The Stoa Consortium

Posted on the Digital Classicist list by Melissa Terras.

Call for Papers: Digitizing Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture

Editors Brent Nelson (University of Saskatchewan) and Melissa Terras
(University College London) invite submissions for a collection of
essays on “Digitizing Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture” to
be published in the New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance
Studies Series edited by Ray Siemens and William Bowen.

This collection of essays will build on the accomplishments of recent
scholarship on materiality by bringing together innovative research
on the theory and praxis of digitizing material cultures from roughly
500 A.D. to 1700 A.D. Scholars of the medieval and early modern
periods have begun to pay more attention to the material world not
only as a means of cultural experience, but also as a shaping
influence upon culture and society, looking at the world of material
objects as both an area of study and a rich source of evidence for
interpreting the past. Digital media enable new ways of evoking,
representing, recovering, and simulating these materials in
non-traditional, non-textual (or para-textual) ways and present new
possibilities for recuperating and accumulating material from across
vast distances and time, enabling both preservation and comparative
analysis that is otherwise impossible or impractical. Digital
mediation also poses practical and theoretical challenges, both
logistical (such as gaining access to materials) and intellectual
(for example, the relationship between text and object). This volume
of essays will promote the deployment of digital technologies to the
study of material culture by bringing together expertise garnered
from complete and current digital projects, while looking forward to
new possibilities for digital applications; it will both take stock
of the current state of theory and practice and advance new
developments in digitization of material culture. The editors welcome
submissions from all disciplines on any research that addresses the
use of digital means for representing and investigating material
culture as expressed in such diverse areas as:

• travelers’ accounts, navigational charts and cartography
• collections and inventories
• numismatics, antiquarianism and early archaeology
• theatre and staging (props, costumes, stages, theatres)
• the visual arts of drawing, painting, sculpture, print making, and
architecture
• model making
• paper making and book printing, production, and binding
• manuscripts, emblems, and illustrations
• palimpsests and three-dimensional writing
• instruments (magic, alchemical, and scientific)
• arts and crafts
• the anatomical and cultural body

We welcome approaches that are practical and/or theoretical, general
in application or particular and project-based. Submissions should
present fresh advances in methodologies and applications of digital
technologies, including but not limited to:

• XML and databases and computational interpretation
• three-dimensional computer modeling, Second Life and virtual worlds
• virtual research environments
• mapping technology
• image capture, processing, and interpretation
• 3-D laser scanning, synchrotron, or X-ray imaging and analysis
• artificial intelligence, process modeling, and knowledge representation

Papers might address such topics and issues as:

• the value of inter-disciplinarity (as between technical and
humanist experts)
• relationships between image and object; object and text; text and image
• the metadata of material culture
• curatorial and archival practice
• mediating the material object and its textual representations
• imaging and data gathering (databases and textbases)
• the relationship between the abstract and the material text
• haptic, visual, and auditory simulation
• tools and techniques for paleographic analysis

Enquiries and proposals should be sent to brent.nelson[at]usask.ca by
10 January 2009. Complete essays of 5,000-6,000 words in length will
be due on 1 May 2009.

Chuck Jones has just posted a call for papers for a special issue of the TAL journal (Revue TAL) on the topic “Natual Language Processing for Ancient Language” over at AWBG.

From an announement circulated by Marjorie Burghart:

Les historiens et l’informatique : un métier à réinventer

Jeudi 4 décembre – 14 h 30
Marilyn Nicoud (École française de Rome)
Accueil des participants

Jean-Philippe Genet (Université de Paris I)
Peut-on prévoir l’impact des transformations de l’informatique sur le travail scientifique de l’historien ?

L’historien et ses sources : archives et bibliothèques - 15 h 00
Anna Maria Tammaro (Università di Parma)
La biblioteca digitale verso la realizzazione dell’infrastruttura globale per gli studi umanistici

Roberto Delle Donne (Università di Napoli Federico II)
Storia e Open Archive

Christophe Dessaux (Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication)
De la numérisation des collections à Europeana : des contenus culturels pour la recherche

Gino Roncaglia (Università della Tuscia)
Libri elettronici : un panorama in evoluzione

Stefano Vitali (Archivio di Stato di Firenze)
I mutamenti nel mondo degli archivi

17 h 45-18 h 45 : Discussion

Vendredi 5 décembre – 9 h 00
Éditer
Michele Ansani (Università di Pavia) et Antonella Ghignoli (Università di Firenze)
Testi digitali : nuovi media e documenti medievali

Pierre Bauduin (Université de Caen) et Catherine Jacquemard (Université de Caen)
La pratique de l’édition en ligne : expériences et questionnements

Paul Bertrand (IRHT, CNRS)
Autour de l’édition électronique et des digital humanities : nouvelle érudition, nouvelle critique ?

10 h 30-11 h 00 : Discussion

Enseigner
Rolando Minuti (Università di Firenze)
Insegnare storia al tempo del web 2.0 : considerazioni su esperienze e problemi aperti

Giulio Romero (Atelhis)
Métier d’historiens, métiers d’historien : les impératifs d’une formation ouverte

12 h 45-13 h 15 : Discussion

Communiquer - 15 h 00
Pietro Corrao (Università di Palermo)
L’esperienza di Reti Medievali

Christine Ducourtieux (Université de Paris I) et Marc Smith (École nationale des Chartes),
L’expérience de Ménestrel

16 h 00 - 16 h. 30 Discussion

Les nouveaux horizons du métier d’historien
Aude Mairey (CESCM, CNRS-Université de Poitiers)
Quelles perspectives pour la textométrie ?

Julien Alerini (Université de Paris I) et Stéphane Lamassé (Université de Paris I)
Données et statistiques : l’avenir du travail en ligne pour l’historien

17 h 45-18 h 15 : Discussion

Samedi 6 décembre – 9 h 00
François Giligny (Université de Paris I)
L’informatique en archéologie : une révolution tranquille ?

Jean-Luc Arnaud (Telemme, CNRS-Université de Provence)
Nouvelles méthodes, nouveaux usages de la cartographie et de l’analyse spatiale en histoire

Margherita Azzari (Università di Firenze)
Geographic Information Systems and Science. Stato dell’arte, sfide future

10 h-30-11 h 00 : Discussion

L’historien et l’outil informatique
Serge Noiret (European University Institute)
Fare storia a più mani con il web 2.0 : cosa cambia nelle pratiche degli storici ?

Philippe Rygiel (Université de Paris I)
De quoi le web est-il l’archive ? Lectures historiennes de l’activité réseau

Jean-Michel Dalle (Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris VI)
Peut-on penser le futur d’une communauté scientifique sans tenir compte de l’économie de l’innovation et de la créativité ?

12 h 45-13 h 30 : Discussion

Conclusions d’Andrea Zorzi (Università di Firenze)

If you want to attend, please contact Marilyn Nicoud or Grazia Parrino, secrma@efrome.it

For those who are not subscribed to the Digital Classicist podcast RSS, I’d like to call attention to the latest “occasional seminar” audio and slides online: Marion Lamé spoke about “Epigraphical encoding: from the Stone to Digital Edition” in the internation video-conference series European Culture and Technology. Marion talked about her PhD project which is to use an XML-encoded edition of the Res Gestae Diui Augusti as an exercise in digital recording and presentation of an extremely important and rich historical text and encoding historical features in the markup.

We shall occasionally record and upload (with permission) presentations of interest to digital classicists that are presented in other venues and series. If you would be interested in contributing a presentation to this series, please contact me or someone else at the Digital Classicist.

Very exciting news - the complete dataset of the Archimedes Palimpsest project (ten years in the making) has been released today. The official announcement is copied below, but I’d like to point out what I think it is that makes this project so special. It isn’t the object - the manuscript - or the content - although I’m sure the previously unknown texts are quite exciting for scholars. It isn’t even the technology, which includes multispectral imaging used to separate out the palimpsest from the overlying text and the XML transcriptions mapped to those images (although that’s a subject close to my heart).

What’s special about this project is its total dedication to open access principles, and an implied trust in the way it is being released that open access will work. There is no user interface. Instead, all project data is being released under a Creative Commons 3.0 attribution license. Under this license, anyone can take this data and do whatever they want to with it (even sell it), as long as they attribute it to the Archimedes Palimpsest project. The thinking behind this is that, by making the complete project data available, others will step up and build interfaces… create searches… make visualizations… do all kinds of cool stuff with the data that the developers might not even consider.

To be fair, this isn’t the only project I know of that is operating like this; the complete high-resolution photographs and accompanying metadata for manuscripts digitized through the Homer Multitext project are available freely, as the other project data will be when it’s completed, although the HMT as far as I know will also have its own user interface. There may be others as well. But I’m impressed that the project developers are releasing just the data, and trusting that scholars and others will create user environments of their own.

The Stoa was founded on principles of open access. It’s validating to see a high-visibility project such as the Archimedes Palimpsest take those principles seriously.

Ten years ago today, a private American collector purchased the Archimedes Palimpsest. Since that time he has guided and funded the project to conserve, image, and study the manuscript. After ten years of work, involving the expertise and goodwill of an extraordinary number of people working around the world, the Archimedes Palimpsest Project has released its data. It is a historic dataset, revealing new texts from the ancient world. It is an integrated product, weaving registered images in many wavebands of light with XML transcriptions of the Archimedes and Hyperides texts that are spatially mapped to those images. It has pushed boundaries for the imaging of documents, and relied almost exclusively on current international standards. We hope that this dataset will be a persistent digital resource for the decades to come. We also hope it will be helpful as an example for others who are conducting similar work. It published under a Creative Commons 3.0 attribution license, to ensure ease of access and the potential for widespread use. A complete facsimile of the revealed palimpsested texts is available on Googlebooks as “The Archimedes Palimpsest”. It is hoped that this is the first of many uses to which the data will be put.

For information on the Archimedes Palimpsest Project, please visit: www.archimedespalimpsest.org

For the dataset, please visit: www.archimedespalimpsest.net

We have set up a discussion forum on the Archimedes Palimpsest Project. Any member can invite anybody else to join. If you want to become a member, please email:

wnoel@thewalters.org

I would be grateful if you would circulate this to your friends and colleagues.

Thank you very much

Will Noel
The Walters Art Museum
October 29th, 2008.

Via Open-Access News we learn:

The University of Michigan Library has decided to adopt Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial licenses for all works created by the Library for which the Regents of the University of Michigan hold the copyrights. These works include bibliographies, research guides, lesson plans, and technology tutorials.

Posted on behalf of David Bamman:

Place: University of Innsbruck, 15. International Colloquium on Latin Linguistics
Date: April 6, 2009

Workshop organizers: David Bamman (Perseus Project, Tufts University), Dag Haug (University of Oslo), Marco Passarotti (Catholic University of Milan)
Invited speaker: Roberto Busa, S.J.

Classical Studies has long had a history of driving pioneering research in linguistics and literary studies. The great Classical philologists and lexicographers of the 19th century are arguably some of the world’s earliest and finest corpus linguists – but we find ourselves now lagging behind the achievements of other languages due in large part to the absence of structured digital resources on which to base our research. While the TLG and the Packard Humanities Institute each released their respective Greek and Latin corpus in the 1970s (only shortly after the release of the Brown Corpus of English in 1967), they remain today – almost 40 years later – two of our most widely used electronic resources. Those ensuing 40 years have seen the rise and widespread development of structured knowledge bases, such as huge treebanks to encode syntactic information in English, Czech, Arabic and over twenty other languages, lexical ontologies such as WordNet, and new corpora being annotated not just with their semantics and syntax disambiguated, but their named entities and propositional data made explicit as well.

We are, however, now beginning to see these same resources being developed for Latin, along with the automatic tools that can exploit them (such as automatic syntactic parsers and morphological taggers) and a new interest in quantitative research that can only exist as a result. As we enter this new era, we must take care to work together as a community going forward – the three organizers, for instance, are each leading the development of independent treebank projects for different eras of Latin (Classical, Biblical and Thomistic) and we recognize that the value of each project is exponentially greater when compatible with the others. This workshop aims to bring together scholars working in the field – both those developing such resources and those conducting linguistic research using them – to share such work and experience.

We invite presentations including the following:
* Electronic resources for Latin in development
* Corpus linguistic research
* Application and evaluation of NLP tools on Latin texts
* Development of corpus driven lexica
* Standards and standardization of annotation styles on different linguistic layers (e.g.,
morphological, syntactic, semantic, propositional)

Please submit abstracts of up to two a4 pages to Dag Haug at daghaug@ifikk.uio.no.ignorethisbit before December 1, 2008. Notifications will be sent before January 1, 2009.

This year’s Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts conference (Cambridge, September 14-17) included a two-part panel on Digital Classicist (sadly divided over two days), organized by Simon Mahony, Stuart Dunn, and myself. Despite some apparently last-minute (and unannounced) scheduling changes, the panel was very successful. I post here only my brief notes on the papers involved, and hope that some of my colleagues may post more detailed reactions or reports either in comments, or as posts to this or other blogs.

Gabriel Bodard

I kicked off the first Classicists’ session on Monday morning with a brief history of the Digital Classicist community and a discussion of the different approaches to studying the use of digital methods in the study of the ancient world (contrasting the historical approach of Solomon 1993 with the forward-looking theme of Crane/Terras 2008, for which authors were asked to imagine their field within Classics in 2018). I talked in general terms about the different trajectories of two very early digital classical projects, the TLG and LGPN, both of which were founded in 1972. The TLG, while a technological innovative project from the get-go, and one which changed (and continues to be indispensible to) the study of Greek literature, has not made a great contribution to the Digital Humanities because of its closed, for-profit, and self-sufficient strategy. The LGPN on the other hand began life as a very technologically conservative projects, geared to the production of paper volumes of the Lexicon, and has always been reactive to changes in technology rather than proactive as the TLG was; as a result of this, however, they have been able to change with the times, adopt new database and web technologies as they appeared, and are now actively contributing to the development of standards in XML, onomastics, and geo-tagging, and sharing data and tools widely. Finally I argued that any study of the community of digital Classics needs both to consider history (lessons to be learned from projects such as those discussed above, and other venerable projects that are still currently innovative such as Perseus and the DDbDP), and consider the newest technologies, standards, and cyberinfrastructures that will drive our work forward in the future.

(David Robey pointed out that Classics has an important and unique position with the UK arts and humanities community in that the subject associations give validity and respectability by their support of and recognition for digital resources and research.)

Stuart Dunn

In a paper titled The UK’s evolving e-infrastructure and the study of the past, Stuart discussed the national e-Science agenda and how it relates to the practices and needs of the humanities scholar, using as a basis the research process of data collection, analysis, and publication/dissemination. The essential definition of e-Science is that it centres around scholarly collaboration across and between disciplines, and the advanced computational infrastructure that enables this collaboration. e-Science often involves working with huge bodies of data or processing-intensive operations on complex material, and the example of this kind of research Stuart offered was not Classical but Byzantine: the use of agent-based modelling by colleagues in Birmingham to simulate the climactic battle of Manzikert. After some general conclusions on the opportunities for advanced e-infrastructure to be used in the study of the ancient world, there was some lively discussion of geospacial resources in the British and European academic spheres.

Simon Mahony

Simon gave a detailed presentation of the Humslides 2.0 project that he is conducting with the Classics department at King’s College London. Building upon the work carried out in a pilot project in 2006-7 to digitise the teaching slide collections of the Classics department (as a pilot study for the School of Humanities), which adopted a free trial version of the ContentDM management system (trial license now expired, and not renewed), the new project will utilize Web 2.0 tools to present and organize some 7000 slides with more metadata and more input from students and other contributors. A Humslides Flickr group has been established, inspired in part by the Commons group set up by Library of Congress and now contributed to by several other major institutions. As well as providing a teaching resource (currently restricted to KCL students until some thorny copyright issues have been wrinkled out), students will be set assessed coursework tasks to contribute to the tagging and annotating of images in this collection.

Elpiniki Fragkouli

Due to illness, Elpiniki’s paper on Training, Communities of Practice, and Digital Humanities was not delivered at this conference. We shall see whether she would be willing to upload her slides on the Digital Classicist website for discussion.

Amy Smith (Leif Isaksen, Brian Fuchs)

The paper on Lightweight Reuse of Digital Resources with VLMA: perspectives and challenges, originally commissioned for the Digital Classicist panel, was at the last minute and for unknown reasons switched over into a panel on Digital Humanites on Tuesday morning. Amy presented this paper, which discussed lessons learned from the Virtual Lightbox for Museums and Archives project (discussed in detail in their article in the special issue of Digital Medievalist journal we edited). Some conclusions and discussion followed on the topic of RDF and other metadata standards, and on browser-based versus desktop applications for viewing and organizing remote objects.

John Pybus (Alan Bowman, Charles Crowther and Ruth Kirkham)

John’s presentation on A Virtual Research Environment for the Study of Documents and Manuscripts gave a succinct and very useful summary of the history of the VRE research that has been carried out by the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents and the humanities VRE team in Oxford. The project is one of four demo projects conducted by the second phase of work that begin with a user requirements survey in 2006-7. Built using uPortal, the VRE allows remote, parallel, and dynamic consultation and annotation of texts, images, and other resources by multiple scholars simultaneously. John showed some examples of the functionality of the VRE platform, including: the ability to show side-by-side parallel views of a tablet (different images or different renderings of the same image); the juxtaposition of multiple fragments in a lightbox; the ability to share views and exchange instant messages between scholars.

Emma O’Riordan (Michael Fulford, et al.)

In a paper that discussed another project related to the Oxford VRE programme, the Virtual Environment for Research in Archaeology: a Roman case study at Silchester, Emma discussed the origins of the VERA system in the Integrated Archaeological Database (IADB) that has been in use at Silchester for several years. The VERA system allows almost instant publication of the years results (as compared to waiting several months for paper notes to be transcribed); is cheaper than manual transcription; and more reliable than manual transcription; perhaps most importantly, the system enables live communication and collaboration between the archaeologists in the field and scholars in other parts of the world. Emma stressed one lesson from this project which was the importance of working alongside computer scientists, so that development of functionality can take into consideration the needs of the archaeologists as well as the research and interests of the programmers. It was interesting, however, that she also noted the potential pitfalls of too much tinkering with a tool while at work in the field.

Claire Warwick (Melissa Terras, et al.)

Originally scheduled in the second “Digital Humanities” on Tuesday morning, this paper followed logically on from Emma’s, and discussed Virtual Environments for Research in Archaeology (VERA): Use and Usability of Integrated Virtual Environments in Archaeological Research. Claire focussed on the evaluation of documentation of the unique needs of archaeologists in the field, and some conclusions the VERA team have been able to draw by the use of questionnaires, diaries, and anonymized interviews with the Silchester workers. Learning new IT skills was considered to be a burdern by students who were already having to learn fieldwork skills on the job; there were also new problems with the technology, as compared to the “pencil and paper” methods for which workflow and solutions had been developed over time. We look forward to a full report on the feedback and usability study that the UCL participants in the VERA project are conducting.

Leif Isaksen

Original scheduled for the “Digital Tools” panel, in this paper, Building a Virtual Community: The Antiquist Experience, Leif spoke to a Digital Classicist audience about a parallel community, Antiquist (who focus on digital approaches to cultural heritage and archaeology). The Antiquist community has an active mailing list (a Google group), a moribund blog, and a wiki whose main function is announcements of events. Antiquist boasts multiple moderators, many of whom try to keep the list active, and from the start they actively invited heritage professionals who were known to them to join the community. There is no set agenda, and membership is from a wide range of industries. Over time, traffic on the list has remained steady, with an unusually high percentage of active participants, but the content of the list traffic has tended recently to become more announcement-focussed rather than long threads and discussions. They are currently considering inviting new moderators to join the team, in the hope of injecting fresh blood and enthusiasm into a team who now rarely innovate and introduce new discussions to the group. Compared to many mailing lists, the community is still very active and very healthy, however. (Leif has usefully uploaded his slideshow and commented in a thread on the Antiquist email group.)

I posted a few weeks ago on a guide to citing Creative Commons works, and just a short while later I saw this not directly related story about a Practical Guide to GPL Compliance, from the Software Freedom Law Center. Where the CC-guide is primarily about citation, and therefore of interest to many Digital Humanists/Classicists who work with these licenses, the GPL-guide is a subtly different animal. Free and Open Source Software licensing is a more fraught area, since in most cases software is re-used (if at all) and embedded in a new product that includes new code as well as the the re-used FOSS parts. In some cases this new software may be sold or licensed for financial gain, or attached to services that are charged for, or otherwise part of a commercial product. It is therefore extemely useful to have this practical guide to issues of legality (including documentation and availability of license information) available to programmers and to companies that make use of FOSS code. One worth bookmarking.

Via Centernet:

The 37th annual conference on Computer Applications to Archaeology (CAA) will take place at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in Williamsburg, Virginia from March 22 to 26, 2009. The conference will bring together students and scholars to explore current theory and applications of quantitative methods and information technology in the field of archaeology. CAA members come from a diverse range of disciplines, including archaeology, anthropology, art and architectural history, computer science, geography, geomatics, historic preservation, museum studies, and urban history.

The full CFP is available here: http://www.caa2009.org/PapersCall.cfm

Charlotte Roueché pointed me to this transcript of a piece from ABC Radio’s Perspective slot: ‘Our Biblioclastic Century‘. The author, Robin Derricourt, an academic publisher with a background in archaeology and history, makes some well-observed points about online publication and the need for sustainability of publication and citation if we are to retain the intellectual and academic output of our culture. With none of this can I disagree. However, he then ends this short, pithy piece with the somewhat knee-jerk conclusion:

I know that my grandchildren will be able to go into a library and read an article by Einstein, a book by Newton, or a manuscript by Captain James Cook, and those by their minor contemporaries. I do not know that they will be able to access the reports, documents and articles that I can read today only on some present day institution’s website. In fact I can be pretty sure most of this will not survive.

And when our own civilisation finally ends, as each civilisation does, where will be the repository that maintains what we now have as knowledge, perhaps even through some future dark ages, for later societies to inherit? They will still have Aristotle, or Darwin, but they may not have the 21st century equivalents to read.

It is important to recognise that this is the well-thought out fear of an informed and intelligent person, and that those of us working for digital sustainability therefore need to communicate our aims and achievements more widely. I cannot help, however, but point out a logical fallacy in this argument: Derricourt assumes the existence of the physical library full of books (as well he might, the library is an institution that will not go away any time soon). But the library has not always existed, and it was by no means automatic or self-evident that the library would come into existence.

If these cultural and academic institutions had not come into being at several points in history (often associated with the courts of kings or religious communities), then books would be in no better shape that websites are now (or rather websites in the world that still exists in Derricourt’s imagination, which was the world of the early Web of the 1990s). Individual copies would have circulated in private collection, some would occasionally have been copied, but not on the scale and with the rigour that we saw in Mediaeval monasteries, for example. The idea of the repository that holds a copy of everything published in a certain domain, whatever its perceived worth, would not exist. A private collection or library could easily be burned or thrown into the trash at the end of its owner’s life, or when moving residence (and not all trash-heaps are as future-friendly as the sand at Oxyrhynchus). The library changed all this, and thanks to the libraries and scriptoria, and later printing houses and repositories, copies were made and works were preserved in multiple places, on durable materials, and with rigorous standards.

On the Web, some might say, we do not have libraries to do this job for us, and so when one private collection (a privately registered web domain, say) disappears due to its owner moving residence or losing interest or failing to keep up payments on the domain registration or service provision, all will be lost. Irrevocably and permanently. (No great loss, others would argue.) However this is not true. There are libraries in the online world. There are digital archives and repositories; the Internet Archive and various search engine caches (among other entities) may be able to recover the lost website from 1998 that Derricourt mourns. Digital libraries set out to make multiple, well-archived, backed-up copies, in open standards and formats and registered with Digital Object Identifiers, of all works in their purview. In short, there are libraries on the web. And it is not therefore true that, as Derricourt argues:

Let’s be realistic - all [sc. online content] will disappear, because no web site is permanent. Only a physical library can maintain and transmit to future generations our heritage of ideas, knowledge, discovery, speculation, literature. I can more easily find an 1898 print article than a 1998 document published on the Web.

In fact, as the world becomes more connected and the Internet becomes the source and the repository for more and more of our information, libraries are going to come under increasing pressure to cut back their accessions, to digitize and archive (or even destroy) their paper collections, and to become custodians of digital rather than physical artefacts. (Don’t get me wrong: I will be in the front line of the fight to defend libraries against this offensive, but the pressure will be there.) It is by no means automatic that physical libraries will always be the best source of cultural and literary preservation in our grandchildren’s time. If no one has bothered to digitize even a 2008 print article, then the 1998 website will be easier to find in one hundred years time. I don’t fear for websites. I fear for paper archives that no one is digitizing.

The Call for Papers for Digital Humanities 09, scheduled for 22-25 June at the University of Maryland, has just been issued. Abstracts are due on 31 October 2008.

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) has released the fall schedule for their “digital dialogues” lecture series. There are a number of interesting talks. I wonder if any of these will be podcast?

Since the full schedule is only available as a PDF at the moment, I’m taking the liberty of pasting the contents here:

Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
an applied think tank for the digital humanities
Digital Dialogues Schedule
Tuesdays @12:30-1:45
Fall 2008 in MITH’s Conference Room
B0135 McKeldin Library, U. Maryland

• 9.9 Doug Reside (MITH and Theatre), “The MITHological AXE: Multimedia Metadata Encoding with the Ajax XML Encoder“
• 9.16 Stanley N. Katz (Princeton University), “Digital Humanities 3.0: Where We Have Come From and Where We Are Now?”
• 9.23 Joyce Ray (Institute of Museum and Library Services), “Digital Humanities and the Future of Libraries”
• 9.30 Tom Scheinfeldt and Dave Lester (George Mason University), “Omeka: Easy Web Publishing for Scholarship and Cultural Heritage”
• 10.7 Brent Seales (University of Kentucky), “EDUCE: Enhanced Digital Unwrapping for Conservation and Exploration”
• 10.14 Zachary Whalen (University of Mary Washington), “The Videogame Text”
• 10.21 Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Pomona College), “Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy”
• 10.28 “War (and) Games” (a discussion in conjunction with the ARHU semester on War and Representations of War, facilitated by Matthew Kirschenbaum [English and MITH])
• 11.4 Bethany Nowviskie (University of Virginia), “New World Ordering: Shaping Geospatial Information for Scholarly Use”
• 11.11 Merle Collins (English), Saraka and Nation (film screening and discussion)
• 11.18 Ann Weeks (iSchool and HCIL), “The International Children’s Digital Library: An Introduction for Scholars”
• 11.25 Clifford Lynch (Coalition for Networked Information), title TBA
• 12.2 Elizabeth Bearden (English), “Renaissance Moving Pictures: From Sidney’s Funeral materials to Collaborative, Multimedia Nachleben”
• 12.9 Katie King (Women’s Studies), “Flexible Knowledges, Reenactments, New Media”

All talks are free and open to the public!

University of Maryland
McKeldin Library B0131
College Park, MD 20742

Neil Fraistat, Director
http://www.mith.umd.edu/

tel: 301.405.8927
fax: 301.314.7111
mith@umd.edu

By way of Open Access News we learn of the announcement of Open Access Day 2008:

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), the Public Library of Science (PLoS), and Students for Free Culture have jointly announced the first international Open Access Day. Building on the worldwide momentum toward Open Access to publicly funded research, Open Access Day will create a key opportunity for the higher education community and the general public to understand more clearly the opportunities of wider access and use of content.

Open Access Day will invite researchers, educators, librarians, students, and the public to participate in live, worldwide broadcasts of events.

Posted on behalf of Greg Crane. Link to the Treebank, which provides more information, at the very end of the post.

We are currently looking for advanced students of Greek and Latin to contribute syntactic analyses (via a web-based system) to our existing Latin Treebank (described below) and our emerging Greek Treebank as well (for which we have just received funding). We particularly encourage students at various levels to design research projects around this new tool. We are looking in particular for the following:

• Get paid to read Greek! We can have a limited number of research assistantships for advanced students of the languages who can work for the project from their home institutions. We particularly encourage students who can use the analyses that they produce to support research projects of their own.
• We also encourage classes of Greek and Latin to contribute as well. Creating the syntactic analyses provides a new way to address the traditional task of parsing Greek and Latin. Your class work can then contribute to a foundational new resource for the study of Greek and Latin - both courses as a whole and individual contributors are acknowledged in the published data.
• Students and faculty interested in conducting their own original research based on treebank data will have the option to submit their work for editorial review to have it published as part of the emerging Scaife Digital Library.

To contribute, please contact David Bamman (david.bamman@tufts.edu) or Gregory Crane (gregory.crane@tufts.edu).

http://nlp.perseus.tufts.edu/syntax/treebank/

Playing around on the website of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities this afternoon I came across the Library of Funded Projects, a database of projects funded through the ODH. Visitors can search by Categories (technical focus of the projects, not subject), Grant Programs, or by keyword. Project records include most information one would want including PI, award dates, funding, abstract, link to project website (when one exists), and a space to link project white papers (which are required at the conclusion of all ODH-funded projects).

The LFP is not up-to-date; searches for several of the grant programs come up empty (including those where there are currently funded projects). Even so, this could be an immensely valuable resource to help scholars keep abreast of new work being done in the field, especially the smaller projects supported through the Start-Up program.

(The keyword search, as most keyword searches, needs some working with. “Classics” turns up nothing, while “classical” and “ancient” pull up two different but slightly overlapping lists.)

UPDATE: Are there similar libraries/databases for other national funding agencies (DFG, JISC, etc.)? If so, please cite them in the comments. Thanks!

A very useful guide is being compiled by Molly Kleinman in her Multi-Purpose Librarian blog. As someone who licenses a lot of work using CC-BY, and who both re-uses and sometimes re-mixes a lot of CC work (especially photographs) for both academic and creative ends, I recognise that it isn’t always clear exactly what “attribution” means, for example. Kleinman gives examples of ideal and realistic usage (the real name of a copyright-holder and/or title of a work may not always been known, say), and makes suggestions for good practice and compromises. This is a very welcome service, and I hope that more examples and comments follow.