(Seminar delivered on Friday, June 5th, 2009, Senate House, London. Full abstract at http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2009-01bv.html . Audio and slideshow to be uploaded shortly.)

This was a very lively and informative kick-off to the Digital Classicist seminar series for this Summer. It was well-attended, and an engaged and enthusiastic audience kept our speaker occupied for 40 minutes after the end of the presentation with in-depth and varied discussion. There was a wide range of agendas and interests among attendees, as is to be expected with classicists, papyrologists, digital librarians, and information scientists in the audience.

Two points occur to me to highlight:

Walter Cockle, in the audience, made the point that the Trismegistos project and in particular their work on onomastics and entity recognition in papyri would benefit from collaboration with the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, who have been at the vanguard of the use of digital resources in the Classics since their inception in the 1970s. (He also made some useful observations about David Packard's involvement in both the LGPN and the DDbDP, which probably bears further discussion in another context.) Mark DePauw pointed out that Elaine Matthews wrote an early letter in support of the Trismegistos project, and so channels of communication are open.

This important suggestion led to a point that I had been intending to make. Bart discussed his work on features such as mapping of collections and ancient places in KML for delivery via Google Maps, and plans to link to and from other online resources including other databases and digital publications of both primary texts and scholarship. A network of projects--including LGPN, as well as the Pleiades Project, the American Numismatic Society, and others--is working on precisely these kind of linkages under the Concordia banner. The semantic web (of linked data) makes the discovery of related resources more transparent and meaningful.

(Another element that Trismegistos and the LGPN have in common is that last Summer's Digital Classicist series was kicked off by Elaine Matthews and Sebastian Rahtz--another excellent start to the season this year!)