The Stoa Consortium

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

This is a reminder of the approaching deadline (April 1st) for abstracts for this summer’s Digital Classicist seminar series.
Full details are on the earlier post and the Digital Classicist website.

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…)

The annual Digital Classicist London seminar series on the subject of research into the ancient world that has an innovative digital component will run again in Summer 2012.

We warmly welcome contributions from students as well as from established researchers and practitioners. Themes could include digital text, linguistics technology, imaging and visualization, linked data, open access, geographic analysis, serious gaming and any other digital or quantitative methods. While we welcome high-quality application papers discussing individual projects, the series also hopes to accommodate broader theoretical consideration of the use of digital technology in Classical studies. The content should be of interest both to classicists, ancient historians or archaeologists, and to information scientists or digital humanists, and have an academic research agenda relevant to at least one of those fields.

The seminars will run on Friday afternoons (16:30-18:00) from June to mid-July in Senate House, London, hosted by the Institute of Classical Studies (ending early this year to avoid clashing with the Olympic Games). In previous years collected papers from the seminars have been published in a special issue of Digital Medievalist; a printed volume from Ashgate Press; a BICS supplement (in production). The last few years’ papers have been released as audio podcasts. We have had expressions of interest in further print volumes from more than one publisher.

There is a budget to assist with travel to London (usually from within the UK, but we have occasionally been able to assist international presenters to attend, so please enquire).

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 April 8th, 2012.

More information will be found at http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2012.html

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.

Tufts University invites applications to “Working with Text in a Digital Age”, a three-week NEH Institute for Advanced Technology in the Digital Humanities (July 23-August 10, 2012) that combines traditional topics such as TEI Markup with training in methods from Information Retrieval, Visualization, and Corpus and Computational Linguistics. Faculty, graduate students, and library professionals are encouraged to apply. Applicants should submit proposals by February 15, 2012. Participant proposals must include CVs and statements of purpose (no more than 1,000 words) describing how they will be able to use participation in the Institute to advance their subsequent careers. Participants must be committed to collaborative work and to publication of results from this Institute under a Creative Commons license. Participants should identify source materials with which they propose to work during the Institute and which must be in the public domain or available under a suitable license. In an ideal case, source materials would include both texts for intensive analysis and annotation and one or more larger corpora to be mined and analyzed more broadly. Statements of purpose must describe initial goals for the Institute. For more information or to submit applications, please contact lcerrato@perseus.tufts.edu.

We particularly encourage participants who are committed to developing research agendas that integrate contributions and research by undergraduates, that expand the global presence of the Humanities, and that, in general, broaden access to and participation in the Humanities. Preference will be given to participants who are best prepared not only to apply new technologies but to do so as a means to transform their teaching and research and the relationship of their work to society beyond academia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

International Workshop on Digital Tools in Papyrology, Vienna.

July 18-23, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are warmly invited to attend
“Digital Transformations: New developments in cultural heritage imaging”
a workshop on digital imaging to be held at the University of Oxford on Friday, 25 February 2011.

The workshop will focus on documentary evidence, from 3D capture techniques to reflectance transformation imaging (RTI). This workshop is part of the collaborative University of Oxford and University of Southampton pilot project “Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) System for Ancient Documentary Artefacts”, supported by the AHRC DEDFI scheme.

Friday, 25 February 2011
Lecture Theatre, The Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St. Giles’, Oxford OX1 3LU
Time: tbc

For free registration, further details and any queries, please go to: http://rtisad-oxford.eventbrite.com/

Best wishes,
The RTISAD Team:
Alan Bowman, Charles Crowther
Jacob Dahl, Graeme Earl
Leif Isaksen, Kirk Martinez
Hembo Pagi, Kathryn E. Piquette

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.

Call for Papers

The Digital Classicist will once more be running a series of seminars in Summer 2011, on the subject of research into the ancient world that has an innovative digital component. Themes could include, but are by no means limited to, visualization, information and data linking, digital textual and linguistic studies, and geographic information and network analysis; so long as the content is likely to be of interest both to classicists / ancient historians / archaeologists and information scientists / digital humanists, and would be considered serious research in at least one of those fields.

The seminars run on Friday afternoons (16:30 – 19:00) from June to mid-August in Senate House, London, and are hosted by the Institute of Classical Studies (University of London). In previous years collected papers from the Digital Classicist seminars have been published in an online special issue of Digital Medievalist, a printed volume from Ashgate Press, a BICS supplement (in production), and the last three years have been released as audio podcasts. We have had expressions of interest in further print volumes from more than one publisher.

We have a budget to assist with travel to London (usually from within the UK, but we have occasionally been able to assist international presenters to attend, so please enquire).

Please send a 300-500 word abstract to gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk by April 15th, 2011. We shall announce the full programme at the end of April.

(Coörganised by Will Wootton, Charlotte Tupman, Matteo Romanello, Simon Mahony, Timothy Hill, Alejandro Giacometti, Juan Garcés, Stuart Dunn & Gabriel Bodard.)

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)

This blog post is the introduction to a lecture on Publishing and Web 2.0 I am delivering to students on the Digital Humanities MA, and is partly intended as a venue for online discussion in the comments section. All are welcome to join in the discussion.

When I posted the question, “What is Web 2.0?” on Twitter at the weekend, the first reply was from @espenore, who wrote:

A buzzword 10 years ago :-)

Leading me to muse:

Does this mean that 2004′s “Web 2.0″ is 2010′s “The Web”?

More seriously, most online definitions of Web 2.0 focus on the dynamic nature of Web content:

“The second generation of the World Wide Web, especially the movement away from static webpages to dynamic and shareable content and social networking”
(Wiktionary)

and

“Web 2.0 does not refer to any specific change in the technology of the Internet, but rather the behavior of how people use the Internet”
(Twinity)

and

“Le web 2.0 se caractérise principalement par la prise de pouvoir des internautes”
(Novaterra)

The idea that the Web is not controlled by a top-down, monolithic publishing industry, but an organic, uncontrolled, intelligent network authored and edited by all users is a powerful one. (On of the nicest descriptions of this is The Machine is Us/ing Us [video].) There is a lot of monolithic content on the Web, of course, and this is sometimes among the more professional and reliable material out there, but almost every web search returns pages from Wikipedia and blogs high in the results list.

It has become the norm to see the Web as a place to post content, to add comments, to correct errors and omissions (or introduce errors and misinformation). Obviously, this is no longer about new technology or tools; all this dynamic functionality has been around for a long time (in Internet terms) and is both the norm and visible on the vast majority of the Web, so the rhetoric of “version 2.0″ is broken. Rather it is a subset of the kind of activity that takes place on the Web: leaving comments rather than just reading news; editing rather than just reading Wikipedia; reviewing rather than just buying books; even searching the Web with cookies enabled.

In this lecture we’re going to discuss the implications of this dynamic and semantic Web on publishing, and especially academic output. We’ll look at a few examples of blogs (The Stoa Consortium, AH Net, DH Now), wikis (Digiclass, Academic Publishing, Uncyclopedia), and talk about the kinds of scholarly activities that are appropriate to publishing in these media.

Watch the comments to see how convincing this all turned out to be.

(My slides for this class are available as an Open Access Google presentation.)

Forwarded for Elton Barker, who would be happy to answer any queries:

One full-time, three year PhD studentship available from 1 January 2011
Interdisciplinary PhD Studentship in Digital Humanities
Open University – Faculty of Arts
Based in Milton Keynes

Digital Humanities at The Open University is a rapidly growing area of research. The proposed studentship is aimed at exploring the application of geographical concepts to research in the Arts and Humanities, and the ways in which they are represented, in the digital medium. We would welcome applications from candidates with an appropriate research proposal in any discipline studied in The Open University Faculty of Arts, ie Art History, Classical Studies, English, History, Music, Philosophy and Religious Studies.

Projects which will benefit from supervision across traditional disciplinary boundaries are particularly encouraged. Also encouraged are proposals with links to one of our existing research groups or collaborative projects.

For FURTHER PARTICULARS go to: http://www3.open.ac.uk/employment/job-details.asp?id=5367

Further details of Digital Humanities-related research at The Open University can be found at http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/digital-humanities/index.shtml

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.

Digitising Cultural Heritage

British Museum: Stevenson Lecture Theatre.
Saturday 4th September 2010, 09:55 – 16:30

Digital technology has revolutionised modern work- and social life. It is also transforming cultural heritage management. The power to store, organise and distribute vast quantities of complex data makes possible today things that only 20 years ago were dreams. This study day brings together a selection of projects that embrace the potential of the digital world to broaden and enrich access to mankind’s shared cultural heritage.

The British Museum’s founding philosophy–free access for ‘all studious and curious Persons’–today means not just free entry to the museum in Bloomsbury, but also free access to the collection online. An increasing community of institutions and projects share this philosophy, and the past is no longer such a foreign country.

Programme:
(more…)

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?