Paregorian: Tom Elliott's Posts and Comments

Thanks Chuck! Here's an actionable link to that piece.

John Muccigrosso and I had a good time at the NEH Project Directors' Meeting in Washington yesterday (#SUG2011 was the twitter hash tag). Here are the slides that Sebastian Heath whipped up for our 2-minute lightning talk about the forthcoming Linked Ancient World Data Institutes (spring 2012 at ISAW; spring 2013 at Drew U.). I blogged my notes on Linked Open Data yesterday.

As we get spun up for our Linked Ancient World Data Institute (LAWDI) and move toward more interlinkedness between Pleiades, Papyri.info, the Ancient World Image Bank and other resources, I've been refreshing my thinking on Linked Open Data (LOD). Among the fodder for this thinking is Tim Berners-Lee's "Linked Data - Design Issues." Today's Digital Humanities Project Directors meeting at NEH has John Muccigrosso and myself channeling Sebastian Heath in a lightning talk, so I thought I'd better get my thoughts in order. It falls to me to briefly define linked open data so John can talk about the institute.

Berners-Lee's piece presents two lists of criteria/considerations/characteristics of linked open data in a way that doesn't entirely reconcile the two. They're overlapping and complementary, but they clearly represent two different stages in the promotion of the idea. I think those lists can be remixed into a single list with three clear rubrics that are easy to remember.

Linked

• Put your content on the web (not under or inside or over it)
• Assign (stable) Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) as names to discrete entities and ideas in your content
• Use HTTP URIs to enable lookup of the names and hide implementation detail
• Provide useful information about named entities on lookup
• Link to other URIs to facilitate discovery
  • Typed links define relationships between named entities both within and beyond your content
  • Typed links facilitate assertion and inference
• Bottom line: my data is your metadata

Open

• Publish under open licenses (e.g., Creative Commons Attribution, GNU Public License)
• Publish in non-proprietary formats
• Publish machine-readable content
• Facilitate discovery via browsing and crawling (i.e., don't require searching/guessing)
• Bottom line: my data is your data

Data

• Publish structured data, not just documents
• Treat both content and links as data
• Express internal and external links in well-defined forms like RDF
• Bottom line: our machines can help

Matt Knutzen recently sent me a draft description of the Pleiades project and asked for my thoughts on it. Here's what resulted:

The Pleiades Project (http://pleiades.stoa.org) is a consortially developed, open-source, web-based platform for using, creating, improving and sharing historical geographic information about the ancient world. It employs a unique data model that adapts best-practice and standards in GIS and spatial computing to deal with the unique challenges of sparse, damaged and contested information about ancient places, spaces and names. The project began by adapting and publishing all the data gathered for the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, but is now working with partners to expand temporally and spatially into Late Antiquity, the Byzantine Empire, the ancient Near East, Egypt and beyond.

best info for me personally!!

You can read a review by Adam Rabinowitz (July 2011) here

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Pleiades machine tags and your photos
Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2011 21:08:41 -0400
From: Dan Diffendale
To: Tom Elliott

Tom (et alii),

depicts, findspot, and origin all make good sense; pleiades:attestsTo could also be used when appropriate, e.g. the Brea Foundation decree:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dandiffendale/3035342766

or the kouros from Phigaleia:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dandiffendale/5252231681

pleiades:observedAt could potentially be employed, though perhaps less useful; most (but not all) of the examples I can think of were observed somewhere else within the area already covered by pleiades:findspot=12345.

I'm certainly happy to get set up with an account, but I wonder about the long-term merits of adding sites piecemeal according to whether or not I (or anyone else) have a relevant photo. Coming down as it does
to a question of priorities and resources, perhaps it's the best option for now?

In terms of the (Greek) Bronze Age, Hope Simpson and Dickinson's Gazeteer of Aegean Civilisation in the Bronze Age springs to mind. The Gazetteer seems to have been used as a source by the ArchAtlas team:

http://www.archatlas.dept.shef.ac.uk/atlas/atlas_sources.php?source=gacba&detail=yes

but only the major sites (generally those already covered by the Barrington/Pleiades) are available at this point. Cracking into the Gazetteer raises the issue of significance; some entries record the findspots of sherd concentrations--and we come rapidly into survey territory: how does Pleiades define a "place"?

cheers,
Dan

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Pleiades machine tags and your photos
Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2011 15:10:12 -0400
From: Tom Elliott
To: Dan Diffendale

FWIW, I tried to create a quick-and-dirty slideshow of everything with Pleiades tags on our main AWIB page at http://isaw.nyu.edu/awib, but it turns out to require more intervention in the page templates than I'm spun up on, so I'm going to have to put it in our web developer's queue behind some [other work].

But meantime we can look at the Pleiades interactions, which is really the core issue at the moment. Though the long-term vision is to find ways to make AWIB, or something AWIB-like, a collaborative venture in which ISAW plays the role of cheerleader and problem solver and offers participants long-term image preservation services through the medium of the NYU Faculty Digital Archive (in case Flickr self-destructs, etc).

I think the "probably" and "said to be from" options are fine. I wonder thought whether we ought to introduce a new tag or two that would let us differentiate between pictures *of* a site and pictures of objects *from* a site. Maybe something like:

pleiades:place=12345 means "picture depicts the site (or some built component thereof)" ... or maybe (in light of the following) something like pleiades:depicts=12345

pleiades:findspot=12345 means "picture depicts object found on the site"

pleiades:origin=12345 means "object originating on the site"

These terms would mirror the vocabulary we've been toying around with for a long time regarding semantic web stuff:

http://gawd.atlantides.org/terms/

What do you (and other addressees on this message) think of that?

It would be great to add the bronze age sites you're finding to Pleiades. Can I set you up with a username and password and we can then talk about the quickest/easiest way for you to make those suggestions? Pleiades is expanding beyond the boundaries of the Barrington, both in temporal and spatial terms. We've already pushed much further back for a few sites in Egypt, and forward in time for Byzantium, and there's a group of folks in California who've just got an NEH startup grant to start adding Ancient Near East places to Pleiades. [...]

Best,
Tom

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Pleiades machine tags and your photos
Date: Sat, 10 Sep 2011 20:14:37 -0400
From: Dan Diffendale
To: Tom Elliott

Hi Tom,

My pleasure. The linking has a lot of potential; I'm looking forward to its further development.

One question that occurs to me is what the minimum standard for artifact provenance is or ought to be; is it worth machine-tagging objects "probably" or "said to be from"...? Also, in a few cases, I've added two machine tags, one for the archaeological provenance and one for the object's place of production--any thoughts on that? I'll keep a running tally of missing places; I've noticed a few so far, mostly Bronze Age sites--not surprising, given the Barrington's focus. I
haven't seen an explicitly-stated chronological range for Pleiades; are you still working within the 1000 BCE-650 CE limits?

Best,
Dan

With Dan Diffendale's permission, I'm posting a series of email messages here that I think are of potential interest to other readers of this post.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Pleiades machine tags and your photos
Date: Sat, 10 Sep 2011 18:22:41 -0400
From: Tom Elliott
To: Dan Diffendale

Dan:

I noticed that you started using Pleiades machine tags this afternoon. Thanks so much! I've long been a fan of your photography. I hope we'll eventually be able to use this mechanism to start building automatic links on the place pages in Pleiades. By adding those machine tags to your photos you're going to be giving Pleiades users a much richer experience when we roll out that functionality.

Do let me know if you have any questions or suggestions, or if you have any critiques of our online publications and resources. Also, if you run across any missing places in Pleiades, drop me a line.

Best,
Tom

Some months ago, ISAW started adding Pleiades machine tags to the Ancient World Image Bank (AWIB) photos we've been uploading to Flickr. This post will explain what that means, how it might be useful to you and how you can add Pleiades machine tags to your own photos so we can find out about them.

Updated: 8:45pm EDT, 10 September 2011 (changes highlighted in orange).

Pleiades Machine Tags

Pleiades is a collaborative, open-access digital gazetteer for the ancient world. AWIB is an open-access publication that uses the Flickr photo-sharing site to publish free, reusable photos of ancient sites and artifacts. Machine tags are an extension to Flickr's basic tag-this-photo functionality that "use a special syntax to define extra information about a tag" (Aaron Straup Cope, "Ladies and Gentlemen: Machine Tags," 24 January 2007).

A Pleiades machine tag looks like this:

pleiades:place=795868

where 795868 is the stable identifier portion of a Pleiades Uniform Resource Identifier (URI).  In this example, the URI corresponding to the machine tag above is:

http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/795868

Note what's in common between the machine tag and the URI (highlighted in yellow).

What Pleiades Machine Tags Are Good For

The Flickr API makes it possible to request lists of machine-tagged photos in the RSS webfeed format. So, to get a list of all photos in Flickr that are tagged with the example machine tag above, pop this into your feed reader:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=pleiades%3Aplace=795868&lang=en-us&format=rss_200

The same results can be viewed in HTML in a browser by resolving the following:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/pleiades:place=795868

To get a list of all photos in Flickr that are tagged with any Pleiades machine tag, try this (the API syntax supports wildcards!):

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=pleiades%3Aplace%3D&lang=en-us&format=rss_200

The same results, viewed in HTML on the Flickr site:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/pleiades:place

Feeds like these aren't just for feed readers anymore. You can add user-interface widgets to your blog or website to summarize the latest content for your readers (check out the right-hand column in this blog). You can hook up services like Networked Blogs or Twitterfeed to pass on the latest changes to your Facebook friends or Twitter followers. If you've got a web-facing numismatic database that you've already linked up with Pleiades for the mint locations, you could write custom code to pull a corresponding picture of the ancient site into your web interface (say, alongside the map you've already got).

Add Pleiades Machine Tags to Your Own Photos on Flickr

Many of you have been taking amazing photos of ancient sites and artifacts for years. Many of you have posted some of them to Flickr and shared them with great groups like Chiron, Visibile Parlare - Greek Inscriptions and Visibile Parlare - Latin Inscriptions. If you'd like these photos to appear in queries and feeds (like those described above), right alongside the photos that we're publishing via AWIB, all you have to do is add the appropriate Pleiades machine tags in Flickr. Just look up your site on Pleiades, copy the numeric ID from the URI in your browser's location bar, append it to the string "pleiades:place=" and tag your Flickr photos with it. In this way, you can help us improve findability of good photos of ancient sites and the artifacts found there for everyone on the web. Who knows ... maybe enough people will join us in this effort that we can someday get the Flickr development team to give Pleiades machine tags some extra love.

Kudos to:

• Aaron Straup Cope for his blog post "Wildcard Machine Tag URLs" (18 July 2008) that showed me how to construct the API queries necessary to get the RSS feeds described above. That, and the Flickr API documentation on feeds.
• Nate Nagy, Managing Editor of AWIB, who applies the tags and keeps AWIB rolling.
• Dan Pet, from the Portable Antiquities Scheme, and Ryan Baumann, from the Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments at the University of Kentucky, who put me onto machine tags in the first place and helped me get up to speed.

John: the Flickr development team from time-to-time select certain machine tag name spaces on which to bestow some "extra love," i.e., they create custom behaviors in the Flickr user interface around those namespaces. Open Street Map is one of them. You can read more about it in a couple of Flickr developer blog posts: here and here.

A huge hurrah! for Dan Diffendale, who has already begun adding Pleiades machine tags to his spectacular collection of photos on Flickr.

You can now view a feed of the latest images tagged with Pleiades machine tags on Flickr (no matter who posted them) by visiting Alcyone Atlantis.

Linking photos on Flickr to place resources in Pleiades

A web only publication by Alison Babeu with good coverage of the Stoa and the Digital Classicist. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The author provides a summative and recent overview of the use of digital technologies in classical studies, focusing on classical Greece, Rome, and the ancient Middle and Near East, and generally on the period up to about 600 AD. The report explores what projects exist and how they are used, examines the infrastructure that currently exists to support digital classics as a discipline, and investigates larger humanities cyberinfrastructure projects and existing tools or services that might be repurposed for the digital classics.
(Council on Library and Information Resources)

PDF Download of Complete Report (2.6 MB file)

Mireille Corbier, director of L’Année épigraphique (Paris, corbier@msh-paris.fr), writes to announce that L’Année épigraphique 2008 (containing 1,770 entries and 960 pages, including 210 pages of index) was published in August, 2011, and is now available. Orders should be sent to Presses Universitaires de France at revues@puf.com.

From Marco Büchler:

The Munich DigitiZation Center (MDZ) of the Bavarian State Library invites you to Munich on Tuesday 11 October and Wednesday 12 October, 2011, for two conferences under the shared title “Historische Dokumente auf dem Weg zum digitalen Volltext – Turning Historical Documents into Digital Full Texts”.

Starting from different viewpoints, both events will focus on using OCR to create digital full texts. You can attend either event separately, or both together.

Please note: both conferences are German-speaking only!

October 11th – Results of OCR Research: IMPACT Demo Day

Jointly organised by the Munich DigitiZation Center of the Bavarian State Library and the Austrian National Library, this Demo Day will present research results and tools from the EU-funded IMPACT Project (IMProving ACcess to Text). It will focus on the challenges involved in creating searchable full text from historical documents, and show the tools and solutions created by IMPACT to resolve these challenges. It will also detail how project outputs will be made available once the project ends (December 2011). The event is open to anyone, but is mainly aimed at representatives from libraries, museums and archives.

October 12th – Insights from Practical Experience: OCR, Full Texts and Forms of Presentation

Digitisation projects can’t just present digital images anymore. User expectations are increasing steadily, and mobile devices and other technological forms of interaction bring their own challenges with them.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and searchable full text are therefore becoming more important. This has consequences for the entire project workflow – from its initial scoping and the choice of hardware, to the presentation of the results online. All of these challenges will be discussed at the conference.

The day will focus on the results of a number of full-text digitisation projects, detailing the particular issues presented by different types of source material. OCR software solutions will be compared, along with a number of post-capture processing tools and techniques, including crowdsourcing to improve OCR.

“Insights from Practical Experience: OCR, Full Texts and Forms of Presentation” is free of charge, thanks to our sponsors: Abbyy Europe, ARPA Data, Image Access, Treventus Mechatronics and Zeutschel.

For more information about the programme and registration, please visit::

http://www.muenchener-digitalisierungszentrum.de/~lza/impact/index.html?c=info&l=en

The deadline for registration is September 25th. Please remember, the events will be German-speaking only.

Contact details:

Munich DigitiZation Center (MDZ) Digital Library
Bavarian State Library
Fedor Bochow / Mark-Oliver Fischer
Ludwigstrasse16
80539 Munich
Germany

mdz[at]bsb-muenchen.de

Tel. +49 (0) 89 28638 2295
oder +49 (0) 89 28638 2890
Fax +49 (0) 89 28638 2672

http://www.muenchener-digitalisierungszentrum.de

http://www.bsb-muenchen.de

TILE is cool kits, hope you try it soon. I really love it

Pleiades will not be affected

A new publication from Pleiades partner project Trismegistos

“”the reason society should value a strong Arts and Humanities culture is not because of any measurable “value” in economic terms”"

Great observation indeed.

software development

Those who have been waiting impatiently for the first stable release of the Text Image Linking Environment (TILE) toolkit need wait no longer: the full program can be downloaded from: <http://mith.umd.edu/tile/>. From that site:

The Text-Image Linking Environment (TILE) is a web-based tool for creating and editing image-based electronic editions and digital archives of humanities texts.

TILE features tools for importing and exporting transcript lines and images of text, an image markup tool, a semi-automated line recognizer that tags regions of text within an image, and plugin architecture to extend the functionality of the software.

I haven’t tried TILE out for myself yet, but I’m looking forward to doing so.

I am an attorney and doctoral student in Philosophy at Texas A&M. I have found this website to be an immensely helpful resource in preparing my dissertation on Athenian law and government and I will be recommending it to my students. Although I never met Dr. Scaife, I hope those of you who knew and loved him (and there are obviously many who did) to know that his work and contributions continue despite his tragic early passing.

EpiDoc Training Workshop
5-8 September 2011
Institute of Classical Studies, Senate House, London

An EpiDoc training workshop will be offered by the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, and the Institute of Classical Studies in September this year. The workshop is free of charge and open to all, but spaces are limited and registration as soon as possible is essential.

This workshop is an introduction to the use of EpiDoc, an XML schema for the encoding and publication of inscriptions, papyri and other documentary Classical texts. Participants will study the use of EpiDoc markup to record the distinctions expressed by the Leiden Conventions and traditional critical editions, and some of the issues in translating between EpiDoc and the major epigraphic and papyrological databases. They will also be given hands-on experience in the use of the Papyrological Editor tool implemented by the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri, which facilitates the authoring of EpiDoc XML via a ‘tags-free’ interface.

The course is targeted at scholars of epigraphy and papyrology (from advanced graduate students to professors) with an interest and willingness to learn some of the hands-on technical aspects necessary to run a digital project. Knowledge of Greek and/or Latin, the Leiden Conventions and the distinctions expressed by them, and the kinds of data that need to be recorded by philologists and ancient historians, will be assumed. No particular technical expertise is required.

Places on the EpiDoc training week are limited so if you are interested in attending the workshop or have any questions, please contact charlotte.tupman@kcl.ac.uk and gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk as soon as possible with a brief statement of qualifications and interest.

International Workshop on Digital Tools in Papyrology, Vienna.

July 18-23, 2011

This workshop, organized jointly by the Austrian National Library, the Austrian Academy of Science and Vienna University, will provide an introduction to the most important digital tools in papyrology. The program will offer a mixture of classes (in English), in which the students will get an overview of the manifold electronic resources in the field, and training sessions on the new editing platform for DDbDP, HGV, and APIS.

The workshop will also include visits to the Papyrus Collection and the Papyrus Museum of the Austrian National Library. The main teachers will be James Cowey (Universität Heidelberg), Mark Depauw (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), Sandra Hodecek (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek), Thomas Kruse (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften), Bernhard Palme (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek/Universität Wien), Lucian Reinfandt (Universität Wien), Joshua D. Sosin (Duke University), Johannes Thomann (Universität Zürich).

The workshop will begin on Monday, 18th July with registration in the morning and courses in the afternoon, and will end on Friday, 22nd July in the evening. On Saturday, 23rd July, morning there will be a guided tour to the Ephesos Museum.

There is no fee for the course, but 125 Euros have to be charged for accommodation in a university Hall of Residence. The number of participants is restricted to 20.

Advanced students with an interest in papyrology and solid knowledge of Ancient Greek and English are invited to participate, whether they have already experience in the subject or not.

Applications, including a curriculum vitae, should be sent before July 12 to Bernhard Palme <bernhard.palme@univie.ac.at>.

Posted for Bernhard Palme, via Papy-L:

This workshop, organized jointly by the Austrian National Library, the Austrian Academy of Science and Vienna University, will provide an introduction to the most important digital tools in papyrology. The program will offer a mixture of classes (in English), in which the students will get an overview of the manifold electronic resources in the field, and training sessions on the new editing platform for DDbDP, HGV, and APIS. 

The workshop will also include visits to the Papyrus Collection and the Papyrus Museum of the Austrian National Library. The main teachers will be James Cowey (Universität Heidelberg), Mark Depauw (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), Sandra Hodecek (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek), Thomas Kruse (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften), Bernhard Palme (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek/Universität Wien), Lucian Reinfandt (Universität Wien), Joshua D. Sosin (Duke University), Johannes Thomann (Universität Zürich). 

The workshop will begin on Monday, 18th July with registration in the morning and courses in the afternoon, and will end on Friday, 22nd July in the evening. On Saturday, 23rd July, morning there will be a guided tour to the Ephesos Museum. 

There is no fee for the course, but 125 Euros have to be charged for accommodation in a university Hall of Residence. The number of participants is restricted to 20. Advanced students with an interest in papyrology and solid knowledge of Ancient Greek and English are invited to participate, whether they have already experience in the subject or not. 

Applications, including a curriculum vitae, should be sent before July 12 to

Bernhard Palme
bernhard.palme@univie.ac.at

Saw this job listing publicised on Antiquist and Humanist and copying it here.

Research Associate at King’s College London, Centre for e-Research

The Centre for e-Research is seeking a Research Associate with strong technical and software development skills to work on e-research projects at the Centre. These projects may result in case studies, proofs of concept and pilots as well as in software for operational service, so the post offers an exciting opportunity to contribute both to the development of the digital and research infrastructure at King’s and its collaborators, and to more exploratory development of innovative ideas solutions using cutting edge approaches. The post-holder will be expected to publish the results of research undertaken in relevant journals. Some current and past projects may be found at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/iss/cerch/projects/.

Approximately 75% of the post-holder’s work (on average over the 2 years of the appointment) will be dedicated to the SAWS (Sharing Ancient Wisdoms) project, an EU-funded international collaboration that is exploring ways of exploiting the digital environment for creating, publishing and interacting with selected digital collections of manuscripts and texts, specifically Greek and Arabic “wisdom literature”. These anthologies of wise or useful sayings were widely circulated throughout antiquity and the middle ages, and they raise particular challenges at a technical and information modelling level due to the complex network of interrelationships among them and among their component parts. The SAWS project requires an imaginative research associate capable of researching, devising and developing innovative methodologies and tools for creating these complex resources, for expressing relationships between them, and for publishing, visualising and exploring them. The remaining 25% will be spent on other projects at the Centre, depending on ongoing requirements and the interests of the appointee.

The candidate will preferably have an education in information science or computer science, or a humanities degree with a strong technical component. Due to the exploratory nature of the work, the role will require problem-solving ability and a high degree of initiative, as well as flexibility and a keenness to learn. Knowledge of Java, web development technologies (e.g. XML, Django, Ajax) and web service technologies is essential. Experience of linked data/semantic web technologies (e.g. RDF, OWL), and of other programming languages (e.g. Python, Ruby), would be an advantage.

This is a full-time position, initially for a period of 24 months. Salary for the position will be at an appropriate point of Grade 6, currently £33,193 to £39,185 per annum (inclusive of a £2,323 London allowance). Benefits include a contributory final salary pension scheme, subsidised gym membership and 27 days of annual leave, 4 college closure days, plus public holidays.

For more details and an application pack please see http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/pertra/vacancy/external/pers_detail.php?jobindex=10378. Alternatively, please email strand-recruitment[@]kcl.ac.uk. All correspondence should clearly state the job title and reference number G6/QLJ/408/11-JT. For an informal discussion of the post please contact Mark Hedges on mark.hedges[@]kcl.ac.uk, or 020 7848 1970.

The closing date is: 12 July 2011

Achievements and progress over the preceding 6 months.

Pleiades now supports several additional time periods for names and locations in ancient Egypt

I learned today from the president of the Alabama School Library Association that at least 8 schools in the state sustained major damage or were totally destroyed in the tornado outbreak on 27 April 2011. There are many other schools that have sustained roof or other damage, and still several others that the ASLA has not yet been able to contact. The affected school libraries have lost many or all of their collections; they will need to be replaced along with the rest of the school infrastructure. In the meantime, many of the school librarians and other administrators are serving as focal points for the distribution of donated books to children who have lost homes and possessions.

I'm going to do what I can to help, and I'd be grateful if friends and colleagues would consider helping as well.

Officers and Board Members of the ASLA are collecting new and gently used books for distribution to schools and local relief efforts. If you would like to contribute, please contact them via their website.

There's also vendor-run effort to collect money for new books for library collections that will be chosen by the librarians themselves. The vendors are matching contributions. You can contribute online (via Paypal) at Alabama School Disaster Relief.

The programme for the summer 2011 Institute of Classical Studies digital seminars has been released.

Fridays at 16:30 in Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU

June 3: Kathryn Piquette and Charles Crowther (Oxford), Developing a Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) System for Inscription Documentation in Museum Collections and the Field: Case studies on ancient Egyptian and Classical material (Room 37)

June 10: David Scott and Mike Jackson (Edinburgh University), Supporting Productive Queries for Research (SPQR): Aggregating Classical Datasets with Linked Data (Room 37)

June 17: Charlotte Roueché and Charlotte Tupman (King’s College London), Sharing Ancient Wisdoms: developing structures for charting textual transfer (Room 37)

June 24: Alessandro Vatri (Oxford University), HdtDep: a treebank and search engine for Greek word order study (Court Room)

July 1: Agiatis Benardou (Digital Curation Unit, R.C. “Athena”), Classical Studies facing digital research infrastructures: From practice to requirements (Court Room)

July 8: Timothy Hill (New York University), Semantics and Semantic Constructs in Cultural Comparison: The Case of Late Antiquity (Court Room)

July 15: Elton Barker (Open University) and Leif Isaksen (Southampton), Mine the GAP: Finding ancient places in the Google Books corpus (Court Room)

July 22: Sandra Blakely (Emory), Modeling the mysteries: GIS technology, network models, and the cult of the Great Gods of Samothrace (Court Room)

July 29: Marco Büchler (Leipzig), Bringing Modern Spell Checking Approaches to Ancient Texts: Automatized Suggestions for Incomplete Words (Room 37)

August 5: Daniel Pett (British Museum), The Portable Antiquities Scheme: a tool for studying the Ancient landscape of England and Wales (Room 37)

August 12: Valentina Asciutti and Stuart Dunn (King’s College London), Digital diasporas: remaking cultural heritage in cyberspace (Room 37)

ALL WELCOME

The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.

For more information please contact Gabriel.Bodard@kcl.ac.uk, Stuart.Dunn@kcl.ac.uk or S.Mahony@ucl.ac.uk. The seminars will be podcast shortly after each event; follow the RSS feed.

Quarterly, long-term, third-party digital archiving

I've just added the Numishare blog to the Electra Atlantis feed aggregator. Ethan Gruber uses it to disseminate news about Numishare, an "open source project hosted by Google Code for the creation, management, and dissemination of numismatic data online."

How is it that lo, these many years I've missed the existence of John Hessler's blog, Warping History: Analytical Methods in Historical Geography? No longer! I've added it to Electra Atlantis and my newsreader.

The Digital Classicist community are presenting two panels at the coming 2011 Classical Association Annual Conference (UK).

The full programme is available from the conference website.

The 2011 Classical Association Annual Conference will be hosted by Durham University. The conference involves around 50 panels with a distinguished array of international and national speakers, and is attended by several hundred delegates. The conference will run from the evening of Friday 15th April until lunch on Monday 18th April.

The two Digital Classicist panels are:
Ancient Space, Linked Data and Digital Research (chair: Gabriel Bodard, King’s College London)
Teaching and Publication of Classics in the Internet Age (chair: Simon Mahony, University College London).

In addition Durham Classics and Ancient History are hosting a Digital Classicist Training Day on Friday April 15. There will be a morning session on Generic Web Tools, and an afternoon one introducing participants to the Papyrological Editor. Note that attendance at the training day needs to be booked separately.

I've just added the following blog to the Maia Atlantis feed aggregator:

• Byzantine News

From Michael Satlow at Brown University. Please direct all questions to him.

WORKSHOP CALL FOR PAPERS
FEBRUARY 13-14, 2012
BROWN UNIVERSITY

The Program in Judaic Studies in collaboration with the Brown University Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship is pleased to announce plans for a two-day workshop devoted to investigating the ways in which the digital humanities has or can change the study of religion in antiquity. The workshop will take place on February 13-14, 2012, at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

We invite proposals for papers and presentations that explore the intersection of ancient religion and the digital humanities. We are particularly interested in presentations of projects that have the potential to open up new questions and avenues of research. Can digital tools not only allow us to do our work faster and more thoroughly but also enable entirely new kinds of research? How might different digital data (e.g., textual, geographic, and material culture) be used together most productively? The workshop will concentrate primarily on research rather than directly on pedagogy or scholarly communication. One session will be devoted to “nuts and bolts” issues of funding and starting a digital project.

The focus of the workshop will be on the religions of West Asia and the Mediterranean basin through the early Islamic period. Proposals relating to other regions, however, will also be considered.

More and updated information can be found at: http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Judaic_Studies/AncientReligionModernTechnologyWorkshop.html

Please submit proposals of up to 300 words by October 31, 2011, to Michael Satlow (Michael_Satlow@Brown.edu).

On March 29th, 2011, the main server for www.stoa.org suffered a hardware failure. Unfortunately, this led to an extended period of downtime for sites and projects hosted on the Stoa. We have now set up a temporary server, and are working to restore sites and services to it from tape backup, while we also look into a long-term solution for replacing the original server. Please bear with us while we work to restore the site, and thank you for your patience.

This morning I've added the following blogs to the Electra Atlantis feed aggregator:

• Digital Antiquity News
• The Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) News

Thanks to Adam Brin at Digital Antiquity for alerting me to their existence.

I have updated feed addresses in Electra for the following blogs, which have changed recently:

• Chuck Jones' Abzu
• Eric Sowell's Coding Humanist

I have also removed the following blogs for the reasons indicated:

• The feed URL for the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (Univ. of Nebraska-Lincoln) is returning an error 500
• Sheila Brennan's Relaxing on the Trail has had its permissions reset so that it is no longer accessible.
• Notis Toufexis' blog seems to have disappeared.

I have added the following blogs to the Maia Atlantis feed aggregator:

• CHS Fellowships Research Blog

This morning I've added the following blogs to the Electra Atlantis feed aggregator:

• Digital Antiquity News
• The Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) News

Thanks to Adam Brin at Digital Antiquity for alerting me to their existence.

I have updated feed addresses in Electra for the following blogs, which have changed recently:

• Eric Sowell's Coding Humanist

I have also removed the following blogs for the reasons indicated:

• Tom Goskar's Past Thinking blog as the feed URL is returning no data even though the site itself appears to be up
• The feed URL for the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (Univ. of Nebraska-Lincoln) is returning an error 500
• The Abzu feed URL is returning 404
• Sheila Brennan's Relaxing on the Trail has had its permissions reset so that it is no longer accessible.
• Notis Toufexis' blog seems to have disappeared.

I have added the following blogs to the Maia Atlantis feed aggregator:

• CHS Fellowships Research Blog

 

Registration open for Triennial Conference, University of Cambridge, 25-28 July 2011

Hosted by the Faculty of Classics, the Celebration of Classics will see a remarkable line up of international scholars brought together in a novel format for such an event. There will, of course, be some very distinguished plenary lecturers, and there will also be two outreach evenings with well-known figures from the media and literary world. But the centre of the event is a set of seminars where leading classicists will be presenting their cutting edge work in a seminar format with extensive opportunities for discussion (each paper will have at least 45 minutes for comment and questions). Each day has only two such seminar slots, leaving plenty of time for debate as well as meeting old and new friends. We are hoping that you will want to come to Cambridge and participate in this event.

For more information about the conference please go to http://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/faculty/seminars_conferences/triennial_conference/.

Professor Stephen Oakley

Chair, Organising Committee

For those interested in adding new/better coordinates to existing Pleiades places, there is now an (I hope) accurate step-by-step outline that I'll soon turn into a full script for a screencast

This looks like a very promising workshop.

(To register to attend this workshop, please visit http://pelagios.eventbrite.com)

The Pelagios workshop is an open forum for discussing the issues associated with and the infrastructure required for developing methods of linking open data (LOD), specifically geodata. There will be a specific emphasis on places in the ancient world, but the practices discussed should be equally applicable to contemporary named locations. The Pelagios project will also make available a proposal for a lightweight methodology prior to the event in order to focus discussion and elicit critique.

The one-day event will have 3 sessions dedicated to:
1) Issues of referencing ancient and contemporary places online
2) Lightweight ontology approaches
3) Methods for generating, publishing and consuming compliant data

Each session will consist of several short (15 min) papers followed by half an hour of open discussion. The event is FREE to all but places are LIMITED so participants are advised to register early. This is likely to be of interest to anyone working with digital humanities resources with a geospatial component.

Preliminary Timetable
10:30-1:00 Session 1: Issues
2:00-3:30 Session 2: Ontology
4:00-5:30 Session 3: Methods

Confirmed Speakers:

Johan Alhlfeldt (University of Lund) Regnum Francorum online
Ceri Binding (University of Glamorgan) Semantic Technologies Enhancing
Links and Linked data for Archaeological Resources
Gianluca Correndo (University of Southampton) EnAKTing
Claire Grover (University of Edinburgh) Edinburgh Geoparser
Eetu Mäkelä (University of Aalto) CultureSampo
Adam Rabinowitz (University of Texas at Austin) GeoDia
Sebastian Rahtz (University of Oxford) CLAROS
Sven Schade (European Commission)
Monika Solanki (University of Leicester) Tracing Networks
Humphrey Southall (University of Portsmouth) Great Britain Historical
Geographical Information System
Jeni Tennision (Data.gov.uk)

Pelagios Partners also attending are:

Mathieu d’Aquin (KMi, The Open University) LUCERO
Greg Crane (Tufts University) Perseus
Reinhard Foertsch (University of Cologne) Arachne
Sean Gillies (Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU) Pleiades
Mark Hedges, Gabriel Bodard (KCL) SPQR
Rainer Simon (DME, Austrian Institute of Technology) EuropeanaConnect
Elton Barker (The Open University) Google Ancient Places
Leif Isaksen (The University of Southampton) Google Ancient Places

I've just added John Wallrodt's Paperless Archaeology blog to the Electra Atlantis feed aggregator.

Over at e-pigraphia, we learn about a seminar on “Epigraphy, society and culture in ancient Rome.” It is organized by the Institut Català d’Arqueologia Clàssica and will be held 2-4 March 2011.

In honor of Kutal Gorkay's upcoming talk at ISAW (Recent Archaeological Research in Zeugma: March 21, 2011), I've taken the opportunity to update the Zeugma resource at Pleiades.

In honor of Kutal Gorkay's upcoming talk at ISAW (Recent Archaeological Research in Zeugma: March 21, 2011), I've taken the opportunity to update the Zeugma resource at Pleiades. It now has:

• a precise location (taken from the visible remains of the theater)
• Greek orthography for the name Zeugma (Ζεύγμα) -- I couldn't quickly find a verifiable ancient reference for the other name we inherited from the Barrington: Seleukeia pros to Euphrate
• an updated description and place type (settlement)
• a modestly expanded "details" section in which I link to Zeugma resources elsewhere (including the official excavation website, Wikipedia, Livius.org and some digital publications by David Walker at the University of Western Australia)

I hope you'll check out both the lecture notice and the Pleiades resource. I'd of course be grateful for comments, corrections and additions to the latter. 

And if you think you could do something like this for another Pleiades place resource, by all means, please join up and give it a try. You'll find how-to instructions in my Valentine's Day Pleiades Post. If you've got Irish interests or ancestry, why not pick an ancient site in Ireland to spruce up in celebration of St. Patrick's Day!

Zeugma on Pleiades: http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/658636
Ancient sites in Ireland link courtesy of the spatial search functions Sean Gillies recently added to Pleiades.

ISMAR 2011: Call for Participation
Tenth IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality
Oct. 26 – 29, 2011, Basel, Switzerland
http://www.ismar11.org

The fields of Mixed Reality (MR) and Augmented Reality (AR) seek to interactively combine real and virtual objects and environments in 3D. The basic paradigm enables fascinating new types of user interfaces, and is beginning to show significant impact on industry and society. The field is highly interdisciplinary, and MR/AR concepts are applicable to a wide range of applications.

This year we are proud to present the 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2011). The symposium will be held on Oct 26–29, 2011 at Congress Center in Basel, Switzerland. We invite you all to participate in this great event for the exchange of new ideas in this exciting field! ISMAR now invites contributions in two programs: the Science & Technology (S&T) program and a complementary Arts, Media and Humanities (AMH) program.

The 2011 ISMAR Arts, Media and Humanities chairs invite artists, designers, architects, urbanists, and scholars to explore the potential of Mixed and Augmented Reality within their respective fields. We welcome artifacts, musings, probings, discourses, and insights to be presented at ISMAR 2011 in the form of papers, posters, art exhibits and performances, panels, workshops, demos, and tutorials.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, case studies, deployments, prototypes, and evaluations of Mixed and Augmented Reality in:

• art,media art, performing arts,
• architecture and urban design,cultural heritage,
• design research,
• game design,
• product design and toys,
• social media,
• transhumanism,
• and advertising and marketing.

Important Deadlines

Paper and Poster Abstracts :    May 11
Paper and Poster Submission :    May 18
Workshop Proposals : June 3
Tutorial Proposals : June 3
S&T Demonstrations : August 15
Art Exhibits: June 3
Tracking Competition: August 15

For further information, please visit the conference website: http://www.ismar11.org

The following blogs have been added:

• AMIR: Access to Mideast and Islamic Resources (electra, maia)
• EES Theban Harbours and Waterscapes Project (taygete)
• PELAGIOS Project Blog (electra, maia)
• Penn Museum Blog (maia)

Over at the Sito Italiano di Epigrafia Greca (SITEG), Alice Bencivenni reports on an EpiDoc/SoSOL training workshop held at the Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, 10-14 January 2011.

The problem is fixed, and Sean has simplified the checkout process. I've modified the instructions in the main blog post to reflect this.

Pleiades places are looking for love and this year you can give it to them (it never hurts to get ready for Valentine's Day early). It will only take a few minutes of your time.

Here are some examples of things you could do (many of them quickly) to enhance the content in Pleiades:

• Add a modern name for an ancient settlement (see, for example: http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/579885, sub "Names:")

• Add Greek orthography to an existing ancient name record that only has a transliteration (compare, for example, http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/638753/stauropolis and http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/599612/arsinoeia)

• Add a link to a corresponding entry in:
• Wikipedia (e.g., http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/142847211, sub "References:")
• The Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites at Perseus (e.g., http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/599659, sub "References")
• FastiOnline (e.g., http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/481808, sub "References")

• Add a link to the website of a current excavation of that site (e.g., http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/550595, sub "Details" and "References")

• Add a link to a book in the Internet Archive or Google Books that treats the place or name in question (e.g., http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/638753/ninoe, sub "Primary Reference Citations:")

• Flesh out the description of a place
• A little bit (e.g., compare http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/912910/ to the original version of the resource, as imported)
• A lot (e.g., compare http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/727153 to the original version)

Here are some ways you could use links to Pleiades to enrich content elsewhere on the web

• Add a Pleiades URI to a blog post or web site that you author or edit (e.g., http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.com/2011/01/schliemann-diaries-online-at-ascsa.html -- scroll down)
• Add a Pleiades URI to comments on a Flickr or Panoramio or Picasa image (e.g., http://www.flickr.com/photos/isawnyu/5054947503/)

Feel free to suggest other ways (with links to examples, where appropriate) in the comments.

How to get started

Are you a registered Pleiades user? If not, please visit the Pleiades Community page and follow the instructions there.

If you are a registered Pleiades user and you want to make a modification to a place resource (improved on 24 January):

• log in
• use the search box to find the place resource you're interested in changing
• select "actions" ... "check out" (this will create a working copy for you)
• select the "edit" tab
• make and save your changes as many times as you like (you're working on a private copy of the original that only you can see)
• once you're happy with the results, select "state: drafting" and change it to "submit for review"
• the editors will review your suggested changes and be in touch via email if they have any questions ... otherwise they'll add your name to the "creator" or "contributor" field (as appropriate) and publish the changes so everyone can see them

Get stuck? 

Ask a question on the pleiades-community list, to which all Pleiades users are automatically subscribed.

Your Pleiades place is waiting for you!

Hi Jeff:

Sorry about the problem. I've been able to duplicate it this morning and we're working on a fix. I'll post here, and email you directly, when it's fixed.

Best,
Tom

This is the greatest thing since digitization began. Great work and congratulations to the Perseus project for their vision and imagination (not to mention the incredibly hard work). I noticed some very minor errors in one of the Plutarch dialogues. is there a way to report those?

Pleiades places are looking for love and this year you can give it to them (it never hurts to get ready for Valentine's Day early). It will only take a few minutes of your time.

Dates: 25 May – 1 July 2011
Location: University of Roma Tor Vergata
More information: http://sites.tufts.edu/latiumvetus/

From Monica Berti:

The 2011 Latium Vetus Program, as part of a collaborative project between Tufts University and Roma Tor Vergata, will allow students to learn the techniques of modern epigraphic study, including digital transcription and documentation of inscriptions, and they will have the unique opportunity to work on unpublished texts from the huge corpus of inscriptions of Ancient Latium and to contribute to the ongoing project of digitizing and publishing these inscriptions.

As an intensive course of first-hand epigraphic and archaeological site and museum study based at the campus of Tor Vergata University and led by Monica Berti of Roma Tor Vergata and J. Matthew Harrington of Tufts University, this program will combine close study of epigraphic remains with exploration of the archaeological contexts and analysis of relevant Latin sources from the sites of Latium and Campania: Rome, Ostia, Pompeii, Tivoli, Praeneste, Veii, Lanuvium, Albano Laziale, Cerveteri, Herculaneum, Nemi, Anzio, Tusculum, Falerii Novi, Sutri, Tarquinia, Napoli, Paestum, Lucus Feroniae, Boscoreale, Oplontis, and more.

Joaquín L. Gómez-Pantoja (University of Alcalá) writes:

The dolium is not really a dolium but a cupa or wine cask, for which there are several ancient images. My favorite is the well known wine ship carrying barrels from a Gaulish funerary monument which is now in Trier Landesmuseum. I don't know why this motive appears on funerary inscriptions but it isn't the only case I have seen. What I know for sure is [that there is] a class of funerary monument not only with the shape of a barrel but even with recognizable staves, as in Faustina's epitaph.