The Stoa Consortium

OAPEN-UK focus groups, first report

Gabriel Bodard — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:12:06 +0000

The JISC-funded OAPEN-UK (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) project have published a report on the first round of focus groups, held in the British Library late last year. Various groups of stakeholders (in this case academics who author research material) were brought together to discuss issues surrounding open access monograph publication. The conclusions and recommendations are perhaps less radical (or more practical?) than some discussions of open publication in this venue, but the report still raises some valuable issues. (Full disclosure, I participated in this session.)

The report can be found at: http://oapen-uk.jiscebooks.org/research-findings/y1-initial-focus-groups/authors-readers/

Job: Digital Archivist at ADS

Gabriel Bodard — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:25:58 +0000

Particularly appropriate for a digital classicist or archaeologist with an interest in digital preservation and a high level of computer skills (from University of York jobs):

The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) has a vacancy for a Digital Archivist for a fixed term of two years, commencing immediately.

The post will involve accessioning, mounting, and indexing of data collections, validation of data and conversion into preferred formats; curation and migration of digital collections; design and development of user interfaces; and discussion and data audits with data depositors.

You should have a first degree or postgraduate qualification in archaeology and/or computer science, and you should possess an exceptionally high level of ICT skills.

Digital Classicist London 2012: Call for Papers

Gabriel Bodard — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:26:33 +0000

The annual Digital Classicist London seminar series on the subject of research into the ancient world that has an innovative digital component will run again in Summer 2012.

We warmly welcome contributions from students as well as from established researchers and practitioners. Themes could include digital text, linguistics technology, imaging and visualization, linked data, open access, geographic analysis, serious gaming and any other digital or quantitative methods. While we welcome high-quality application papers discussing individual projects, the series also hopes to accommodate broader theoretical consideration of the use of digital technology in Classical studies. The content should be of interest both to classicists, ancient historians or archaeologists, and to information scientists or digital humanists, and have an academic research agenda relevant to at least one of those fields.

The seminars will run on Friday afternoons (16:30-18:00) from June to mid-July in Senate House, London, hosted by the Institute of Classical Studies (ending early this year to avoid clashing with the Olympic Games). In previous years collected papers from the seminars have been published in a special issue of Digital Medievalist; a printed volume from Ashgate Press; a BICS supplement (in production). The last few years’ papers have been released as audio podcasts. We have had expressions of interest in further print volumes from more than one publisher.

There is a budget to assist with travel to London (usually from within the UK, but we have occasionally been able to assist international presenters to attend, so please enquire).

To submit a paper for consideration for the Digital Classicist London Seminars, please email an abstract of 300-500 words to gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk, by midnight UTC on April 1st, 2012.

More information will be found at http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2012.html

Guide to Evagrius Ponticus

Tom Elliott — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 16:36:27 +0000

This just in from Joel Kalvesmaki:

I am pleased to announce the appearance of the Guide to Evagrius Ponticus, a digital-only, peer-reviewed reference work about the fourth-century monastic theologian. Updated quarterly, it provides definitive, integrated lists of Evagrius’s works, of editions and translations of those works, and of studies related to his life and thought. The Guide also includes a sourcebook of key ancient testimonies to Evagrius and his reception, in English translation, as well as a checklist of images from the ancient world.

The Guide takes relatively new approaches to open-access academic publishing in the digital humanities [ed: cc-nc-sa], and so is anticipated to develop over the coming years. Future editions will include a manuscript checklist, images of manuscripts, transcriptions of those manuscripts, and open-source critical editions of Evagrius’s writings.

http://evagriusponticus.net/

(For a more complete experience, read the Guide on a browser other than Internet Explorer.)

Linked Ancient World Data Institute at NYU (Spring 2012)

Tom Elliott — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:29:44 +0000

New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) will host the Linked Ancient World Data Institute (LAWDI) from May 31st to June 2nd, 2012 in New York City. “Linked Open Data” is an approach to the creation of digital resources that emphasizes connections between diverse information on the basis of published and stable web addresses (URIs) that identify common concepts and individual items. LAWDI, funded by the Office of Digital Humanities of the National Endowment for Humanities, will bring together an international faculty of practitioners working in the field of Linked Data with twenty attendees who are implementing or planning the creation of digital resources.

More information, including a list of faculty, and application instructions are available at the LAWDI page on the Digital Classicist wiki.

Working with Text in a Digital Age, RFP

Gabriel Bodard — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 20:39:00 +0000

Tufts University invites applications to “Working with Text in a Digital Age”, a three-week NEH Institute for Advanced Technology in the Digital Humanities (July 23-August 10, 2012) that combines traditional topics such as TEI Markup with training in methods from Information Retrieval, Visualization, and Corpus and Computational Linguistics. Faculty, graduate students, and library professionals are encouraged to apply. Applicants should submit proposals by February 15, 2012. Participant proposals must include CVs and statements of purpose (no more than 1,000 words) describing how they will be able to use participation in the Institute to advance their subsequent careers. Participants must be committed to collaborative work and to publication of results from this Institute under a Creative Commons license. Participants should identify source materials with which they propose to work during the Institute and which must be in the public domain or available under a suitable license. In an ideal case, source materials would include both texts for intensive analysis and annotation and one or more larger corpora to be mined and analyzed more broadly. Statements of purpose must describe initial goals for the Institute. For more information or to submit applications, please contact lcerrato@perseus.tufts.edu.

We particularly encourage participants who are committed to developing research agendas that integrate contributions and research by undergraduates, that expand the global presence of the Humanities, and that, in general, broaden access to and participation in the Humanities. Preference will be given to participants who are best prepared not only to apply new technologies but to do so as a means to transform their teaching and research and the relationship of their work to society beyond academia.

Postdoc in Digital Humanities: University of Alabama

Tom Elliott — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 23:03:55 +0000

The Alabama Digital Humanities Center at the University of Alabama (http://www.lib.ua.edu/digitalhumanities) is pleased to invite applications for a post-doctoral fellowship in Digital Humanities. The fellowship offers the successful candidate a unique platform for professional advancement: financial and material support for independent research combined with the opportunity to play an instrumental role in nurturing the growing digital humanities community at the University of Alabama.

See the full announcement here.

Open Book Publishers: Cicero

Gabriel Bodard — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 12:04:46 +0000

The Open Access academic publishing house Open Book Publishers is about to publish, on November 18th, their first Classics title, Ingo Gildenhard’s edition of Cicero, Against Verres, 2.1.53–86. This title, as all OBP books, will soon thereafter be available free to read online in Google Books, and for a reasonable price in PDF or print versions. The press are seeking scholars who would be willing to review this title—either online or for a classical journal.

This is the first I’ve come across this press, but from what I can see it’s a nice example of the academic model—all the peer review etc. carried out by academic volunteers, as usual, but without the traditional publisher sucking cash out of the process of getting the publication back into the hands of the scholarly community who fed the research in the first place.

**Edited November 3 at 16:22 to correct nature of Open Access publication**

“Rome Wasn’t Digitized in a Day”: Building a Cyberinfrastructure for Digital Classicists

Simon Mahony — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 05:39:17 +0000

A web only publication by Alison Babeu with good coverage of the Stoa and the Digital Classicist. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The author provides a summative and recent overview of the use of digital technologies in classical studies, focusing on classical Greece, Rome, and the ancient Middle and Near East, and generally on the period up to about 600 AD. The report explores what projects exist and how they are used, examines the infrastructure that currently exists to support digital classics as a discipline, and investigates larger humanities cyberinfrastructure projects and existing tools or services that might be repurposed for the digital classics.
(Council on Library and Information Resources)

PDF Download of Complete Report (2.6 MB file)

„Historische Dokumente auf dem Weg zum digitalen Volltext“ – Turning Historical Documents into Digital Full Texts

Tom Elliott — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 20:20:17 +0000

From Marco Büchler:

The Munich DigitiZation Center (MDZ) of the Bavarian State Library invites you to Munich on Tuesday 11 October and Wednesday 12 October, 2011, for two conferences under the shared title “Historische Dokumente auf dem Weg zum digitalen Volltext – Turning Historical Documents into Digital Full Texts”.

Starting from different viewpoints, both events will focus on using OCR to create digital full texts. You can attend either event separately, or both together.

Please note: both conferences are German-speaking only!

October 11th – Results of OCR Research: IMPACT Demo Day

Jointly organised by the Munich DigitiZation Center of the Bavarian State Library and the Austrian National Library, this Demo Day will present research results and tools from the EU-funded IMPACT Project (IMProving ACcess to Text). It will focus on the challenges involved in creating searchable full text from historical documents, and show the tools and solutions created by IMPACT to resolve these challenges. It will also detail how project outputs will be made available once the project ends (December 2011). The event is open to anyone, but is mainly aimed at representatives from libraries, museums and archives.

October 12th – Insights from Practical Experience: OCR, Full Texts and Forms of Presentation

Digitisation projects can’t just present digital images anymore. User expectations are increasing steadily, and mobile devices and other technological forms of interaction bring their own challenges with them.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and searchable full text are therefore becoming more important. This has consequences for the entire project workflow – from its initial scoping and the choice of hardware, to the presentation of the results online. All of these challenges will be discussed at the conference.

The day will focus on the results of a number of full-text digitisation projects, detailing the particular issues presented by different types of source material. OCR software solutions will be compared, along with a number of post-capture processing tools and techniques, including crowdsourcing to improve OCR.

“Insights from Practical Experience: OCR, Full Texts and Forms of Presentation” is free of charge, thanks to our sponsors: Abbyy Europe, ARPA Data, Image Access, Treventus Mechatronics and Zeutschel.

For more information about the programme and registration, please visit::

http://www.muenchener-digitalisierungszentrum.de/~lza/impact/index.html?c=info&l=en

The deadline for registration is September 25th. Please remember, the events will be German-speaking only.

Contact details:

Munich DigitiZation Center (MDZ) Digital Library
Bavarian State Library
Fedor Bochow / Mark-Oliver Fischer
Ludwigstrasse16
80539 Munich
Germany

mdz[at]bsb-muenchen.de

Tel. +49 (0) 89 28638 2295
oder +49 (0) 89 28638 2890
Fax +49 (0) 89 28638 2672

http://www.muenchener-digitalisierungszentrum.de

http://www.bsb-muenchen.de