The Stoa Consortium

Digital CHASS Conference

On Friday, December 9, EPIC’s Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (CHASS) Virtual Institute will host an all-day conference focused on digital tools. This event will be an information exchange among scholars in humanities, arts, social sciences, and computer science and will be an opportunity to discuss projects that use advanced visualization and/or digital tools.

The conference will be held in the auditorium of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA; 1205 W. Clark St. , Room 1122) on the University of Illinois , Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) campus , from 9:00am-5:00pm Central Time.

If you are not able to attend at UIUC, you are welcome to participate via the Access Grid. For information on the Access Grid, see http://www.accessgrid.org/ . For specifics on the Dec. 9 the conference, see http://agschedule.ncsa.uiuc.edu/meetingdetails.asp?MID=12050

The agenda for the conference follows. Please help with organization by pre-registering before December 6 at www.chass.uiuc.edu/register.html or by contacting chass@ncsa.uiuc.edu. For current news and updates visit the CHASS website, http://www.chass.uiuc.edu

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From Wired, “Podcast Chaos Be Gone“:

Podzinger and blinkx scour audio content for keywords by translating the audio into text and creating an index for quick searching. It’s a significant step above traditional search engines that identify only keywords in a podcast’s metadata, such as the headline and introductory notes describing the audio file’s general content.

Podzinger, in beta until mid-December, lets users jump to the spot in a podcast where their search term appears, rather than forcing them to scan an entire program for pertinent parts as blinkx does. Its minimalist design has an uncluttered search page, à la Google. And Podcasters can link to a searchable index of their content in order to sell sponsored links to text in the index provided by Podzinger.

Both Podzinger and blinkx include information about the source of the podcast and excerpts of text translated from the podcast with the relevant search terms highlighted. But Podzinger’s information is more extensive and the results include a counter indicating where in the podcast the snippet is located. And Podzinger allows users to click on the Play button to hear the excerpt and determine its relevancy before clicking on a link to download the entire podcast.

A third search engine, launched last spring by TVEyes and called Podscope, searches podcasts but scans only for the sounds of syllables rather than full words.

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.”

Marilyn Skinner has completed editorial work on a peer-reviewed collection of essays, Gender and Diversity in Place: Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Feminism and Classics, May 27-30, 2004, University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona. These essays are now published as part of Diotima.

http://www.forumancientcoins.com/numiswiki/view.asp

The Forum Ancient Coins have set up a new Wiki for the collaborative authoring and editing of numismatic articles online. I’m not familiar with this site, which seems to include catalogues of coins for sale, so I’m not sure how scholarly it is?

From the home page…

What is NumisWiki?

It is a collection of numismatics and history references and articles that you can read, edit, correct or update right now. The online format includes edit features that allows all FORVM members to add new documents or to modify the existing ones. Any member can edit any page including this page you are reading right now. All you have to do is click the “Edit” button from above and start typing. If you mess things up too much, don’t worry, you can revert to the older version anytime using “History”.

Troels takes great pictures, and just recently he’s added a bunch more from Italy and Spain.

The podcasting project mentioned here a few days ago continues, with some much improved techniques and voices (notice I’m not one of them this time!):

• Erasmus, Echo. Readers: William du Cassé and Milena Minkova
• Erasmus, Abbatis et Eruditae. Readers: William du Cassé and Erika Peck
• Erasmus, Adolescentis et Scorti. Readers: William du Cassé and Jessica McCormack
• Vives, Prima Salutatio. Readers: William du Cassé, Antoine Haaker, and Jessica McCormack

The RSS feed is at http://www.stoa.org/colloquia/podcasts/channel-01.xml

Alternatively, this feed is registered with FeedBurner.

Archaeology Data Service User Services Manager – Department of Archaeology
Vacancy reference: BR05505

Applications are invited for the position of User Services Manager in the Archaeology Data Service, available from February 2006. This is an opportunity to take a key management role within a team environment. The User Services Manager is responsible for promoting the ADS/ AHDS Archaeology and usage of its digital resources, particularly in Higher Education. You will be expected to have an active teaching and research profile and to undertake project management. Applicants should have a first degree and postgraduate qualification, at least one of which should be in archaeology.

In late October the Association of Research Libraries Forum, the Coalition for Networked Information the Council on Library and Information Resources and the Digital Library Federation held a forum ehtitled Managing Digital Assets: Strategic Issues for Research Libraries. The keynote address, “Managing Digital Assets in Higher Education: An Overview of Strategic Issues” [a work in progress], by Don Waters, Program Officer, Scholarly Communication, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, articulates some very interesting general ideas on the emerging roles and potential reasponsibilities of University Libraries in the future of digital asset management.

Via RogueClassicism, a longish and worthwhile article about Don Sanders and his LearningSites company, which produces archaeological VR projects.

William du Cassé (who’s enrolled in the flourishing UK Institute for Latin Studies) and I began a site this week for publication of recordings of neo-Latin colloquia saved as mp3 files. Should you want to keep track of new additions to the directory, the RSS feed you can use is

http://www.stoa.org/colloquia/podcasts/channel-01.xml

That’s suitable for plugging into your copy of iTunes as the subscription information for the colloquia site. (Start iTunes, then pull down Advanced, and select Subscribe to Podcast.)

Alternatively, this feed is registered with FeedBurner.

Note too that we have registered the project with the iTunes Podcast Directory, so you can search for e.g. “colloquia” among the podcasts in the iTunes Music Store via your copy of iTunes, in order to subscribe to the feed. (Subscription to this series of podcasts is entirely free, of course.)

Our RSS feed will work for you at bloglines.com or whatever other RSS reader you like to use to keep up to date with your favorite blogs and podcasts. In fact you don’t even need an iPod to listen to the recordings. These are basic mp3 files playable any number of ways.

As our summary in the RSS file notes, you can if you like simultaneously read (aloud!) the words of the colloquia on Jeff Rydberg-Cox’s CHLT site at http://www.chlt.org/sandbox/colloquia/

Eventually we expect to produce some QuickTime “text movies” that will sync the sound and the text segments in a single file, but we’re not quite there yet. (We also plan to load all of the TEI-XML source texts into a CTS-conformant eXist database; we’re not there yet either, but we do have a plan…)

Feedback welcome! We are new at this and still learning to control the level and quality of the sound.

By the way, this is quite inexpensive: we are using a Sony ECMMS907 Digital Recording Microphone, a Behringer Eurorack UB502 mixer, and the GPL-bearing program Audacity to edit the audio files, for now.

(Apologies to those who did not need the various explanations.)

In this morning’s mail bag:

The draft report of the American Council of Learned Societies’ Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Sciences is now available for public comment, at

http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/acls-ci-public.pdf

The file is about 2.4MB in size. The Commission invites you to contribute to the final version of this report by offering critique, providing examples, proposing ways to improve the draft, or raising issues omitted from the draft. We do not promise to incorporate all suggestions, but we do promise to consider them, and we encourage you to call this request for comments to the attention of others. Comments on the draft may be sent to cybercomments@listserv.acls.org.

The Commission will meet again early in 2006 to discuss public comments and complete their work, so comments should be submitted by December 31st, 2005.

John Unsworth, Chair

ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Science

… do not include Latin, apparently.

Peter Suber compares the Open Content Alliance with Google Library in the most recent SPARC Open Access Newsletter (#91 November 2, 2005).