In addition to this we are also featured along with some discussion (and pix where possible) on the arts-humanities.net community blog.

We now have a Twitter hash tag (#digiclass) which means you can follow what’s new there as well. Just put #digiclass in your Twitter search box.

Tuesday, June 23
11-12:30

Benjamin Banneker Room
Chair: Dot Porter

Towards an Interpretation Support System for Reading Ancient Documents
Henriette Roued Olsen, Segolene Tarte, Melissa Terras, Michael Brady, Alan Bowman

Image as Markup: Adding Semantics to Manuscript Images
Hugh Cayless

Computer-Aided Palaeography, Present and Future
Peter A. Stokes

2-3:30

Margaret Brent Room
Chair: Patrick Juola

Medieval scribes in parts of speech (paper #3)
Karina van Dalen-Oskam

Benjamin Banneker Room
Chair: Paul Caton

Creating a Composite Cultural Heritage Artifact - the Digital Object
Fenella G. France, Eric F. Hansen, Michael B. Toth

On-site Scanning of 3D Manuscripts
Timothy H. Brom, James Griffioen, W. Brent Seales

The Ghost in the Manuscript: Hyperspectral Text Recovery and Segmentation
Patrick Shiel, John G. Keating, Malte Rehbein,

Juan Ramon Jimenez Room
Chair: Elisabeth Burr

Integrating Images and Text with Common Data and Metadata Standards in the Archimedes Palimpsest (paper #1)
Doug Emery, Michael B. Toth

Wednesday, June 24
11-12:30

Juan Ramon Jimenez Room
Chair: Dino Buzzetti

MAPS: Manuscript map Annotation and Presentation System
Charles van den Heuvel

Manuscript Annotation in Space and Time
Erica Fretwell

The Atlas of Early Printing: Digital History and Book History
Gregory J. Prickman

Thursday, June 25
11:00-12:30

Charles Carroll Room

Digital Classicist: Re-use of Open Source and Open Access Publications in Ancient Studies
Gabriel Bodard, C. W. Blackwell, Tobias Blanke, Tom Elliott, Sean Gillies, Mark Hedges, D. N. Smith

4:00-5:30
Charles Carroll Room

Funding the Digital Humanities
Moderator: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

Discussion with officers from the NEH, Mellon, IMLS, SSHRCC (Canada), NSF, DFG (Germany), AHRC (UK)

Posters
Session #2, 3:30-4:00pm, Tuesday June 23rd

Implementing Greek Morphology
Helma Dik, Richard Whaling

Digital Editions for Corpus Linguistics: Encoding Abbreviations in TEI XML Mark-up
Alpo Honkapohja

The earlier post has been updated with the full details.
See: http://www.stoa.org/?p=909

Simon

The EpiDoc community has been developing protocols for the publication of inscriptions, papyri, and other documentary Classical texts in TEI-compliant XML: for details see the community website at http://epidoc.sf.net.

Over the last few years there has been increasing demand for training by scholars wishing to use EpiDoc. We are delighted to be able to announce two training workshops, which will be offered in 2009. Both will be led by Dr Gabriel Bodard. These sessions will benefit scholars working on Greek or Latin documents with an interest in developing skills in the markup, encoding, and exploitation of digital editions. Competence in Greek and/or Latin, and knowledge of the Leiden Conventions will be assumed; no particular computer skills are required.

London session, 20-24 July 2009. This will take place at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London, 26-29 Drury Lane. The cost of attendance will be £50 for students; £100 for employees of universities or other non-profit institutions; £200 for employees of commercial institutions. Those interested in enrolling should apply to Dr Bodard, gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk by 20 June 2009.

We hope to be able to offer some follow-up internships after the session, to enable participants to consolidate their experience under supervision; please let us know if that would be of interest to you.

Rome session, 21-25 September 2009. This will take place at the British School at Rome. Thanks to the generous support of the International Association of Greek and Latin Epigraphy, the British School and Terra Italia Onlus, attendance will be free.

Those interested in enrolling should apply to Dr Silvia Orlandi, silvia.orlandi@uniroma1.it by 30 June 2009.

Practical matters
Both courses will run from Monday to Friday starting at 10:00 am and ending at 16:00 each day.

Participants should bring a wireless-enabled laptop. You should acquire and install a copy of Oxygen *and* either an educational licence ($48) or a 30-day trial licence (free). Don’t worry if you don’t know how to use it!

International Conference

Codicology and Palaeography in the Digital Age

Munich, 3-4 July 2009

The conference will focus on the challenges and consequences of using IT and the internet for codicological and palaeographic research. The authors of some selected articles of an anthology to be published this summer by the Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Editing (IDE) will present and discuss their excellent research results with scholars and experts working on ancient books and manuscripts. The presentations will be given on current issues in the following fields: manuscript catalogues and descriptions, digitization of manuscripts, collaborative systems of research on manuscripts, codicological databases, manuscript catalogues, research based on digital resources, e-learning in palaeography, palaeographic databases (characters, scripts, scribes), (semi-) automatic recognition of scripts and scribes, digital tools for transcriptions, visions and prototypes of other digital tools.

A panel discussion will be held with renowned exponents in the field of codicology and palaeography and contributors of cutting edge research to get an overview of the state of the art as well as to open up new perspectives of codicological and palaeographic research in the “digital age”.

(More information including preliminary programme)

Digital Classicist/ICS Work in Progress Seminar, Summer 2009

Fridays at 16:30 in STB3/6 (Stewart House), Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU

(NB: July 17th seminar in British Library, 96 Euston Rd, NW1 2DW)

June 5: Bart Van Beek (Leuven)
‘Onomastics and Name-extraction in Graeco-Egyptian Papyri’

June 12: Philip Murgatroyd (Birmingham)
‘Starting out on the Journey to Manzikert: Agent-based modelling and
Mediaeval warfare logistics’

June 19: Mark Hedges & Tobias Blanke (King’s College London)
‘Linking and Querying Ancient Texts: A multi-database case study with epigraphic corpora”

June 26: Marco Büchler & Annette Loos (Leipzig)
‘Textual Re-use of Ancient Greek Texts: A case study on Plato’s works’

July 3: Roger Boyle & Kia Ng (Leeds) *NB: in room:STB 9*
‘Extracting the Hidden: Paper Watermark Location and Identification’

July 10: Cristina Vertan (Hamburg)
‘Teuchos: An Online Knowledge-based Platform for Classical Philology’

July 17: Christine Pappelau (Berlin) *NB: in British Library*
‘Roman Spolia in 3D: High Resolution Leica 3D Laser-scanner meets
ancient building structures’

July 24: Elton Barker (Oxford)
‘Herodotos Encoded Space-Text-Imaging Archive’

July 31: Leif Isaksen (Southampton)
‘Linking Archaeological Data’

August 7: Alexandra Trachsel (Hamburg)
‘An Online Edition of the Fragments of Demetrios of Skepsis’

ALL WELCOME

We are inviting both students and established researchers involved in the application of the digital humanities to the study of the ancient world to come and introduce their work. The focus of this seminar series is the interdisciplinary and collaborative work that results at the interface of expertise in Classics or Archaeology and computer Science.

The seminars will be followed by wine and refreshments.

For more information please contact any of the following:
Gabriel.Bodard@kcl.ac.uk
Stuart.Dunn@kcl.ac.uk
Juan.Garces@bl.uk
Simon.Mahony@kcl.ac.uk
or see the seminar website at
http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2009.html

ISMAR and its forerunners IWAR, ISMR and ISAR, have been the premier forums in this vital field since 1998 (http://www.ismar-conf.org). This year, we place particular emphasis on widening the scope of MR/AR toward the areas of arts, entertainment and the humanities. To this end, the “traditional” Science & Technology track will be complemented by an Arts, Media and Humanities track with its unique and separate publication. Both programs will follow ISMAR’s stringent publication requirements with reviews being provided by qualified peers from these respective disciplines.

The focus and scope of this call for participation in the Arts, Media and Humanities track are new and have different topics, reviewers and selection criteria. These will be complemented with Tutorials, Workshops, Demonstrations and Competitions will provide more opportunities for contributions and submissions.

Contact AMH@ismar09.org for further inquiry.

—————

InterFace 2009: Second Call for Papers

**PLEASE NOTE - ALL PARTICIPANTS MUST PRESENT A POSTER OR LIGHTNING TALK**
**DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS IS MAY 1ST**

InterFace 2009:
1st National Symposium for Humanities and Technology
9-10 July, University of Southampton, UK.

http://www.interface09.org.uk

InterFace is a new type of annual event. Part conference, part workshop, part networking opportunity, it will bring together postdocs, early career academics and postgraduate researchers from the fields of Information Technology and the Humanities in order to foster cutting-edge collaboration. As well as having a focus on Digital Humanities, it will also be an important forum for Humanities contributions to Computer Science. The event will furthermore provide a permanent web presence for communication between delegates both during, and following, the conference.

Delegate numbers are limited to 80 (half representing each sector) and all participants will be expected to present a poster or a ‘lightning talk’ (a two minute presentation) as a stimulus for discussion and networking sessions.  Delegates can also expect to receive illuminating keynote talks from world-leading experts, presentations on successful interdisciplinary projects, ‘Insider’s Guides’ and workshops. The registration fee for the two-day event is £30. For a full overview of the event, please visit the website.

Confirmed Speakers

Keynote:

* Willard McCarty
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, KCL

* Dame Wendy Hall, President of the Association of Computing Machinery
University of Southampton

Insider’s Guides:

* Stephen Brown, De Montfort University
Knowledge Media Design, De Montfort University

* Ed Parsons
Geospatial Technologist, Google

* Sarah Porter
Head of Innovation, JISC

Project Showcase:

* Mary Orr & Mark Weal, University of Southampton
Digital Flaubert

* Adrian Bell, University of Reading
The Soldier in Later Medieval England

* Kathy Buckner, Centre for Social Informatics, Edinburgh Napier University
e-Participation Projects in Action: a socio-technical perspective

Workshops:

1) Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)
Arianna Ciula, European Science Foundation & Sebastian Rahtz, Oxford University

2) Visualisation
Manuel Lima, VisualComplexity.com

3) EPrints Respositories: Managing Data for Mash-ups
Leslie Carr & Adam Field

4) Interdisciplinarity & the Media
Jon Copley & Claire Ainsworth

Paper Submissions:

If you are interested in attending, please submit an original paper, of 1500 words or less, describing an idea or concept you wish to present. Please indicate whether you would prefer to produce a poster or perform a 2-minute lightning talk. Papers must be produced as a PDF or in Microsoft Word (.doc) format and submitted through our EasyChair page:

- Register for an easy chair account: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/account_apply.cgi
- Log in: https://www.easychair.org/?conf=interface09
- Click New Submission at the top of the page and fill in the form.

Make sure you:
- Select your preference of lightning talk or poster.
- Select whether you are representing humanities or technology.
- Attach and upload your paper.
If you encounter any problems, please e-mail submissions@interface09.org.uk

Papers should focus on potential (and realistic) areas for collaboration between the Technology and Humanities Sectors, either by addressing particular problems, new developments, or both. Prior work may be presented where relevant but the nature of the paper must be forward-looking. As such, the scope is extremely broad but topics might include:

Technology

* 3D immersive environments
* Pervasive technologies
* Online collaboration
* Natural language processing
* Sensor networks
* The Semantic Web
* Agent based modelling
* Web Science

Humanities

* Spatial cognition
* Text editing and analysis
* New Media
* Linguistics
* Applied sociodynamics & social network analysis
* Archaeological reconstruction
* Information Ethics
* Dynamic logics
* Electronic corpora

Due to the limited number of places, papers will be subject to review by committee and applicants notified by email as to their acceptance. All accepted papers will be published online one week in advance of the conference.

Important Dates:

* Paper Submission Deadline: 1 May 2009
* Acceptances Announced: 18 May 2009
* Conference: 9th-10th July 2009

For further information, please visit the conference website (http://www.interface09.org.uk) or e-mail admin@interface09.org.uk.

• Ryan Baumann & Gabriel Bodard, 3D Visualization and Digitization of Epigraphic Materials
• Stuart Dunn, Seeing into the Past: Visualization, the ancient world, and the e-Science programme
• Brian Fuchs, Rashmi Singhal, Jazz Mack Smith, & Gregory Crane, PhiloGrid: A Web Toolkit for the Ancient World
• Caroline Macé, Ilse deVos, & Philippe Baret, Can phylogenetics methods help to cure contaminated textual traditions?

There was a slight change to the line-up on the day as Stuart Dunn’s attempts to reach Glasgow were scuppered by the incompetence of a budget airline: the three remaining papers were followed by 20 minutes open discussion, and then slightly early adjournment to the hotel bar.

Baumann spoke about the difficulties of reading, photographing, and visualizing curse tablets in general, and the steatite fragments from Amathous in Cyprus especially, which are translucent and therefore resistent to both normal photography and even the laser imaging used to take high-resolution 3-D images of inscribed objects. He then showed examples of a lead tablet (DT 25) which has degraded further in the century since it was transcribed, and argued that the high quality imaging this project is piloting is an important conservation exercise as well as having potential for improving the interpretation and transcription of the texts. The remainder of the presentation was a demonstration of some of the techniques for taking and manipulating 3-D readings using the laser scanner.

Fuchs gave a detailed history of and report on the PhiloGrid services, created by Imperial College London and the Perseus Project as part of a JISC/NEH Transatlantic collaborative digitization grant from 2008-09. He summarised the objectives and achievements of the project, including the mounting of Perseus web services such as lexical and morphological tools, the construction of a citation framework based on FRBR, and the digitization of new content. He also gave an introduction to and invited all present to attend a workshop on Arabic web services to be held at Imperial College London on Wednesday May 13 (further details to be announced here soon).

Macé and de Vos introduced the work carried out by classicists and generic biologists at the Université Catholique de Louvain on using statistical and probabilistic phylogenetic software to try and reconstruct the stemma of a contaminated manuscript tradition. They tested the phylogenetic algorithms for fitness for this task by creating a fictional manuscript tradition for a small section of the text of Proclus, including both horizontal and vertical contamination. Two phylogenetic methods—parsimony analysis and bootstrap analysis—were applied to the data, with mixed results. Vertical contamination in particular still defeats the generic technologies, but further work may improve the accuracy of such tools. (This work, needless to say, will also result in more robust algorithms and methodologies for the biologists, so this is a true e-Science interdisciplinary collaboration that really does have research interest for both fields.)

Many thanks to all who contributed to this panel, including the audience members who took part in the lively discussion afterward. Clearly there is a call for discussion of e-Science issues at Classics venues.

This story, which is best read in full at the Boingboing link above, involves an archive of police records including evidence of the abuse and murder of “subversives”–teachers, students, journalists, campaigners, and the like–which was dumped in the basement of an old detention centre and has mouldered and rotted for 25 years. The digitization and decypherment of these records has led to the arrest and prosecution of at least one police office for the murder of a civilian in 1984. Although this is a grim story, it is heartening to hear that the work we do so painstakingly to reconstruct ancient texts has applications with current social value as well. (I’ll keep working on those curse tablets, then!) I don’t know if any digital humanities scholars were involved in this work, but would be interested to hear if anyone has any insight into that.