Scholars in the sciences have been light-years ahead of their peers in the humanities in exploring the possibilities of open-access publishing. But a new venture with prominent academic backers, the Open Humanities Press, wants to help humanists close the gap.

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“Scholars in all disciplines tend to confuse online publication with the bypassing of peer review,” [Peter] Suber observed. “That’s simply mistaken.” In the humanities in particular, he said, “we’re fighting the prestige of print.”

CHE, Today’s News, May 7, 2008:

http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=WqvC6RkTkxgjB9pb92RywcgrsJVtXz9K

Taking into consideration the latest developments in scientific publishing, the Institute for Byzantine Research of the National Hellenic Research Foundation has reevaluated the aims of ΣΥΜΜΕΙΚΤΑ, a journal it has published since 1966. Under the new name BYZANTINA SYMMEIKTA, it has become a peer-reviewed open access journal with well-defined processes and scope and it is freely accessible at: http://www.byzsym.org/. Its printed version will be published at the end of each year.

Fridays at 16:30 in NG16, Senate House, Malet St, London, WC1E 7HU
(June 20th, July 4th-18th seminars in room B3, Stewart House)
(June 27th seminar room 218, Chadwick Bdg, UCL, Gower Street)

**ALL WELCOME**

6 June (NG16): Elaine Matthews and Sebastian Rahtz (Oxford), The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names and classical web services

13 June (NG16) Brent Seales (University of Kentucky), EDUCE: Non-invasive scanning for classical materials

20 June (STB3) Dot Porter (University of Kentucky), The Son of Suda On Line: a next generation collaborative editing tool

27 June (UCL Chadwick 218) Bruce Fraser (Cambridge), The value and price of information: reflections on e-publishing in the humanities

4 July (STB3) Andrew Bevan (UCL), Computational Approaches to Human and Animal Movement in the Archaeological Record

11 July (STB3) Frances Foster (KCL), A digital presentation of the text of Servius

18 July (STB3) Ryan Bauman (University of Kentucky), Towards the Digital Squeeze: 3-D imaging of inscriptions and curse tablets

25 July (NG16) Charlotte Tupman (KCL), Markup of the epigraphy and archaeology of Roman Libya

1 Aug (NG16) Juan Garcés (British Library), Digitizing the oldest complete Greek Bible: The Codex Sinaiticus project

8 Aug (NG16) Charlotte Roueché (KCL), From Stone to Byte

15 Aug (NG16) Ioannis Doukas (KCL), Towards a digital publication for the Homeric Catalogue of Ships

22 Aug (NG16) Peter Heslin (Durham), Diogenes: Past development and future plans

**ALL WELCOME**

We are inviting both students and established researchers involved in the application of the digital humanities to the study of the ancient world to come and introduce their work. The focus of this seminar series is the interdisciplinary and collaborative work that results at the interface of expertise in Classics or Archaeology and Computer Science.

The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.

Audio recordings and slideshows will be uploaded after each event.

(Sponsored by the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London.)

For more information please contact gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk or simon.mahony@kcl.ac.uk, or visit the seminar website at http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2008.html

Attendees (who should be familiar with Greek/Latin and the Leiden Conventions) will need to bring a laptop on which has been installed the Oxygen XML editor (available at a reduced academic price, or for a free 30-day demo).

The EpiDoc Summer School is free to participants; we can try to help you find cheap (student) accommodation in London. If any students participating would like to stay on afterwards and acquire some hands-on experience marking up some texts for the Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica project, they would be most welcome!

All interested please contact both charlotte.roueche@kcl.ac.uk and gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk as soon as possible. Please pass on this message to anyone who you think might benefit.

The main objective of Art2008 is to bring together experts in non-destructive evaluation and material analysis with professionals from the fields of preservation of cultural heritage, archeology, art history and architectural researchers of ancient structures.

Non-destructive methods of analysis have become a routine in many areas of technology, engineering and medicine. With a growing number of application areas, non-destructive analysis found its way into the world of art and archeology. Its advantage over sampling is obvious in the cases of unique objects of cultural heritage. Continuous improvement of sensitivity and reliability has caused non-destructive investigations to become a preferred approach even in cases where microanalysis sampling is permitted.

Many non-destructive techniques and evaluation methods applied in the natural sciences offer advantages to cultural heritage preservation. The synergy between experts will lead to the continuous development and adjustments of new scientific methods and their application in the fields of preservation, reconstruction and diagnostics of museum and archaeological objects.

Conference website: http://www.isas.co.il/art2008/

As primary source materials move online, in both licensed and freely available form, what will be the impact on scholarship? On teaching and learning practice? On the collecting practices of research libraries? These are questions we are hoping to explore in the third day of our annual meeting (June 4th). This symposium, which we’re calling “Digitization and the Humanities: Impact on Libraries and Special Collections,” will feature perspectives from scholars on how digital collections are impacting both their research and teaching practice. We’ll also have perspectives from university librarians (Paul Courant, University of Michigan and Robin Adams, Trinity College Dublin) on the potential impact on library collecting practices.

The symposium will be held at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and on Tuesday evening (June 3rd), the Philadelphia Museum of Art will host a reception for attendees. It should be a great event and a thought provoking conversation, and we hope you will join us. RLG Partners may register online.

http://www.virginiafoundation.org/NEH%20Workshop%20Report%20FINAL-3.pdf

Attendees included representatives from funding agencies and university presses, historians, just one or two literary scholars, one medievalist, and no classicists. It appears that much of the discussion focused on creating a service provider for scholarly editions, something to work between scholars and university presses to turn scholarship into digital publications.

I’m of two minds about this. On one hand, I know a lot of “traditional scholars” who find the idea of digital publication a little scary, just the idea of having to learn the technology. So it could be a good way to bring digital publication into the mainstream. But on the other hand, this kind of model could be stifling for creativity. One of the exciting things about digital projects is that, at this time, although there are standards there is no single model to follow for publication. There’s a lot of room for experimentation. It’s certainly not either/or - those of us doing more cutting-edge work will continue to do it whether there are mainstream service providers at university presses or not. But it’s interesting that this is being discussed.

What is the role of the humanist scholar (and his home institution, and her professional society) in the era of big digitization? Readers of this blog know about the on-going Million Books discussions. I’ve opined elsewhere that the creation of stable, sustainable, massively interlinked scholarly reference works is a critical contribution. The issue also surfaces regularly in attempts to define “digital scholarship in the humanities” and to organize funding for it. Yet, clearly the questions are arising spontaneously in many quarters and there is not yet a field-wide dialog on the subject.

We may agree with Steven Wheatley that:

The day will come, not that far off, when modifying humanities with ‘digital’ will make no more sense than modifying humanities with ‘print.’ (in A. Guess, “Rise of the Digital NEH,” Inside Higher Ed, 3 April 2008).

Ask your colleagues: what is your role in getting there and how will you work when we’ve arrived? Comments welcome.