Thursday, April 24, 2008

La construcción de una identidad provincial

José-Vidal Madruga sent me a notice about this interesting conference, set for 8-10 May in Sevilla. GB has already blogged it at Current Epigraphy, but the announcement I received has names of papers, so ...

C O N G R E S O

La construcción de una identidad provincial La experiencia hispana

8-10 mayo 2008

Coordinación : A. Caballos Rufino Universidad de Sevilla S. Lefebvre Université de Bourgogne

Organisation : Universidad de Sevilla | Casa de Velázquez

Entidades colaboradoras: Museo Arqueológico de Sevilla. Consejería de Cultura. Junta de Andalucía Universidad de Sevilla. Facultad de Geografía e Historia Universidad de Sevilla. Departamento de Historia Antigua

Jueves 8 mayo

Aula Carriazo - Facultad de Geografía e Historia - Universidad de Sevilla

17 h 00 - 20 h 00

Presentación A. Caballos Universidad de Sevilla y S. Lefebvre Université de Bourgogne

P. Le Roux Université de Paris 13-Villetaneuse Introduction: identité civique, identité provinciale

F. Pina Polo Universidad de Zaragoza Etnia, ciudad y provincia en la Hispania republicana

M. Navarro Caballero CNRS-Centre Ausonius-Université de Bordeaux III Référents identitaires. Groupe, culture et territoire. L'identité celtibère dans le cadre de la province de Citérieure

Coloquio

Viernes 9 mayo

Aula Carriazo - Facultad de Geografía e Historia - Universidad de Sevilla

09 h 30 - 13 h 30

S. Lefebvre Université de Bourgogne Onomastique et identité provinciale: le cas de "Lusitanus"

S. Marcos Université de Paris I Espace géographique, espace politique : La frontière provinciale, une limite déterminante ?

F. J. Navarro Santana Universidad de Navarra El gobierno de la Tarraconense y la identidad de la provincia

R. Haensch Kommission für Alte Geschichte und Epigraphik, Munich Das Verhältnis von Statthaltern zu ihrer Provinz

M. Gordón Peral Universidad de Sevilla Estructura funcional y vertebración provincial: el conventus Hispalensis

E. Melchor Gil Universidad de Córdoba Elites supralocales en la Bética: entre la civitas y la provincia

Coloquio

17 h 30 - 20 h 00

G. Chic García Universidad de Sevilla Los elementos económicos en la integración de la provincia Bética

A. Dardenay Université de Toulouse II-Le Mirail La diffusion iconographique des mythes fondateurs de Rome dans l'Occident romain : spécificités hispaniques

A. A. Reyes Domínguez Universidad de Sevilla La imagen como soporte de difusión ideológica en la provincia

M. Hainzmann Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz 'Nationale' Identität im Lichte des Götterkultes. Das Beispiel Noricums

Coloquio

Sábado 10 mayo

Salón de Actos - Museo Arqueológico de Sevilla

09 h 30 - 14 h 00

J. C. Saquete Chamizo Universidad de Sevilla La religión como elemento de integración de las provincias y los provinciales hispanos en época imperial

L. Brassous Université de Pau Les capitales des provinces d'Hispanie après la réforme administrative de Dioclétien

F. Wulff Alonso Universidad de Málaga Hablando de identidades. Debates teóricos y reflexiones historiográficas entre la República y el Imperio

Coloquio

Sesión de Clausura

F. Beltrán Lloris Universidad de Zaragoza "...et sola omnium provinciarum uires suas postquam uicta est intellexit": Hispania como referente identitario en el mundo romano"

Visita al Museo Arqueológico de Sevilla

CVZ Casa de Velázquez | c/ Paul Guinard, 3 | 28040 Madrid | España | e-mail Tlf: (00 34) 914 551 580 Flora Lorente | Fax: (00 34) 914 551 597

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

New Planets: Concordia and Pleiades

Neither Pleiades nor Concordia has its own news blog; and I hope you'll forgive the fact that the team members were reluctant to create same, since some of us already blog in multiple places. The solution? Aggregate and filter our regular blog posts into project-specific streams. So today I have added to the Atlantides system the following:
  • Concordia: News and Views (html | rss)
  • Pleiades: News and Views (html | rss)
Hat-tip to the regexp_sifter.py filter in Sam Ruby's Venus.

Monday, April 7, 2008

More Traffic!

How, you ask? Just put the word "vulgar" in the title of your post and get Sean to link to it. Referral bonanza!

Glossary functionality

The National Weather Service has added glossary links for technical terms and acronyms in the text products surfaced via their website, e.g. the Huntsville Area Forecast Discussion. The links point to a separate glossary application, which doesn't seem to succeed in looking up the word that's passed by the link.

:(

What I'd really love, even beyond getting this particular app to actually work, is a mouseover kite containing the appropriate gloss. There are all sorts of javascripty ways to do that, but the easiest way (in a modern browser, if the gloss is short) is to simply wrap the technical term or acronym in a span element with a title attribute containing the textual gloss. Fewer clicks, more happiness.

This sort of functionality should be a standard component, IMO, of any technical document (a classics journal article, say) that's posted to the web with any desire to reach students or a non-specialist audience. With a bit of infrastructure work, and maintenance of a glossary, it could be made to happen almost automagically as part of a publishing workflow. I'm sure there are sites where that's already the case.

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Concordia licensing and openness

Andy Powell hopes "that the conditions of funding in this case mandated that the resulting resources be made open rather than just free" and wonders what licenses will govern the content produced or incorporated by the various projects funded under the joint NEH/JISC Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration grants.

I can only speak for the Concordia project, a collaboration of ISAW and CCH.

In answer to the first question: no, I am not aware of any mandate placed on us in this regard. We did make explicit commitments of our own in our proposal about licensing, and we're now bound to abide by those.

Here is a list of the software and content that we will use, modify or produce, indicating the license that now governs (or will govern) each:

Vulgar Geography

There, I gave it a proper name. I had to. Sean blasted the economish OGC neologism and the VGI moniker has run aground on class distinctions. Now I'm gonna wrap up in what's left of my tattered regalia and head back to the mosh pit where I can sweat it out to the oldies with my new friends.

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Tastes like mushrooms

I enjoyed reading William J. Broad's "Inside the Black Budget" in today's New York Times, even though in the end I think the title is a little misleading (there's also an accompanying slideshow). The article is an imperfect mashup between a soft piece on the Bush White House, the Pentagon's black budget and Trevor Paglen's new book I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me (Brooklyn, Melville Publishing House, 2007; ISBN: 9781933633329). I found the patches aspect to be the most interesting angle, even though the black budget and its increase under this administration is a news-worthy topic of significant importance.

Soldiers, veterans and defense contractors know that patches, both official and unofficial, are a ubiquitous part of the visual culture of the military and the industries that support it. As the article notes, patches and their heraldry "are real if often unofficial efforts at building team spirit." They are sometimes also vehicles for advertising, and for satire and social commentary, aspects that go unaddressed in Broad's article.

I was surprised that there was no effort to decode a patch that's mentioned prominently:
One patch shows a space alien with huge eyes holding a stealth bomber near its mouth. “To Serve Man” reads the text above, a reference to a classic “Twilight Zone” episode in which man is the entree, not the customer. “Gustatus Similis Pullus” reads the caption below, dog Latin for “Tastes Like Chicken.”
It's just a guess, but I don't think that's a patch for a unit that flies stealth aircraft.

And then there's "semper in obscurus," featuring a big mushroom. This is blandly captioned by the Times (presumably following Paglen) thus: "Special Projects Office: Oversaw F-117A stealth fighter support." Can our intrepid researcher and reporter not have heard the standard line -- ubiquitous in defense circles -- about being treated like a mushroom?:
They keep me in the dark and feed me bullshit.
I don't think that one's got a straightforward positive morale message.

Somewhere I've still got a very unofficial patch that started circulating among active-duty personnel at Grissom Air Force Base in the early 1990s, shortly after its realignment to the Air Force Reserve was announced. It features an individual in BDUs reclining in a desk chair with his feet up on the desk and his hands clasped behind his head. A box on the desk, labeled "IN", is piled high with papers; there's a spiderweb in the "OUT" box. The caption is an acronym: FITBIC. There was more than one expansion widely offered for that acronym. The one intended for anyone senior who asked was: "Faith, Integrity, Trust. Because I care." I'll leave it to you, gentle readers, to puzzle out the other supplement.