Geoffrey Rockwell has put up a collection of tagged links to online works about humanities computing. It’s a good complement to Bill Turkel’s Readings in Digital History. And, best of all, it’s TAPoRized, so you can search the collection and run its contents through any of the TAPoR text analysis tools.
Charlie Lowe just blogged about the Educause Learning Initiative‘s helpful introductory 2-pager entitled 7 Things You Should Know About E-books. It’s a decent tool for introducing colleagues to some of the key issues surrounding, and potential benefits involved in, electronic publication methods.
But it also pains me to find that the document, which contains the following valid observation …
E-books have been slow to break the pattern of simply being digital copies of paper books with a few added features
… is only available as an Adobe PDF file, laid out in two columns that I’m sure make it pretty and easy-to-read on paper, but that render the document highly annoying to try to read on-screen.
Seen in the Creative Commons feed, an article in the British Medical Journal by John Wilbanks, executive director of the Science Commons, on why scientific research needs to be Open Access (and his arguments apply to all academic research, of course):
Summary points
Authors should be prioritising open access to their works—for the good of other scientists and to ensure that the full benefits of the internet and advanced technology may be realised
Open access is rapidly becoming a mainstream idea in scholarly publishing, with more than 2000 open access journals and more than a million author self archived open access papers
Legal and technical barriers to open access are easily overcome using freely available tools
Full article at http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/333/7582/1306
Greg Crane wants me to think about Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR). Steven MacCall’s lecture slides on Historical Overview of Information Organization, AKA The ‘From Tablets to FRBR’ Lecture (requires Flash) seem like a good place to get started.
William Denton’s FRBR blog (by way of code4lib) brought this to my attention, along with a couple of other useful looking starting points:
By way of Dan Cohen’s blog, I discovered Bill Turkel’s list of nearly 100 books relevant to digital history. The meme is a comps reading list for an imaginary digital history sub-field. I was psyched to see geographic history and GIS for history getting plenty of coverage, and python too!
I’m ashamed that I wasn’t subscribed to Bill’s blog feed until this morning.
A new journal entitled Open Access Research (OAR) is now accepting submissions and plans its first issue (thereafter, thrice a year) in August 2007. It’s described as “a peer-reviewed, open-access journal that will enable greater interaction and facilitate a deeper conversation about open access.”
By way of Dorothea Salo’s Caveat Lector and planet.code4lib.org.
Seen in Slashdot, a comment by Kent Simon:
“Many people may not know that MIT has initiated OpenCourseWare, an initiative to share all of their educational resources with the public. This generous act is intended (in classical MIT style) to make knowledge free, open, and available. It’s a great resource for people looking to improve their knowledge of our world. OpenCourseWare should prove exceptionally beneficial to those who may not be able to afford the quality of education offered at a school like MIT. Here’s a link to all currently available courses. It is expected that by the end of the year every course offered at MIT will be available on the OpenCourseWare site, including lecture notes, homework assignments, and exams. OpenCourseWare is not offered to replace collegiate education, but rather to spread knowledge freely.”
Seen in Humanist:
I’m pleased to announce that the complete text of A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004) is now freely available online, at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/ —please forward this announcement to other lists and communities who may be interested in the news. Thanks very much to Blackwell for agreeing to this arrangement, and to Jonathan Gorman of the UIUC libraries (and the UIUC Gradaute School of Library and Information Science) for modifying XTF (from the California Digital Library) so that it works with the Blackwell DTD. The editors encourage you to consider buying the paperback when it comes out in the fall of 2007. Also, if you spot typos or other errors in the text, please send them to John Unsworth [unsworth@uiuc.edu].
As far as I can see there is no special provision for downloading or printing the articles, but the advantage of course is being able to search and cite (and if you want it on paper, buy it!). The volume includes Harrison Eiteljorg’s ‘Computing for Archaeologists‘ and Greg Crane’s ‘Classics and the Computer: An End of the History‘.
My wife just gave me a copy of John Maeda’s The Laws of Simplicity, a book I’ve been wanting to read for a while. Maeda, whom I heard once at an ACH-ALLC meeting in Georgia, ranks on my top-three list of really inspiring speakers along with John Seeley Brown, who once addressed a HICSS convention in Maui, and also Ben Shneiderman, who lit up the recent Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science with his talk on information visualization (a topic that usually makes me yawn).
From the ACLS:
The ACLS is pleased to announce that “Our Cultural Commonwealth: The final report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences” was released December 13, 2006.
In 2004, ACLS appointed the Commission and charged it to recommend how the humanities and social sciences could develop online research environments that would empower scholars and students. The Commission, chaired by John Unsworth, Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science and Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has worked over two years to present a guide to achieving that goal.
A grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supported the work of the Commission and the publication of the report.
From Current Cites:
Entlich, Richard. “The Missing Dimension in Web-based Museum Exhibitions: Obstacles to Adding Depth to Digital Data” RLG DigiNews 10(6)(15 December 2006). – This “FAQ” feature in RLG DigiNews “provides a brief discussion about the development of 3D technology on the World Wide Web, its adoption by museums, and the obstacles that continue to keep the creation, dissemination, and management of 3D imagery via the Web from becoming a fully mainstreamed activity.” It provides a useful summary of 3D technologies such as VRML, QuickTime-VR, Shockwave3D, and others, along with examples of them in use. Although there have been various obstacles to the wide adoption of 3D technologies, the piece ends on a hopeful note with standards being solidified, high-capacity networks more widespread, and end-user computers gaining in capability for graphic rendering. RT
From Current Cites:
Coyle, Karen. “Mass Digitization of Books” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 32(6)(November 2006): 641-645. – A very well done overview of mass and near-mass digitization of books by Google, the Open Content Alliance, Microsoft, Project Gutenberg, and many library-based projects. Coyle touches on issues such as workflow, output and book structure, user interface, standards, preservation, and scoping the project. If you’re interested in this topic, this is the single best overview currently available. Highly recommended.
from Engadget:
The device, known as the E-Quran, is a handheld, low-power computer … which contains the full text of the Islamic holy book along with audio versions in 40 languages and interactive, interpretive material.
Greg Crane points out a new paper by Mark J. Schiefsky:
The specific purpose of this paper is to describe a set of new software tools and some of their applications to the study of Euclid’s Elements. More generally, it is intended as a case study to illustrate some of the ways in which recent developments in information technology can open up new perspectives for the study of source materials in the history of mathematics and science. I argue that the creative and judicious use of such technology can make important contributions to historical scholarship, both by making it possible to pursue old questions in new ways and by raising new questions that cannot easily be addressed using traditional means of investigation.
The Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies (CTB) http://www.kantl.be/ctb/ of the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature, the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH) http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/ of King’s College London, and the School for Library, Archive, and Information Studies (SLAIS) http://www.slais.ucl.ac.uk/ of University College London, are involved in the joint project “TEI by Example”.
Featuring freely available online tutorials walking individuals through the different stages in marking up a document in TEI (Text Encoding Initiative http://www.tei-c.org), these online tutorials will provide examples for users of all levels. Examples will be provided of different document types, with varying degrees in the granularity of markup, to provide a useful teaching and reference aid for those involved in the marking up of texts.
Eight tutorial modules will address a wide range of issues in text encoding with TEI:
1. Introduction to text encoding with TEI
2. The TEI header
3. Prose
4. Poetry
5. Drama
6. Manuscript Transcription
7. Scholarly Editing
8. Customizing TEI, ODD, RomaTo build as much as possible on available sources of existing practice in the field and to be able to present a broad view on the wide variety of encoding practices, we warmly welcome you to contribute TEI-encoded examples (either fragments or complete texts) that are applicable to any of these subjects. Examples are preferably encoded as TEI P5 XML texts, but also texts encoded in TEI P4 XML, other XML formats, or other (documented) electronic formats are of interest. Even examples of less-ideal encoding practices are welcome, since the idea of learning by error is a valuable didactic principle. Please do provide some indication of the errors or controversies in such examples when appropriate. After selection and editing, the example fragments will be incorporated in the freely available online deliverables, which will be issued under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license (see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/). All contributors will be credited.
The examples can be sent (preferably compressed in .zip format and with an indication of applicability and credits due) to teibyexample@kantl.be. Please do not hesitate to contact us for any inquiries regarding copyright issues or any more general issues.
Kind regards,
The project team:
Ron Van den Branden, Melissa Terras, Edward Vanhoutte
From Neel Smith comes word of The Pantheon Project – The Pilot Project of the Karman Center. Definitely worth a look, with very nice OA policies covering the core project data:
… many questions remain concerning the design, construction, statics, building logistics and the original purpose of this unique monument. The Karman Center’s Pantheon Project aims to resolve these questions with up-to-date technical means, new digital measurings of the entire building and new forms of web-based scientific collaboration … One of the new means of the Pantheon Project for scientific work is a 3D digital data model based on 540,000,000 points (= >9 gigabytes of numerical data) from a laser scanning operation executed in Rome during December 2005. The model not only contains the coordinates of all the points but also the colour value of the surface … The Pantheon Project, as all other future Karman Center projects, focuses on Open Access Scholarship, that is, not only the research results from the Pantheon Project and the Karman Center, but also all the basic data and discussion concerning them will be made freely accessible to all interested scholars for their own use. We also hope to convince archives and other institutions owning historical sources, such as drawings, photographs, prints, rare books, maps, etc., to help us make them available online for research. This would not only help to intensify scholarly work but would at the same time help to preserve the often very delicate or easily damaged originals.
Curious about where classics might go in a digital world? See the preprint of a new article about ePhilology (by Gregory Crane, David Bamman, and Alison Babeu of the Perseus Project at Tufts University) that will appear in The Blackwell Companion to Digital Literary Studies.
From the introduction: “The term ePhilology implicitly states that, while our strategic goal may remain the scientia totius antiquitatis, the practices whereby we pursue this strategic goal must evolve into something qualitatively different from the practices of the past.”
Emphasis added:
For better or for worse, Wikipedia has become the first destination for many a student researcher. Does the site’s ubiquity mean that professors have a responsibility to contribute? “I feel I have an obligation to do so, at least within my field,” said Alexander M.C. Halavais, an assistant professor of communications at Quinnipiac University, during a live Chronicle chat yesterday. “Public scholarship…is an important part of being a professor,” Mr. Halavais said. “Since Wikipedia is probably the single most visible source of knowledge for many today, it strikes me as an important place to engage in that role. I would love to see universities and tenure committees embrace that role, but I am not holding my breath.” A complete transcript of the chat — in which Mr. Halavais discussed Wikipedia’s strengths and weaknesses, and the role of the encyclopedia as a research tool — is now available online.
Progress Report (as of October 2, 2006):
Assigned: 20,385
Translated: 20,001
Vetted: 19,998
A message from Managing Editor Bill Hutton to contributors and potential contributors:
Dear contributors to the Suda On-Line:
Yesterday the 20,000th was submitted to the Suda On Line (http://www.stoa.org/sol/). This means we are roughly 2/3 of the way toward having translations of every single entry in our database. Thanks to the work of our editors, particularly the indefatigables, David Whitehead and Catharine Roth, practically all of those 20,000 entries have received at least preliminary editorial review. Considering the fact that this is not anyone’s full-time job, and not even the number-one research/publication project for the vast majority of us, this is not an achievement to be sneezed at. It took us 5 years to get to 10,000 entries (1998-2003), and only three more years to get up to 20,000.
Thank you for helping us reach that goal, and if you have not contributed to the project recently, I hope you will consider doing so and helping us do the last 10,000 entries even more quickly. Remember that you can use the SOL’s facilities to perform word searches on the Greek text of the Suda, thereby finding untranslated entries that interest you. Alternatively, the managing editors will be happy to assign you blocks of random entries that need to be translated. Those of you with “editor” status: we also need you to take a look at entires in your areas of expertise and make any necessary changes.
Please also bring the project to the attention of other people you think might be interested in contributing. Those of you who teach Greek might consider the benefit of having your students work on translating and/or annotating entries. We have had people do that successfully both on the graduate and the undergraduate levels.
If you have questions or need help getting back into SOL, just let us know: sudatores@lsv.uky.edu
Among the Arts & Humanities videos just released by the University of California at Berkeley, there is “Ancient Egypt and the Tebtunis Papyri.”
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).
Via rogueclassicism comes the news that The Center for Studies in Oral Tradition now offers universal, free access to its academic journal.
The Unicode(R) Consortium announces that pre-orders of Version 5.0 of the Unicode Standard can be made now through the Unicode Consortium’s website. As a special introductory offer, The Unicode Guide — the handy tri-fold developer’s reference guide — will be included with the Version 5.0 book at a combined price of $40.00 for both. This offer will expire on October 15, 2006.
To pre-order, go to: http://www.unicode.org/book/bookform.html
For further details on the book, go to:
http://www.unicode.org/book/aboutbook.html
The new version defines 1,369 new characters, including additional mathematical and linguistic symbols, and characters needed for Greek, Hebrew, Kannada, and for minority language support. Five new scripts are added in 5.0: Balinese, N’Ko, Phags-pa, Phoenician, and Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform.
Besides defining new characters, Unicode Standard 5.0 now contains the Unicode Standard Annexes, and includes significantly updated figures, tables, definitions, and tables.
The text itself provides better guidance on the handling of combining characters, Unicode strings, variation selectors, line breaking, and segmentation. This latest version is the basis for Unicode security mechanisms, the Unicode collation algorithm, the locale data provided by the Common Locale Data Repository, and support for Unicode in regular expressions. Improved expression of the Unicode encoding model makes it much clearer how to represent Unicode text in UTF-8 and other encoding forms. Character properties have been systematized and greatly extended to help with Unicode text processing. This new version is a major update which supersedes and obsoletes all previous versions of the standard.
Unicode is required by modern standards as XML and is widely supported in computer systems. Windows Vista runs on Unicode 5.0 and Google, Yahoo!, and ICU all have plans to upgrade to it.
The book is smaller and lighter than Unicode 4.0.
Publication details: Hardback, 1472 pages, $59.99 (list price)
For ordering questions, contact:
Magda Danish, Sr. Administrative Director, The Unicode Consortium
650-693-3921
magda@unicode.org
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.