bill Sanders think about a particular context or situation or find.

I don't need to mention the accomplishments of William Sanders. He received most of the honors and awards that an archaeologist can get, he achieved the respect of the entire profession, and he was a larger than life figure in Mesoamerican archaeology. I'm sure that some very good obituaries will be published before long. I could not find a complete bibliography of his works on line, and I hope that such a list will be forthcoming.

Of greatest relevance to this blog, William Sanders published prolifically. Most or all of his many fieldwork projects have been published in the form of detailed data reports as well as interpretive studies. Few archaeologists can claim to have published as many data reports. Many were published through the series, “Occasional Papers in Anthropology” at Pennsylvania State University. Although the production standards of this series often left something to be desired, the intellectual and scientific standards have always been high. Given the astonishingly high incidence of unpublished archaeological fieldwork, Sanders has been a guiding light in archaeological publishing. It is much better for the profession to get the data published, in whatever format, than to sit on data waiting for it to achieve some kind of perfection before publishing. I will refrain from naming names here, to protect the guilty.

Sanders also published some of the most influential syntheses of Mesoamerican archaeology. Mesoamerica: The Evolution of a Civilization (Sanders, and Price 1968) was a landmark study that established a scientific comparative framework for the Mesoamerican past. People have been attacking this book for 40 years now, a sure signal of its importance and influence. There were aspects of Sanders’s theoretical approach that one could criticize, but he was consistent and thorough and very clear about his views, which were always based strongly on the data. The Basin of Mexico: Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization (Sanders, et al. 1979) was another enormously influential book.

Sanders always liked a good argument (as anyone who ever hung around Mesoamericanists at a meeting of the Society for American Archaeology can attest), and many of his debates were carried out in journal articles, book chapters, and book reviews. Published critiques and debates are essential for the health of archaeology, and Bill’s contributions were models of scientific argument. He always focused on the data and the issues, without the ad hominen attacks that are unfortunately all too frequent in archaeology today. I considered it a badge of honor that my very first professional conference paper (at the 1976 SAA meetings) was attacked by Bill Sanders. I wish there was time at such conferences now for discussion and questions after papers (although such time constraints did not always seem to bother Bill.....)

I’ll stop here; I could easily go on and on about William Sanders. I always had great respect and admiration for him as a scholar and as a person, and I was proud to count him as a mentor, a colleague, and a friend. His contributions to publishing in archaeology are matched by few. He also has the distinction of publishing a paper with one of my favorite titles: “The Jolly Green Giant in Tenth Century Yucatan” (Sanders 1979).

REFERENCES CITED:

Sanders, William T. (1979) The Jolly Green Giant in Tenth Century Yucatan, or Fact and Fancy in Classic Maya Agriculture (review of Prehispanic Maya Agriculture, ed. Harrison and Turner). Reviews in Anthropology 6:493-506.

Sanders, William T., Jeffrey R. Parsons and Robert S. Santley (1979) The Basin of Mexico: Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization. Academic Press, New York.

Sanders, William T. and Barbara J. Price (1968) Mesoamerica: The Evolution of a Civilization. Random House, New York.

A SHORT LIST OF A FEW OF HIS IMPORTANT PUBLICATIONS:

• Sanders, William T. (1949) The "Urban Revolution" in Central Mexico. Undergraduate Honors Thesis Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University.
• Sanders, William T. (1956) The Central Mexican Symbiotic Region: A Study in Prehistoric Settlement Patterns. In Prehistoric Settlement Patterns in the New World, edited by Gordon R. Willey, pp. 115-27. Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology. vol. 23. Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, New York.
• Sanders, William T. (1967) Life in a Classic village. In Teotihuacán: Onceva Mesa Redonda, pp. 123-43. Sociedad Mexicana de Antropología, Mexico City.
• Sanders, William T. (1994-2000) The Teotihuacan Valley Project, Final Report. Occasional Papers in Anthropology. 5 vols. Department of Anthropology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park.
• Sanders, William T. (1999) Three Valleys: Twenty-Five Years of Settlement Archaeology in Mesoamerica. In Settlement Pattern Studies in the Americas: Fifty Years Since Virú, edited by Brian R. Billman and Gary M. Feinman, pp. 12-21. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC.
• Sanders, William T., Alba Guadalupe Mastache and Robert H. Cobean (editors) (2003) El urbanismo en mesoamérica / Urbanism in Mesoamerica. Proyecto Urbanismo dn Mesoamérica / The Mesoamerican Urbanism Project vol. 1. Pennsylvania State University and Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, University Park and Mexico City.
• Sanders, William T. and Joseph W. Michels (editors) (1977) Teotihuacan and Kaminaljuyu. Pennsylvania State University, University Park.
• Sanders, William T., Jeffrey R. Parsons and Robert S. Santley (1979) The Basin of Mexico: Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization. Academic Press, New York.
• Sanders, William T. and Barbara J. Price (1968) Mesoamerica: The Evolution of a Civilization. Random House, New York.
• Sanders, William T. and Robert S. Santley (1983) A Tale of Three Cities: Energetics and Urbanization in Pre-Hispanic Central Mexico. In Prehistoric Settlement Patterns: Essays in Honor of Gordon R . Willey, edited by Evon Z. Vogt and Richard Leventhal, pp. 243-291. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.
• Sanders, William T. and David Webster (1988) The Mesoamerican Urban Tradition. American Anthropologist 90:521-546.

I spent last week in London at a conference on Maritime History. I also had some time for sight-seeing. I did the usual tourist things, such as visiting museums and famous sites (Stonehenge, Tower of London, etc.). It was very different mingling with other tourists and participating in guided tours. Different in the sense that for the last few years I have not been a tourist at historical sites (aquariums and zoos yes) and it was an eye-opener in many respects. It was quite frustrating to be dependent on others for what to see and for how long. I am also not a big fan of crowds and this certainly contributed to my frustration. It was interesting to see how people interacted with the exhibits and I was surprised to see how superficial this interaction was, and how limited a person's patience is for reading signs/posters and listening to guides. This certainly reinforced for me the idea that academics are usually out of touch with the general public. It really shows how in today's society you only have a few seconds to grab people's attention, hence the importance of sound bites. It was also interesting to note that the exhibits that people seemed to like the best were the most modern ones with bells and whistles. The question I have thinking about for the last few days is how to incorporate these observations into my teaching. I will let you know what I come up with.

RSM

I'm off to England next week to present some of this work at the Metropolis on Trial conference, so it is time to bring this series of posts to a close. I'd like to wrap up by summarizing what we've accomplished and making a clearer case for machine learning as a tool for historical research.

Papers in the machine learning literature often say something like "we tested learners x, y, and z on this standard data set and found errors of 40%, 20% and 4% respectively. Learner z should therefore be used in this situation." The value of such research isn't immediately apparent to the working historian. For one thing, many of the most powerful machine learning algorithms require the learner to be given all of the training data at once. Historians, on the other hand, tend to encounter sources piecemeal, sometimes only recognizing their significance in retrospect. Training a machine learner usually requires a labelled data set: each item already has to be categorized. It's not obvious what good a machine learner is, if the researcher has to do all the work in advance. Finally, there is the troublesome matter of errors. What good is a system that screws up one judgement in ten? Or one in four?

In this work we considered a situation that is already becoming familiar to historians. You have access to a large archive of sources in digital form. These may consist of raw OCR text (full of errors), or they may be edited text, or, best of all, they may be marked up with XML, as in the case of the Old Bailey trials. Since most of us are not lucky enough to work with XML-tagged sources very often, I stripped out the tags to make my case more strongly.

Now suppose you know exactly what you're looking for, but no one has gone through the sources yet to create an index that you can use. In a traditional archive, you might be limited to starting at the beginning and plowing through the documents one at a time, skimming for whatever you're interested in. If your archive has been digitized you have another option. You can use a traditional search engine to index the keywords in the documents. (You could, for example, download them all to your own computer and index them with Google Desktop. Or you could get fancy with something like Lucene.) Unless your topic has very characteristic keywords, however, you will be getting a mix of relevant and irrelevant results with every search. Under many conditions, a keyword search is going to return hundreds or thousands of hits, and you are back to the point of going through them one at a time.

Suppose you're interested in larceny. (To make my point, I'm picking a category that the OB team has already marked up, but the argument is valid for anything that you or anyone else can reliably pick out. You might be studying indirect speech, or social deference, or the history of weights and measures. As long as you can look at each document and say "yes, I'm interested in this" or "no, I'm not interested in this" you can use this technique.) Anyway, you start with the first trial of 24 Nov 1834. It is a burglary, so you throw it in the "no" pile. The next record is a burglary, the third is a wounding, and so on. After you skim through 1,000 trials, you've found 444 examples of larceny and 556 examples of trials that weren't larceny. If you kept track of how long it took you to go through those thousand trials, you can estimate how long it will take for you to get through the remaining 11,959 trials in the 1830s, and approximately how many more cases of larceny you are likely to find. But you're less than a tenth of the way through the decade's trials, and no further ahead on the remaining ones.

Machine learning gives you a very powerful alternative, as we saw in this series. The naive bayesian learner isn't the most accurate or precise one available, but it has a couple of enormous advantages for our application. First of all, it is relatively easy to understand and to implement. Although we didn't make use of this characteristic, it is also possible to stop the learner at any point and find out which features it thinks are most significant. Second, the naive bayesian is capable of incremental learning. We can train it with a few labelled items, then test it on some unlabelled items, then train it some more. Let's go back to the larceny example. Suppose as you look at each of the thousand trials, you hand it off to your machine learner along with the label that you've assigned. So once you decide the first trial is a burglary, you give it to the learner along with the label "no". (This doesn't have to be laborious... the process could easily be built into your browser, so as you review a document, you can click a plus or minus button to label it for your learner.) Where are you after 1,000 trials? Well, you've still found your 444 examples of larceny and your 556 examples of other offence categories. But at this point, you've also trained a learner that can look through the next 11,959 trials in a matter of seconds and give you a pile containing about 2,500 examples of larceny and about 750 false positives. That means that the next pile of stuff that you look through has been "enriched" for your research. Only 44% of the first thousand trials you looked at were examples of larceny. Almost 77% of the next three thousand trials you look at will be examples of larceny, and the remaining 23% will be more closely related offences. Since the naive bayesian is capable of online learning, you can continue to train it as you look through this next pile of data.

Machine learning can be a powerful tool for historical research because

1. It can learn as a side effect of your research process at very little cost to you
2. You can stop the system at any point to see what it has learned, getting an independent measure of a concept of interest
   
3. You can use it at any time to "look ahead" and find items that it thinks that you will be interested in
4. Its false positive errors are often instructive, giving you a way of finding interesting things just beyond the boundaries of your categories
5. A change in the learner's performance over time might signal a historically significant change or discontinuity in your sources
   

Tags: archive | data mining | digital history | feature space | machine learning | text mining

I've decided to close the ResearchBlogging.org forums. They were never especially active and they required a significant amount of maintenance. However, in case anyone would like to see the forums return, I thought I'd put up a post where people can discuss plans for doing that.

If there is significant interest, I can play some role in the resurrection of the forums, but others in the ResearchBlogging.org community will also need to step forward and assist with the project.

I was contacted by someone who has downloaded portable GIS, very sensibly asking for information on the postgresql connection details. When I tried to respond to this person, their email address bounced back with a permanent failure, so I thought I’d better write something here so he doesn’t think I’m not replying!

Now, I was sure that I had included a readme file specific to the postgresql installation, but it looks like the pixies might have eaten it. Anyhow: the very secret local username and password for postgresql on the USB stick are: postgres and grespost. Please take the opportunity to create your own username and password if you are concerned about security. Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

The next version (in a couple of months) will have better documentation- I promise. The trouble is that as every developer knows, creating documentation is the longest part of any project. If I had waited until I had some decent documentation I wouldn’t have released it at all, and believe me I’m glad I did, the reponse has been fabulous. I won’t, however, be including  documentation about how to use the programmes, as the majority of them already have pretty good user manuals online- I will include links to them though. You can hold me to that if you like!

Have you ever wondered what the differences are between the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece, 27th ed. (NA27) and the United Bible Societies Greek New Testament, 4th ed. (UBS4) or between the various Greek New Testaments available for Libronix? Wonder no more. Rick Brannan has done extensive comparative analysis between these two popular editions of the Greek New Testament and gives you all of the details in this very informative article “NA27 vs. UBS4 (Greek New Testaments).” He also helpfully compares our various Greek New Testament texts.

I turned to Rick on a question a while back regarding a difference between the NA27 and UBS4 and quickly learned that Rick really knows his stuff on this. I think Rick’s article would make excellent required reading for Greek students (and professors!).

Go give it a read, and be sure to bookmark it for future reference.

 

I've been thinking more about disciplines after posting a few days ago on "tricking oneself out of disciplinary biases" (http://www.hastac.org/node/1454). Now I'm thinking about disciplinary shame and fudging. Is that one of the most important (unspoken) rules a discipline has to teach? Where to blur the lines?

 

Of course we go into a discipline for some deep affective reason. We love reading books so we become an English major and soon we're on the way to a Ph.D. We love seeing art, going to museums. Art History! Live music, theater: Music and Performance Studies. The elegance of working through complex equations, the perfect symmetries of numbers: mathematics. Making things work: engineering. The contradictions of human behavior and the joy (I'm into this lately) of concocting experiments that show people's unarticulated biases: cognitive psychology. Healing: nursing. On and on and on. Of course, often in the discipline itself, as a full professional, one finds oneself not getting much of a fix of that thing you thought would be your life. But you get more of it than you would probably if you hadn't chosen this walk of life. (I'm pausing over that idiom "walk of life": I like it.)

 

Once you are working extensively in a discipline, you begin to discover not only its affective joys but also its sources of disciplinary shame. Sometimes these are hangovers from (which is to say reactions to) prejudices or methods or now-disputed assumptions of the previous generation. In literary studies, we're still reacting in so many ways to New Criticism's credo that you study the text, not context, but close reading of a text that is about aesthetics and its various substructures. Much of literary theory post New Criticism has had an implicit reinsertion of The Political. And much of the critique of the first generation of Marxist literary theory is that it was too universalist, without enough attention to cultural specifities ( of the kind that drive postcolonial theory), histories, and political categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

 

That is so potent a part of our profession that you can count on at least one reviewer, either while the book is in manuscript form or after it is published, to critique any book for not having enough attention to those categories. The result is that many brilliant books on race will include some pretty sloppy overgeneralizations on class, gender, and sexuality; or brilliant books on gender will hastily add some asides about race, class, and sexuality. It's not that one can't do all of those while still focusing on a specific topic. It's that each of those categories has its own histories, its own theories, and its own disciplinary formations in reaction to past disciplinary formations. Its own sources, in other words, of unacknowledged disciplinary shame. So an argument that is theoretically informed on, say, immigration's impact on Black-white racial realignments in the post-World War II South is already complex. To keep that rolling and to theorize concurrent (or causal or unrelated or implicated) gender, class, and sexuality realignments is possible, but mind-boggling in the required amount of historical, sociological, and theoretical dexterity to keep all those balls in the air at once. Likely one or two will be dropped. So, instead of trying to keep all aloft with the same degree of precision, authors will often work one and fudge the other lines of argument. Paying lip service, it's called.

 

I'm guessing that most of us could go through our past books and point out (not that most of us would want to) those places where we're paying eloquent lip service, which is to say fudging. That is, there's a theory, there's a history, there's an argument and it doesn't quite cover all the categories and we fudge that with a different kind of hedgy language or a different level of grand polemic. It's very Playing in the Dark---Toni Morrison's brilliant book on race in literature, where she makes the astute observation that the page before a Black character is about to enter the scene in a white-authored text that is primarily about white people often there's a sizzle on the page, some unarticulated but overdetermined static. If you just look at the page itself, you think, "What's going on here? Why did the tone change? Why did the adjectives suddenly proliferate in this way?" And then you turn the page and in walks an African American character . . . as if the author was nervous about the entry ( maybe even self-conscious that he wouldn't do it exactly right, or worried that you won't like it) was preparing you for it by this overdetermined and hyperbolic break in the text.

 

It's a brilliant observation and it occurs outside literature too. It often occurs when we are addressing disciplinary shame--a lacunae or an absence--with an overgeneralization designed to cover over that absence. Disciplinary fudging to cover disciplinary shame, the shame of being all-too-aware that one is not fully addressing all of the categories that one's field is concerned to address.

 

My friend P tells me that, in genetics, one major locus of disciplinary shame is race. And it comes not in arguments over conclusions but often in criticism of the data-collection methods. If you don't have a coherent and consistent definition of "race" (and no one does), how can you collect "racial data" and then scientifically argue from that data to some conclusion about racialized genomics? The sample itself, the data itself, is already corrupt (as wet bench scientists say) because there is no control for (so called) mixed race subjects who, of course, carry a variety of "racial" markers in their genes. A lot of static, in the Playing in the Dark sense, has to happen when geneticists make race-based genetic claims based on data collected from subjects whose genetic strain is multi-raced. Fudging, pushback, intolerance, anger, fury: all those covers for disciplinary shame.

 

In the fields I'm reading in now, evolution seems to be the background noise, and especially the evolutionary evolution (so to speak) from E. O. Wilson's sociobiology from the 1970s to a somewhat more circumspect and modified current variation on evolutionary biology or evolutionary psychology. While many now claim not to buy the sociobiological reductionism of Wilson's evolutionary explanations for "human nature," it is rare to read a work of cognitive science, cognitive psychology, animal behaviorism, biology, or virtually any of the human-based social sciences without encountering some nod towards (it's often in the last chapter) evolution and some grand and vague and general evolutionary explanation of "how man developed his prefrontal cortex" or "why inattentional blindness is an evolutionary adaptation to biodiversity" or something else gestural, grand, and sizzling (in Morrison's sense). Now, Wilson himself was trained as an entymologist. He specialized in ants, and extrapolated from ant behavior to sociobiology, "the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior." By which he meant all human social behavior. That's a leap. There's a lot of room, there, for an empirical scientist to feel a bit queazy about scientific method in that progress from ants to a grand theory that accounts for "all human social behavior." There's a bit of logical wiggle room, I'd say.

 

But then there's a world of fundamentalists out there saying Darwinian evolutionary theory is Satanic or just plain false. Some insist the world is 4000 years old because they believe the Bible says so. So there's not only disciplinary shame but external pressure to defend evolution as a theory or, as my biologist friends say, as a "historical fact." (The analogy in literary studies is the attack from the Right Wing on anyone in the humanities who studies race, class, gender, or sexuality as being "politically correct" or interested in "identity politics" and therefore "reductionist.") It's hard to do your disciplinary work, do your experiments, make conclusions, and make your particular carefully-honed and hedged nod toward evolutionary thinking, no matter what your stand on Wilsonian sociobiology.

 

I've been reading enough in these other disciplines to feel the static on the page before the evolutionary argument enters the scene, the drumroll, please, before the move from a very carefully controlled experiment, clever in its design and powerful in its implications, perhaps about face recognition in two month old infants, to some grand theory of the brain differentiation of the frontal cortex in humans as a species (as opposed to other primates) that had to have happened in the early Pleistocene. You need a drumroll before you make a 1.5 million year leap based on one experiment measuring infantile saccadic eye movements.

 

Here's the big disciplinary question: if you read enough in other disciplines, especially if you are lucky enough to find those disciplinary scholars (cognitive neuroscientist Dan Levitin is great at this) who like to situate their work within their discipline and who give outsiders clues to what those important disciplinary debates and parameters are, you can detect the shame sites. But, if you are writing in other disciplines, do you know enough about what that shame feels like to know how and where and when to fudge? Morrison's point is that the white reader and writer share a racial shame so the dissonance on the page before the African American character enters is a kind of code language, almost a warning, an Althusserian hailing, like a pirate's treasure map: Here Thar Be Shame.

 

I'm not sure I know how to do shame in other disciplines precisely because I don't inhabit those disciplines which is to say I don't have to experience that disciplinary shame. I can spot it. But I don't have to worry about covering it up. My discipline isn't going to hold me accountable for what's shameful in yours---and vice versa. Maybe that's the ultimate interdisciplinary (ir)responsibility and freedom: to know the other disciplines' source of shame, but not to have to partake in it because, in the end and after all, it's not your own. You have plenty enough to worry about at home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Special thanks to "Rubared" for posting this photograph on Flickr. For Rubared's photostream, and full documentation, please click on the image.

These are the words of the National Trust’s Director-General, Fiona Reynolds on a new kind of campaign by the trust to get the public to decide the future of Seaton Delaval Hall, its gardens, grounds and a large area of countryside in south Northumberland near Blyth.

The Trust intend to purchase the house and its estate to save it for the nation in perpetuity. It is willing to back the purchase with £6m of its own money but needs to raise a further £6m from public appeal, fundraising and public grants.

Romantic and partly-ruined, Seaton Delaval was built between 1718 and 1731 by Sir John Vanbrugh, architect of Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard, and is widely said be the finest work of the English Baroque and one of the most important historic houses in Britain.

In quite a firm statement, the NT’s Trustees have said that without public support, both in terms of fundraising and the public demonstrating a desire for the acquisition to take place, they will not proceed with the acquisition.

This announcement comes hot on the heels of the announcement yesterday of a new Chairman for the National Trust, Simon Jenkins, well-known as a newspaper editor, journalist, writer and heritage conservation campaigner. There have been no big pronouncements from him about his appointment and the future of the Trust which is a refreshing change.

So is this a one-off for the Trust and similar bodies? Does the public have to decide such things? Or is this a genuine attempt to change the way society deals with the conservation and preservation of the country’s past? The latest news on their website does not mention the Seaton Delaval campaign but then again the press release was only received 23 minutes ago. However, if I have managed to blog it, I should think they could do the same. I do hope their campaign will properly use such methods to communicate and raise its profile. I watch with intense interest.

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 Bringing ‘tools of the west’ to sub-Saharan healthcare http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2008/06/24_melissaho.shtml Melissa Ho, an iSchool Ph. D. student, was recently given the “Foundations of Change” Thomas I. Yamashita Award. [...]

Recently Tom blogged about the prospect of the National Trust’s massive investment into digital technologies, including the web. Electric Acorns is a great new blog started by a an NT employee and devoted to peeling back some of the layers of the great institution in an effort to allow the public and fellow professionals a better insight into all the work the Trust does (see his comment below).

Institutions involved with promoting, undertaking or advising on the conservation of historic environments and artefacts are not great at communicating their work. I often wonder, if they were, whether the tensions between access and preservation could be better ‘managed’ (to use a phrase en vogue) but at the very least, better understood by the wider public, and whether funders and politicians would regard conservation as being a cultural activity of the highest value to society and therefore less willing to withdraw or withold support (see my post on the Textile Conservation Centre’s closure).

Interest in history, the past and the environment has never been more keen than it is now. Neither has it been more easy to have your say in front of a global audience with the internet revolution. Why aren’t more institutions involved with conservation adopting open and honest communication with the public through the web in the form of blogs, web forums, podcasts and more? Matthew of Electric Acorns is taking a step forward for his organisation (I do hope they appreciate it). What is everyone else doing? Here’s a short survey.

ICOMOS-UK (International Council on Monuments and Sites UK)

ICOMOS-UK is one of the organisations I am currently working for. They hired me for a period of 7 months, part-time, to take a hold of their web projects: a redeveloped website that would a) raise the profile of the organisation in the UK and internationally and b) provide an information service on international conservation and heritage news relating to cultural historic environments, especially World Heritage Sites: ICOMOS is UNESCO’s official adviser on cultural world heritage. The second web project was to set up a members-only discussion network (a collection of web fora) where people could discuss and debate various issues relating to the wide remit of ICOMOS and ICOMOS-UK.

Desired result: That committee members and the small staff of the Secretariat will continue to keep up the information service blog on a regular basis with honest, wide-ranging and newsworthy stories, predominantly from UK and international members. They will present themselves as a genuinely independent and leading voice for world and UK conservation and heritage.

A likely result: For this to work the culture within the organisation needs to change, to focus more on providing information to the public and fellow professionals than on corporatising its image and standing apart from its sister organisations. It is this aspect that is, always, the hardest to change but is also the most important. I am no so confident this will happen as a result of my intervention in the organisation. If the concept of harnessing the power of the web is simply endorsed, rather than genuinely understood and adopted, and high-quality information is not disseminated via the blog, the service will not attract interest, few people will subscribe and the organisation will not be taken seriously as a leading voice for world and UK conservation and heritage.

English Heritage

If you search for ‘English heritage blog’ in Google, the first result you get is: Your Place or Mine, a blog and podcasts related to a two-day conference back in November 2006, co-organised with the National Trust. Photos of the event were even put on flickr. For a conference aimed at ‘Engaging New Audiences with Heritage’ not much seems to have happened since. The flurry of comments on the blog posts show that people are interested in how such organisations work, what they do and how it affects them. Perhaps this is one small step towards a change in attitude?

So what’s happened since November 2006? Not a lot (that is visible to me). But look at this blog post by the Birmingham Post on the listing of Birmingham Central Library with subsequent comments. This should be on EH’s website. Wider participation would increase understanding in EH’s philosophy, surely?

Historic Scotland

The first thing Historic Scotland says about itself on its website is that they are an executive agency of the Scottish Government followed by highly corporatised sections on procurement, freedom of information and sponsorship. Meanwhile, a rather crafty but highly visible blog called Independent
Republic of the Canongate aims to tell the “stories behind the PR spin of the developers, the architects, politicians and council officials” in a bid to save the historic fabric of the Old Town of Edinburgh (part of Edinburgh’s World Heritage Site) from insensitive development. A search on Historic Scotland’s website for information about the inquiries into the planning and development of these sites reveals little (even if information is tucked away somewhere). Perhaps HS’s own cause would have been helped with a bit of honest blogging, which needn’t compromise confidentiality or sensitivity.

Natural History Museum

Getting a little tired now so have tried a simple Google search on ‘conservation blog’. To my great and pleasant surprise I found this blog, the NHM’s Antarctic Conservation Blog. It is being written by members of the 2008 Antarctic conservation winter team and describes the really very fascinating conservation work done on objects from the explorer’s hut left behind by Ernest Shackleton in 1908, complete with object record photography. It is written honestly and candidly.

This will surely rank as one of the most historically interesting museum/conservation blogs in future years? A great public advertisement for the cultural value of conservation.

This is but a random and quick sample. I am on the look out for more good examples but I maintain that if only the organisations we worked for, and cared for, took their work to the public and shared it with their fellow professionals just a little bit more openly, the public worth of conservation as a cultural activity in its own right would be better appreciated and therefore more people would stand up for our causes when we need them to.

*I should add that my interest is in the conservation of cultural artefacts, landscapes and sites, rather than the conservation of natural resources and environment.

I'm back, and I'm pleased to present the first draft of a new song adaptation! This time I've tackled the classic love theme from "Titanic," and it's ready for critique by my fellow Latinists! As always, this is NOT intended to be an exact translation of the original lyrics but rather a close approximation that fits the melody and rhymes of the song. So, any constructive feedback on the viability/propriety of these lyrics will be greatly appreciated. I'm primarily concerned with grammar and syntax and only mildly with stylistics. That is to say, I'm not aiming for absolute adherence to classical style, but I would like to have something that a Roman could at least understand easily. So, without further ado, here are the lyrics: Tē somniandō sentiō. Tē sēnsū inveniō. Permanēre sapiō tē sīc. Quamquam ā mē distās, Sub tuō sum obtūtō. Permanēre mōnstrās tē sīc. Stās hīc Quamvīs procul sīs. Perdūrāre cor semper crēdō. In mē Manēs sēcūrē. Iānuam prō mē aperīs. Perdūrābit semper cor. Cum advenit amor, Fit vītā aeternior. Numquam nōs relinquet Certē. Sēnsum hunc inter nōs Aeternē tenēbō. Sīc meā vītā tuam vīvēs. Stās hīc Quamvīs procul sīs. Perdūrāre cor semper crēdō. In mē Manēs sēcūrē. Iānuam prō mē aperīs. Perdūrābit semper cor. Vīvō Iam nīl timendō. Perdūrāre cor semper sapiō. Inter Nōs sīc sit semper. In meō vīvis cordī. Perdūrābit semper cor.

We've renamed our "GeoJSON" package to "geojson", uploaded the first beta release, and plan to finalize it within a couple weeks.

Geojson provides geometry, feature, and collection classes, and supports pickle-style dump and load of objects that provide the lab's Python geo interface. Here's an example of a round-trip through the GeoJSON format:

>>> import geojson
>>> p = geojson.Point([0.0, 0.0])
>>> p
Point(coordinates=[0.0, 0.0])
>>> data = geojson.dumps(p)
>>> data
'{"type": "Point", "coordinates": [0.0, 0.0]}'
>>> q = geojson.loads(data, object_hook=geojson.GeoJSON.to_instance)
>>> q
Point(coordinates=[0.0, 0.0])

The geometry classes interoperate with Shapely via the geo interface:

>>> from shapely.geometry import asShape
>>> x = asShape(p)
>>> x.wkt
'POINT (0.0000000000000000 0.0000000000000000)'

A manual is forthcoming; for now there are many doctest examples. We would appreciate your giving it a try, which is as easy as:

$ easy_install geojson

From the July 1, 2008 edition of The Wired Campus

Armchair archaeologists will have ringside, or dig-side, seats this month at university explorations of the world’s richest collection of rock art and the ruins of a Panamanian village that may once have been spotted by Christopher Columbus’s son, among other expeditions. Instead of swatting mosquitos, all they will have to do is click a mouse.

During July, undergraduates from the University of California at Los Angeles will write blogs from seven locations where they are taking part in archaeological digs. The countries include Albania, Canada, Chile, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and the U.S.

The blogs are for public consumption. “We want to create the next generation of archaeology fans,” Ran Boytner, director of international research at UCLA’s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology and head of the field studies program, said in a prepared statement.

The blogs will be written by students in UCLA’s field studies program. They will describe work at the largest group of pre-Columbian forts in the New World, in Ecuador; a 19th-century village in British Columbia that shows contact between newly arrived Europeans and indigenous peoples; remains of a Native American culture on Catalina Island, off the California coast; and a Peruvian valley lived in first by Inca emperors and later by Spanish conquistadors.

A further note on sources of CDLI data

At the end of February of this year, we posted to the Agade mailing list a notice on "CDLI's policy of open access, and of fair use of published images of cuneiform inscriptions." While we hope that all colleagues welcome a central online access point for quick cuneiform text reference, we have received a number of recommendations that we improve the transparency of the authorship of all contributions to the documentation of primary cuneiform sources in CDLI pages.

The data source information that we have been able to cull from our own records is now online. Take for instance the text BCT 2, 2. The initial section of this page, according to our presentation format, contains in the left column a list of common catalogue information, including publication, author, collection IDs, provenience and period, together with a link to a page with greater catalogue detail, but now, added in the right column, metadata tags concerning the original sources of data found here. The catalogue entry itself derives in the first instance from the upload of a legacy database of the CDLI project named "20011220ur3cat"; the entry thus was entered to CDLI's central database on 20 December 2001, using the database "ur3cat", itself ultimately in large part a derivative of an Ur III database maintained by Marcel Sigrist in the 1990's. The original electronic transliteration of BCT 2, 2, was prepared by the Leiden team of Remco de Maaijer and Bram Jagersma

The digital image of the original artifact was prepared by CDLI staff (in this case by Jacob Dahl in Birmingham, processed by Englund in Los Angeles) and is for the non-commercial use of any person, but is, as in the case of all images of original objects prepared by CDLI staff, subject to the commercial copyright of the institution where the text is housed, here the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. Digital line art ("hand copies") of cuneiform artifacts, prepared by CDLI staff or other collaborating contributors, is, unless otherwise noted, to be credited to the primary publication author(s) cited in the first line of the catalogue section, thus in this case the published line art derives from the hand of Phil Watson. (Hand copies of earlier editors are as a rule stored as "line art detail".) Finally, we have initiated an automatic feed of transliteration revisions just below the transliteration found in the right column of the next section. The first "revision" of most current CDLI transliterations is credited to "cdlistaff" and represents simply their initial entry to our transliteration server.

We are hopeful that these steps will heighten the web presence of, and access to, collections, publications, and professional participation in cuneiform scholarship; we of course welcome corrections to the numerous errors and omissions that undoubtedly lurk in these new credit lines, and recommendations on how we might improve this process.

For the CDLI,
Robert K. Englund, UCLA
Jacob Dahl, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
Robert Casties, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

Show Us a Better Way want to know, and if your idea is good they might give you £20,000 to develop it to the next level.

Do you think that better use of public information could improve health, education, justice or society at large?

The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated.

Importantly, you don't need to be a geek:

You don't have to have any technical knowledge, nor any money, just a good idea, and 5 minutes spare to enter the competition.

And they've made "gigabytes of new or previously invisible public information" available for the project, including health, crime and education data (but no personal information).

I read a request last week from someone wishing for a way to search the footnotes in the NET Bible. If you’re familiar with the NET Bible, you know how valuable the notes are. While you probably normally want to see notes when you’re looking at a specific passage of Scripture, sometimes you may want to search them for particular words or phrases.

If you own one of our base packages, then it’s very likely that you have the NET Bible with notes. (The Christian Home Library is the only base package that doesn’t include the NET Bible.)

To search just the footnote text, you would want to use a field search. Simply put footnote: before the word or phrase you’d like to search for. Make sure to use the Basic Search rather than the Bible Search (or Bible Speed Search), since the Bible Search by default excludes footnotes (i.e., everything but Bible text). A search like this will return results only in the footnote text and eliminate everything else.

The Center for History and New Media (CHNM, http://chnm.gmu.edu) at George Mason University invites expressions of interest to join the Center in applying to the National Endowment for the Humanities for one of NEH’s Fellowships at Digital Humanities Centers.

NEH Fellowships at Digital Humanities Centers (FDHC) support collaboration between digital centers and individual scholars. An award provides funding for both a stipend for the fellow while in residence at the center and a portion of the center’s costs for hosting a fellow. Awards are for periods of six to twelve months. The intellectual cooperation between the visiting scholar and the center may take many different forms and may involve humanities scholars of any level of digital expertise. Fellows may work exclusively on their own projects in consultation with center staff, collaborate on projects with other scholars affiliated with the center, function as “apprentices” on existing digital center projects, or any combination of these. The results of the collaboration may range from “proof of concept” to finished product.

The aims of the program are to 1) support innovative collaboration on outstanding digital research projects; 2) expand digital literacy and expertise; 3) promote the work of digital humanities centers; and 4) encourage broad and open access to the humanities. (For the full guidelines, see http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/fdhc.html)

CHNM plans to select a scholar for its application by July 31, 2008. Interested scholars should send a CV and a 2-3 pp. description of 1) their general interest in the fellowship and the Center; 2) what specifically they would like to work on during the term of the fellowship; 3) any experience they might have that is applicable to this work; and 4) how this work dovetails with any current Center projects (e.g. the National History Education Clearinghouse, Zotero, Omeka, the Bracero History Archive, etc.) Send these two documents to chnm@gmu.edu with the subject line “NEH Fellowship” as soon as possible. Applications will be reviewed as they come in, through July 31. The selected scholar will be notified soon thereafter, and CHNM will work with that scholar to submit a grant application to NEH by September 15, 2008.

HASTAC is very proud to have helped to sponsor and support Christopher M. Kelty's important new book TWO BITS: THE CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE OF FREE SOFTWARE. It's a book, its an online presence, it's a blog, it's a virtual book club, it's a movement. You can buy the book here: http://www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3?isbn=978-0-8223-4264-9.

You can read about and join the TWO Bits book club here: http://dukeupress.typepad.com/dukeupresslog/2008/07/ Or you can download free and remix. To download TWO BITS, click here: http://twobits.net/

 

At HASTAC we first read this important book in manuscript and wanted to be part of the process of multi-modal publishing--in conventional paperback and with an online presence, including moderated contributions by readers, scholars, Free Software advocates. We helped support it, which meant we were among those (in a small way) who made it possible for Duke University Press (a nonprofit, of course) to support Chris in all of the online, free download, remix possibilities that he and the Free Software movement could dream up. I mention that not to blow our own horn, but because I'm both a True Believer in the Free Software movement and also aware that unpaid labor, rip offs, and jeopardizing nonprofit organizations who already face enormous challenges in this economy is not a common good. "Free" is one of those words that, behind the scenes, can cost a whole lot of money, time, energy, and dedication of someone. HASTAC wanted to be part of this vision of a collaborative production, wanted to be part of an experiment in multiple ways of book distribution, and wanted to support a really terrific manuscript.

 

NB: Our own publication, of the first HASTAC conference, is also available from LULU, a self-publishing source from which you can buy or download and remix. We are trying to explore many forms of publication and want to hear from others who are trying different forms of publication as well. As I've noted previously in blogs, the "free" in that LULU book was actually ten months of intense voluntary labor plus work by several people who were on our HASTAC staff and one Research Assistant who came in and did all of the myriad things--organizational, copyediting, proofreading, design, all that--that a press would normally do. The end result is good but none of the team was a professional publisher so "free" meant a lot of labor, paid and voluntary, and a publication that couldn't possibly conform to all the normal rules and professional standards of academic publishing.

 

That's one form of publishing hybrid in this transitional moment for all forms of publishing. We learned so much from that process, including that none of us is a professional editor. It was humbling.

 

Chris Kelty's book is something quite different. It is a fully professional book in every way, a gorgeous university press publication, beautifully produced by pros. AND it has online supplementary components for participation, modulation, remixing, downloading. It's not so much a new model of electronic publishing as a traditional model of scholarly book publishing with an add-on of a free, downloadable version with an online website that is interactive and collaborative. Again "free" is interesting since, of course, adding this "free" component also cost lots of time and money.

 

However, it will be interesting to learn what happens. What is the ratio of books sold in the conventional paperback university press version and what downloaded for free onto either someone's laptop or onto paper someone supplies (neither of which, of course, is "free" either). Also, will the online version encourage sales of the paperback or take away? How will that be measurable? Will excitement about the download help spread word about the book in a terrible book environment where there are fewer and fewer reviewing media out there? And does internet word translate into sales? Does this blog mean someone actually will "click here" and order the book? All of these are part of an interesting experiment by Duke University Press, Chris Kelty, and HASTAC wants to learn from this experiment too. Thus our support and participation, both in helping to defray a very small amount of the costs (to support "free" downloading) and in spreading the word. In the end, we hope to learn more about how much free costs.

 

So what is TWO BITS about? For those who haven't read it yet, you are in for a treat. It's smart, it's written in an engaged and engaging style, it's intellectual scope is huge, and it moves between technology and the people who create those technologies, with a sophisticated awareness that "technology" is never just a tool, a thing, but a complex of social uses, practices, and communities. TWO BITS is an ethnography of the people and practices of the Free Software developer community, those who collaborately create software source code and make it openly and freely available through activist and sometimes unconventional copyright practices. The impact has been huge on music, film, science, education, and all forms of publishing. Kelty's interest is in all aspects of the culture of Free Software, including the creation of a public sphere---"recursive publics."

 

The specific sites Kelty examines: an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston, media labs in Berlin, young entrepreneurs in Bangalore. He analyzes technologies, a moral vision, and a mission to create and distribute free software that binds together hackers, geeks, lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. They share source code, conceptualize openness, write copyright licenses, coordinate collaboration, and proselytize the Free Software movement.

 

They are, in a real sense, descendants of Tim Berners-Lee who created the World Wide Web as a free and open space. They are fellow travelers with activist groups such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to create an online scholarly textbook commons.

 

HASTAC, of course, works with Creative Commons Licensing. To find out more, click here: http://creativecommons.org/

 

At HASTAC we first read this important book in manuscript and wanted to be part of the process. We helped support it, which meant we were among those (in a small way) who made it possible for Duke University Press (a nonprofit, of course) to support Chris in all of the online, free download, remix possibilities that he and the Free Software movement could dream up. I mention that not to blow our own horn, but because I'm both a True Believer in the Free Software movement and also aware that unpaid labor, rip offs, and jeopardizing nonprofits who already face enormous challenges in this economy is not a common good. "Free" is one of those words that, behind the scenes, can cost a whole lot of money, time, energy, and dedication. HASTAC wanted to be part of this vision of a collaborative production, wanted to be part of an experiment in multiple ways of book distribution, and wanted to support a really terrific manuscript. (Our own publication, of the first HASTAC conference, is also available from LULU, a self-publishing source from which you can buy or download and remix.).

 

Big congratulations to Chris Kelty and Duke University Press! To download TWO BITS, click here: http://twobits.net/

To purchase: http://www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3?isbn=978-0-8223-4264-9

 

To download ELECTRONIC TECHTONICS: THINKING AT THE INTERFACE (THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL HASTAC CONFERENCE), click here: http://www.lulu.com/content/2124631

 

------------

[Special thanks to Brennan Moore's photostream on Flickr for these images from the Internet Cult Leaders Talk at Rice University, moderated by Chris Kelty. Please click on the image for the rest of the photostream and full documentation and terms of use. And courtesy of YouTube, below, Chris Kelty talks about TWO BITS.]

I’m on the way to Dublin right now and I’ve just finished my presentation for the session I’m speaking at tomorrow. It is now available on slideshare as I’ve just uploaded it from Gatwick. Probably not that useful without the words to accompany it…. World Archaeology Congress Paper

I received my email from The Wired Campus today and it had an article entitled "Point and Click Archaeology." The article discusses how undergraduates from UCLA will write blogs this summer about their experience on 7 different archaeological projects. I have to admit that I was struck by several different thoughts. On one hand, I am happy to see that archaeology is making use of new technologies, if you can call blogging a new technology. On the other hand, the article seems to imply how new and innovative this is, and yet PKAP has been doing this for the last 2 summers with staff, graduate students, and undergraduates all contributing to the PKAP blogging experience. Bill Caraher has been the driving force behind this and has overseen this aspect of our summer fieldwork and continues to expand it each summer - for example, this summer he added podcasts. I have to admit that participating in the blogging forces you to think about what you are doing on the project in a different light and really adds to the experience in a very meaningful way.

RSM

So far, we've only been working with the Old Bailey trials of the 1830s, almost thirteen thousand in total. It would be nice to know if our learner continues to perform well as we give it more testing data. In the following runs, I trained a TFIDF-50 learner for each offence category that was attested more than 10 times in the 1830s. The training data consisted of all of the trials from the decade, labelled and presented to the learner in chronological order. Training was then stopped, and each learner was tested on the 25,403 unlabelled trials of the 1840s, also presented in chronological order. In order to assess the learners' performance, I used the same measures that we developed earlier, comparing the ratio of misses to hits (accuracy) and the ratio of false positives to hits (precision). As before, I added one to the denominator, so as not to accidentally divide by zero. (Computers hate it when you do that.)

The results for the accuracy measure are shown below, in the form of a bar graph rather than the scatterplot-style figure we used before. In this graph and the next one, we can see that the performance of the learner is about as good for data that it hasn't seen (i.e., the 1840s trials) as it is for the data that were used to train it. Most of the measures are around two or less, which is comparable to what we saw before. The performance has actually improved for many of the offence categories, like assault, fraud, perjury, conspiracy, kidnapping, receiving and robbery. We do notice, however, some performance degradation for a number of sexual offences, including sexual assault with sodomitical intent, bigamy, indecent assault, rape and sodomy. This might be a statistical anomaly. On the other hand, it might be a sign that the language that was used to describe sexual offences changed somewhat in the 1840s, causing a learner trained on 1830s data to miss later cases. This is one of the ways that tools like machine learning can be used to generate new research questions.



The next figure shows the results for the precision measure. In general the learner makes more false positive errors than misses, which is exactly what we want, given that the false positives can be useful in themselves. We don't see quite the same clear difference between sexual and non-sexual offence categories that we saw with the accuracy measure ... and for some reason it is quite hard for our learner to pick out cases of perverted justice in the 1840s.



Tags: archive | data mining | digital history | feature space | machine learning | text mining

Anthony Robert Terras Ostler, born on Friday 27th June. That'll be me on maternity leave then - will start posting again when I catch up on the zzzzzzzzzzs......

...you could go and read some of the blogs listed in the ComputerWeekly.com IT Blog Awards 08.

If you like this blog, you could vote for it in the Programming and technical blogs category, but given how good some of the other blogs are, I certainly don't expect you to!

On the other hand, if you've really got time to be bored, maybe you could figure out the best way for a one-programmer (i.e. me*) project to store and publish layers of user-generated content on top of data drawn from APIs. KTHXBAI!

* More about that project soon when I report on the mashed museum day - I'd love other programmers to join me.

Last week I had the opportunity to give a seminar on EpiDoc as a guest of Prof. Carla Salvaterra and the Department of Ancient History at the University of Bologna. We titled the session "Digital Publishing with EpiDoc: Epigraphy, Papyrology, Interoperability."

I had a delightful time, and greatly appreciated extended discussion with the faculty and students who participated.

For what they're worth, I've posted my slides:

• Digital Publishing with EpiDoc (PowerPoint version)
• Digital Publishing with EpiDoc (OpenOffice version)
  

The NEH's Division of Research is looking to fill one or more vacant program officer positions.  As a program officer, you will advise applicants about NEH grant programs, review and analyze grant proposals, select panelists, attend conferences, perform other outreach events on behalf of the NEH,  help the NEH formulate new grant programs, etc.  The job is located here in beautiful Washington, D.C.  I will also note that we have an ice cream shop right in the lobby of our building, should that factor into your decision making process.
 
We are quite keen on finding some candidates who are very knowledgeable about digital humanities.  More and more humanities research involves the use of digital technology.  So experience with databases, digitization, humanities computing, data mining, or other areas of technology as it applies to humanities research would be extremely helpful.
 
Salary ranges from $69,764 - $107,854.  If you or a colleague might be interested, please consult the vacancy announcement.  Deadline to apply is July 17, 2008.

ETANA Core Texts Full Listing

The civilizations of the ancient Near East produced the world's earliest written texts — in hieroglyphs, cuneiform, and alphabets — with which they described the first empires, recorded the first legal codifications, preserved the first love songs, and registered the first contracts, among states or individuals. Not surprisingly, these cultures elicited broad curiosity among later civilizations, our own not excepted, resulting in a flood of evaluation, scholarly or otherwise. While the discovery of new texts always leads to new evaluation, it is remarkable how assessments arrived at decades ago continue to be of much value, not only because they often carry editions of original documents, but because they contain insights minted freshly after first exposure to major documents.

ETANA (Electronic Texts and Ancient Near Eastern Archives) has digitized, and continues to digitize, texts selected as valuable for teaching and research relating to ancient Near Eastern studies. We have selected primarily editions that are outside of copyright, or with the permission of copyright holders. While the new electronic editions we have produced are under copyright, the ETANA project chooses to make these freely available for noncommercial teaching and research purposes.

As part of a USAID grant to assist Iraqi universities rebuild their archaeology programs and collections, Stony Brook University in New York State has digitized 181 cuneiform text publications and archaeological site reports, including dissertations relating to archaeology in Iraq. Prof. Elizabeth Stone was the Principal Investigator for this grant. These texts are either out of copyright, or Stony Brook has received permission to digitize them. We are pleased to report that Stony Brook has contributed these digital texts to the ETANA Core Texts collection for free access to anyone engaged in teaching and research.

As of today (30 June 2008) there are 355 digitized books and one developing resource (eTACT) in ETANA Core Texts. In response to numerous request, I present here all of those titles in a single list organized alphabetically by author's name. Oddities (to some) of the way entries were originally added to the database are known to me and are retained here. We are always seeking ways to improve ETANA and Abzu, so comments are welcome.

• 1. eTACT: electronic Translations of Akkadian Cuneiform Texts


• 2. Vorderasiatische Schriftdenkmaler der Koniglichen Museen zu Berlin. Heft I.


• 3. Vorderasiatische Schriftdenkmaler der Koniglichen Museen zu Berlin. Heft III.


• 4. Vorderasiatische Schriftdenkmaler der Koniglichen Museen zu Berlin. Heft IV.


• 5. Vorderasiatische Schriftdenkmaler der Koniglichen Museen zu Berlin. Heft V.


• 6. Vorderasiatische Schriftdenkmaler der Koniglichen Museen zu Berlin. Heft VI.


• 7. Vorderasiatische Schriftdenkmaler der Koniglichen Museen zu Berlin. Heft VII.


• 8. Vorderasiatische Schriftdenkmaler der Koniglichen Museen zu Berlin. Heft VIII.


• 9. Abel, Ludwig, and Hugo Winckler. Keilschrifttext; zum Gebrauch bei Vorlesungen


• 10. Adams, Robert McCormick. Heartland of cities; surveys of ancient settlement and land use on the central floodplain of the Euphrates


• 11. Adams, Robert McCormick. Land behind Baghdad; a history of settlement on the Diyala Plains.


• 12. Adams, Robert McCormick. The Uruk countryside; the natural setting of urban societies.


• 13. Allotte De La Fuye, Francois Maurice. Documents Presargoniques, - Deuxieme Partie. 30 Planches: - De LXXXVI a CXX


• 14. Allotte De La Fuye, Francois Maurice. Documents Presargoniques, Deuxieme Partie. 30 Planches: - De CXXI A CLXVIII


• 15. Allotte De La Fuye, Francois Maurice. Documents Presargoniques, Fascicule I. - Deuxieme Partie. 30 Planches: - De XXVI a LV


• 16. Allotte De La Fuye, Francois Maurice. Documents Presargoniques, Fascicule I. - Premiere Partie. 30 Planches: - De I a XXV.


• 17. Allotte De La Fuye, Francois Maurice. Documents Presargoniques, Fascicule II. Premiere Partie 30 Planches: - De LVI a LXXXV


• 18. Andrae, Walter. Festungswerke von Assur


• 19. Andrae, Walter. Stelenreihen In Assur


• 20. Augapfel, Julius. Babylonische Rechtsurkunden. Artaxerxes I. und Darius II
  
• 21. Banks, Edgar James. Bismya or The Lost City of Adab


• 22. Barnett, Richard David. Sculptures from the north palace of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh (668-627 BC)


• 23. Barton, George A. Haverford Library Collection, Cuneiform Tablets, Documents From the Temple Archives of Telloh, Part I


• 24. Barton, George A. Haverford Library Collection, Cuneiform Tablets, Documents From the Temple Archives of Telloh, Part II


• 25. Barton, George A. Haverford Library Collection, Cuneiform Tablets, Documents From the Temple Archives of Telloh, Part III


• 26. Barton, George A. Miscellaneous Babylonian Inscriptions


• 27. Barton, George A. Sumerian Business and Administrative Documents From the Earliest Times to the Dynasty of Agade


• 28. Benzinger, Immanuel. Hebräische Archäologie


• 29. Bezold, C. Catalogue of the Cuneiform Tablets in the Kouyunjik Collection of the British Museum Volume I


• 30. Bezold, C. Catalogue of the Cuneiform Tablets in the Kouyunjik Collection of the British Museum Volume II


• 31. Bezold, C. Catalogue of the Cuneiform Tablets in the Kouyunjik Collection of the British Museum Volume III


• 32. Bezold, C. Catalogue of the Cuneiform Tablets in the Kouyunjik Collection of the British Museum Volume IV


• 33. Bezold, C. Catalogue of the Cuneiform Tablets in the Kouyunjik Collection of the British Museum Volume V


• 34. Boissier, Alfred. Choix de texts Relatifs a la Divination Assyro-Babylonienne


• 35. Boissier, Alfred. Documents Assyriens Relat