New Colleague: Chuck Jones

The word is on the street: Chuck Jones will start work as the head librarian at ISAW in March. We're batting around various initiatives already, so if there's something you think that ISAW should be doing (at the intersection of digital scholarship, libraries and ancient studies),
let us hear about it.

Is the UK Government Out to Get Me?

Just when I started focusing serious mental concentration on the issue of long-term archival arrangements for Pleiades data output, the UK cut funding for the Arts and Humanities Data Service. Now, one of the online resources that has been most influential on my thinking about how to do online resources for ancient studies is under funding threat: the Portable Antiquities Scheme. And just when we were gearing up for some serious interoperation. I'll let Alun Salt give you all the details.

I'm going to go put on my Grumpy shirt and cross my fingers ...

Yes, I know I'm an American and our project is spearheaded by American institutions. But we all study antiquity. And we all collaborate.

Traveling with Demetrios of Skepsis

I've known about Alexandra Trachsel's project on Demetrios of Skepsis for some time (we hope Pleiades will provide the raw data for maps she'll need), but it was only today that I stumbled across (by way of a link report for Pleiades from Google's Webmaster Tools) her interesting blog. One finds more there than meta for her project, especially interesting thoughts and reactions to new trends and reports in digital publishing and digital humanities research.

Ancient Gazetteer/Geodata Builders, Unite!

I keep running into more and more examples of people or projects building interesting and useful datasets/gazetteers for the ancient world. Maybe we should be talking to each other in a more regular and organized fashion?

There are, of course, the big digital gazetteers (compiled from multiple sources) that incorporate some ancient sites (e.g., the open-access Alexandria Digital Library Gazetteer and GeoNames and the proprietary Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names). But there are also established academic/historical projects like the China Historical GIS (unfortunately locked away from the geoweb by its license). Some other academic projects focus on the capture of metadata (including spatial information) about archaeological surveys, digs, bibliography and more (for example, Fasti Online, the Mediterranean Archaeological GIS, the Portable Antiquities Scheme, the TAY Project: Archaeological Settlements of Turkey, and some of the vast array of projects cataloged by the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative over the last decade).

Then there are the folks building teaching and reference datasets (e.g., Ross Scaife's Bronze Age Crete KML for Google Earth), as well as those developing regional gazetteers for academic purposes (I just noticed Bill Caraher's mention of his plans to co-author with David Pettegrew a gazeteer of the Eastern Corinthia -- hint: search in page for "gazetteer").

If I were going to try to gather some information about projects creating academic historical "gazetteers" or "geographic datasets" (focused on "ancient" times), what questions should I be asking? Should your project be listed?

If you have thoughts on this, please post a comment or a blog post linking back to this one.

Shapely: A Python Package for Programming with 2D Geospatial Geometries

Sean deserves a big hand, and a break: he's just released Shapely 1.0.

What:

It's a package of python code for manipulating and analyzing two-dimensional geospatial geometries. Shapely lets you calculate unions, intersections and differences of two-dimensional shapes, thereby letting you determine whether these shapes intersect, touch or contain one another.

Who:

Sean had alot of great help (see Shapely Credits). Some of Sean's work on Shapely was supported by our NEH grant for Pleiades.

Why:

Why would humanists care about (or help fund) such a code library?

I'll give you the Pleiad-o-centric part of the answer: information discovery is an essential component of humanities research, and geography is often highly relevant. What's near what? What's within something else? Or within a certain distance of something else? Are there Roman-era weapon finds cataloged by the Portable Antiquities Scheme that fall within 2km of a Roman-era fort registered by Pleiades? Are there excavations documented by Fasti Online or regional surveys cataloged by MAGIS that correlate with features cataloged in Pleiades? (If so, dynamically provide Pleiades users with links to them as they browse).

Shapely gives us what we didn't have: a tested, free, open-source, pythonic base for building these kinds of correlation functions and cross-project interoperability calculations into Pleiades and, hopefully, helping others do the same.

John Matthews' Theophanes wins Breasted Prize

Thanks to Chuck's post on ANE-2, I just learned that the AHA has awarded the 2007 James Henry Breasted Prize to:

• John F. Matthews, The Journey of Theophanes: Travel, Business and Daily Life in the Roman East, Yale, 2006, ISBN: 9780300108989 (publisher's page; BMCR Review by R. Talbert)
  

Blunt Instrument Trauma (or why you haven't heard from me lately)

Rant advisory

Rob Frieden wants us to "blame blogspot" for his email not getting to his wife (her company's spam filtering solution deems any message containing any blogspot url to be spam and bounces it).

I've been having similar problems sending legitimate professional email to colleagues at various universities (these emails contained citations of various entries on this here blog; bounces included Harvard and the University of California Santa Barbara among others). Some of them at least employ a bounce message that explains why:

Spamhaus is the culprit.

Newsflash for Spamhaus and filter writers everywhere:

• Link spam is an evil-bad problem.
  
• Dropping a nuke in the baby's bathwater is not the schoolhouse solution.

Maybe I should bill Spamhaus (or those institutions using its black list) for the time I've spent troubleshooting this. Maybe you should too.

Update: this has been going on for a while:

• Spam resource: blogger listed (9 July 2007)
  
• Skeptacles: blogger domain blocked (8 July 2007)
  

And, most interesting of all, the comment stream on Storm Hits Blogger Network (slashdot, 30 August 2007) ... search in page for "spamhaus" ... where we find arguments to the effect that my reaction above fails to capture the full complexities of the situation.