The Stoa Consortium

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.

Lecture announcement: http://www.loc.gov/loc/kluge/news/index.html#sep27

September 27, 2012
Lecture: “Chasing Krüger’s Dream: Studying the Transmission of Classical and Medieval Manuscripts Using Lattice Theory and Information Entropy.” John W. Hessler, Kluge Staff Fellow.
4:00 – 5:00 p.m., LJ-119, Thomas Jefferson Building, Library of Congress. Reception to follow.

Abstract

How accurately have culturally fundamental texts from literature, law, science, geography, and philosophy been handed down from ancient Rome and Greece to the present by way of scribal copying in the Middle Ages?  This fundamental question of how various manuscripts from a textual tradition have been transmitted through space and time has been the concern of scholars since at least the founding of the great Library of Alexandria in the third century BC.

Early Medieval scribes recognized that in the process of copying ancient texts mistakes were made, and that these errors became part of the textual tradition, to be passed on through history. They also realized that this process of copying error had a random or chaotic nature, and so they invented the demon Tutivillus, whom they considered to be the error’s source. Throughout the Renaissance scholars, like Erasmus, battled this demon in their attempts to re-construct important Latin and Greek manuscripts descended from antiquity. Later in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries scholars, like Karl Lachmann and Paul Krüger, tried to systematize a method in order to determine which parts of medieval manuscripts were errors, and which were the real readings descended from the original authors.

This paper will highlight a new computational technique to show how modern digital philology is changing the way we think of the transmission of medieval manuscripts through space and time, and is also helping to solve this seemingly simple, but unfortunately, rather complicated problem. Using the notes of the classical philologist Paul Krüger, whose manuscripts were recently rediscovered in the Law Library of Congress, complex three dimensional visualization techniques will be used to show how the medieval manuscripts making up the Codex of Justinian are spatially and temporally related to each other. This talk will also highlight how these new techniques give scholars the tools to postulate what the structure of missing and destroyed manuscripts might have been.  Using these methods, based in lattice theory and information entropy, this paper can be seen as a case study in how digital and computational algorithms are changing the face of even the most traditional of the humanities, classical philology.

The results of this study and my year long Kluge Fellowship will be published in the book  called, Roman Law in Ruins: a Computational Study of the Medieval Transmission of Justinian’s Codex“. This has been made possible through a generous grant from the American Academy in Rome and it will be published copyright free both in hardcover and on the web by Franz-Steiner Verlag (Berlin) in February, 2014 as part of their Alte Geschichte Monograph Series.

This just in from Joel Kalvesmaki:

I am pleased to announce the appearance of the Guide to Evagrius Ponticus, a digital-only, peer-reviewed reference work about the fourth-century monastic theologian. Updated quarterly, it provides definitive, integrated lists of Evagrius’s works, of editions and translations of those works, and of studies related to his life and thought. The Guide also includes a sourcebook of key ancient testimonies to Evagrius and his reception, in English translation, as well as a checklist of images from the ancient world.

The Guide takes relatively new approaches to open-access academic publishing in the digital humanities [ed: cc-nc-sa], and so is anticipated to develop over the coming years. Future editions will include a manuscript checklist, images of manuscripts, transcriptions of those manuscripts, and open-source critical editions of Evagrius’s writings.

http://evagriusponticus.net/

(For a more complete experience, read the Guide on a browser other than Internet Explorer.)

New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) will host the Linked Ancient World Data Institute (LAWDI) from May 31st to June 2nd, 2012 in New York City. “Linked Open Data” is an approach to the creation of digital resources that emphasizes connections between diverse information on the basis of published and stable web addresses (URIs) that identify common concepts and individual items. LAWDI, funded by the Office of Digital Humanities of the National Endowment for Humanities, will bring together an international faculty of practitioners working in the field of Linked Data with twenty attendees who are implementing or planning the creation of digital resources.

More information, including a list of faculty, and application instructions are available at the LAWDI page on the Digital Classicist wiki.

The Alabama Digital Humanities Center at the University of Alabama (http://www.lib.ua.edu/digitalhumanities) is pleased to invite applications for a post-doctoral fellowship in Digital Humanities. The fellowship offers the successful candidate a unique platform for professional advancement: financial and material support for independent research combined with the opportunity to play an instrumental role in nurturing the growing digital humanities community at the University of Alabama.

See the full announcement here.

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

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).

From Rachel Opitz:

TRAIL 2011 Training and Research in the Archaeological Interpretation of Lidar
14-16 March 2011, European Research Centre at Bibracte, Glux-en-Glenne, France

The objective of these days is to create a forum for discussion for professionals, researchers and students who have previously worked with LiDAR or are currently involved in the preparatory or active phase of a project using LiDAR. The exchanges at this workshop aim to show the potential of the technology for archaeological applications, to discuss possibilities for coordination, method sharing and to outline research perspectives at the European level.

This workshop will be organized in two phases:

• Two half-day sessions targeted for archaeologists who are not LiDAR specialists but who are interested in the potential archaeological applications;
• Two half-day sessions targeting archaeologists already familiar with the technology.

Application forms and more information are available from: http://modelter.zrc-sazu.si/ .

Please direct any questions to Rachel Opitz at rachel.opitz@mshe.univ-fcomte.fr.

New York University
Programmer/Analyst

New York University’s Division of the Libraries seeks a Programmer/Analyst to work on the “Papyrological Navigator” (http://papyri.info) and associated systems. Papyri.info is a web-based research portal that provides scholars worldwide with the ability to search, browse and collaboratively edit texts, transcriptions, images and metadata relating to ancient texts on papyri, pottery fragments and other material. The incumbent will work closely with the Project Coordinator and with scholars involved in the project at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, Duke University, the University of Kentucky and the University of Heidelberg, as well as with NYU Digital Library Technology staff.

The incumbent’s initial responsibilities will include: close collaboration with project team members to enhance and extend a robust production environment at NYU for the ongoing ingest and processing of new and updated text transcriptions, metadata and digital images; performing both analysis and programming of any required changes or enhancements to current PN applications.

Candidates should have the following skills:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer or information science and 3 years of relevant experience or equivalent combination
• Must include experience developing web applications using Java
• Demonstrated knowledge of Java, Javascript, Tomcat, Saxon, Lucene, Apache, SQL, XML, XSLT
• Experience with metadata standards (e.g. TEI, EpiDoc)
• Experience working in Unix/Linux environments
• Preferred: Experience with Apache Solr, RDF triple stores (e.g. Mulgara), Clojure
• Preferred: Experience designing, building, and deploying distributed systems
• Preferred: Experience working with non-Roman Unicode-based textual data (esp. Greek)
• Excellent communication and analytical skills

Applicants should submit resume and cover letter, which reflects how applicant’s education and experience match the job requirements.

NYU offers a competitive salary and superior benefit package, which includes tuition benefits for self and eligible family members, generous vacation, medical, dental, and retirement plans. For more information about working at NYU visit our website at: www.nyucareers.com.

To apply:

To apply for this position online, visit
http://www.nyucareers.com/applicants/Central?quickFind=52507

NYU is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer.

Seen in a post, on various lists, by Fabian Reiter:

Liebe Kollegen,

im Rahmen des von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft geförderten
Digitalisierungsprojektes der Berliner Papyrussammlung ist für 3 Jahre
die Stelle eines Fachinformatikers zu besetzen, vgl. die Ausschreibung
unter den folgenden Adresse:

http://hv.spk-berlin.de/deutsch/beruf_karriere/freie_stellen/museum/AeMP2-2010.pdf

Marco Büchler asked me to post the following notice:

Workshop: eHumanities – How does computer science benefit?
Organiser: Prof. Gerhard Heyer and Marco Büchler (Natural Language Processing / CS, University of Leipzig)

SPECIAL HINT:
————————–
The workshop is compiled NOT only by presentations of computer scientists BUT researchers from humanities and infrastructure as well. HUMANISTS ARE VERY WELCOME!!!

Dates:
———
Conference Sept. 27th – Oct. 1st, 2010
eHumanities workshop: Thursday Sept. 30th.

Registration details:
——————————–
**Early bird registration:  July 30th, 2010**
Registration page: http://www.informatik2010.de/480.html

Workshop description:
————————————
In recent years the text-based humanities and social sciences experienced a synthesis between the increasing availability of digitized texts and algorithms from the fields of information retrieval and text mining that resulted in novel tools for text processing and analysis, and enabled entirely new questions and innovative methodologies.

The goal of this workshop is to investigate which consequences and potentials for computer science have emerged in turn from the digitization of the social sciences and humanities.

(more…)

The following notice comes by way of Elli Mylonas at Brown University:

The digital Sanskrit library in the Department of Classics at Brown University seeks a post-doctoral research associate for one year to assist in an NEH-funded project entitled, “Enhancing Access to Primary Cultural Heritage Materials of India.”  The position carries a stipend of $25,000 for one year.

The Sanskrit Library is a collaborative project to make the heritage texts of India accessible on the web.  The project is building a digital Sanskrit library by integrating texts, linguistic software, and digital Sanskrit lexical sources.  This year the project is making digital images of manuscripts of the Mahābhārata and Bhāgavatapurāṇa housed at Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania, cataloguing them, and linking them with the corresponding machine-readable texts.  Extending the scope of linguistic software to these digital images serves as a pilot project to demonstrate the feasibility of doing so with manuscript images generally.

The research associate will work with the project director, software engineer, and student assistants on the following tasks:

–to mark manuscript page boundaries in machine-readable texts
–to develop word-spotting and automated text-image alignment techniques
–to develop conduits for simultaneous print, PDF, and html publication of the catalogue and other documents.

The position requires advanced training in Sanskrit, academic research skills, and expertise in XML.  Desirable additionally are some or all of the following: competence in the text-encoding initiative (TEI) standards, XSLT, HTML, CSS, TeX, Java, user-interface design, Perl, PhP, and server administration.  The applicant is expected to be creative and to able to work individually as well as to collaborate with technical personnel.

Brown University is an affirmative action, equal opportunity employer.  Women and minorities are especially encouraged to apply.  Apply by sending a resumé, a description of your relevant experience with links to products produced, a clear indication of your role and responsibility in their production (whether you are exclusively responsible or the manner and extent of your responsibility), and the names and contact information of three references to the project director (Peter Scharf) via email (scharf@brown.edu) with the subject heading, “Sanskrit Library Assistant,” by 1 December 2009.

We have an immediate opening for a full-time web master / systems administrator at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University.

Amanda French has started a publicly accessible calendar of conferences and events related to “Digital Humanities, Digital Libraries and Digital Museums.”

The National Endowment for the Humanities is hiring: two “humanities administrator” positions (aka program officers), and one accountant. Better hurry:   one of them closes this Friday.

Marco Büchler at the University of Leipzig just sent around this announcement:

The Natural Language Processing Division at the Computer Science Department of the  University of Leipzig, Germany, is the leading partner in the E-Humanties project eAQUA –  a project financed by the German Ministry of Research and Technology for applying  advanced text mining technology to digital ancient texts (www.eaqua.net).

For this project we are searching for computer scientist with demonstrated research expertise  in one or more of the following areas:

• Experience in Text Mining and Natural Language Processing,
• Programming skills in Java with applications in the E-Humanties,
• Processing of large digital text resources.

Prior experience in participating in large European or other transnational initiatives is highly  desirable.

The starting date for this full-time position is February 1, 2009. The initial period of  appointment is for two years, with the possibility of renewal subject to follow-up funding.
The position is at the rank of “Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter” (M.A. or equivalent required).  The salary is determined by the German civil servants standard (Entgeltgruppe 13 TV-L) and  amounts to 42000-52000 Euro per year. The exact salary depends on the successful  applicant’s experience.

Applications should include CV, an outline of research experience, as well as names and  addresses of references. Applications should be sent by mail or by email to the address below.

Prof. Dr. Gerhard Heyer
Automatische Sprachverarbeitung
Institut für Informatik
Universität Leipzig
Postfach 10
D – 04009 Leipzig
Germany
email: heyer@informatik.uni-leipzig.de

Applications received by January 31, 2009 will receive full consideration, although interviews  may start at any time and will continue until the position has been filled.

Disabled applicants will be preferred if they have the same qualifications as non-disabled  applicants. The University of Leipzig strives to increase the proportion of women in research  and teaching, and therefore encourages qualified female scientists to apply.

Chuck Jones has just posted a call for papers for a special issue of the TAL journal (Revue TAL) on the topic “Natual Language Processing for Ancient Language” over at AWBG.

Via Open-Access News we learn:

The University of Michigan Library has decided to adopt Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial licenses for all works created by the Library for which the Regents of the University of Michigan hold the copyrights. These works include bibliographies, research guides, lesson plans, and technology tutorials.

The Call for Papers for Digital Humanities 09, scheduled for 22-25 June at the University of Maryland, has just been issued. Abstracts are due on 31 October 2008.

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

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

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

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

All talks are free and open to the public!

University of Maryland
McKeldin Library B0131
College Park, MD 20742

Neil Fraistat, Director

http://www.mith.umd.edu/

tel: 301.405.8927
fax: 301.314.7111
mith@umd.edu

By way of Open Access News we learn of the announcement of Open Access Day 2008:

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), the Public Library of Science (PLoS), and Students for Free Culture have jointly announced the first international Open Access Day. Building on the worldwide momentum toward Open Access to publicly funded research, Open Access Day will create a key opportunity for the higher education community and the general public to understand more clearly the opportunities of wider access and use of content.

Open Access Day will invite researchers, educators, librarians, students, and the public to participate in live, worldwide broadcasts of events.

Michael E. Smith has just blogged an opinion piece on self-archiving.

Miguel Helf, writing in the New York Times, reports:

Microsoft said Friday that it was ending a project to scan millions of books and scholarly articles and make them available on the Web … Microsoft’s decision also leaves the Internet Archive, the nonprofit digital archive that was paid by Microsoft to scan books, looking for new sources of support.

The blog post in question (by Satya Nadella, Senior vice president search, portal and advertising) indicates that both Live Search Books and Live Search Academic (the latter being Microsoft’s competitor with Google Scholar) will be shut down next week:

Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes. This also means that we are winding down our digitization initiatives, including our library scanning and our in-copyright book programs.

For its part, the Internet Archive has posted a short response addressing the situation, and focusing on the status of the out-of-copyright works Microsoft scanned and the scanning equipment they purchased (both have been donated to IA restriction-free), and on the need for eventual public funding of the IA’s work.

This story is being widely covered and discussed elsewhere; a Google News Search rounds up most sources.

By way of Open Access News, we learn of this announcement, recently posted at openaccess.gr:

Taking into consideration the latest developments in scientific publishing, the Institute for Byzantine Research of the National Hellenic Research Foundation has reevaluated the aims of ΣΥΜΜΕΙΚΤΑ, a journal it has published since 1966. Under the new name BYZANTINA SYMMEIKTA, it has become a peer-reviewed open access journal with well-defined processes and scope and it is freely accessible at: http://www.byzsym.org/. Its printed version will be published at the end of each year.