Job at Cologne: Professor of ArchaeoInformatics / Computational archaeology

June 13th, 2013 by Tom Elliott

Posted for Michael Heinzelmann:

Professor of ArchaeoInformatics / Computational archaeology (W2)

The Institute of Archaeology of the University of Cologne invites applications for a Full Professorhip in ArchaeoInformatics / computational archaeology (pay grade W2). The starting date for this position is October 1st, 2014.

We seek a distinguished faculty member in the position of a full professor for ArchaeoInformatics / computational archaeology and as director of the Institute’s Digital Archaeology Laboratory. Candidate’s scientific focus is in one or more of the following fields: databases, geographic information systems, CAD-, 3D-Modelling. Relevant experience in usage and development of methods in information technology methods is preconditioned. The archaeological focus should be in Classical / Mediterranean archaeology. The successful candidate will have profound knowledge in research and teaching. Applicants should be internationally recognized for leadership and scholarship in their discipline.

Duties will be to head the Digital Archaeology Laboratory and to provide intellectual and administrative leadership for the Institute of Archaeology and its activities as well as interdisciplinary research and teaching in Classics. Cooperation with regional, national and international research facilities is mandatory.

The position is open to candidates with Ph.D and habilitation or equivalent achievement in  Classical or Mediterranean archaeology.

The University of Cologne is an equal opportunities employer. Preference will be given to suitably qualified women or persons with disabilities, all other considerations being equal.

For further information please contact: Prof. Michael Heinzelmann (email: michael.heinzelmann(at)uni-koel.de).

Letter of application, CV,  list of publications, list of given lectures and diplomas (please do not send any original documents) to be sent to

Den Dekan der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität zu Köln,
Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923 Köln.

Closing date is June 30th, 2013.

Digital.Humanities @ Oxford Summer School

June 10th, 2013 by Tom Elliott

Noted on the Digital Classicist list:

The Digital.Humanities @ Oxford Summer School (DHOxSS) is an annual event for anyone working in the Digital Humanities. This year’s Summer School will be held on 8 – 12 July, at the University of Oxford. If you are a researcher, project manager, research assistant, or student of the Humanities, this is an opportunity for you to learn about the tools and methodology of digital humanities, and to make contact with others in your field. You will be introduced to topics spanning from creating, managing, analysing, modelling, visualizing, to publication of digital data for the Humanities. Visit http://digital.humanities.ox.ac.uk/dhoxss/2013/ for more information.

With the DHOxSS’s customisable schedule, you book on one of our five-day workshops, and supplement this by booking several guest lectures from experts in their fields.

The main five-day training workshops this year are:

1. Cultural Connections: exchanging knowledge and widening participation in the Humanities
2. How to do Digital Humanities: Discovery, Analysis and Collaboration
3. A Humanities Web of Data: publishing, linking and querying on the semantic web.
4. An Introduction to XML and the Text Encoding Initiative
5. An Introduction to XSLT for Digital Humanists

There are a variety of evening events including a peer-reviewed poster session to give delegates a chance to demonstrate their work to the other delegates and speakers. The Thursday evening sees an elegant drinks reception and three-course banquet at historic Queen’s College, Oxford! (Well worth it!)

DHOxSS is a collaboration for Digital.Humanities @ Oxford between the University of Oxford’s IT Services, the Oxford e-Research Centre (OeRC), the Bodleian Libraries, and The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities.

If you have questions, then email us at courses@it.ox.ac.uk for answers.
More details at: http://digital.humanities.ox.ac.uk/dhoxss/2013/

James Cummings,
Director of DHOxSS

CFP: Practical Experiences with CIDOC CRM and its Extensions

June 7th, 2013 by Tom Elliott

Noted on the Antiquist list:

CALL FOR PAPERS
Practical Experiences with CIDOC CRM and its Extensions (CRMEX)

http://www.ontotext.com/CRMEX

26th September 2013 in Valetta, Malta

A workshop affiliated with the 17th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2013)

http://www.tpdl2013.info/

Background and Objectives

The CIDOC CRM (international standard ISO 21127:2006) is a conceptual model and ontology with a fundamental role in many data integration efforts in the Digital Libraries and Cultural Heritage (CH) domain. It has spawned various CRM-compliant extensions, such as:

  • Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBRoo) for works and bibliographic data -
  • CRM Digitization (CRMdig) for digitization and provenance
  • CRM for English Heritage (CRMEH) for archaeology
  • British Museum Ontology (BMO) for museum objects
  • Sharing Ancient Wisdoms (SAWS) for medieval gnomologia (collections of wise sayings)
  • PRESSoo, a FRBRoo extension for serial publications

A number of data models, while not CRM-compliant, have been influenced by the CRM, e.g. the Europeana Data Model

EDM. At the same time, some people claim that the examples of practical working systems using CRM are few and far between. There are various difficulties facing wider CRM adoption and interoperation:

  • Because CRM allows many different ways of representing the same situation, CRM adopters in various CH areas need mapping guidelines and best practices to increase the chance of interoperation.
  • - While RDF is the most viable CRM representation, there are various low-level RDF issues that are not standardized. Since RDF representation implies a certain implementation bias and still undergoes changes of good practice, CRM-SIG has been expecting good practices to emerge from people applying CRM in order to make recommendations

The goal of this workshop is to describe and showcase systems using CRM at their core, exchange experience about the practical use of CRM, describe difficulties for the practical application of CRM, and share approaches for overcoming such difficulties.

The ultimate objective of this workshop is to encourage the wider practical adoption of CRM.

The workshop addresses important topics and is quite relevant to the topics of TPDL, given the following:

  • Libraries are opening more and more towards Linked Open Data and semantic technologies
  • Library holdings are often considered one part of CH, to be combined and complemented with data from other CH institutions (consider Europeana and similar national aggregation efforts). CRM is a foundational ontology that can provide a unifying ground for all CH domains
  • FRBRoo is a popular CRM extension with direct application in the library domain

Topics

The workshop invites papers that cover, but are not limited to, the following topics:

  • Software systems and similar developments using CRM
  • CRM repositories that aggregate large amounts of CRM RDF data
  • CRM-compliant extension ontologies and domain specializations. Principles for extending CRM
  • Best practices for representing specific situations from specific CH domains in CRM
  • Best practices, guidelines and detailed mappings from various metadata formats and various CH domains to CRM
  • Joint use of CRM and other popular ontologies. Principles for selecting constructs from different ontologies.
  • Querying, searching and faceted browsing of CRM repositories
  • Display, editing, annotation and cross-linking of CRM data
  • Reasoning with CRM data
  • Encountered mistakes in representing CRM data. CRM learning curve and didactic considerations
  • Shortcomings of CRM, recommendations for CRM evolution. Collaboration on CRM evolution, merging RDF standardization approaches, recommendations for collaborative approaches.
  • Performance and volumetric information about CRM-based systems
  • Evaluations of CRM adoption, usability of CRM-based systems, usage of specific CRM constructs

Workshop Format

The workshop will be a full day:

  • Up to 10 papers, presented in 25 minutes each plus 5 minutes for discussion. We expect a presentation to be submitted for each paper, and an author to present in person.
  • Up to 8 system demos and posters
  • A collaborative session of 1 hour, to draft common position paper and recommendations

Submission instructions

  • The peer review process will be organized at EasyChair. Watch http://www.ontotext.com/CRMEX for news
  • Each paper will be reviewed by three reviewers, assigned by random choice.
  • Workshop proceedings will be published freely at CEUR WS. The authors are advised to use the LNCS format.
  • Accepted papers are expected to be submitted in camera-ready form a week before the workshop, so the proceedings can be ready for the workshop.
  • We expect authors to prepare and submit a presentation a day before the workshop. These presentations will also be included in the proceedings.
  • We also solicit Position Papers for the collaborative session (not refereed, up to 3 pages).

Important dates

  • Paper submission deadline: Jul 27, 2013
  • Paper acceptance notification: Aug 27, 2013
  • Camera-ready version of accepted papers: September 20, 2013
  • Presentations for accepted papers: September 24, 2013
  • Position Papers (non-refereed): September 24, 2013
  • Papers publication at CEUR-WS: September 24, 2013
  • Workshop date: September 26, 2013
  • Final proceedings publication: October 5, 2013 (including presentations and common position paper)

Organizing Committee

  • Vladimir Alexiev, Ontotext, Bulgaria (vladimir.alexiev@ontotext.com). Workshop Chair
  • Vladimir Ivanov, Kazan Federal University, Russia (nomemm@gmail.com). Review Chair
  • Franco Niccolucci, University of Florence, Prato, Italy. Publication Chair
  • Christian-Emil Ore, University of Oslo, Norway. Authors Liaison
  • Guenther Goerz, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. Publicity Chair

Program Committee

  • Christian-Emil Ore, Unit for Digital Documentation, University of Oslo, Norway
  • Ceri Binding, Hypermedia Research Unit, Hypermedia Research Unit; Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Science; University of South Wales
  • Costis Dallas, Associate Professor, Director of Museum Studies, University of Toronto
  • Eero Hyv?nen, Professor and Research Director, Semantic Computing Research Group, Department of Media Technology, Aalto University and University of Helsinki
  • Franco Niccolucci, Director, VAST-LAB, PIN, University of Florence, Prato, Italy (former: Professor at the Faculty of Architecture)
  • Guenther Goerz, lead, Digital Humanities group, Computer Science Department, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany
  • Kai Eckert, Postdoctoral Researcher, Research Group Data and Web Science, University of Mannheim
  • Keith May, Information Strategy Advisor, Strategic Planning & Management Division, English Heritage; Visiting Fellow, University of Glamorgan
  • Martin Doerr, Research Director, Center for Cultural Informatics, Information Systems Laboratory, Institute of Computer Science, FORTH, Greece
  • Michele Pasin, Information architect, Nature Publishing Group (formerly research associate, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College)
  • ?yvind Eide, Senior Analyst, Unit for Digital Documentation, University of Oslo, Norway
  • Panos Constantopoulos, Director of Information Systems and Databases Laboratory, Professor and Department Chairman of Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business; Digital Curation Unit, Institute for the Management of Information Systems, ?Athena? Research Centre
  • Patrick Le Boeuf, Biblioth?que nationale de France
  • Rainer Simon, senior researcher, Digital Memory Engineering research group, Austrian Institute of Technology
  • Stefan Gradmann, Professor at Faculty of Arts, Director of the University Library, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
  • Trond Aalberg, Associate Professor, Data and Information Management group, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
  • Vladimir Alexiev, Lead, Data and Ontology Management group, Ontotext Corp, Bulgaria
  • Vladimir Ivanov, Senior research assistant, Computational Linguistics Laboratory, Kazan Federal University, Russia. Cultural Heritage Digitization Center of Tatarstan

 

 

CFP: CAA2014 Paris Conference

June 4th, 2013 by Tom Elliott

Seen on the Antiquist list:

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

You are warmly invited to take part in the CAA2014 Paris Conference, which will be held at the “Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne – Institut d’art et d’archéologie” 3 rue Michelet, 75006 Paris, France, from 22th to 25th April 2014.

The CAA (Computers Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology) is an international congress which has taken place every year for 40 years, the last being in Australia. This conference usually brings together hundreds of participants and works on the principle of parallel sessions and workshops or roundtables.

The best papers will be published in a volume.

Call for sessions

Sessions, roundtables & workshop proposals are welcome from 25th May to 14th July 2013.

Sessions Themes :

The themes of the conference are likely to include the following :

Field and laboratory data recording
Historiography
Ontologies and standards
Internet and archaeology
3D Archaeology
AIS (Archaeological Information Systems)
GIS & spatial analysis
Mathematics and Statistics in Archaeology
Open source
Computing in Epigraphy and History
Multi-agent systems and complex system modelling
Virtual Archaeology

Session proposals Guideline:

The CAA 2014 Conference organizers invite proposers to read the session guidelines and make their submission accordingly (in English).

Format:

- Paper sessions (only Long paper sessions (LP)

A conventional format session of related 20 minute papers with 5 minute of question time. Papers should present new and ground-breaking research.

- Roundtables

A panel addressing a specific topic or issue, coordinated by one or more individuals. Presentations by the speakers will normally be followed by a discussant and general discussion.

- Workshops:

The conference will include a number of half and full day pre-conference workshops. Workshops will generally include practical work or other active participation of attendees above a technical subject with implementation of software and specific tools.

Proposal structure

Title of the session.
Session theme selected in the Sessions Themes list
An abstract of 300-500 words on a coherent and focused session topic, including a leading question, key issues, the scientific relevance of the subject and
Session category: Long paper session, roundtable or workshop
Name, affiliation, mailing address and e-mail address of the session organizer(s). Each session should have at least two organizers. We will give priority to sessions which are co-organized by scholars from different universities /countries.
Previous experience of the organizer(s) in organizing conference sessions, if any (especially in CAA conferences). Young scholars without previous experience in organizing sessions may list their experience in presenting papers at international conferences. Session organizers are allowed to give a paper and to contact potential paper givers (you can give an indicative list but the papers will have to be submitted after the session acceptance)

Key Dates

30 June 2013            Sessions, Roundtables and Workshops deadline

15 July 2013              Accepted proposals will be posted on the CAA2014 Conference webpage

15 July                         Paper call

31 October 2013       Paper call closed

How to Submit

We look forward to receiving your Proposal. Please submit your proposal via the CAA web site

http://caa2014.sciencesconf.org/

If you have any technical problems in uploading your submission please send an email to

caa2014-submission@sciencesconf.org

For more information about Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA) please visit the CAA International Home Page

We look forward to seeing your Proposal and seeing you in Paris in 2014.

The Local Organising Committee

Dr Laurent Costa, Ingenior CNRS – UMR ArScan, Nanterre

Pr François Djindjian, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne & UMR Trajectoires

Pr François Giligny, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne & UMR Arscan

Dr Paola Moscati, Research Director, Istituto di Studi sulle civiltà Italiche e del Mediterraneo Antico, Rome

Dr Hélène Noizet, Maître de Conférences université Paris1 & LAMOP

Dr Sandrine Robert, Maître de Conférences EHESS Paris & UMR ArScan

Seminar: Hestia 2: Exploring spatial networks through ancient sources

June 4th, 2013 by Tom Elliott

Via Leif Isaksen on the Digital Classicist list:

Dear all,

The AHRC-funded Hestia project is pleased to announce “Hestia2:
Exploring spatial networks through ancient sources”, a one-day seminar
on spatial network analysis and linked data in Classical studies,
archaeology and cultural heritage.

The seminar will be held at The University of Southampton on 18 July.
Registration for this event is free, but we do recommend registering
as early as possible since the number of available places is limited.
More information, including abstracts and registration, can be found
via the following link: http://connectedpast.soton.ac.uk/hestia-2013/

We are looking forward to welcoming you to Southampton!

Elton Barker, Stefan Bouzarovski, Leif Isaksen and Tom Brughmans

—–

Hestia2: Exploring spatial networks through ancient sources

Spatial relationships appear throughout our sources about the past:
from the ancient roads that connect cities, or ancient authors
mentioning political alliances between places, to the stratigraphic
contexts archaeologists deal with in their fieldwork. However, as
datasets about the past become increasingly large, spatial
relationships become ever more difficult to disentangle. Network
visualization and analysis allow us to address such spatial
relationships explicitly and directly. This seminar aims to explore
the potential of these innovative techniques for research in the
higher education, public and cultural heritage sector.

The seminar is part of Hestia2, a public engagement project aimed at
introducing a series of conceptual and practical innovations to the
spatial reading and visualisation of texts. Following on from the
AHRC-funded initiative ‘Network, Relation, Flow: Imaginations of Space
in Herodotus’s Histories’ (Hestia: http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/hestia/
), Hestia2 represents a deliberate shift from experimenting with
geospatial analysis of a single text to making Hestia’s outcomes
available to new audiences and widely applicable to other texts
through a seminar series, online platform, blog and learning materials
with the purpose of fostering knowledge exchange between researchers
and non-academics, and generating public interest and engagement in
this field.

Preliminary programme:

11:00                     Registration and coffee
11:30                     HESTIA-team
Welcome and introduction to HESTIA and HESTIA2
12:00                     Maximilian Schich (The University of Texas at Dallas)
Topography and Topology: Towards common ground in archaeological research
12:25                     Alex Godden (Hampshire County Council)
Historic Environment Records: New ways of looking for the past
12:50                     John Goodwin (Ordnance Survey)
Ordnance Survey and Linked Data
13:15                     Discussion
13:35                     Tea and coffee break
13:55                     Terhi Nurmikko (University of Southampton)
“To survey the land, he left his city” and other proverbs: Mapping ancient Mesopotamia from cuneiform inscriptions
14:20                     Kate Byrne (University of Edinburgh)
Geoparsing and spatial network
analysis in the GAP projects
14:45                     Giorgio Uboldi (Politecnico di Milano)
Knot: an Interface for the Study of Social Networks in the Humanities
15:10                     Discussion
15:35                     Tea and coffee break
16:00                     Keith May (English Heritage)
Exploring the Use of Semantic
Technologies for Cross-Search of Archaeological Grey Literature and
Data
16:25                     Paul Cripps (University of Glamorgan)
GeoSemantic Technologies for Archaeological Resources

Open Book Digital Humanities Series

June 4th, 2013 by Tom Elliott

Via Roberto Rosselli Del Turco on the Digital Classicist list:

Open Book Publishers is proud to announce the launch of a Digital Humanities Series. The series is overseen by an international board of experts and its books subjected to rigorous peer review. Its objective is to encourage and support the development of experimental monographs, edited volumes and collections that extend the boundaries of the field and help to strengthen its interrelations with the other disciplines of the arts, humanities and beyond. We are also interested in introductory guides for non-specialists, best practices guides for practitioners and “state of the art” surveys. The Series will offer digital humanists a dedicated venue for high-quality, Open Access publication.

Proposals in any area of the Digital Humanities are invited. For further details and instructions on how to submit please see
http://www.openbookpublishers.com/section/29/1/digital-humanities

Editorial Board

Paul Arthur, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Julia Flanders, Gary Hall, Brett
Hirsch, Matthew, L. Jockers, John Lavagnino, Willard McCarty, Roberto
Rosselli Del Turco and Elke Teich.

Open Book Publishers

Open Book is an independent academic publisher, run by scholars who are committed to making high-quality research available to readers around the world. We publish monographs and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and offer the academic excellence of a traditional press, with the speed, convenience and accessibility of digital publishing. All our books are available to read for free online. To date we have 30 books in print, over 215,000 visits to these books via the Web and readers from over 125 countries. See http://www.openbookpublishers.com/ for more information.

Lecture: Exploring visibility networks in Iron Age and Roman Southern Spain with Exponential Random Graph Models

June 4th, 2013 by Tom Elliott

Via Simon Mahony:

The first of this Summer’s Digital Classicist & Institute of Classical Studies seminars is this Friday.

Tom Brughmans (University of Southampton)
‘Exploring visibility networks in Iron Age and Roman Southern Spain with Exponential Random Graph Models’

Friday June 7 at 16:30
Room G37, Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU

Are lines of sight between Roman towns important for explaining their location? Through a case study on visibility patterns between urban settlements in Iron Age and Roman Southern Spain, this paper will discuss how Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGM) can help explore hypothetical past processes of interaction and site location. With these models the frequency of certain subnetworks in random networks and the empirically attested network is compared, to examine the probability that the subnetworks might have emerged through random processes. This paper will critically evaluate the potential and limitations of such an approach for archaeology.

The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.

All are welcome

The full 2013 programme is at <http://digiclass.cch.kcl.ac.uk/wip/wip2013.html>

Job: British Library paid internship: digital mapping and medieval cartography

June 4th, 2013 by Tom Elliott

Seen on the Antiquist list:

Date: Fri, 31 May 2013 16:29:52 +0100
From: KC Kowal <kckowal@GOOGLEMAIL.COM>
Subject: Internship: Virtual Mappa Research Associate

A part-time, 12-month, paid internship opportunity is available at the British Library. It would be ideal for a graduate student interested equally in digital mapping technologies for humanities research and medieval cartography.

Funded by a Digital Humanities Implementation Grant, DM: From Annotation to Dissemination dm.drew.edu<https://gs10.globalsuccessor.com/britishlibrary/dm.drew.edu>, is an exciting new project combining medieval research with the latest digital tools. The British Library is a partner in this project and is pleased to be able to host a research intern at the London St Pancras site.

In liaison with the Virtual Mappa Project Team, the Research Associate will work within the Cartographic and Topographical Materials section towards development of content and tools. He/she will create metadata and annotations for map and textual content; assist in design of templates and schemas; generate linked data, and identify external web resources (e.g. other digital repositories, database resources, bibliographic items). Working closely with and under the guidance of the Project Team with testing of new functionality, he/she will contribute to producing the project’s public face – a website virtually collecting the core group of maps and displaying various layers of annotations by different users or groups of users.

To read the full job description and to apply please see https://gs10.globalsuccessor.com/fe/tpl_britishlibrary01.asp?newms=sr Note that the closing date for this post is 16 June. Applicants must have the right to work in the UK.

Kimberly C. Kowal
Lead Curator, Digital Mapping
The British Library
96 Euston Rd.
London NW1 2DB
Tel: +44 (0)20 7412 7849

Which beginners’ Ancient Greek textbook(s) do you use?

May 17th, 2013 by Gabriel Bodard

Dear colleagues,

Please could you take a moment to fill in this survey on the use of textbooks for the teaching of beginners’ Ancient Greek. Only the first three questions are obligatory, and the whole survey should only take a minute to complete. Please circulate this request to any colleagues or communities who may not have seen it here.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FBJ39QL

I’ll post a summary of results to Stoa.org when I’ve collated them in a few weeks time.

A couple of notes:

1. Please answer the questions with regard to your own teaching: only include classes taught by others if you are sure no one else will include them in their answers. (e.g. if you are in a small teaching unit and your colleagues have told you they have no intention of answering). This will never be a comprehensive or reliable survey, but I’d like to avoid any blatant inaccuracy as far as possible.

2. Because of the nature of the questions, this survey is only really appropriate for the anglophone world. I’d be very interested to see more international results, but someone else would need to design the survey.

Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing (DC3)

May 8th, 2013 by Hugh Cayless

Colleagues:

We are very pleased to announce the creation of the Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing (DC3), a new Digital Classics R&D unit embedded in the Duke University Libraries, whose start-up has been generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Duke University’s Dean of Arts & Sciences and Office of the Provost.

The DC3 goes live 1 July 2013, continuing a long tradition of collaboration between the Duke University Libraries and papyrologists in Duke’s Department of Classical Studies. The late Professors William H. Willis and John F. Oates began the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri (DDbDP) more than 30 years ago, and in 1996 Duke was among the founding members of the Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS). In recent years, Duke led the Mellon-funded Integrating Digital Papyrology effort, which brought together the DDbDP, Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis der Griechischen Papyrusurkunden Ägyptens (HGV), and APIS in a common search and collaborative curation environment (papyri.info), and which collaborates with other partners, including Trismegistos, Bibliographie Papyrologique, Brussels Coptic Database, and the Arabic Papyrology Database.

The DC3 team will see to the maintenance and enhancement of papyri.info data and tooling, cultivate new partnerships in the papyrological domain, experiment in the development of new complementary resources, and engage in teaching and outreach at Duke and beyond.

The team’s first push will be in the area of Greek and Latin Epigraphy, where it plans to leverage its papyrological experience to serve a much larger community. The team brings a wealth of experience in fields like image processing, text engineering, scholarly data modeling, and building scalable web services. It aims to help create a system in which the many worldwide digital epigraphy projects can interoperate by linking into the graph of scholarly relationships while maintaining the full force of their individuality.

The DC3 team is:

Ryan BAUMANN: Has worked on a wide range of Digital Humanities projects, from applying advanced imaging and visualization techniques to ancient artifacts, to developing systems for scholarly editing and collaboration.

Hugh CAYLESS: Has over a decade of software engineering expertise in both academic and industrial settings. He also holds a Ph.D. in Classics and a Master’s in Information Science. He is one of the founders of the EpiDoc collaborative and currently serves on the Technical Council of the Text Encoding Initiative.

Josh SOSIN: Associate Professor of Classical Studies and History, Co-Director of the DDbDP, Associate editor of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies; an epigraphist and papyrologist interested in the intersection of ancient law, religion, and the economy.

 

Digital Classicist London & Institute of Classical Studies Seminar 2013

May 2nd, 2013 by Simon Mahony

The programme for the Digital Classicist London & Institute of Classical Studies Seminar 2013 is now published (the abstracts will be added very soon). Please circulate this via your networks. We have, for several years, been recording these seminars and making the audio files available on our seminar webpage. This year we will be recording video and so presentation slides, audio and video files will be available after each seminar.

The programme flyer can be downloaded as a PDF.

All seminars are on Fridays at 16:30 at Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU.

  • June 7: Tom Brughmans (University of Southampton) Exploring visibility networks in Iron Age and Roman Southern Spain with Exponential Random Graph Models
  • June 14: Valeria Vitale (King’s College London) An Ontology for 3D Visualization in Cultural Heritage
  • June 21: Tom Cheesman (University of Swansea) Putting Translations To Work: TransVis
  • June 28: Adrian Ryan (University of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa) Quantifying stylistic distance between Athenian vase-paintings
  • July 5: Dot Porter (University of Pennsylvania) The Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance: a federated platform for discovery and research
  • July 12: 16:30: Eleni Bozia (University of Florida) The Digital Epigraphy and Archaeology Project
    17:30: Greta Franzini (University College London) A catalogue of digital editions: Towards an edition of Augustine’s City of God
  • July 19: Federico Boschetti ( ILC-CNR, Pisa) & Bruce Robertson (Mount Allison, Canada) An Integrated System For Generating And Correcting Polytonic Greek OCR
  • July 26: Marie-Claire Beaulieu (Tufts University) Teaching with the Perseids Platform: Tools and methods
  • August 2: Neel Smith (College of the Holy Cross) Scholarly reasoning and writing in an automatically assembled and tested digital library
  • August 9: Agnes Thomas, Francesco Mambrini & Matteo Romanello (DAI, Berlin) Insights in the World of Thucydides: The Hellespont Project as a research environment for Digital History

Classical Association 2014: Call for Papers: ‘New Approaches to e-Learning in Classics’

May 1st, 2013 by Bartolo Natoli

Following on from wide interest shown in this topic at the Classical Association 2013 Conference, it is proposed that similar panels on e-Learning be convened for CA 2014. Papers are sought on topics relating to the use of e-learning in Classical subjects, including Latin, Greek, Classical Civilisation and Ancient History. The organisers are keen to encourage the submission of papers presenting the innovative use of new technologies, as well as discussion papers on the current state of theory and practice in e-Learning for Classics. The scope of this panel covers the educational sector as a whole, from Primary level through to Higher Education.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words will need to be submitted for consideration by the end of August. Please contact panel organiser Bartolo Natoli by email (bnatoli@utexas.edu) or tweet/DM (@banatoli) if you would like to be involved.

HESTIA2: Exploring spatial networks through ancient sources

April 25th, 2013 by Simon Mahony

Copied from the Digital Classicist list on behalf of the organisers:

CALL FOR PAPERS

HESTIA2: Exploring spatial networks through ancient sources

University of Southampton 18th July 2013
Organisers: Elton Barker, Stefan Bouzarovski, Leif Isaksen and Tom Brughmans, in collaboration with The Connected Past
http://connectedpast.soton.ac.uk/

A free one-day seminar on spatial network analysis in archaeology, history, classics, teaching and commercial archaeology.

Spatial relationships are everywhere in our sources about the past: from the ancient roads that connect cities, or ancient authors mentioning political alliances between places, to the stratigraphic contexts archaeologists deal with in their fieldwork. However, as datasets about the past become increasingly large, these spatial networks become ever more difficult to disentangle. Network techniques allow us to address such spatial relationships explicitly and directly through network visualisation and analysis. This seminar aims to explore the potential of such innovative techniques for research, public engagement and commercial purposes.

The seminar is part of Hestia2, a public engagement project aimed at introducing a series of conceptual and practical innovations to the spatial reading and visualisation of texts. Following on from the AHRC-funded “Network, Relation, Flow: Imaginations of Space in Herodotus’s Histories” (Hestia: http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/hestia/ ), Hestia2 represents a deliberate shift from experimenting with geospatial analysis of a single text to making Hestia’s outcomes available to new audiences and widely applicable to other texts through a seminar series, online platform, blog and learning materials with the purpose of fostering knowledge exchange between researchers and non-academics, and generating public interest and engagement in this field.

For this first Hestia2 workshop we welcome contributions addressing any of (but not restricted to) the following themes:

Spatial network analysis techniques
Spatial networks in archaeology, history and classics
Techniques for the discovery and analysis of networks from textual sources
Exploring spatial relationships in classical and archaeological sources
The use of network visualisations and linked datasets for archaeologists active in the commercial sector and teachers
Applications of network analysis in archaeology, history and classics

Please email proposed titles and abstracts (max. 250 words) to:
t.brughmans@soton.ac.uk by May 13th 2013.

Report on Digital Classics panel, Classical Association 2013

April 17th, 2013 by Gabriel Bodard

(Report by Bartolo Natoli on the digital classics panel, April 6, 2013.)

Last week, I had the privilege of participating in the Classical Association Annual Conference at the University of Reading, UK. One of the panels that I attended struck me as particularly intriguing and important in today’s world of Higher Education: the Digital Classics panel. In fact, at the same time at which the CA Conference was occurring, the first annual Digital Classics Association Conference was happening at the University of Buffalo, a fact that further underlines the growing importance of this emerging side of Classics. Read the rest of this entry »

Report on e-learning panel, Classical Association 2013

April 6th, 2013 by Gabriel Bodard

(Report by Bartolo Natoli on the e-learning panel, April 5, 2013.)

Earlier today, the Classical Association’s Annual Conference, hosted by the University of Reading, presented two panels on ‘New Approaches to e-Learning’, a topic of growing interest in Classical Studies. The two panels boasted papers full of insights and suggestions for incorporating educational technology into both Latin and Classical Civilization classes. The first panel, consisting of papers by Jonathan Eaton and Alex Smith, focused more on how technology could be employed in classroom instruction on a macro-level. Eaton’s talk provided examples of how Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) could be used to enhance student learning and touched on the controversial topic of massive open online courses (MOOCs). Eaton suggested that VLEs be used to offer resources to students asynchronically, whereas evaluation and direct instruction be employed in a f2f setting: blended learning was a key means of maximizing learning potential. An example of such blended learning was Alex Smith’s discussion of using technology to provide students with collaborative and higher-level learning activities based on synthesis through the creation of a website in eXeLearning that was based on set lines of Latin. Students worked through both Latin content and 21st century, real-world skills such as collaboration and web design. Technology provided the medium, but was not the goal. Read the rest of this entry »

Open Philology Project Announced

April 4th, 2013 by Tom Elliott

Via Marco Büchler, Greg Crane has just posted “The Open Philology Project and Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at Leipzig” at Perseus Digital Library Updates.

Abstract: The Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig sees in the rise of Digital Technologies an opportunity to re-assess and re-establish how the humanities can advance the understanding of the past and to support a dialogue among civilizations. Philology, which uses surviving linguistic sources to understand the past as deeply and broadly as possible, is central to these tasks, because languages, present and historical, are central to human culture. To advance this larger effort, the Humboldt Chair focuses upon enabling Greco-Roman culture to realize the fullest possible role in intellectual life. Greco-Roman culture is particularly significant because it contributed to both Europe and the Islamic world and the study of Greco-Roman culture and its influence thus entails Classical Arabic as well as Ancient Greek and Latin. The Humboldt Chair inaugurates an Open Philology Project with three complementary efforts that produce open philological data, educate a wide audience about historical languages, and integrate open philological data from many sources: the Open Greek and Latin Project organizes content (including translations into Classical Arabic and modern languages); the Historical Language e-Learning Project explores ways to support learning across barriers of language and culture as well as space and time; the Scaife Digital Library focuses on integrating cultural heritage sources available under open licenses.

Details of the project, its components, and rationale are provided in the original post.

Possible Jobs in Digital Humanities at Leipzig

February 16th, 2013 by Simon Mahony

I picked up this announcement from the Perseus Digital Library

Possible Jobs in Digital Humanities at Leipzig

The Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities and Department of Computer Science at the University of Leipzig is looking for candidates for two possible collaborating research groups, one focused on reinventing scholarly communication for Greek and Latin, as a case study for historical languages in general, with the other helping the University Library develop methods to manage and visualize billion of words and associated annotations of many kinds. Details of the funding are being finalized but positions will ideally start in May 2013 and with an initial one year contract that could be extended to a second year that could include one semester residence at a US university. Read the rest of this entry »

Bursaries available for London EpiDoc training, April 2013

February 7th, 2013 by Gabriel Bodard

A reminder that we are inviting applications for a training event in digital encoding of epigraphy and papyrology at the Institute for Classical Studies, London, April 22-5, 2013 (see full announcement). Thanks to the generosity of the British Epigraphy Society and Society for Promotion of Roman Studies, we now have a limited number of bursaries available to assist students with attending this workshop.

If you would like to apply for financial support in attending the EpiDoc workshop, please note in your application email that you would like to be considered for a bursary, approximately how much you expect the trip to cost you, and what other sources of funding you have. If you have already applied for the training, please just send an additional email asking to be considered, and we’ll add a note to this effect to your application. A decision will be made shortly after the closing date on March 1st.

Digital Classicist London 2013: Call for Papers

January 24th, 2013 by Gabriel Bodard

The Digital Classicist London seminar series, which provides a forum for research into the ancient world that employs digital research methods, invites submissions for Summer 2013.

We warmly welcome contributions from students as well as established researchers and practitioners. Themes could include digital text, semantics and linguistics, imaging and visualization, linked data, open access, geographic analysis, information science and serious gaming, although this list is by no means exhaustive. While we welcome high-quality application papers discussing individual projects and their immediate context, the series also hopes to accommodate broader theoretical consideration of the use of digital technology in ancient studies. Presentations should have an academic research agenda relevant both to classicists, ancient historians or archaeologists, and to information specialists or digital humanists.

The seminars will run on Friday afternoons at 16:30, from June to early August in the Institute of Classical Studies, Senate House, London. There is a budget to assist with travel to London (usually from within the UK, but please enquire if you’re coming from further afield).

To submit a paper for consideration for the Digital Classicist London Seminars, please email an abstract of 300-500 words to gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk, by midnight UTC on March 22nd, 2013.

More information will be found at http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2013.html

EpiDoc Workshop, London, April 22-25, 2013

January 11th, 2013 by Gabriel Bodard

We invite applications for a 4-day training workshop on digital text-markup for epigraphic and papyrological editing, to be held in the Institute for Classical Studies, London and supported by the British Epigraphy Society and Society for Promotion of Roman Studies. The workshop will be taught by Gabriel Bodard (KCL), James Cowey (Heidelberg), Simona Stoyanova (KCL) and Charlotte Tupman (KCL). There will be no charge for the teaching, but participants will have to arrange their own travel and accommodation.

EpiDoc (epidoc.sf.net) is a set of guidelines for using TEI XML (tei-c.org) for the encoding of inscriptions, papyri and other ancient documentary texts. It has been used to publish digital projects including the Inscriptions of Aphrodisias and Tripolitania, the US Epigraphy Project, Vindolanda Tablets Online and Curse Tablets from Roman Britain, Pandektis (inscriptions of Macedonia and Thrace), and the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri. The workshop will introduce participants to the basics of XML and markup and give hands-on experience of tagging textual features and object description in EpiDoc as well as use of the tags-free Papyrological Editor (papyri.info/editor).

No technical skills are required to apply, but a working knowledge of Greek or Latin, epigraphy or papyrology and the Leiden Conventions will be assumed. The workshop is open to participants of all levels, from graduate students to professors or professionals.

To apply for a place on this workshop please email gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk with a brief description of your reason for interest and summarising your relevant skills and background, by Friday March 1st, 2013.

Diccionario Griego-Español online

December 21st, 2012 by Gabriel Bodard

Forwarded for Sabine Arnaud-Thuillier:

The members of the Diccionario Griego-Español project (DGE, CSIC, Madrid) are pleased to announce the release of DGE online (http://dge.cchs.csic.es/xdge/), first digital edition of the published section (α-ἔξαυος) of our Lexicon. Although still in progress, the DGE, written under the direction of Prof. F.R. Adrados, is currently becoming the largest bilingual dictionary of ancient Greek: it already includes about 60,000 entries and 370,000 citations of ancient authors and texts. Simultaneously, we are releasing the edition of LMPG online(http://dge.cchs.csic.es/lmpg/), the digital version of the Lexicon of Magic and Religion in the Greek Magical Papyri, written by Luis Muñoz Delgado (Supplement V of DGE). The digitization of this smaller Lexicon is considered as a successful prototype of this ambitious digitization initiative: further on DGE online will be improved with similar advanced features, such as the implementation of a customized search engine. Any critics and suggestions on that matter will be very welcome. We hope these new open access dictionaries will be of your interest and will become, to some extent, valuable tools for Ancient Greek studies.

Juan Rodríguez Somolinos (Main Researcher) and Sabine Arnaud-Thuillier (responsible for the digital edition)
juan.rodriguez@cchs.csic.es
sabine.thuillier@cchs.csic.es

Workshop on Canonical Text Services: Furman May 19-22, 2013

December 18th, 2012 by Gabriel Bodard

Posted for Christopher Blackwell:

What · With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Furman University’s Department of Classics is offering a workshop on the Canonical Text Services Protocol.

When · May 19 – 22, 2013.

Where · Greenville, South Carolina, (Wikipedia); Furman University.

Who · Applications will be accepted from anyone interested in learning about exposing canonically cited texts online with CTS. We have funds to pay for travel and lodging for six participants.

How · Apply by e-mail to christopher.blackwell@furman.edu by January 31, 2013.

For more information, see http://folio.furman.edu/workshop.html or contact christopher.blackwell@furman.edu

RA Job: The Art of Making in Antiquity (King’s College London)

December 10th, 2012 by Gabriel Bodard

Research Assistant position, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London

The Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London is looking for a highly motivated individual to work on The Art of Making in Antiquity project: www.artofmaking.ac.uk

This research-led project explores the tools, techniques and working practices of Roman stone carvers through a unique set of photographic images alongside new contextual information brought together into an innovative online collection employing cutting edge digital solutions including image annotation. This position is an excellent opportunity for a postgraduate student looking for experience to help them move to more advanced research in ancient visual culture and/or the application of the digital humanities to the classical world.

This is a 6-month position and the closing date for applications is the 1st January 2013.

More details about the position and details of how to apply can be found at: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/pertra/vacancy/external/pers_detail.php?jobindex=12621

For an informal discussion of the post please contact Paul Vetch on 020 7848 1040, or via email at paul.vetch@kcl.ac.uk

Suggestions for new Greek, Latin texts? English translations?

December 6th, 2012 by gregcrane

[Please repost!]

We are preparing for a new set of texts to be entered by the data entry firm with which we work (http://www.digitaldividedata.org/). The next order will be sent in mid December but a more substantial order will be placed early in 2013.

What would you like to see added to the Perseus Digital Library, both for use within the Perseus site and for download as TEI XML under a Creative Commons license? Note that we only enter materials that are in the public domain and that can be freely redistributed for re-use by others.

Some possibilities — but please suggest other things that you find important!

* Scholia of Greek and Latin authors.

* Collections of fragmentary authors

* Sources from later antiquity (esp. Christian sources)

* More English translations

Please think about (1) individual authors and texts and (2) what you would want to see if we could do something big.

If you have individual suggestions, please write gcrane2008@gmail.com. A public discussion via the Digital Classicist would probably be the best.

Let us know what you want!

Digital Humanities developer post at KCL

November 21st, 2012 by Gabriel Bodard

The Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London is advertising for a research developer to work on some of the active projects in the department.

The successful candidate for this position will have wide experience in modelling structured data and developing tools to search, query, retrieve and display them using relational databases, RDF, and related technologies; in designing, writing and modifying programs which facilitate content creation; and collaborating in the development of integrated interfaces for web publication.

Experience in creating and manipulating structured data with a range of RDB-related and web-delivery standards and technologies (SQL, SPARQL, Django/ Python, Javascript/ JQuery) is essential. Familiarity with ontologies, text processing techniques and standards-compliant XHTML and CSS is highly desirable, as is experience in the modelling of humanities data, especially that relating to manuscripts and documents.

Among other projects, the appointee is likely to contribute to the Ancient Inscriptions of the Northern Black Sea.

Full job description and application information at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/pertra/vacancy/external/pers_detail.php?jobindex=12519