The Stoa Consortium

From Greg Crane comes the much-anticipated word that all of the hopper code and much of the content in Perseus is now officially open sourced:

November 9, 2007: o *Install Perseus 4.0 on your computer*:

All of the source code for the Perseus Java Hopper and much of the content in Perseus is now available under an open source license. You can download the code, compile it, and run it on your own system. This requires more labor and a certain level of expertise for which we can only provide minimal support. However, since it will be running on your own machine, it can be much faster than our website, especially during peak usage times. You also have the option to install only certain collections or texts on your version, making it as specialized as you wish. Also, if you want to use a different system to make the content available, you can do so within the terms of the Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-sa/3.0/us license. This is the first step in open sourcing the code: you can modify the code as much as you want, but at this time, we cannot integrate your changes back into our system. That is our ultimate goal, so keep a look out for that!

Download source code here
http://sourceforge.net/projects/perseus-hopper

Download text data here
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/%7Ersingh04/

Adding this grandiose Open Library system to the Internet Archive strikes me as simply brilliant. In this case “fully open” is defined as “a product of the people: letting them create and curate its catalog, contribute to its content, participate in its governance, and have full, free access to its data. In an era where library data and Internet databases are being run by money-seeking companies behind closed doors, it’s more important than ever to be open.”

But simply building a new database wasn’t enough. We needed to build a new wiki to take advantage of it. So we built Infogami. Infogami is a cleaner, simpler wiki. But unlike other wikis, it has the flexibility to handle different classes of data. Most wikis only let you store unstructured pages — big blocks of text. Infogami lets you store semistructured data…

Each infogami page (i.e. something with a URL) has an associated type. Each type contains a schema that states what fields can be used with it and what format those fields are in. Those are used to generate view and edit templates which can then be further customized as a particular type requires.

The result, as you can see on the Open Library site, is that one wiki contains pages that represent books, pages that represent authors, and pages that are simply wiki pages, each with their own distinct look and edit templates and set of data.

from the mailbag:

My name is Silvio and I’ve recently concluded a set of English-Latin-English dictionaries which I thought you could be interested in sharing with your site’s visitors. The dictionaries provide clear and precise translations and are absolutely free of charge.

Latin Dictionary: http://www.babylon.com/define/112/Latin-Dictionary.html

If you have any feedback on them, I’d be happy to hear.

Regards,

Silvio Branco

(Note: I cannot vouch for these dictionaries but simply pass along the announcement.) 

• Tom Elliott, Horothesia: thoughts and comments across the boundaries of computing, ancient history, epigraphy and geography.
• Shawn Graham, Electric Archaeology: Digital Media for Learning and Research.  Agent based modeling, games, virtual worlds, and online education for archaeology and history.

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

Seen in last week’s New Scientist:

A 3D software model of London containing over 3 million buildings in photorealistic detail is now unlikely to reach the public because of a dispute between a UK government agency and Google.

The full article requires subscription, but the long and short of it is that Google wanted to incorporate the Ordnance Survey-derived data from the Centre for Advanced Spatial Awareness (at UCL) into Google Earth, and were negotiating for a one-off license fee to cover the rights. However, the British agency Ordnance Survey refused to license their data on anything but a license that required payments based on the number of users. Some mapping and visualisation experts fear that this is more significant than a simple failure of two commercial entities to reach an agreement.

Timothy Foresman, director-general of the fifth International Symposium on Digital Earth in San Francisco in June, fears that OS’s decision could set a precedent: “The OS model is a dinosaur,” he says. “If the UK community doesn’t band together and make this a cause célèbre, then they will find the road is blocked as further uses [of the OS data] become known.”

• Centre for Advanced Spatial Awareness (the entity responsible for the 3D London model)
  
• Open Street Map (touted as an Open Source alternative to Ordnance Survey data)

See and forwarded from Classicists mailing list

————————————————–

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

FACULTY OF CLASSICS

Sub-Faculty of Ancient History

E-Science, Imaging Technology and
Ancient Documents

Applications are invited for two posts for which funding has been secured through the AHRC-EPSRC-JISC Arts and Humanities E-Science initiative to support research on the application of Information Technology to ancient documents. Both posts are attached to a project which will develop a networked software system that can support the imaging, documentation, and interpretation of damaged texts from the ancient world, principally Greek and Latin papyri, inscriptions and writing tablets. The work will be conducted under the supervision of Professors Alan Bowman FBA, Sir Michael Brady FRS FREng (University of Oxford) and and Dr. Melissa Terras (University College London).

1. A Doctoral Studentship for a period of 4 years from 1 January, 2008. The studentship will be held in the Faculty of Classics (Sub-Faculty of Ancient History) and supported at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents and the Oxford E-Research Centre. The Studentship award covers both the cost of tuition fees at Home/EU rates and a maintenance grant. To be eligible for a full award, the student must have been ordinarily resident in the UK for a period of 3 years before the start of the award.

2. A postdoctoral Research Assistantship for a period of 3 years from 1 January, 2008. The post will be held in the Faculty of Classics (Sub-Faculty of Ancient History) and supported at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents and the Oxford E-Research Centre. The salary will be in the range of £26,666 – £31,840 p.a. Applicants must have expertise in programming and Informatics and an interest in the application of imaging technology and signal-processing to manuscripts and documents.

The deadline for receipt of applications is 21 September 2007. Further details about both posts, the project, the qualifications required and the method of application are available from Ms Ghislaine Rowe, Graduate Studies Administrator, Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St Giles’ , Oxford OX1 3LU (01865 288397, ghislaine.rowe@classics.ox.ac.uk). It is hoped that interviews will be held and the appointments made on 11 October.

Professor Alan Bowman
Camden Professor of Ancient History
Brasenose College,
Oxford OX1 4AJ
+44 (0)1865 277874

Director, Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents
The Stelios Ioannou School for Research in Classical and Byzantine Studies
66 St Giles’
Oxford OX1 3LU
+44 (0)1865 610227

Seen on the Creative Commons blog:

A study titled “The Common Information Environment and Creative Commons” was funded by Becta, the British Library, DfES, JISC and the MLA on behalf of the Common Information Environment. The work was carried out by Intrallect and the AHRC Research Centre for studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law and a report was produced in the Autumn of 2005. During the Common Information Environment study it was noted that there was considerable enthusiasm for the use of Creative Commons licences from both cultural heritage organisations and the educational and research community. In this study we aim to investigate if this enthusiasm is still strong and whether a significant number of cultural heritage organisations are publishing digital resources under open content licences.

(Full report.)

This is an interesting study worth watching, and hopefully the conclusions and recommendations will include advice on coherent legal positions with regards to Open Content licensing. (See the controversy surrounding yesterday’s post.)

Joint Information Systems Committee

Copied from JISC Digitisation Blog

“In July 2007 JISC held a two-day digitisation conference in Cardiff and the event was live blogged and podcasted. Here you can find links to all the resources from the conference, from Powerpoint presentations and audio to the live reports and conference wiki.”

The link to this blog which has audio, Powerpoints and PDFs from the wide range of speakers:

http://involve.jisc.ac.uk/wpmu/digitisation/digitisation-conference-2007/

There is much there about building digital content and e-resources.

More can be found about the JISC digitisation programme at: 

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/digitisation_home.html

Posted to the Digital Classicist list (from ancientpglinguistics) by Kalle Korhonen:

Electronic corpora of ancient languages

International Conference
Prague (Czech Republic), November 16-17th, 2007
http://enlil.ff.cuni.cz/ecal/
Call for papers

Aims of conference

Electronic corpora of ancient languages offer important information about the culture and history of ancient civilizations, but at the same time they constitute a valuable source of linguistic information. The scholarly community is increasingly aware of the importance of computer-aided analysis of these corpora, and of the rewards it can bring. The construction of electronic corpora for ancient languages is a complex task. Many more pieces of information have to be taken into account than for living languages, e.g. the artefact bearing the text, lacunae, level of restoration, etc. The electronic corpora can be enriched with links to images, annotations, and other secondary sources. The annotations should deal with matters such as textual damage, possible variant readings, etc., as well as with many features specific to ancient languages. (more…)

Alun Salt notes

Recently the 5000^th photo was uploaded to the Chiron pool at Flickr. That’s over 5000 photos connected to antiquity which you can pick up and use in presentations or blogs for free. It’s due in no small part to the submissions by Ovando and MHarrsch, but there’s 130 other members. It’s a simple interface and an excellent example of what you can do with Flickr.

You can see the latest additions to Chiron in the photobar at the top of the page and you can visit the website of the people who had such a good idea at Chironweb.

Forwarded from AHESC Arts and Humanites e-Science Support Centre
(http://www.ahessc.ac.uk/)

The next lectures in the e-Science in the Arts and Humanities Theme (see http://www.ahessc.ac.uk/theme) begin next week. The Theme, organized by the Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (AHeSSC) and hosted by the e-Science Institute in Edinburgh, aims to explore the new challenges for research in the Arts and Humanities
and to define the new research agenda that is made possible by e-Science technology.

The lectures are:

Monday 2 July: Grid Enabling Humanities Datasets

Friday 6 July: e-Science and Performance

Monday 23 July: Aspects of Space and Time in Humanities e-Science

In all cases it will be possible to view the lecture on webcast, and to ask questions or contribute to the debate, in real time via the arts-humanities.net blog feature. Please visit http://wiki.esi.ac.uk/ E-Science_in_the_Arts_and_Humanities, and follow the ‘Ask questions
during the lecture’ link for more information about the blog, and the ‘More details’ link for more information about the events themselves and the webcasts.

AHeSSC forms a critical part of the AHRC-JISC initiative on e-Science in Arts and Humanities research. The Centre is hosted by King’s College London and located at the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) and the AHRC Methods Network. AHeSSC exists to support, co-ordinate and promote e-Science in all arts and humanities disciplines, and to liaise with the e-Science and e-Social Science communities, computing, and information sciences.

Please contact Stuart Dunn (stuart.dunn[at]kcl.ac.uk) or Tobias Blanke
(tobias.blanke[at]kcl.ac.uk) at AHeSSC for more information.

Saw this on Humanist. Anything out there and also freely available for UK English?

A new 100+ million word corpus of American English (1920s-2000s) is now freely available at:

http://corpus.byu.edu/time/

The corpus is based on more than 275,000 articles in TIME magazine from 1923 to 2006, and it contains articles on a wide range of topics – domestic and international, sports, financial, cultural, entertainment, personal interest, etc.

The architecture and interface is similar to the one that we have created for our version of the British National Corpus (see http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc), and it allows users to:

– Find the frequency of particular words, phrases, substrings (prefixes, suffixes, roots) in each decade from the 1920s-2000s. Users can also limit the results by frequency in any set of years or decades. They can also see charts that show the totals for all matching strings in each decade (1920s-2000s), as well as each year within a given decade.

– Study changes in syntax since the 1920s. The corpus has been tagged for part of speech with CLAWS (the same tagger used for the BNC), and users can easily carry out searches like the following (from among endless possibilities): changes in the overall frequency of “going + to + V”, or “end up V-ing”, or preposition stranding (e.g. “[VV*] with .”), or phrasal verbs (1920s-1940s vs 1980s-2000s).

– Look at changes in collocates to investigate semantic shifts during the past 80 years. Users can find collocates up to 10 words to left or right of node word, and sort and limit by frequency in any set of years or decades.

– As mentioned, the interface is designed to easily permit comparisons between different sets of decades or years. For example, with one simple query users could find words ending in -dom that are much more frequent 1920s-40s than 1980s-1990s, nouns occurring with “hard” in 1940s-50s but not in the 1960s, adjectives that are more common 2003-06 than 2000-02, or phrasal verbs whose usage increases markedly after the 1950s, etc.

– Users can easily create customized lists (semantically-related words, specialized part of speech category, morphologically-related words, etc), and then use these lists directly as part of the query syntax.

———-

For more information, please contact Mark Davies (http://davies-linguistics.byu.edu), or visit:

http://corpus.byu.edu/

for information and links to related corpora, including the upcoming BYU American National Corpus [BANC] (350+ million words, 1990-2007+).

————————————————————————
—– Mark Davies
Professor of (Corpus) Linguistics
Brigham Young University
Web: davies-linguistics.byu.edu

Bill Turkel has some very interesting things to say about “the widespread digitization of historical sources” and — near and dear to my heart — “augmenting places with sources”:

• William J. Turkel, “Seeing There,” Digital History Hacks, 18 June 2007
• Ibid., “Hope, the New Research Strategy,” Digital History Hacks, 19 June 2007

The last paragraph in “Seeing There” resonated especially, given what we’re trying to do with Pleiades:

The widespread digitization of historical sources raises the question of what kinds of top-level views we can have into the past. Obviously it’s possible to visit an archive in real life or in Second Life, and easy to imagine locating the archive in Google Earth. It is also possible to geocode sources, link each to the places to which it relates or refers. Some of this will be done manually and accurately, some automatically with a lower degree of accuracy. Augmenting places with sources, however, raises new questions about selectivity. Without some way of filtering or making sense of these place-based records, what we’ll end up with at best will be an overview, and not topsight.

There’s an ecosystem of digital scholarship building. And I’m not talking about SOAP, RDF or OGC. I’m talking about generic function and effect …  Is your digital publication epigraphic? Papyrological? Literary? Archaeological? Numismatic? Encyclopedic? A lumbering giant library book hoover? Your/my data is our/your metadata (if we/you eschew walls and fences). When we all cite each other and remix each other’s data in ways that software agents can exploit, what new visualizations/abstractions/interpretations will arise to empower the next generation of scholarly inquiry? Stay tuned (and plug in)!

from the Chronicle for Higher Education:

Ancient Rome Restored — Virtually

A group of Virginians and Californians has rebuilt ancient Rome. And today they received the grateful thanks of the modern city’s mayor. The rebuilding marked by this ceremony has been digital. Researchers from the University of Virginia and the University of California at Los Angeles led an international team of archaeologists, architects, and computer scientists in assembling a huge recreation of the city. Rome Reborn 1.0 shows Rome circa 320 AD as it appeared within the 13 miles of Aurelian Walls that encircled it. In the 3D model, users can navigate through and around all the buildings and streets, including the Roman Senate House, the Colosseum, and th e Temple of Venus and Rome. And of course, since the city is virtual, it can be updated as new scientific discoveries are made about the real remains. –Josh Fischman

The RR website repays browsing. The still image of the interior of the Curia Julia is unusually attractive to my eyes, for a digital reconstruction. Of greater interest is what’s said under “Future of the Project,” namely that “The leaders of the project agree that they should shift their emphasis from creating digital models of specific monuments to vetting and publishing the models of other scholars.” I hope that process gets underway.

Update: Troels Myrup Kristensen has his doubts:

Notice the absence of signs of life – no people, no animals, no junk, no noises, no smells, no decay. The scene is utterly stripped of all the clutter that is what really fascinates us about the past. The burning question is whether this kind of (expensive and technology-heavy) representation really gives us fundamentally new insights into the past? From what I’ve seen so far of this project, I’m not convinced that this is the case.

Amy Hackney Blackwell has a new piece in Wired on the just-concluded month-long effort to digitize Venetus A at the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice.  (There’s a nice gallery of images too.)
I was fortunate to be part of this CHS-sponsored team for one week. Ultimately, we managed to acquire 3-D data as well as very high resolution images for three different annotated manuscripts of the Iliad. All of this material will be made available on-line on an Open Access basis.

Josiah Ober, Walter Scheidel, Brent D. Shaw and Donna Sanclemente, “Toward Open Access in Ancient Studies: The Princeton-Stanford Working Papers in Classics” in Hesperia, Volume: 76, Issue: 1. Cover date: Jan-Mar 2007

Following the recent public announcement that the UK’s AHRC intends to withdraw funding from the Arts and Humanities Data Service, the following petition has been set up at the British Government’s website.

• http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/AHDSfunding/

On 11 May 2007, Professor Phillip Esler, Chief Executive of the AHRC, wrote to University Vice-Chancellors informing them of the Council’s decision to withdraw funding from the AHDS after eleven years. The AHDS has pioneered and encouraged awareness and use among Britain’s university researchers in the arts and humanities of best practice in preserving digital data created by research projects funded by public money. It has also ensured that this data remains publically available for future researchers. It is by no means evident that a suitable replacement infrastructure will be established and the AHRC appears to have taken no adequate steps to ensure the continued preservation of this data. The AHDS has also played a prominent role in raising awareness of new technologies and innovative practices among UK researchers. We believe that the withdrawal of funding for this body is a retrograde step which will undermine attempts to create in Britain a knowledge economy based on latest technologies. We ask the Prime Minister to urge the AHRC to reconsider this decision.

You must be a British citizen or resident to sign the petition.

Oxford University and UCL are pleased to announce the recent funding of a new project to work on aiding scholars in reading and interpreting Ancient Texts. Three year funding, including one additional phd studentship, has been secured from the AHRC-EPSRC-JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Intitiative to work on new computational tools and techniques to aid papyrologists and palaeographers in their complex task.

Original documents are primary, often unique, resources for scholars working in literature, history, archaeology, language and palaeography of all periods and cultures. The complete understanding and interpretation of textual documents is frequently elusive because of damage or degradation, which is generally more severe the older the document. Building on successful earlier research at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents http://www.csad.ox.ac.uk/ (Professor Alan Bowman) and Engineering Science (Professor Sir Mike Brady) at Oxford University http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~mvl/, in collaboration with UCL SLAIS www.ucl.ac.uk/slais/ (Dr Melissa Terras), this project aims to construct a signal to symbol system, which will aid scholars in propagating interpretations of texts through a combination of image processing, computational interactive reasoning under uncertainty, the provision of tools to construct datasets of palaeographical information for dissemination in the research community, and through the provision of training methods and resources in the application of e-science technology to texts and documents.

The project will begin in October 2007, with studentship and postdoc details to be posted shortly.

The New Scientist this week reports on the Encyclopedia of Life, a new, massive, collaborative, evolving resource to catalogue the 1.8 million known species of life on the planet. Although this is a biology resource and so, for example, has access to greater funding sources than most of us in the humanities dream of (E. O. Wilson has apparently already reaised $50 million in set-up funds), a lot of the issues of collaborative research and publication, of evolving content, of citability, of authority, of copyright, of free access, and of winning the engagement of the research community as a whole are exactly the same as we face. It would serve us well to watch how this resource develops.

It is a truism that we can learn a lot from the way scientists conduct their research, as they are better-funded than we are. But, dare I say it, the builders of this project could also do worse than to consult and engage with digital humanists who have spent a lot of time thinking about innovative and robust solutions to these problems in ways that scientists have not necessarily had to.

Making the rounds on various lists this morning is a call for participation in “an international network of digital humanities centers.” Julia Flanders et al. write:

If you represent something that you would consider a digital humanities center, anywhere in the world, we are interested in including you in a developing network of such centers.  The purpose of this network is cooperative and collaborative action that will benefit digital humanities and allied fields in general, and centers as humanities cyberinfrastructure in particular.  It comes out of a meeting hosted by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Maryland, College Park, April 12-13, 2007 in Washington, D.C., responding in part to the report of the American Council of Learned Societies report on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, published in 2006.

The rest of the message, including contact information for response, follows here …

(more…)

Seen on Humanist:

Announcing TAPoR version 1.0
http://portal.tapor.ca

We have just updated the Text Analysis Portal for Research (TAPoR) to
version 1.0 and invite you to try it out.

The new version will not appear that different from previous
versions. The main difference is that we are now tracking data about
tool usage and have a survey that you can complete after trying the
portal in order to learn more about text analysis in humanities
research.

You can get a free account from the home page of the portal. If you
want an introduction you can look at the following pages:

Streaming video tutorials are at
http://training.tapor.ca

Text analysis recipes to help you do things are at:
http://tada.mcmaster.ca/Main/TaporRecipes

Starting points can be found at

http://tada.mcmaster.ca/Main/TAPoR

The survey is at
http://taporware.mcmaster.ca/phpESP/public/survey.php?name=TAPoR_portal

A tour, tutorial, and useful links are available on the home page,
portal.tapor.ca.

Please try the new version and give us feedback.

Yours,

Geoffrey Rockwell

From the ANCIEN-L list (via Thoughts on Antiquity):

Friends and colleagues: The ruins of Pompeii are crumbling, but the digital imaging project known as CyArk is generating a three-dimensional record of the site that will be available for future generations. This part of the ambitious CyArk Project is described in Pompeii: A CyArk Case Study, the latest video feature on our nonprofit streaming-media Web site, The Archaeology Channel (http://www.archaeologychannel.org/).

Pompeii exemplifies CyArk, a project of the Kacyra Family Foundation that is preserving the world’s most valued cultural heritage sites in three-dimensional digital form. Buried in A.D. 79 beneath a thick mantle of volcanic deposits by an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, much of Pompeii has been uncovered, only to decay steadily from natural and human causes. This video shows how CyArk is preserving the site in digital imagery through laser scanning technology and the most accurate 3D models possible today.

This and other programs are available on TAC for your use and enjoyment. We urge you to support this public service by participating in our Membership
(http://www.archaeologychannel.org/member.html) and Underwriting (http://www.archaeologychannel.org/sponsor.shtml) programs. Only with your help can we continue and enhance our nonprofit public-education and visitor-supported programming. We also welcome new content partners as we reach out to the world community.

Please forward this message to others who may be interested.

Richard M. Pettigrew, Ph.D., RPA

President and Executive Director
Archaeological Legacy Institute

http://www.archaeologychannel.org

Winners of the 2007 Pulitzer Prizes in various categories were announced yesterday.  Unfortunately, there isn’t yet a prize for a blogger.  If there had been, I can’t imagine a more deserving recipient than K.C. Johnson, for bravely staring down the Durham legal establishment, the frighteningly large swath of crazed and mendacious faculty at Duke, and a big chunk of the MSM as well, with his labor of love, the remarkable Durham-in-Wonderland blog.

Seen at Academic Commons:

The folks at the Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory aka HASTAC (http://hastac.org) have posted a draft of a paper entitled “The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age.”  The paper will evolve through online collaboration and conversations, and will be published in its final form as part of the Occasional Paper Series on Digital Media and Learning sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

It is framed by the following proposition:
“We are faced today by a pressing question: How do institutions–social, civic, educational–transform in response to and in order to promote new kinds of learning in the information age?”

This provocative and difficult question–What does a peer-to-peer learning institution look like and how does it differ from what we understand our traditional learning institutions to be?–is only part of what makes this project exciting. It is also notable for its delivery platform, a terrific and soon-to-be-released WordPress blogging plugin (code name Comment Press) that the folks at the Institute for the Future of the Book have developed, and that allows for context-specific commenting at multiple levels.