American School Corinth Volumes on JSTOR

Charles Watkinson has just announced, via the website of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, that the following publication series is being made available digitally to subscribers of JSTOR (3 year moving wall):

• Corinth: Results of Excavations Conducted by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ISSN 1558-7185)

See the announcement for details and background.

Happy Birthday, Chiron!

Χείρων·(Chiron), the "collaborative space for teachers of classics" is two years' old. Congratulations!

If you're not familiar with Chiron, check out the "About" page (Spanish; English)

Tom Tartaron on "Mycenean Coastal Worlds" in Huntsville, 2 October 2008

On Thursday, 2 October, at 7:30 p.m. the North Alabama Society of the Archaeological Institute of America will host a lecture by Prof. Tom Tartaron (Dept. of Classics, University of Pennsylvania) entitled "Mycenean Coastal Worlds." Tartaron is co-director of the Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project, which is studying the "first ever positively identified Mycenean harbor" and fortified port town at a site on the Saronic Gulf now called Kalamianos (Penn Current Research article; Penn Museum News article).

The lecture will be held in the Chan Auditorium on the campus of the University of Alabama in Huntsville (map, courtesy UAHuntsville Theatre).

More on the Zotero lawsuit

Hugh Cayless, who originally tweet-alerted me to the Zotero lawsuit, now has blogged about it (with some encouraging words for Dan Cohen and the GMU team): "Go Zotero!"

Reuters (EndNote) sues George Mason over Zotero

By way of the Courthouse News Service we hear that:

Thomson Reuters demands $10 million and an injunction to stop George Mason University from distributing its new Web browser application, Zotero ... Reuters claims George Mason is violating its license agreement and destroying the EndNote customer base.

Why email a newsletter but not post it?

I have to confess publicly, at the risk of being thought rude, that I was dumbfounded to read Polly Low's comment this morning:

The absence of the latest newsletter from the BES website is deliberate — only [listserv] subscribers get the cutting-edge news!

Why on earth would a professional academic organization with a web presence and a mission statement thereon that contains the following words limit themselves in this way?:

to promote the study of inscriptions, texts and historical documents ... disseminating news of the latest developments in epigraphic studies, in Britain and around the world

Or is the real issue that "subscribers" = "members" and timely access to the newsletter is seen by the Society as an exclusive benefit of membership?

Database Normalization and the Historian

Over at the UVA Library's Scholar's Lab Blog, Jean Bauer has a useful post ("Normality: For or Against") in which she considers the process of database normalization, its value in the context of particular historical research tasks, and the interesting problems that arise when you consider publishing such a database -- designed originally to support a particular line of inquiry -- for the use of other scholars.

Moontown Fly-In 2008: 20-21 September

Blake Mathis just sent an email to the Moontown Airport announcements list (where I as a non-piloting neighbor lurk; kml):

Annual Fly-In Reminder, This Saturday & Sunday, tell your friends!

All, this is a friendly reminder of the BIG, FANTASTIC and FUN, Annual Moontown Fly-In, THIS Saturday and Sunday, September 20-21. There is will lots of planes, lots of people, food and lots of fun. Plan to bring your family out to an Old Fashion Grass Field fly-In, the way it used to be. Bi-wings, homebuilt, Cubs, Champs and many more. No admission charged for the fly-in.

Tickets are still on sale for the Saturday night dinner banquet at George’s hangar. This annual event has featured speakers from Astronauts to Authors. This year, the planning committee asked me to MC the evening and present to you some of our own local legends from around our community. Come enjoy a special evenings with friends as we look to the past and learn what it was like to serve in the military during World War II, Korea and Vietnam. Whether it was storming the beaches at Normandy or flying bombers round the clock to intimidate Russia, the brave service of these people helped make America what it is today. They will share a few details of their service. Hear serious stories of survival; as well as some humor that sometime kept them going. Who knows, we might even talk George into dancing for us!

Visit the website for details on the entire weekend event and call the lounge to get your tickets for the dinner banquet, Before They Are Gone! 852-9781. Be sure to forward this to your friends. See you there!

First Thousand Years of Greek: Utilities

I recently blogged the announcement of the CHS-sponsored First Thousand Years of Greek project. It looks as if Neel is beginning to roll out related code, documentation and information on the CHS Digital Incunabula site.

Wine, Treasure, and (Mayan) Archaeology in Huntsville

Help support the lecture series of the North Alabama Society of the Archaeological Institute of America.

On Saturday, November 15th, 7:00-9:00 PM, NASAIA will host a wine tasting at the Lowe House (210 Williams Street) the elegant, historic home of UAHuntsville President Dave Williams. Sommelier Tami Herrington of Pinnacle Imports will guide guests through the wines of South America. As you sample these fine wines you can bid on the treasures available in a silent auction. As a special event, renowned NASA archaeologist Dr. Tom Sever will give a brief talk on his most recent research on the Maya.

Tickets available for $25/glass, $40/couple, and $15/seniors. Please Contact Lillian Joyce for tickets: JoyceL@uah.edu.

Sarah Parcak on Egypt in Huntsville, September 17

The North Alabama Society of the Archaeological Institute of America is hosting Dr. Sarah Parcak for two talks next Wednesday:

• Women and Power in Antiquity: A New Kingdom Case Study from Deir el-Medina, Thebes, 2:20 p.m. in Roberts 419 on the UAH campus
• Making the Mummies Dance from Space: Using Satellite Imagery to Find Ancient Egypt, 7:30 p.m. in the Chan Auditorium (first floor Business Administration Building) on the UAH campus

You can read more about Dr. Parcak's work, and much else, on the NASAIA blog, Excavate!

"A New Low in the Exploitation of Adjunct Faculty"?

The above quote is attributed to Gwendolyn Bradley, of the American Association of University Professors, in this morning's issue of Inside Higher Education where Scott Jaschik writes about a "New Form of Adjunct Abuse":

At San Antonio College ... adjuncts are being encouraged to take on extra courses, ... [but] the college is asking some part timers ... to agree in writing to pretend that they aren’t teaching 12 credits. ...

Gerald J. Davey, an adjunct at San Antonio College who has served as the adjunct representative on the Faculty Council there, did not sign a waiver, but he has spoken with those who have and is angry about the system being used. Davey said that, in years past, once an adjunct has had a contract for 12 credits, benefits and higher pay scales have kicked in — and that the waivers are an attempt to limit what adjuncts receive from the college.

Aside:

I can't help but draw attention to this most unfortunate of "context-sensitive" advertisements that appeared alongside Jaschik's story:

Pinakes: Greek texts and manuscripts

Post by Arietta Papaconstantinou noted just now on the papy list (closed archive, sorry, so no link to original message):

Pinakes: Greek texts and manuscripts

http://pinakes.irht.cnrs.fr

The Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes (CNRS, Paris) is happy to announce that the Pinakes database (formerly Greek Index Project) is now available for consultation in a free web version.

The database lists the manuscripts of Greek works written prior to A.D. 1600, for the most part recorded in printed catalogues of manuscripts.

The current version of Pinakes includes 200,000 entries. It provides manuscript listings for 13,000 works, which represent almost 40,000 manuscripts from 1,300 libraries worldwide. The records are intentionally brief and concise. The focus is on the content of each manuscript (authors and works). Dates are given according to catalogues. Basic codicological and paleographical information is provided only insofar as it is related to the texts.

Copyright and artifacts

Kevin Smith's "Copyright use case on a Grecian urn," Scholarly Communications @ Duke (6 September 2008) is worth a read. One highlight:

owning an object in the public domain, like a classical vase, does not create any intellectual property rights. Simply by owning and displaying the vase the museum does not gain a copyright interest where there was no such interest before

Osgood on Linderski's Roman Questions 2

Just one highlight in a BMCR Review well worth reading:

Specialists in a range of sub-fields will be consulting this volume for years to come, and the indices facilitate this. As Linderski observes, "without detailed indices all texts but particularly inscriptions are half mute" (412), but as he also points out, one now wants more: electronic editions fully machine-searchable. Academic publishers need to keep up with technology at the rate scholars do or they risk obsolescence.

BAtlas IDs: first full release (all maps)

Grab the whole thing here: http://atlantides.org/batlas/2008-09-04/baids-2008-09-04.tgz

Let me know what problems you find.

README file for Barrington Atlas Identifiers, version published 2008-09-04
This is the first complete release.
Reference URL: http://atlantides.org/batlas

Background: http://horothesia.blogspot.com/search/label/batlasids
New maps covered in this release: 100, 101, 102
List of all maps presently covered: 1-102 (complete)

Major classes of change from prior versions are listed below. Consult individual files named like map22-diff.txt for output files differencing from prior version to this version.

• No changes to previously released IDs.

BAtlas ID update: Maps 1-6 and 65

README file for Barrington Atlas Identifiers, version published 2008-09-03
Reference URL: http://atlantides.org/batlas

Background: http://horothesia.blogspot.com/search/label/batlasids
New maps covered in this release: 1, 1a, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 64
List of all maps presently covered: 1-99

Major classes of change from prior versions are listed below. Consult individual files named like map22-diff.txt for output files differencing from prior version to this version.

• No changes to previously released IDs.
• Note that map 64 was erroneously listed as included in previous releases, but was not present. This difficiency is corrected with this release.

What Would TS/SCI Jesus do?

I'm outraged. When I started this blog, I vowed to myself to confine its scope to my professional work and to local matters where I live. But I can't let this pass:

In sum, our investigation concluded that [former U.S. Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales mishandled classified materials regarding two highly sensitive compartmented programs. We found that Gonzales took his classified handwritten notes home and stored them there for an indeterminate period of time. The notes contained operational aspects and other information about the NSA surveillance program that is classified at the TS/SCI level. By regulation, such material must be stored in a Sensitive Compartmented Storage Facility (SCIF). At the time he took these materials home, Gonzales did not have a SCIF at his house. Although Gonzales did have a safe at his residence at this time, we found that he did not use it to store the notes.

We also found that Gonzales improperly stored other highly classified documents about the two compartmented programs in a safe at the Department that was not located in a SCIF. Several employees in the OAG had access to the safe where Gonzales stored the documents even though they lacked the necessary security clearances for this information. We concluded that Gonzales’s mishandling of both the notes and the other classified documents violated Department security requirements and procedures.

You can read the nauseating details via various liberal, elite gay-married terrorist media outlets:

• Carrie Johnson, "Report: Gonzales Mishandled Classified Data," Washington Post (2 September 2008)
  
• Associated Press, via the New York Times: "Report Faults Gonzales on Data" (2 September 2008 -- now that's a soft-pedal title, isn't it?)
• Terry Frieden, "Report: Ex-AG Won't be Charged for Mishandling Secret Papers" CNN (2 September 2008 -- includes a link to PDF of the DOJ Inspector General's report, whence the quote above)
  

I'll skip most of the rest of the ranting and just say this. There are plenty of folks over the years -- hardworking, well-meaning, patriotic folks in government service, the military and working for defense contractors -- who've been investigated, counseled, sanctioned, disciplined, busted, fired and even confined for accidentally mishandling classified information at levels far lower than TS/SCI.

And the Department of Justice decides not to seek prosecution for a man who was too busy (or something) to properly safeguard this stuff according to well-established procedures?