The Stoa Consortium

A message from G. Schwendner (Wichita State University):

I am putting up a weblog to keep track of new publications, announcements etc. in papyrology (my field). We see these, for the most part, on the Papy-list, but the archives are resticted to list members, and so its news does not flow very far. Most important, it does not get into the seach engines. Anyway, below is the url; let me know what you think. I have not had the time to reformat the Greek that appears in the tables of contents, but the publishers’ pdf versions are linked, and few, I think, are searching the web for unicode Greek text at this point.

http://papyrology.blogspot.com/

A message from Judith Lynn Sebesta (University of South Dakota):

Call for Collaborators to The On-line Companion to The Worlds of Roman Women

The On-Line Companion to the Focus Reader, The Worlds of Roman Women,1 expands the book’s wide representation of Latin texts by and about women dating from the earliest periods through the fourth century CE. The medium of a website, moreover, offers the opportunity to integrate visuals to texts, thus enabling users to make connections between language and material culture. The Companion has two major parts.

The Worlds section includes Class, Religion, Childhood, Learning, Marriage, Family, Body, State, Work, and Flirtation. Each World opens to reveal a thematic image of women in this world, a brief essay on this World, a list of on-line texts and hyperlinked images. The glossed on-line texts are hyperlinked as well. For example, the introduction to Gnome Pierinis (Work) Flavian ornatrix is hyperlinked to a Flavian woman’s bust with elaborate hairstyle.

The Instructional section contains: a Guide to Using the Site; an Annotated Bibliography; Activities for Classroom Use; Syllabi and Lesson Plans; and Credits and Contributors. The annotated bibliography is hyperlinked to materials such as downloadable theses, essays, articles, and more.

Future development of the Companion will extend the geographic reach of Companion to all the provinces. We will add essays on aspects of Roman culture and women’s lives.

This point leads to our call for collaborators from all Latin teachers on all levels. “Collaboration” includes suggestions for additional texts; correction, revision and expansion of glosses and vocabulary for readings; evaluation of the grammatical difficulty of a text; sharing of images (that are legally in free-use) and syllabi; submission of glossed texts, classroom activities and annotated bibliographical items; identifying useful links; writing essays for teachers and/or students; and continuing updating of knowledge in the field. To make suggestions or to volunteer as a Companion collaborator, contact either Ann Raia (araia@cnr.edu) or Judith Sebesta (JL.Sebesta@usd.edu).

Dan Cohen has new blog posts about the Zotero project, which among other things has just landed substantial new support from Mellon.  For interesting details of where things stand, read Dan’s blog; meanwhile here’s a summary of what Zotero can do:

• captures citation information you want from a web page automatically, without typing or cutting and pasting on your part, and saves this information directly into the correct fields (e.g., author, title, etc.) of your Zotero library
• lets you store—beyond citations—PDFs, files, images, links, and whole web pages
• allows you to easily take notes on the research materials you capture
• makes it easy to organize your research materials in multiple ways, such as folders, saved searches (smart folders), and tags
• offers fast, as-you-type search through your materials so that you can quickly find that source that you only vaguely remember
• lets you export formatted citations to your paper, article, book, or website
• has an easy-to-use, modern interface that simplifies all of your research tasks, with “where has that been?” features such as autosaving your notes as you type
• runs right in your web browser and is a platform for new forms of digital research that can be extended with other web tools and services
• is free and open source
• has a name that is loosely based on the Albanian (yes, Albanian) word zotëroj, meaning “to acquire, to master,” as in learning

A message received yesterday from David Bamman at Perseus:

The Perseus Project has recently received a planning grant from the NSF to investigate the costs and labor involved in constructing a multimillion-word Latin treebank, along with its potential value for the linguistics and Classics community. While our initial efforts under this grant will focus on syntactically annotating excerpts from Golden Age authors (Caesar, Cicero, Vergil) and the Vulgate, a future multimillion-word corpus would be comprised of writings from the pre- Classical period up through the Early Modern era. To date we’ve annotated a total of 12,000 words in a style that’s predominantly informed by two sources: the dependency grammar used by the Prague Dependency Treebank (itself based on Mel’cuk 1988), and the Latin grammar of Pinkster 1990.

While treebanks provide valuable training data for computational tasks such as grammar induction and automatic syntactic parsing, they also have the potential to be used in traditional research areas that Classicists in particular are poised to exploit. Large collections of syntactically parsed sentences have the potential to revolutionize lexicography and philology, as they provide the immediate context for a word’s use along with its typical syntactic arguments (this lets us chart, for example, how the meaning of a verb changes as its predominant arguments change). Treebanks enable large-scale research into structurally-based rhetorical devices particularly of interest to Classicists (such as hyperbaton) and they provide the raw data for research in historical linguistics (such as the move in Latin from classical SOV word order to romance SVO).

The eventual Latin treebank will be openly available to the public; we should, therefore, come to a consensus on how it should be built. To that end we encourage input from the linguistics and Classics community on the treebank design (including the syntactic representation of Latin) and welcome contributions by annotators (for which limited funding is available).  Interested collaborators should contact David Bamman (David.Bamman@tufts.edu) at the Perseus Project.

I had to laugh (along with some others, I see) at Microsoft patent application # 20060195313, filed 31 August 2006:

Method and system for selecting and conjugating a verb

Abstract: A verb conjugating system allows a user to input a form of a verb and display the verb forms. The verb conjugating system allows the user to input the infinitive form or non-infinitive forms of a verb. When a user inputs a non-infinitive form of a verb, the verb conjugating system identifies a corresponding base form of the verb. The verb conjugating system then uses the base form to retrieve and display the verb forms for the verb. The verb conjugating system may highlight the non-infinitive form of the verb within the displayed verb forms to assist the user in locating the verb form of interest.

Isn’t this just what the Perseus DL has been providing for more than fiften years now?

from ars technica:

Google went ahead and did it. Books no longer in copyright are now available for download from the Google Book Search site. If you’re looking for something tasty, might we recommend an early English translation of Montaigne’s provocative essay “On Some Verses of Virgil”? (Hint: the naughtiest bits are in the Latin epigrams, the worst of which aren’t even translated).

There’s plenty of precendent for this sort of thing. Project Gutenberg provides access to 19,000 classic books, but in a text-only format. The Christian Classics Ethereal Library offers both text and PDF versions of a massive collection of source material, but only one one particular topic. There’s also the Perseus Project, which offers ancient and Renaissance texts. Google could top all of these projects by providing fully-searchable versions of a much wider selection of books, many of which can also be downloaded as PDFs that are ready to print.

While this only applies to older books, it’s still a great way of democratizing access to the world’s knowledge (in English, at any rate), and it can’t raise any objections from publishers. Books which were before available only on the shelves of large academic libraries are now available to anyone with a Web connection and some curiosity. Scienta vincit omnia!

But not everyone is thrilled with the results so far. From Planet PDF:

There’s no doubt Google needs to be applauded for the idea, but the execution (i.e. the books they’ve produced) could definitely do with some work. The PDF books are difficult to download, large in size, of such low resolution they’re difficult to read, unsearchable, and do not allow the user to copy text from them. It’s left me wondering what Google expects people to do with the books.

And more critique here.

A MuGeum is a museum of places that are described by their geographic coordinates (latitude, longitude and altitude). A MuGeum can span any distance. A MuGeum may deal with one specific historic event (such as a discovery or a battle), or deal with a much broader topic or period of time (such as Bronze Age settlements in north Africa, or the development of literary traditions in China)…

KML files for Google Earth are now automatically generated for every MuGeum.

The image below is from curator Bill Storage’s MuGeum of the Roman Forum and Vicinity. Bill’s beautiful, original photography and detailed descriptions combine with the excellent satellite imagery and geospatial navigation of Google Earth to create a gorgeous bird’s-eye preview of this MuGeum. Pack your bags! Next stop, the Eternal City!

Via Scribblings and Musings, word of an interesting new blog, if:book, sponsored by the Inbstitute for the Future of the Book.  One of the entries in the if:book blog references a chapter Clifford Lynch has written entitled, “Open Computation: Beyond Human-Reader-Centric Views of Scholarly Literatures” for an upcoming book on open access edited by Neil Jacobs of the Joint Information Committee.  Here among other things Lynch references data-mining and text-analysis efforts at Perseus.

from John Battelle’s SearchBlog:

xcavator is a new and exciting technology for searching and sorting images. With all the control granted to you, it makes image searching easy and specific. It’s very much like text-based searching in Google or Yahoo! but instead of selecting keywords, in xcavator you choose key points to define the type of image you are looking for. xcavator is connected to flickr to create a cool demo. The next 2 pages are a quick intro so that you understand the interface and can immediately take full advantage of the power ofxcavator!

I think it would be interesting for an ASCSA regular member to use this techique with photographs taken during the fall and winter trips.

The TeleRead blog points to what looks like a useful Newsforge article about the the Sunrise desktop conversion tool and the Plucker reader.

Via the JISC-Repositories list comes notice of a report summarizing some current initiatives in digital preservation. This is one of a growing list of reports produced by the Jorum Repository Service.

Yesterday the Inside Google Book Search blog offered details concerning The four ways you’ll see books in Google Book Search.

(hat tip Peter Suber)

Microsoft said it plans to sponsor an open-source project to create software that will convert Office documents to OpenDocument, a rival format gaining ground, particularly among governments.

The software giant on Thursday launched the Open XML Translator project on SourceForge.net, a popular site for hosting code-sharing projects. The software will be available under the BSD open-source license.

The software, developed by a France-based Microsoft partner, will allow people to use Microsoft Office to open and save documents in the OpenDocument, or ODF, format.

… The goal is to have a Word plug-in for Office 2007 by the end of this year and translators for Excel and PowerPoint next year, said Jean Paoli, the general manager of interoperability and XML architecture at Microsoft. The conversions will be based on Microsoft’s Open Office XML, the XML-based file formats that will be the default setting in Office 2007, due next year.

Google’s Book Blog (devoted to the Google Book Search project) has an entry on the Google Shakespeare project. This latter site seems to give a good feel for some of the things Google wants to do with its digitized books.

The Google Earth Blog also notes the existence of a textured model of the Globe Theater in its 3D Warehouse.

The final report of a summit on Digital Tools for the Humanities is available now.

Eric Kansa of The Alexandria Archive Initiative, has initiated a new blog Digging Digitally: Archaeology, data sharing, digitally enabled research and education on behelf of the Digital Data Interest Group of the SAA.

“DDIG members can use this blog to share news and announcements about their programs and activities. Hopefully, DDIG members will post suggestions on developing data sharing standards, intellectual property frameworks, policies, and other issues. DDIG members are also invited to use this weblog as a way to share links to individuals, projects, programs and organizations…”

Bret Mulligan sends word that he has begun a set of placemarks for the major contingents named in the Homeric Catalogue of Ships (Iliad, II.494-760).

I’ve added many more placemarks and grouped them by category (e.g. palaces, peak sanctuaries, Cycladic sites) in subfolders which may be turned on or off (depending on what you want to see) in the left panel of the Google Earth user interface.  The project continues to be available from the Gooogle Earth Community forum.

Today I spent some time associating placemarks for Minoan sites with scholarly resources. The file could obviously be developed much further but even now it may have some utility. I posted it to the Google Earth Community forum, whence it may be downloaded and displayed in your copy of GE. In several cases it’s possible to zoom in all the way to visible excavations.
People have asked in the comments section how such a file might be deployed. I plan to try using it in the classroom in the fall, as the portal to texts and images related to the sites we are studying. The choice of “front-end” should place a desirable emphasis on geographic and topographic considerations.

Browsing through the message board for the Google Earth Community shows that various enthusiasts have been busily creating themed sets of placemarks.

• Ancient Rome in 51 annotated placemarks
• Hadrian’s Villa, details of roman imperial palace
• 40 roman amphitheatres in high res
• 76 ancient theatres (roman and greek) in high res
• around the mediterranean sea with Julius Caesar
• H21′s best folders (4258 placemarks)
• Alexander: Battle of Gaugamela
• Roman Coliseum
• Mausoleum of Augustus
• Roman Forum
• Mausoleum of Munatius Plancus
• Life of Hannibal, the great carthagenian general
• KNOSSOS – “reconstruction” IMAGE OVERLAY
• Knossos – Ancient Minoan capital
• The Acropolis, Athens

An interesting example of Google Earth put to use for literary history.

From The Kelsey Museum of Archaeology comes Building a New Rome: The Imperial Colony of Pisidian Antioch, including lots of photographs and models, as well as an overhead view of the 3D restoration of Antioch mapped over the location of the city on the globe.

From the TEI list, announcement by Edward Vanhoutte of a new project to teach TEI markup:

At the Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies of the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature (Belgium) we’re currently working on a set of on-line TEI tutorials, branded ‘TEI by Example’ which will become available in Fall 2006. The work is sponsored by King’s College London and the project is managed by Melissa Terras (SLAIS-UCL) and myself. Project officer is Ron Van den Branden. I copy from the project description:

The aims of the project are:

* the creation and on-line delivery of a TEI by example course for
teaching TEI in higher education and workshops.
* the creation and on-line delivery of a software toolkit for teaching text encoding
* the documentation of the methodology, workflow and findings of the project in a project report

The deliverables of the project are:

* on-line tutorials TEI by example
* a printable PDF version of the tutorials TEI by example
* an on-line software toolkit for text encoding
* a downloadable CD-ROM image for burning off-line toolkits for use by course participants
* a project report which could be published in the project reports section of LLC or DHQ, and on the ALLC website

The deliverables will be published and hosted by CCH (King’s College London) under endorsement by the ALLC.

Please consult http://www.teibyexample.org for the latest on the project.

Here and here, respectively (neither model is geo-located in Google Earth yet).