The Stoa Consortium

Another interesting call for papers via Jack Sasson’s Agade list:

CALL FOR PAPERS

International aerial archaeology conference (AARG 2008)
Ljubljana, 9 – 11 September 2008

Hosted by the Department of Archaeology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana

Proposals for sessions, papers and posters are invited

The following sessions have been proposed, for which offers of papers are welcome:

• Aerial Archaeology in the Mediterranean; New Projects; Postgraduate research;
• Airborne Thematic Mapping/Airborne Laser Scanning;
• An archaeology of natural places … from the air;
• Aerial photography in context – recording landscape and urban areas

11 September Conference Day 3

Field Trip

Note: session titles are provisional and all papers and session proposals are welcome.

Oral papers should usually be 20 minutes duration, and equal weighting is given to poster presentations.

Closing date for abstracts is 31st May 2008.

Address for conference correspondence:

Dave Cowley
RCAHMS
16 Bernard Terrace
Edinburgh, EH8 9NX
Scotland
Email dave.cowley@rcahms.gov.uk

By way of Jack Sasson’s Agade list:

We would like to bring your attention to the International School in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage that we’re organizing in May 2008, in Ascona, Switzerland.

It’s a jointly organization between:

• ETH Zurich
• University of SIENA, Italy
• Research center FBK in Trento, Italy
• University of California Merced

The School will face the problem of the modern technologies in the heritage field, giving participants the opportunity to obtain a detailed overview of the main methods and applications to archaeological and conservation research and practice. Furthermore, our School will give the chance to participants to enter in a very short time the kernel of the scientific discussion on 3D technologies — surveying methods, documentation, data management and data interpretation — in the archaeological research and practice.

The School will be open to ca 60 participants at graduate level, to those carrying out doctoral or specialist research, to established research workers, to members of State Archaeology Services and to professionals specializing in the study and documentation, modeling and conservation of the archaeological heritage.

The deadline for the registration is 31st March, 2008.

Grants provided by UNESCO and ISPRS will be available for students with limited budgets and travel possibilities. The deadline for the grant application is 15st February, 2008.

The grant application and registration form are available online [pdf].

The School is to be held in the congress centre Centro Stefano Franscini, Monte Verità, Ascona, Switzerland. The centre is an ETH-affiliated seminar complex located in a superb botanical park on the historic and cultural Monte Verità area, which will also be the residence of the participants with its integrated hotel and restaurant.

We would be grateful if you could also circulate this announcement to all the possible participants.

Don’t hesitate to contact by email info@3darchaeology.org the organization if you should have any question.

Thank you and best regards,

Prof. Armin Gruen

Dr. Stefano Campana

Dr. Fabio Remondino

Prof. Maurizio Forte

See further http://thatcamp.org/:

a BarCamp-style, user-generated “unconference” on digital humanities … organized and hosted by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Digital Campus, and THATPodcast

From Brett Bobley:

This is a reminder that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) invite applications to a digital humanities grant competition sponsored by the two federal agencies. The grant program, “Advancing Knowledge: The IMLS/NEH Digital Partnership,” seeks applications for projects that would explore new ways to share, examine, and interpret humanities collections in a digital environment and develop new uses and audiences for existing digital resources.   Grants are intended to spur innovation and new collaborations; advance the role of cultural repositories in online teaching, learning, and research; and develop collaborative approaches involving the scholarly community and cultural repositories for the creation, management, preservation, and presentation of reusable digital collections and products.

Projects must be collaborative with at least one museum, library, or archive as an integral member of the project team. Awards normally are for two years and typically range from $50,000 to a maximum of $350,000. Nonprofit institutions interested in applying can find guidelines online.  The deadline for applications is March 18, 2008.  Applicants are encouraged to contact program officers who can offer advice about preparing the proposal and review draft proposals. Draft proposals should be submitted six weeks before the deadline. Questions and drafts may be submitted by e-mail to preservation@neh.gov.

Monday, 21 January 2008 in room 2B08, Strand Campus, King’s College London:

• Developing International Collaboration for Digitisation: the JISC – National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) perspective, an evening panel session looking at issues related to international digitization, hosted by the Centre for Computing in the Humanities

In Brett Bobley’s recent email, he alerted us to Susan Schreibman’s survey:

Colleagues,

Over the past few years, the idea of tool development as a scholarly activity in the digital humanities has been gaining ground. It has been the subject of numerous articles and conference presentations. There has not been, however, a concerted effort to gather information about the perceived value of tool development, not only as a scholarly activity, but in relation to the tenure and promotion process, as well as for the advancement of the field itself.

Ann Hanlon and myself have compiled such a survey and would be grateful if those of you who are or have been engaged in tool development for the digital humanities would take the time to complete an online Digital Humanities Tool Developers’ Survey.

You will need to fill up a consent form before you begin, and there is an opportunity to provide us with feedback on more than one tool (you simply take the survey again). The survey should not take more than 10-15 minutes. It is our intention to present the results of our survey at Digital Humanities 2008.

With all best wishes,

Susan Schreibman
Assistant Dean
Head of Digital Collections and Research McKeldin Library University of
Maryland College Park

Noted by way of the DigitalClassicist List:

Reminder – Second Call for Papers

Dear colleague,

A conference on 3D Colour Laser Scanning will be held at UCL on the 27th and 28th of March 2008.

Proposals are invited for contributions to the conference. The proposals, in the form of extended abstracts, should focus on one of the following main themes:

1. 3D scanning in Education and Interpretation
2. 3D scanning in Display and Exhibition
3. 3D scanning in Conservation.

More general papers related to the applications of 3D scanning technologies in the museum and  heritage sector are also welcome.

Abstracts should be 800-1000 words, and in English. Author(s) should select 5 to 8 keywords and should indicate clearly on the Abstract Submission Form to which theme the paper is intended. The presenting author (corresponding author) must also be clearly indicated.

Please note that the deadline for the submission of abstracts has been extended to the 8th of February 2008.

Authors will be informed whether their papers have been submitted no later than 15th February 2008. Selected abstracts will be incorporated in an edited cd-rom publication.

Please see below the proposed outline of the abstract submission form.

Abstracts should be submitted electronically or by post to:

Kalliopi Vacharopoulou,
Chorley Institute, Pearson Building, UCL
Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT
Email: k.vacharopoulou@ucl.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)207 679 2074

The conference is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and is organised by UCL Museums and Collections and UCL Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering.

In the meantime, please do not hesitate to contact me with further enquiries or for an electronic version of the abstract submission form.

I will be looking forward to hearing from you.

Kindest regards,

Kalliopi Vacharopoulou

3D Colour Laser Scanning Project Assistant
UCL Museums and Collections

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION FORM
Title of the Paper:
Theme [1]:
Author(s) [2]:
Corresponding Author [3]
Keywords (5-8):
ABSTRACT (800-1000 words) [4]

[1]  Authors must indicate clearly to which theme the paper is intended. The main themes are: Display and exhibition; Education and Interpretation; Conservation; General applications of 3d scanning in the museum sector.

[2]  Should include the author(s) name(s), affiliation, mailing address, e-mail.

[3]  Should indicate who the corresponding author is (i.e. the person who will be presenting the paper, in case of multiple authors)

[4]  An abstract should be 800-1000 words, and in English. It should include all main points of the paper that will be presented.

Brett Bobley wrote to alert subscribers to the publication of updated Guidelines for the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants. The major change since last year: level I applications (basic research) are a maximum 5 page narrative; maximum page count for larger level II applications is 12 pages!

Noted by way of JISC-REPOSITORIES:

DCC Tutorial: The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model – A New Standard for Knowledge Sharing
January 29 2008
University of Glasgow

The DCC and FORTH are delighted to announce that they will be delivering a joint one-day tutorial on the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model.

This tutorial will introduce the audience to the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, a core ontology and ISO standard (ISO 21127) for the semantic integration of cultural information with library, archive and other information. The CIDOC CRM concentrates on the definition of relationships, rather than terminology, in order to mediate between heterogeneous database schemata and metadata structures. This led to a compact model of 80 classes and 130 relationships, easy to comprehend and suitable to serve as a basis for mediation of cultural and library information and thereby provide the semantic ‘glue’ needed to transform today’s disparate, localised information sources into a coherent and valuable global resource. It comprises the concepts characteristic for data structures employed by most museum, archive and library documentation. Its central idea is the explicit modelling of events, both for the representation of metadata, such as creation, publication, and use, as well as for content summarization and the creation of integrated knowledge bases. It is not prescriptive, but provides a framework to describe common high-level semantics that allow for information integration at the schema level for a wide area of domains.

The CIDOC CRM, as an effort of the museums community, is paralleled by the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) by IFLA for the librarians community. Both Working Groups have come together since 2003 and started to develop a common harmonized model. The first draft version is now available as a compatible extension of the CRM, the ooFRBR, covering equally libraries and museums.

The tutorial aims at rendering the necessary knowledge to understand the potential of applying the CRM – where it can be useful and what the major technical issues of an application are. It will present an overview of the concepts and relationships covered by the CRM. As an example of a simple application, it will present the CRM Core Metadata Element Set, a minimal metadata schema of about 20 elements, still compatible with the CRM, and demonstrate how even this simple schema can be used to create large networks of integrated knowledge about physical and digital objects, persons, places and events. As an example of a simple compatible extension, it will present the core model of digitization processes used in the CASPAR project to describe digital provenance.

In part two, the tutorial will present in detail the draft ooFRBR Model. This model describes in detail the intellectual creation process from the first conception to the publishing in industrial form such as books or electronically. It should be considered equally interesting for the digital libraries community, and it is a fine example of the extensibility of the CRM for dedicated domains.
There will be enough time for questions and discussion.

Presenter:
Martin Doerr, Information Systems Lab, Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH), Vassilika Vouton.

Target audience: Ontology experts, digital library designers, data warehouse designers, system integrators, portal designers that work in the wider area of cultural and library information, but also IT-Staff of libraries, museums and archives, vendors of cultural and other information systems. Basic knowledge of object-oriented data models is required.

Duration: Part one: 3 hours
Part two: 1.5 hours
Cost: £50 for DCC Associate Network members and £75 for non members.

If you are interested in taking part, please email british.editor@erpanet.org. Please feel free to forward this message on to any interested parties.

Noted on Classics-l:

Call for Papers: APA 2009, Philadelphia
Outreach Committee

“Podcasting and the Classics”
Co-organizers Chris Ann Matteo and Ed DeHoratius

In the field of classical humanities, professors and K -12 teachers alike are witnessing the democratizing power of the “podcast” word: audio players and iPods are intimate hardware for both our students and the public we want to reach, and have proven a particularly powerful tool to restore oral and aural practice in our classrooms.

In the past few years, a number of highly successful podcasts — audio media that are free to download — have received attention from National Public Radio and other news sources. A few examples of these are WordNerds out of Reston, Virginia, The Adventures of Indigo Jones, Classical Archaeologist! sponsored by the Teagle Foundation, and Twelve Byzantine Rulers from Stony Brook School teacher Lars Brownworth.

This panel will explore the various kinds of podcasts that are available and in development, and will explore uses of this new technology to enhance our pedagogy.

The kinds of questions the panelists might address could include:

• What are some of the ways we might use this in our classrooms, in both K-12 and college-level education?
• How and why did a given podcast originate?
• How does one actually get “podcasted” (what are the “bottom-line” practicalities: how much does it cost in terms of money, time, equipment)?
• Should we regard the podcast as an oral performance text?
• What does it mean to have a “timely” podcast in our subject matter (i.e., they are “live” and yet time can lapse, and I can elect when I want to listen)?
• What role do we see podcasts playing in our culture (educational, entertainment, and research)?
• What are the political or ideological dimensions of conveying the classics in this new medium?
• How does it affect what might be perceived as a “divide” separating the classics secondary school teacher and the professoriate?
• Can podcasts be used in our scholarship and, if so, how?
• What kinds of collaboration between academic and media interests have been productive in this area?
• What other uses can we imagine for them?

Submit abstracts electronically to Chris Ann Matteo camatteo@mac.com by Friday, 1 February 2008. The abstract proper should follow the APA guidelines (one full page in 11 pt type; title in upper right-hand corner in 12 pt type) and be anonymous: it should contain a clear statement of purpose, a summary of the argumentation, some examples to be used in the argumentation, and, if appropriate, a brief explanation of the abstract?s relationship to previous literature on the topic. Papers will normally be no longer than 20 minutes long. Please include requests for audio-visual equipment and allow time for listening to excerpts in your estimate of time needed.

Noted by way of JISC-REPOSITORIES:

Please circulate as appropriate…

• OKCon 2008 – ‘Open Knowledge: Applications, Tools and Services’
• where: London School of Economics, London, UK
• when: 15th March 2008 (1030-1830)
• www: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/
• register: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/register/
• wiki: http://www.okfn.org/wiki/okcon2008/

Following on from the success of our inaugural conference last year, we’re pleased to announce that the second Open Knowledge conference (OKCon) will take place on Saturday 15th March 2008.

The event will bring together individuals and groups from across the open knowledge spectrum for a day of seminars and workshops around the theme of ‘Applications, Tools and Services’. Three main sessions will focus on ‘Transport and Environment’, ‘Visualization and Analysis’ and ‘Education and Academia’. In addition there will be an ‘Open Space’ suitable for presentations and demos of general open knowledge related work.

The event is open to all but we encourage you to register because space is limited. A small entrance fee is planned to help pay for costs but concessions are available.

More Information

‘Open Knowledge’ is material that others are free to access, reuse or re-distribute and may be anything from sonnets to statistics, genes to geodata. In recent years we’ve seen the growth of successful open knowledge projects – from peer reviewed journals to community edited encyclopaedias – but what impact can open licensing have in education, research and commerce? Is sharing the key to scaling? What kinds of business models are available to open knowledge distributors and how is open knowledge applied in different institutional and professional contexts?

There now exists a vast amount of open content and data but what kinds of tools are available to analyse and represent this wealth of material? How can we sort, search, store it to maximise its visibility and reusability?

We’ve also witnessed the rise of web-based services — from social networking sites to online spreadsheet packages. While we have definitions for open software and open knowledge, what is an open service and what kinds of new services can be built using open knowledge?

Want to give a presentation or demo? Want to help out?

If you have a presentation, demo or workshop you’d like to give, or would like to help out with OKCon 2008 please either post on the wiki (link above) or let us know by email on info [at] okfn [dot] org.

Noted by way of Antiquist:

1st Annual Antiquist Workshop

21-23 April 2008
Department of Archaeology
Southampton University
www.antiquist.org

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS

The 1st Annual Antiquist Workshop will be hosted at Southampton University Archaeology Department in April 2008. The purpose of the Workshop is to provide postgraduate students in Archaeological Informatics and associated disciplines with the opportunity to:

• Broaden their skill base with a short series of practical seminars focusing on real-world applications of IT in archaeology

• Get career guidance from professionals working in the field

• Network with peers from other institutions

• Become involved with the Antiquist online community for IT & Cultural Heritage

Seminars will be based on topics requested by participants but are likely to include GIS, web-based mapping, 3D visualisation & reconstruction, data structuring and scripting. Workshop attendance is free but participants will need to pay for food and accommodation where required. The organisers will be happy to reserve accommodation at a local hostel or hotel on request. Places on the workshop are limited and will be assigned on a first-come-first-served basis. Topics requested by early registrants may also be given priority. The final deadline for registration is 10 February 2008.

In order to register please send an email to l.isaksen@soton.ac.uk stating your name, institution and course, two specific topics which would be of interest to you, and whether accommodation arrangements should be made.

Please feel free to forward this to any person or list likely to be interested.

Best wishes

The AAW team

Workshop at the 2008 annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in Chicago

Sunday, 6 January 2008, 9:00 a.m. – noon, Water Tower, Bronze Level, West Tower, Hyatt Regency Hotel

Moderators: Rebecca K. Schindler and Pedar Foss, DePauw University

In recent years several powerful web-based research tools for Mediterranean archaeology have emerged; this workshop brings together researchers who are building and/or maintaining them. Having examined each other’s projects beforehand, presenters demonstrate their own projects, assess their functionality and usefulness, and discuss future needs and possibilities.

The projects range from macro-scale (country- or Mediterranean-wide metadata) to micro-scale (specific sites and artifact types). Two initiatives are on-line databases for archaeological fieldwork: Foss and Schindler demonstrate MAGIS, and inventory of survey projects across Europe and the Mediterranean; Fentress demonstrates the Fasti OnLine, which records excavations in Italy and several neighboring countries. Both projects employ web-based GIS to allow spatial and database searches. With the release of Google Earth and Google Maps, GIS functionality for tracking landscapes has become widely available to mainstream, not just specialist, users. Savage offers the Jordan Archaeological Database and Information System (JADIS) as a case-study of how Google-GIS functionality may be employed in archaeological research.

Numerous archaeological projects use the web to present and collect data (to varying degrees of detail). Watkinson and Hartzler demonstrate the Agora Excavations on-line, an example of how the web can clearly present a complex, long-excavated site through its organization of artifacts, documentary materials, and visual interfaces. Heath then gives a close-up look at the on-line study collection of ceramics from Ilion; what is the potential for Web-based reference collections to enhance the study of ceramic production and distribution?

ArchAtlas, presented by Harlan and Wilkinson, and the Pleiades Project, presented by Elliott, both seek to link geo-spatial and archaeological data through on-line collaborations. These projects raise issues of interoperability and shared datasets. ArchAtlas aims to be a hub for interpretive cartographic visualization of archaeological problems and data; Pleiades is developing an atlas of ancient sites. Finally, Chavez from the Perseus Project considers the challenges of accessibility, sustainability, and viability in the ever-changing world of technology — how do we ensure that these projects are still usable 20 years from now, and what new resources can we imagine developing?

These projects are representative of the types of on-line initiatives for Mediterranean archaeology in current development. Their tools enable the compilation and dissemination of large amounts of information that can lead to interesting new questions about the Mediterranean world. This is a critical time to step back, assess the resources, and consider future needs and desires.

Panelists:

• Pedar Foss (DePauw University)
• Elizabeth Fentress (International Association for Classical Archaeology)
• Stephen Savage (Arizona State University)
• Bruce Hartzler and Charles Watkinson (American School of Classical Studies at Athens)
• Sebastian Heath (American Numismatic Society)
• Tom Elliott (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
• Debi Harlan (Oxford University)
• Toby Wilkinson (British Institute at Ankara)
• Robert Chavez (Tufts University)

Friday, 4 January 2008, 1:30 – 4:30 p.m., Burnham, Hyatt Regency, Chicago

Cynthia Damon, organizer

advanced registration required

Greek and Latin texts in editions that harness technological advances for scholarly desiderata will serve us well in our work and in our endeavor to make classical antiquity accessible beyond our ranks. This seminar will consider what such editions might look like in a variety of textual traditions: verse vs. prose, literary vs. technical, individual vs. collective authorship, unique vs. multiple transmission, etc. Pragmatic considerations such as collaboration, funding, intellectual property rights, and the degree to which the academy values such infrastructure-building ventures will also be addressed, and projects already under way will be scrutinized as potential models.

• Editing Classical Commentary (Dirk Obbink, University of Oxford)
• Towards a New Edition of the Scholia to Euripides (Donald Mastronarde, University of California, Berkeley)
• Medieval Latin Editing: Problems and Prospects (Gregory Hays, University of Virginia)
• Ex Machina Quis Non Servabit? Are Computers Too Much of a Good Thing? (James McKeown, University of Wisconsin – Madison)
• New Challenges and Opportunities: Critical Editions in the Electronic Age (Mark Schiefsky, Harvard University)
• Respondent: John Duffy, Harvard University

Saturday, January 5th, noon – 1:30 p.m., Grand Ballroom B, Hyatt Regency, Chicago (APA Annual Meeting 2008)

Roundtable discussion group; joint APA/AIA session
Moderators: Andrew Reinhard (Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, Inc.) and Jennifer Sheridan Moss (Wayne State University)

Saturday, January 5th, 8:30-11:00 a.m., Crystal Ballroom C, Hyatt Regency, Chicago (APA Annual Meeting 2008)

Sponsored by the APA Committee on Publications

Donald Mastronarde, Chair

Thanks to digitization projects by both the commercial and the open-access sectors, the long-predicted transition from books and paper to digital formats for resources and information used in research and teaching may at last be occurring. This panel brings together speakers who represent classics and classical archaeology, libraries, and open-content organizations to address issues of coverage, quality, and accessibility of digital materials, to assess the trends indicated by current and planned projects, and to identify the tools needed to take advantage of the new digital riches and to allow new scholarly questions to be asked and effectively pursued.

• Trends in the Online Availability of Subscription Journals in the Classics (W. Gerald Heverly, New York University)
• The Future is Now? Who Cares? Electronic Media and the Ancient World (Charles E. Jones, American School of Classical Studies at Athens)
• The Role of Large-Scale Digitization in Classics (Sayeed Choudhury, Johns Hopkins University)
• Planning a Digital Library for Classics from Image Books (Gregory Crane, Tufts University)
• Respondent: Thomas Elliott, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

By way of various email lists and blogs, we learn of the call for papers for CIDOC 2008 Athens, “The Digital Curation of Cultural Heritage”:

Digital curation emerged as an important new concept in the theory and management of cultural information.

It covers all of the actions needed to maintain digitised and born-digital cultural objects and data, going beyond digital preservation to encompass their utilisation in the context of their entire life cycle, from acquisition and appraisal to exhibition, learning and commercial exploitation.

The focus of CIDOC 2008 on the digital curation of cultural heritage will allow curators, collection managers, documentalists, archivists and museum information specialists to explore a broad range of theoretical, methodological, professional practice and technological issues related to the appraisal, digitisation, management, representation, access and use of digital cultural assets, such as those increasigly becoming part of museum information systems and digital archives.

A core emphasis of the meeting will be to understand and re-contextualise the know-how and history of established curatorial practice in museums, and memory institutions, in general, in the new field of digital cultural heritage; to review and discuss the applicability of standards- and good practice-related work in the context of managing digital cultural information; and to identify and explore the issues, methods and challenges involved with the development of new genres and contexts of virtual exhibition, e-learning and technology-enhanced services for scholarship and research.

More: http://www.cidoc2008.gr

Tom Elliott has put out a new call for papers that looks good, “The Publication and Study of Inscriptions in the Age of the Computer.”

Full programme and abstracts online at Institute of English Studies; Thursdays at 1730 in Senate House, London.

10 October:
David Ganz (King’s College London), “Medieval Libraries in the Digital Age”

15 November:
Paul Eggert (New South Wales), “Text as Algorithm and as Process: A Critique”

13 December:
Jan Christoph Meister (Hamburg), “The Myth of the Digital or: Why Humanities Computing is Really Business as Usual”

17 January:
James E. Tierney (Missouri-St. Louis), “British Periodicals, 1660-1800: An Electronic Index”

21 February:
Andrew Prescott (Wales, Lampeter), “Digital Manuscripts: Retrospects and Prospects”

13 March:
Charles Henry (Council on Library and Information Resources), “The Talisman of Format: Celebrating the End of the Book”

17 April:
Marilyn Deegan (King’s College London), “I’ve read the news today, oh boy!”

The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative and the Digital Library Program of the University of California, Los Angeles, are pleased to announce their successful proposal to the Institute for Museum and Library Services program “National Leadership Grants: Building Digital Resources” for funding of a two-year project dedicated to improving data management and archiving tools in Humanities research.

Project Title: “Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative: Second Generation”

The UCLA University Library and UCLA’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures will create the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative: Second Generation (CDLI 2). The project will migrate 450,000 legacy archival and access images and metadata from CDLI to UCLA’s Digital Library Content System, standardizing and upgrading the metadata to improve discovery and enable content archiving within the California Digital Library’s Digital Preservation Repository. The project will add 7,000 digital artifacts with cuneiform inscriptions, including collections housed at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute and in Syrian national museums. This project will ensure the long-term preservation of text inscribed on endangered ancient cuneiform tablets. (see the IMLS notice of grants in this cycle)

Principal Investigators:

Stephen Davison
Robert K. Englund

NEH Program Officer Jason Rhody sends the following announcement:

As part of its Digital Humanities Initiative, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in the United States is joining with the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the United Kingdom to offer support for digitization projects in the humanities. These grants provide funding for one year of development in any of the following areas:

• new digitization projects and pilot projects,
• the addition of important materials to existing digitization projects, or
• the development of infrastructure (either technical “middleware,” tools, or knowledge-sharing) to support U.S.-England digitization work.

Collaboration between U.S. and English institutions is a key requirement for this grant category. Awards range from $100,000 to $240,000 (approximately £50,000 to £120,000) for a one-year period, with projects starting from April 2008 for up to 12 months. The receipt deadline for applications is November 29, 2007.

For further information, review the full guidelines on the NEH website:

http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/JISC.html

For further information about NEH’s Digital Humanities Initiative, please see:

http://www.neh.gov/grants/digitalhumanities.html

From Martin Mueller at Northwestern (full disclosure: I’ll be a speaker):

The program for the Second Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science has now been set, and you can see it at http://dhcs.northwestern.edu/index.html.

The Colloquium will take place on Sunday and Monday, October 21-22, 2007 at Northwestern University. This is an event jointly sponsored by the Illinois Institute for Technology, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago. Registration is free, and you are cordially invited to attend.

Information about logistics will appear shortly on the web site. You may also contact the conference coordinator, Nathan Mead (n-mead2 at northwestern dot edu).

There still is room for poster sessions, and we will be delighted to receive and review submissions on a rolling basis. Please send them to dhcs-submissions at listhost.uchicago.edu.

The theme of this year’s colloquium is “Exploring the scholarly query potential of high quality text and image archives in a collaborative environment.” The presentations range widely across cultures and technologies. There are digital surrogates of Mesopotamian cylinder seals and of 3,000 clay statuettes from a Chinese Buddhist temple that make you see things you could not easily see “in the flesh.” How to find readable and manipulable representations of the symbols that appear in Isaac Newton’s alchemical writings. How to explore the “countless links” that are at the heart of the Orlando Project about Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present. How to make the history of North Carolina speak in different ways when the print records (a massive work of late nineteenth century scholarship) are translated into a digital medium.

A special session on Monday will explore the different ways in which quite similar technologies of text mining support different goals in legal, literary, and business analysis, and it will ask what these different approaches can learn from each other.

The keynote speakers, Matt Kirschenbaum (The Remaking of Reading) and Lew Lancaster (Beyond 2-D Text/Plan: The Chinese Buddhist in 3-D) nicely define the range of topics. Ray Siemens will sum it all up.

(Thanks to Lizzie Belcher, Classics outreach officer at Oxford for drawing my attention to this.)

A Conference on The Villa of the Papyri

Saturday 22 and Sunday 23 September, 2007
Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies and Christ Church, Oxford

Of particular interest to Digital Classicists ought to be the Sunday afternoon session:

Session 3. Digital Reconstruction

2:05 – 2:10 pm Introduction

2:10 – 2:50 pm
Diane Favro (UCLA)
From pleasure, to ‘guilty pleasure,’ to simulation: rebirthing the Villa of the Papyri

3:00 – 3:40 pm
Dirk Obbink (University of Oxford)
Innovation and Impact in Digital Reconstruction of the Herculaneum Library

3:50 – 4:30 pm
Richard Janko (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
The leaves of the Sibyl: rediscovering the lost originals of forty Herculaneum papyri

4:40 – 5:00 pm Tea

5:00 – 5:40 pm
Mantha Zarmakoupi (University of Oxford)
The digital model of the Villa of the Papyri: issues of reconstruction

5:50 – 6:30 pm
Reinhard Förtsch (Universität zu Köln)
Fragmented understanding of Roman Villas. Some levels of perception in antiquity and 3 D

6:30 – 7:00pm Discussion and concluding remarks.

Picked this up and copied it from mailing lists:

From: British Academy [mailto:britishacademy@email.britac.ac.uk]
Sent: Wed 08/08/2007 02:43

Change to British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme

The timetable for applications for British Academy Postdoctoral fellowships has been brought forward in order to provide for earlier announcements, to give universities more time to plan to integrate Postdoctoral Fellows into departmental teaching and other programmes. The process will be conducted over two stages instead of one, in order to reduce the burden on HEIs. The deadline for outline submissions is 15 October 2007 for awards to be taken up from September 2008. Institutions are required to countersign outline applications but need provide no further information at this stage. Applicants will be notified of the outcome in December 2007, and those who successfully pass the initial selection stage will be invited to submit full bids by the deadline of 28 February 2008. Institutions are required to provide detailed information, including a complete statement of support and the financial appendix showing Full Economic Costs (FEC), only at this second stage. Awards will be announced in May 2008.

Details and application forms are available from www.britac.ac.uk/funding/guide/pdfells.html

Contact: Research Posts Department 020 7969 5265 or email:
posts@britac.ac.uk

The British Academy
10 Carlton House
London SW1Y 5AH

Tel: 020 7969 5200
Fax: 020 7969 5300
Web: www.britac.ac.uk

Copied from the Digital Medievalist mailing list:

Call for Papers for the 43rd International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 8-11, 2008, Kalamazoo, Michigan

The Medieval Academy of America Committee on Electronic Resources invites submissions to the following sponsored session:

“Digital Media and Peer Review in Medieval Studies”

Medievalists are increasingly turning to digital media both to produce new types of scholarship such as encoded texts and non-bookish digital projects (e.g. archives and interactive electronic resources) and to advance and increase the efficiency of traditional forms of scholarship such as critical editions. There is not yet widespread agreement, however, regarding how this new work should count for academic promotion, and many scholars working in these new media find that there are few established avenues for getting their work peer reviewed. At the same time, we are witnessing rapid and widespread changes in how we use print texts (e.g. often in scanned, searchable copies), and many traditional publishers of print journals and monographs are under enormous financial pressures from declining sales and print runs, thereby further limiting access to peer review and opportunities for publication. How can we, as a community, bring scholarship, publishing, and the need for peer review into balance?

Please email abstracts (not to exceed 300 words) to Timothy Stinson (stinson@jhu.edu). Please include name, professional/university affiliation, and contact information.