Declan Butler, Virtual globes: The web-wide world, Nature, February 15, 2006. Google Earth is becoming a platform for OA geospatial data. Butler explores how scientists are using GE and how –because GE is free, fun, and spectacular– this science is reaching the public.
(Thanks to Peter Suber)
MediaShift offers a guided tour through the various major podcast directories.
Writing to the JISC-Repositories list, Richard Green (manager of the RepoMMan Project at the University of Hull) announces “an early draft of a project deliverable that describes [their] work getting going with Fedora”: D-D4 Iterative Development of Fedora materials. Sorry, I can’t give you a direct link because they use some kind of indirection from the document title link to the current version … you’ll have to hunt it on their documents page yourself if you want the most recent version.
Patacriticism has just released Juxta 1.0:
Juxta is an open-source cross-platform tool for comparing and collating multiple witnesses to a single textual work. The software allows users to set any of the witnesses as the base text, to add or remove witness texts, to switch the base text at will, and to annotate Juxta-revealed comparisons and save the results.
Juxta comes with several kinds of analytic visualizations. The primary collation gives a split frame comparison of a base text with a witness text, along with a display of the digital images from which the base text is derived. Juxta displays a heat map of all textual variants and allows the user to locate — at the level of any textual unit — all witness variations from the base text. A histogram of Juxta collations is particularly useful for long documents. This visualization displays the density of all variation from the base text and serves as a useful finding aid for specific variants. Juxta can also output a lemmatized schedule (in HTML format) of the textual variants in any set of comparisons.
… The document comparison algorithm implemented in Juxta is a modified version of the Java port of Diff by Ian F. Darwin.
(Hat tip Geoff Rockwell)
A review at Bryn Mawr Classical Review of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, Third electronic edition, published by K. G. Saur.
Peter Heslin at Durham has some interesting things to say about the value of this work and of such Greek and Latin textual search tools in general. There are points that would be well raised in discussion either here or in the Digitalclassicist list if people want to share thoughts…
Linden Lab Fellowship in the Visual and Performing Arts For Creative Innovation in the Online World of Second Life
This fellowship is made possible by Linden Lab®, the creators of Second Life®, to provide a young artist with a chance to be free for a semester or summer to explore the use of the digital world of Second Life as an artistic medium. In doing so, we hope that we will see Second Life used to even greater potential in the expressive arts to the benefit of both the Second Life culture and the broader world of art.
The fellowship will be made available to an undergraduate or graduate student in the visual and performing arts (including music, film, video, new media arts, and architecture) who has shown through his or her work a commitment and talent in innovating using digital media. The fellowship is not intended to support study, but to allow a student the free time to fully explore the potential of Second Life as a creative medium.
All projects must be completed within a semester and/or summer, make use of Second Life tools and capabilities, and be available for view or exhibit within Second Life.
Details and application form at http://secondlife.com/_files/FellowshipApp.pdf
My post this morning to classics-l about Bruce Byfield’s newsforge article (Gentium: An award-winning font joins the free software world ) has sparked an interesting and informative discussion.
Gist@newsforge: Gentium’s creator, Victor Gaultney, has re-released the useful and attractive font through his employer SIL International under an open license to encourage redistribution and collaborative improvement.
Gist@classics-l: He’s going to get that collaborative help from some very talented people. Oh, and they like the font alot (it’s got Greek, among other things).
Rogueclassicism notes that the University of Chicago Library have put online a searchable version of Woodhouse’s English-Greek Dictionary. At first glance, it looks as though this–although it has a bit of a clunky search engine–will be a nice complement to the English-Greek feature of the Perseus dictionaries.
This blog has now been upgraded to the WordPress 2.0 “Duke” release, named in honor of jazz pianist and composer Duke Ellington. No big changes on the surface, but nicer to work with behind the scenes.
I have begun to expand the scope of Abzu to include Classics and Mediterranean Archaeology in addition to the ancient Near East.
Abzu is an index to open access material served from stable platforms. It covers material realting to the Ancient Near East, Classics and Mediteranean Archaeology.
To find material newly added to Abzu, you can follow
the View items recently added to Abzu link. Entries stay there for a month from the date they are entered.
Alternatively you can make use of the RSS feed from the same page, or you can read the blog constructed from the RSS feed:
What’s New in Abzu blog.
If you have anything you’d like to have included, please let me know either directly, or by means of the “Suggest a Resource for Abzu” at the bottom of the page
Gentium has now been re-released under a license that permits modification and redistribution – the SIL Open Font License. This is an exciting new development that will give great freedom to people who find Gentium useful, and the freedom to extend the font if needed.
Update: a reader emails to say that the Greek Font Society has released an interesting font, GFS Didot, with the following statement regarding licensing: “You may use these fonts for personal and commercial use. These fonts may be freely redistributed, provided that you do not alter them in any way and that you credit GFS for this.”
We have just spotted the Packard Humanities Institute Greek Inscriptions database online version.
http://erga.packhum.org/inscriptions/
I have been unable to learn if this is (a) a permanent fixture, or in particular (b) a permanent URL.
The site has a good index of inscriptions by region, moving down to individual inscriptions, and a fairly effective search tool attached. But it has no documentation, introduction, or special features. It is not even clear if we are supposed to know about it yet. Does anyone know any more? Please comment here.
Excellent news though.
Just found a quick way to get a Subversion client going on a Mac that hasn’t got Fink on it, here at Metissian.com. (Also here.) Click to install the package, check /etc/profile to be sure /usr/local/bin is in the path, and away you go.
That client works at the command line. svnX provides a decent GUI (if you want one), usefully complemented by SSHPassKey (or here), to enable svn+ssh interaction with your remote repository.
Juicy stuff in D-Lib this month:
Hierarchical Catalog Records: Implementing a FRBR Catalog
David Mimno, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Gregory Crane and
Alison Jones, Tufts University
Development and Assessment of a Public Discovery and Delivery Interface
for a Fedora Repository
Leslie Johnston, University of Virginia
The Society of Biblcal Literature [SBL] has an interesting model for the development of fonts that are “… attractive and legible on computer screens and in print, include characters and symbols found in critical editions, display complex scripts, and transfer between operating systems and applications that support Unicode/OpenType standards…”
They are currently working on a Greek font and seek comment from thos who have use for such a thing.
If you wish to have a sample of the font and the contact information for comments send me a message.
Folks who recall the now-defunct Argos LASE (limited area search engine) may be interested in Klaus Graf‘s experiments with Rollyo, a site that lets you limit search results to certain sources. Klaus has now created a neo-Latin Rollyo, and an OA Rollyo, among others.
Dieser Aufruf zur Beteiligung kann man auch auf deutsch lesen
Cet appel à participation se trouve aussi en français
Questa richiesta di partecipazione e’ disponibile anche in Italiano
We should like to announce the creation of a new project and community, hosted by the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (KCL), applying humanities computing to the study of the ancient world. The Digital Classicist has a pilot web site at http://www.digitalclassicist.org, which, as well as serving as a placeholder for further content, sets out our aims and objectives in a preliminary manner. As you will see, key sections of the website and summaries of articles will, where possible, be translated into the major languages of European scholarship: e.g. English, French, German, Italian, Spanish etc. The project also comprises a discussion list, a Wiki, and a Blog.
The project, which is committed to being ongoing and available in the long term, fills a gap in the current academic environment: there are countless important digital research projects in the classics, including many that offer advice and share tools; there are sites that discuss, host, or list such resources (the Stoa, the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents in Oxford, EAGLE in Rome, to name but a few); but there is no single platform for scholars and interested experts in the international and polyglot community to discuss problems, share experiences, post news and advice, and go to for help on all matters digital and classical. We shall of course work closely with other organisations and projects that are active in these areas (in particular the Stoa, and other subject communities such as the Digital Medievalist, including specialists in archaeological, historical, and geographical technologies), to avoid excessive overlap and maximise co-operation and collaboration.
At this point we especially need members of the international scholarly community to contribute to the project. If you feel you could get involved in an editorial capacity, or you could recommend somebody else to do so, please do get in touch. There is no obligation that editors give up many hours of their time, of course–editorial roles are discussed in a posting at http://tinyurl.com/cpdsu . In addition we should be very grateful if you could suggest other people–especially those in non-Anglophone Europe–who might be interested in participating in this project in any way.
And in any case, please spread the word, join the mailing list and get involved in the discussions as we establish this new project and community.
Best regards,
The Editors
digitalclassicist.org
Two Italian scholars, Berti and Costa, have a review in BMCR 2004.09.10 of the Antiquarium software for reading the TLG and PHI CD Roms. They make some sound (and enthusiastic) observations about the price, speed, ease of use, and comprehensive Beta Code coverage of the tool, which seems to be a good choice especially for those scholars without the financial backing of an institution that subscribes to the TLG Online (which remains the only truly acceptable way to search the TLG, in my humble opinion…)
The Stoa now mirrors the Digital Incunabula site from the Center for Hellenic Studies.
This story has implications for speech synthesis and language analysis. It would be great to see this applied to Latin or Greek via a corpus like the TLG.
(From New Scientist)
• 06 August 2005
COMPUTER scientists have developed a program that can teach itself new languages. Feed it a piece of text, in any language, and the program analyses its structure and can then produce new, meaningful sentences.
Conventional translation software programs have all the rules of grammar coded into them. But the ADIOS (automatic distillation of structure) program, developed by researchers at Cornell University in New York and Tel Aviv University in Israel, infers the building blocks of a language using statistical and algebraic processes. The software learns the grammar of a new language by searching text for patterns. The researchers think the program will be useful in cognitive science and bioinformatics, as well as in applications such as voice recognition.
From issue 2511 of New Scientist magazine, 06 August 2005, page 23