The Stoa Consortium

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.

This call for papers was picked up from the Digital Classicist mailing list.

Word, Space, Time: Digital Perspectives on the Classical World

An interdisciplinary conference organized by the Digital Classics Association

University at Buffalo, SUNY
Buffalo, NY 14261, USA

April 5 – 6, 2013

Archaeological GIS, digital historical mapping, literary text mining, and other computational techniques are increasingly shaping how we understand classical antiquity. Digital methods are breaking down sub-disciplinary barriers, allowing literary scholars to more easily explore epigraphical inscriptions, archaeologists to place their findings on digital historical maps, and philosophers to explore style and argument with sophisticated search techniques. Digital tools also offer new ways to explain aspects of classical antiquity in the classroom and to the public at large.

The aim of the inaugural Digital Classics Association (DCA) conference is to provide a survey of current approaches to digital methods of research, teaching, and outreach across classical sub-disciplines, with the goals of further opening inter-disciplinary perspectives and establishing common objectives for digital research and education. (more…)

TextGrid (http://www.textgrid.de) is a platform for scholars in the humanities, which makes possible the collaborative analysis, evaluation and publication of cultural remains (literary sources, images and codices) in a standardized way. The central idea was to bring together instruments for the dealing with texts under a common user interface. The workbench offers a range of tools and services for scholarly editing and linguistic research, which are extensible by open interfaces, such as editors for the linkage between texts or between text sequences and images, tools for musical score edition, for gloss editing, for automatic collation etc.

On the occasion of the official release of TextGrid 2.0 a summit will take place from the 14th to the 15th of May 2012. On the 14th the summit will start with a workshop day on which the participants can get an insight into some of the new tools. For the following day lectures and a discussion group are planned.

For more information and registration see this German website:

http://www.textgrid.de/summit2012

With kind regards

Celia Krause

–
Celia Krause
Technische Universität Darmstadt
Institut für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft
Hochschulstrasse 1
64289 Darmstadt
Tel.: 06151-165555

Call for papers and proposals

TEI and the C(r|l)o(w|u)d
2012 Annual Conference and Members’ Meeting of the TEI Consortium
Texas A&M University, Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture

• Deadline for submissions: May 15, 2012
• Meeting dates: Wed 7 November to Sat 10 November, 2012
• Workshop dates: Mon 5 November to Wed 7 November, 2012 (see separate call)

The Programme Committee of the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Text Encoding
Initiative (TEI – www.tei-c.org) Consortium invites individual paper proposals, panel sessions, poster sessions, and tool demonstrations particularly, but
not exclusively, on digital texts, scholarly editing or any topic that applies TEI to its research.

(more…)

Taking Archaeology Digital

A Conference on the Use of New Technologies in Archaeology

University of Puget Sound, Oct. 25-28, 2012

Technology is changing our world in ways that previous centuries could not have imagined, and it is a constant struggle for us to keep up with these frequent changes and innovations.  While archaeology is a very old practice, only in the later 20^th century was it given serious methodological consideration, and now, in the 21^st century, this explosion in the availability of technological tools offers the potential to transform the practice of archaeology.  But the mere existence of a new tool, no matter how fun and exciting it might seem, does not necessarily translate into good use of that tool. This is the theme we hope to address in the upcoming Redford Conference in Archaeology at the University of Puget Sound, October 25-28, 2012.

We invite proposals for papers and presentations that explore the question of how archaeologists can best make use of the vast range of possibilities that technology opens up.  We are particularly interested in presentations from people who may have already had some experiences in trying to fit new technologies into archaeological practice. Often those who study the past have had difficulty adapting their practice to the existence of new tools, and one goal is to help us learn from the experiences of others. (more…)

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

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

The full programme is available from the conference website.

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

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

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

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).

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

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

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

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

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

Confirmed Speakers:

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

Pelagios Partners also attending are:

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

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.

I’m delighted to see that the proceedings of last month’s conference on Digital Imaging of Ancient Textual Heritage are now online as an open access PDF.

Download from: http://www.eikonopoiia.org/files/Eikonopoiia-2010-Proceedings.pdf

There was an impressive line-up at this important conference, and I was sorry not to be able to attend. This collection of papers will be incredibly useful to anyone working in the imaging of manuscripts and other textual objects. (Now if only I could also have a hardcopy for my bookshelf!)

(Thanks to Melissa for pointing this out on Twitter)

Posted on behalf of Marcus Dohnicht.

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,
liebe Kolleginnen und Kollegen,

der 14. Internationale Kongress für Griechische und Lateinische Epigraphik wird auf Einladung der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in Verbindung mit dem Deutschen Archäologischen Institut vom 27. bis zum 31. August 2012 in Berlin stattfinden. Die Internetseite des Kongresses ist unter

http://www.congressus2012.de

zu erreichen. Über den jeweils neuesten Stand der Kongressvorbereitung wird mit einem Newsletter informiert werden. Bitte melden Sie uns unter

http://www.congressus2012.de/de/newsletter.html

dass Sie den Newsletter erhalten wollen; auf diese Weise erhalten wir auch ihre neueste E-Mail Adresse. Die Anmeldung für den Newsletter ist noch keine Anmeldung zum Kongress.

Wir wären Ihnen sehr dankbar, wenn Sie diese E-Mail an alle Interessenten und Institutionen weiterleiten würden, besonders an jüngere Kollegen und solche, die über keinen eigenen E-Mail-Anschluß verfügen. Falls diese uns entsprechend schreiben, werden wir ihnen die Informationen auf normalem postalischem Weg zusenden.

Wir bitten um Entschuldigung, falls Sie diese E-Mail mehrfach erhalten sollten.

In der Hoffnung, dass sehr viele von Ihnen unserer Einladung nachkommen, mit freundlichen Grüßen
Werner Eck

As noted here a few weeks ago, there is a remarkable number of panels on Digital Technology and the Tools of the Trade at the 26e Congrès international de papyrologie, which takes place this week in Geneva, Switzerland. Earlier this week I wrote to both the Digital Classicist and Papyrology lists asking if anyone was planning to blog or live-tweet these sessions. So far all that I’ve come across is:

• Alexandra Trachsel has reported on two papers on geographic databases and papyrology at her blog “Travelling with Demetrios of Skepsis”
• Tom Elliott tweeted earlier today that the SoSOL demo received a warm reception

If anyone else has or intends to blog the conference, or has notes on any of the technology sessions that could be turned into a short report, please post a link in the comments or get in touch.

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…)

(Thanks to Gregg Schwendner for posting the papyrological congress programme at What’s New in Papyrology.)

Thursday August 19th, morning
88. DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AND TOOLS OF THE TRADE I Adam Bülow-Jacobsen  presiding
89. Herwig Maehler Die Zukunft der griechischen Papyrologie
90. Bart Van Beek Papyri in bits & bytes – electronic texts and how to use them
91. Marius Gerhardt Papyrus Portal Deutschland

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AND TOOLS OF THE TRADE I Roger Bagnall  presiding
101. Reinhold Scholl Textmining  und Papyri
102. Herbert Verreth Topography of Egypt online

107. Joshua Sosin / James Cowey Digital papyrology : a new platform for collaborative control of DDbDP, HGV, and APIS data Plenary session in Room MR080 (1 hour)

Friday August 20th, morning
DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AND TOOLS OF THE TRADE II Rodney Ast presiding
133. Giovanna Menci Utilità di un database di alfabeti per lo studio della scrittura greca dei papiri
134. Marie-Hélène Marganne Les extensions du fichier Mertens-Pack3 du CEDOP AL
135. Robert Kraft Imaging the papyri collection at the University of Pennsylvania Museum (Philadelphia PA, USA)

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AND TOOLS OF THE TRADE III James Cowey presiding
146. Roger T. Macfarlane / Stephen M. Bay Multi-Spectral Imaging and Papyrology : Advantages and Limitations
147. Adam Bülow-Jacobsen Digital infrared photography of papyri and ostraca

So this astonishingly rich programme of digital topics at the International Papyrological Congress this year makes me wonder: what would it take to get this much digital interest at a major epigraphic meeting, or the annual Classics meetings, for that matter? (A couple of Digital Classicist panels at recent APA/AIA and CA conferences notwithstanding–there’s nothing as diverse and in-the-wild as the above at any Classics conference I’ve been to in recent years.) Can we do anything about this with top-down encouragement, or does it have to be a natural ground-swell? Or is papyrology just a naturally more technical subdiscipline than the rest of Classics?

Deadline extended to May 15, see original call.

Registration for the 2010 Digital Humanities conference (July 7-10, 2010, King’s College London) is now open (http://dh2010.cch.kcl.ac.uk/registration.html).

In addition to the conference programme, seven workshops are offered between July 5-7. All are free for conference attendees.

• Access to the Grid: Interfacing the Humanities with Grid technologies (Stuart Dunn)
• Text Mining in the Digital Humanities (Marco Buechler et al., eAQUA Project)
• Service-Oriented Computing in the Humanities (Nicolas Gold et al.)
• Content, Compliance, Collaboration and Complexity: Creating and Sustaining Information (Joanne Evans et al.)
• Designing a Digital Humanities Lab (Angela Veomett et al.)
• Peer Reviewing Digital Archives: the NINES model (Dana Wheeles et al.)
• Introduction to Text Analysis using JiTR and Voyeur (Stéfan Sinclair et al.)

To find out more about these workshops, see Workshop Programme.

Call for proposals
2010 Annual Meeting of the TEI Consortium

TEI Applied: Digital Texts and Language Resources

http://ling.unizd.hr/~tei2010/

• Meeting dates: Thu 11 November to Sun 14 November, 2010
• Workshop dates: Mon 08 November to Wed 10 November, 2010

The Program Committee of the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium invites individual paper proposals, panel sessions, poster sessions, and tool demonstrations particularly, but not exclusively, on digital texts, language resources and any topic that applies TEI to its research.
(more…)

Posted for Roberto Rosselli del Turco:

III Incontro di Filologia Digitale – Verona 3-5 marzo 2010
Sala Conferenze
Banco Popolare di Verona
Via san Cosimo, 10 Verona

Conference Programme

Mercoledì 3 marzo 2010

14.30 Saluti delle Autorità
15.00 Apertura dei lavori

15.00-15.45 Federico Giusfredi / Alfredo Rizza (Hethitisches Wörterbuch, Institut für Assyriologie und Hethitologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München – Dep. of Linguistics, UCB, Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar)
Zipf’s Law and the Distribution of Signs

15.45-16.30 Manuela Anelli / Marta Muscariello / Giulia Sarullo (Istituto di Scienze dell’Uomo, del Linguaggio e dell’Ambiente, Libera Università di Lingue e Comunicazione IULM, Milano)
The Digital Edition of Epigraphic Texts as Research Tool: the ILA Project

16.30-17.15 Margherita Farina (Dipartimento di Scienze Storiche del Mondo Antico, Università di Pisa)
Electronic analysis and organization of the Syro-Turkic Inscriptions of China and Central Asia (more…)

Posting this on behalf of the organisers.

Digital Imaging of Ancient Textual Heritage: Technological Challenges and Solutions

The Academy of Finland research unit ‘Ancient Greek written sources’ (CoE) is organizing a symposium “Digital Imaging of Ancient Textual Heritage: Technological Challenges and Solutions”. The symposium takes place on 28-29 October, 2010, in Helsinki, Finland.

The programme comprises of two plenary sessions that are open for public, two workshops that are intended for the speakers only, and one open session on end-user perspective.

Participation in the symposium is free of charge (however, registration is compulsory). For the accepted speakers the CoE will be covering the travel and accommodation costs.

We would be grateful if the following short ad could be included in the web site of Digital Classicist to promote our symposium.

Maarit Kinnunen
tel. + 358 50 577 9153
maarit.kinnunen@expericon.fi

============================================

Digital Imaging of Ancient Textual Heritage: Technological Challenges and Solutions 28-29 October 2010 in Helsinki, Finland.
Organizer: The Academy of Finland Research Unit “Ancient Greek written sources” (CoE)
Partner: The National Library of Finland
For more information, see www.eikonopoiia.org

There was a lot of talk of Digital Humanities at the MLA last week; as Hugh pointed out, though, there seems to be only one explicitly digital panel at our subject meeting, the APA/AIA in Anaheim. However, it should be a good one, and I’d encourage anyone with digital or collaborative interests to make sure and attend. The below is taken from the APA programme, annotated by me:

SECTION 28
Digital Research and Developments in Collaborative Work in Classics
FRIDAY January 8, 11:15 A.M. – 1:15 P.M. Elite Ballroom 3
Gabriel Bodard and Alex Lee, Organizers

The papers in this panel concern themselves with the implications of digital editing on the research process. ‘Editing’ in this context includes the collection, research, sharing, and preparation for publication of textual, historical, or archaeological material. The digital work, which is often seen as a tool en route to creating an online publication, also transforms the editor’s research—both in terms of the speed and the sequence with which we can perform certain tasks, and of the different and new sorts of questions that the data throws up
for us to consider.

1. Valentina Asciutti & Stuart Dunn, King’s College London
Mapping Evidence for Roman Regionalism and Regional Literacy in Roman Britain from the Inscribed and Illustrated Objects (20 mins.)
*Read by Sebastian Heath*

2. Gabriel Bodard & Irene Polinskaya, King’s College London
A Digital Edition of IOSPE: Collaboration and Interoperability Enabled by e-Science Methods (20 mins.)
*Read by Tom Elliott*

3. Alex Lee, University of Chicago
Scholarly Editing in the Digital Age: the Archimedes Palimpsest as a Case Study (20 mins.)

Although two of the three papers will be read by someone other than their authors, the readers are themselves experts in closely related areas, and Alex, Tom and Sebastian (and other expert attendees, to be announced) will be conducting a round table discussion on the subject of digital research and collaboration for the remaining time of the session.

Conference: CAA 2010
XXXVIII Annual Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology “Fusion of Cultures”

Conference Dates: April 6-9, 2010
Conference Location: Granada, Spain
URL: http://www.caa2010.org

Upcoming Deadlines:

- Session proposals submission deadline November 15, 2009
- Round tables proposals submission deadline December 15, 2009
- Workshops proposals submission deadline January 31, 2010

Other importat dates:
- Full papers submission will be open on November 20th,2009
- Full papers submission deadline December 15, 2009
- Short papers submission deadline January 31, 2010
- Poster submission deadline January 31, 2010
- Virtual theatre videos submission deadline January 31, 2010

The XXXVIII Annual CAA Conference will be held in Granada, Spain, from April 6 to 9, 2010 and is expected to bring together archaeologist, computer scientist and mathematicians to explore and exchange knowledge in order to enhance our understanding of the past. Classical disciplines like archaeology, anthropology or geography, and more modern ones like computer science, geomatics or museology exchange their most recent advances during the conference.
CAA 2010 is inspired in the concept “Fusion of Cultures” that identifies the scope of the conference and the spirit of the historical city of Granada. The aim of the conference is to create an collaborative atmosphere among all disciplines, by participating via papers, posters, round tables, workshops, short papers and a novel virtual theatre non-stop show. (more…)

Forwarded from DH2010 committee:

We are pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the Digital Humanities 2010 Conference.

Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations Digital Humanities 2010
Call for Papers
Abstract Deadline: Oct. 31, 2009

Proposals must be submitted electronically using the system which will be available at the conference web site from October 8th. Presentations may be any of the following:

• Single papers (abstract max of 1500 words)
• Multiple paper sessions (overview max of 500 words)
• Posters (abstract max of 1500 words)

Call for Papers Announcement

The International Programme Committee invites submissions of abstracts of between 750 and 1500 words on any aspect of humanities computing, broadly defined to encompass the common ground between information technology and problems in humanities research and teaching. We welcome submissions in all areas of the humanities, particularly interdisciplinary work. We especially encourage submissions on the current state of the art in humanities computing, and on recent developments.

Suitable subjects for proposals include, for example,

* text analysis, corpora, language processing, language learning
* IT in librarianship and documentation
* computer-based research in cultural and historical studies
* computing applications for the arts, architecture and music
* research issues such as: information design and modelling; the cultural impact of the new media
* the role of digital humanities in academic curricula

The special theme of the 2010 conference is cultural heritage old and new.

(more…)

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)

On Saturday April 4, 2009, a panel on “Ancient World and e-Science”, organized by the Digital Classicist, was held at the Classical Association Annual Meeting at the University of Glasgow (full abstracts in GoogleDoc). The speakers and titles listed were:

• 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.