horothesia

Osgood on Linderski's Roman Questions 2

2008-09-07T07:39:00.003-04:00

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.

NYU Programming Job: Papyrological Navigator

2008-08-07T12:43:00.004-04:00

New York University: Programmer/Analyst (7421BR)

New York University’s Division of the Libraries seeks a Programmer/Analyst to work on the "Papyrological Navigator" (http://papyri.info), a major web-based research portal that provides scholars worldwide with access to texts, transcriptions, images and metadata related to ancient texts on papyri, pottery fragments and other material. The incumbent will work closely with the Project Coordinator (at Columbia University) and with scholars involved in the project at NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, Duke University and the University of Heidelberg, as well as with NYU Digital Library Technology staff.

The incumbent's initial responsibilities will include: migrating existing PN software applications from Columbia University to NYU; optimizing performance as needed; establishing a robust production environment at NYU for the ongoing ingest and processing of new and updated Greek text transcriptions, metadata and digital images; performing both analysis and programming of any required changes or enhancements to current PN applications.

This is a grant-funded position and is available for 2 years.

Candidates should have the following skills:

Bachelor's degree in computer or information science and 3 years of relevant experience or equivalent combination
Must include experience developing applications using Java
Demonstrated knowledge of Java, Tomcat, Saxon, Lucene, Apache, SQL, XML, XSLT
Experience with metadata standards (e.g. TEI, EpiDoc)
Experience working in a Unix/Linux environments
Preferred: Experience with image serving software (eRez/FSI), Java Portlets, Apache Jetspeed-2, and Velocity templates.
Preferred: Experience designing, building, and deploying distributed systems.
Preferred: Experience working with non-Roman Unicode-based textual data (esp. Greek)
Excellent communication and analytical skills

Applicants should submit resume and cover letter, which reflects how applicant’s education and experience match the job requirements.

Please apply through NYU's application management system: www.nyu.edu/hr/jobs/apply.

At this page click on "External Applicants" then "Search Openings." Type 7421BR in the "Keyword Search" field and select search. NYU offers a generous benefit package including 22 days of vacation annually. NYU is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer.

New York University Libraries: Library facilities at New York University serve the school’s 40,000 students and faculty and contain more than 4 million volumes. New York University is a member of the Association of Research Libraries, the Research Libraries Group, the Digital Library Federation; serves as the administrative headquarters of the Research Library Association of South Manhattan, a consortium that includes three academic institutions. The Library’s website URL is http://library.nyu.edu

EpiDoc in Bologna

2008-07-01T13:51:00.003-04:00

Last week I had the opportunity to give a seminar on EpiDoc as a guest of Prof. Carla Salvaterra and the Department of Ancient History at the University of Bologna. We titled the session "Digital Publishing with EpiDoc: Epigraphy, Papyrology, Interoperability."

I had a delightful time, and greatly appreciated extended discussion with the faculty and students who participated.

For what they're worth, I've posted my slides:

Connections: Ross Scaife

2008-03-18T08:26:00.005-04:00

There's no point in reiterating here what Dot, Brent, Chris and Cathy have so eloquently written about Ross. Even though I'd had the news of his death privately over the weekend, the deep emptiness of his being gone didn't really hit me until I saw the first public notice on Classics-l. There's something brutally liminal about a death notice in a professional forum, no matter how gently written: it is the crisp, formal ceremony that transfers a person from the active present to the static past of the discipline.

This sombre realization is rippling through the web of connections that was Ross' personal and professional network. You can detect it in the spattering of blog posts, emails and the subdued communications of his many colleagues and friends.

And yet, it is clear that the interpersonal fabric Ross wove will be a lasting, living contribution to the field, and to our lives. There are so many people Ross introduced to each other and encouraged in collaborative digital classics work. He watched our backs when things got rough, applauded our successes, pulled us out of ditches, and kicked our asses well and thoroughly when we deserved it. Vast indeed is the sea of those whom Ross has mentored and enabled.

I've written elsewhere about Ross's contribution to the EpiDoc effort. Pleiades owes him an equal debt. It was Ross's 2001 invitation to speak at the Center for Computational Sciences in Lexington that first forced me to formalize the ideas that I'd been batting around privately with Richard Talbert, Stephen MacGregor, Hugh Cayless, Noel Fiser, Amy Hawkins and others in Chapel Hill. And it gave those ideas their first public airing. Ross and I had originally discussed them, along with Sebastian Heath and Neel Smith, in Newport the previous year. Ross helped us refine the plan through subsequent iterations and grant proposals and, when it emerged that UNC could not provide us with the class of hosting we needed for development, he offered server space belonging to the Stoa. The collaborative editorial approach embodied in the Suda Online underlies our model for the Pleiades workflow, to be rolled out later this year. Ross remained deeply engaged in both the vision and the technical details of Pleiades, even during his illness. Without him, Pleiades would not be.

And so I have now both sadly and joyfully yielded -- like Patrick, Melissa, Troels, Hugh and others -- to the compulsion to hold up for you to see one more swathe of the Rossian fabric, saying "Look! Here's another bit he did with us. Doesn't it shine, gold and purple in the sun?"

Atom+GeoRSS for interoperability: Cyrenaican archaeology, epigraphy, geography

2008-02-29T11:23:00.003-05:00

The influenza kept me off the plane to Rome, but happily I was at least able to give my talk (via Skype) this morning. The occasion is a meeting at the British School in Rome, organized by the Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica project, to bring together scholars working in Cyrenaica to explore the potential for cross-project collaboration and data sharing. I used our work so far on Pleiades (and a bunch of Sean's ideas exchanged on IRC) as a spring-board for a methodological proposal: using Atom+GeoRSS feeds to facilitate cross-project data discovery and citation.

There will be more about this in future posts, but for now, the slides (mostly screen shots) are available:

Tom Elliott: Atom+GeoRSS for Interoperability (ODP zipped)

Tom Elliott: Atom+GeoRSS for Interoperability (PPT zipped)

EpiDoc meets dissertation: epigraphic bibliography

2008-02-20T11:40:00.007-05:00

This is the first in a highly irregular series exploring aspects of my attempt to turn my dissertation (or parts thereof) into a digital publication using the EpiDoc customization of the Text Encoding Initiative tagset (in XML). I'm starting using a batch of boundary inscriptions from Roman Cyrenaica, partly because I'm working with a team in London and Cambridge that is working on the definitive publication of the Roman Inscriptions of Cyrenaica (IRCyr) as collected and analyzed by Joyce Reynolds. This collection will include a number of previously unpublished boundary inscriptions.

Today's topic: epigraphic bibliography

There are various examples of code below, but you can also download a fully encoded example.

A proper epigraphic edition includes a complete history of previous published editions, published derivative texts, corrections and, often, commentary on same. There are various common mechanisms for presenting these citations in print, usually in a compact form that makes liberal use of abbreviations and short titles. Thus, text 62.2 in my dissertation (of Claudian date), presented the following bibliography:

EDH HD011697 (Latin); SEG 26.1819; AE 1974.682; *Reynolds 1971, 47-49.1.

Here, order signifies date and the asterisk indicates the edition I follow in my own catalog. So, we can read this as:

Originally published in Reynolds 1971, 47-49.1, whence derivative editions in AE 1974.682, SEG 26.1819 and EDH HD011697 (the latter only providing the Latin portion of this bilingual Greek/Latin text).

Often, such bibliographies include other notation to indicate the "genetic lemma" (derivative relationships) between publications. So, one could have produced something like:

[EDH HD011697 (Latin)] = [SEG 26.1819] = [AE 1974.682] = Reynolds 1971, 47-49.1

where the square brackets indicate derivative editions, i.e., those that derive from another published edition rather than autopsy of the stone and/or reference to a squeeze, rubbing or photograph. This particular lemma is a little misleading, since the provisional EDH edition actually derives from the edition in AE, which is itself derivative of the Reynolds edition.

How to do this in EpiDoc?

Let's start with something like the more prose-ish of the above examples, since this is the approach IRCyr is using (demonstrated in ALA2004 and IAph2007). First, EpiDoc calls for the bibliography to be wrapped in an appropriately typed <div> element, as follows:


<div type="bibliography">
 <p>Original publication was Reynolds 1971, 47-49.1,
    whence derivative editions in AE 1974.682, SEG 26.1819
    and Elliott 2004, 167.62.2. The Latin portion of the
    text is reproduced in EDH HD011697 (1997, provisional)
    on the basis of AE.</p>
</div>

Part of the reason to do our bibliography in XML is to be able to encode relationships, assertions and semantic distinctions in a way that is machine actionable. On the bibliographic front, we might want to be able to search, sort and index by these other editions, or link to them if digitally available. That means we need to mark each citation as a discrete bibliographic citation, and TEI provides the <bibl> element for this purpose:


<div type="bibliography">
 <p>Original publication was
   <bibl>Reynolds 1971, 47-49.1</bibl>,
   whence derivative editions in
   <bibl>AE 1974.682</bibl>,
   <bibl>SEG 26.1819</bibl>
   and
   <bibl>Elliott 2004, 167.62.2</bibl>.
   The Latin portion of the text is reproduced in
   <bibl>EDH HD011697 (1997, provisional)</bibl>
   on the basis of AE.</p>
</div>

We may want to have a search function distinguish between original editions and those that are derivative, so we need to encode that distinction too. We don't want to have to parse text strings and try to infer the meaning of phrases like "original publication" or "derviative". Rather, we'll use the standard TEI "type" and "subtype" attributes on the <bibl> element to make this distinction clear for our little silicon friends. The values we're using for this attribute are specific to the EpiDoc customization of TEI.


<div type="bibliography">
 <p>Original publication was
   <bibl type="edition" subtype="primary">
     Reynolds 1971, 47-49.1
   </bibl>,
   whence derivative editions in
   <bibl type="edition" subtype="derivative">
     AE 1974.682
   </bibl>,
   <bibl type="edition" subtype="derivative">
     SEG 26.1819
   </bibl>
   and
   <bibl type="edition" subtype="derivative">
     Elliott 2004, 167.62.2
   </bibl>.
   The Latin portion of the text is reproduced in
   <bibl type="edition" subtype="derivative">
     EDH HD011697 (1997, provisional)
   </bibl>
   on the basis of AE.</p>
</div>

There's additional tagging internal to each <bibl> element that we can/should do to facilitate sorting, searching and linking to digital/digitized works, but we'll skip over that here (check out the example file for the full encoding).

The only thing our example doesn't do that we might like is encode the derivative relationships between the various editions. We know that one is "primary" and the others "derivative", but it's not clear what the path of derivation is for each one. EpiDoc doesn't currently have guidance for this, and I'm not sure what the broader TEI community thinks (I'm posting a link to this entry on TEI-L to find out), but it occurs to me that this would be pretty easy to do with the TEI <link> element. We'll need unique identifiers on each <bibl> element to make use of this approach.


<div type="bibliography">
 <p>Original publication was
   <bibl xml:id="reynolds-1971-1" type="edition" subtype="primary">
     Reynolds 1971, 47-49.1
   </bibl>,
   whence derivative editions in
   <bibl xml:id="ae-1974-682" type="edition" subtype="derivative">
     AE 1974.682
   </bibl>,
   <bibl xml:id="seg-26-1819" type="edition" subtype="derivative">
     SEG 26.1819
   </bibl>
   and
   <bibl xml:id="elliott-2004-62-1" type="edition" subtype="derivative">
     Elliott 2004, 167.62.2
   </bibl>.
   The Latin portion of the text is reproduced in
   <bibl xml:id="edh-hd011697" type="edition" subtype="derivative">
     EDH HD011697 (1997, provisional)
   </bibl>
   on the basis of AE.</p>
   <link targets="#reynolds-1971-1 #ae-1974-682 #seg-26-1819 #elliott-2004-62-1"/>
   <link targets="#ae-1974-682 #edh-hd011697"/>
</div>

Stay tuned for further adventures, in which we exploit some of this bibliographic tagging, and then move on to encoding the epigraphic text itself.

TEI P5 Hits the Streets, What's EpiDoc Doing?

2007-11-07T13:21:00.001-05:00

That substantial seismic WHOMP! you felt last Friday was the 1.0 release of the Text Encoding Initiative, version P5 making its official entry into the light of day. A hearty congratulations to the editors, the TEI Technical Council, and everyone else who worked so hard to make this major revision a reality.

As a sizable percentage of my legions of readers will know, the TEI underpins the work of the EpiDoc Community, which aims to provide guidance and tools for the XML markup of ancient primary sources -- especially documentary ones -- preserved in inscriptions, on papyri and the like. Right now, EpiDoc depends on the previous (P4) version of the TEI, but incorporates a number of P5 structures that are especially useful (or economical) for our needs. We'll hold at this point until sometime at least in mid-2008, when we'll look at revising EpiDoc to full P5 compliance. This delay recognizes that key members of the community will be pretty busy in the meantime on a number of projects that shouldn't be slowed down for a major revision.

A particularly important current project in this regard is the conversion of the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri (description somewhat out of date) to full EpiDoc conformance. This conversion underpins an effort to establish better interoperability with the Advanced Papyrological Information System and the Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis der griechischen Papyrusurkunden Ägyptens. This APIS/Duke/HGV work is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and it's driving major improvements to the EpiDoc Guidelines and software tools.

There's also an interesting, and rapidly growing, list of other EpiDoc projects.