Comment feed recycle?

Well, either my feed reader is playing up, or Blogger somehow/why reset all comment feeds this morning. And it's not just this blog: the comment feed for AWBG reset too.

Subaudible to me: maya-archaeology.org

I can't find a web feed for updates to the FLAAR Network's Mayan Archaeology site. Bummer.

Subaudible to me: APIS News and Updates

No easily spotted webfeed for APIS News and Updates either. Bummer.

Concordia grant award

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a nice event at the Folger library during which the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities announced the award of 5 grants under the NEH/JISC joint Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration rubric (press release).

I'm happy to report that Pleiades is part of one of the winning proposals. The award goes jointly to ISAW at NYU and to CCH/Classics at King's College, London for a collaboration we're calling "Concordia" (to reflect its focus on cross-project interoperability). The principal investigators are Roger Bagnall and Charlotte Roueché. Sean Gillies, Gabriel Bodard and I will join them in working on the project. The period of performance is 1 April 2008 - 31 March 2009.

What will we do?

• Add more content to Pleiades (Tripolitania and northern Egypt)
• Digitize Joyce Reynold's and J.B. Ward-Perkins' Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania (IRT) and release it (in EpiDoc format) online
• Use the newly-released OAI/ORE specification to link up content in Pleiades with IRT, the Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica (now in preparation at King's), the Inscriptions of Aphrodisias 2007, the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri and the Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis der griechischen Papyrusurkunden Ägyptens. We'll add geographic information, by way of GeoRSS tags and references to Pleiades places.
• Create software to exploit the Atom feeds that embody the ORE resource maps and provide search services (including spatial proximity search) that can be used by third parties. We'll integrate the output from those searches into Pleiades and some of the other collections (so e.g., you can see, from Pleiades, what inscriptions or papyri were found at a given site).

Our advisory board:

• Rodney Ast (Advanced Papyrological Information System, Columbia University)
• Hugh Cayless (Digital Library Research and Development, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
• Elaine Matthews (Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, Oxford)
• Sebastian Heath (American Numismatic Society)
• Daniel Pett (Portable Antiquities Scheme, British Museum, London)
• Joshua Sosin (Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri, Duke University, Durham, NC)
• Richard Talbert (Ancient World Mapping Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Subaudible to me: Digital Medievalist News

I can't find a web feed for Digital Medievalist News. Bummer.

Connections: Ross Scaife

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?"

Disabling keystroke activation of Frontrow in Mac OSX

My productivity has been taking a hit lately because of Apple's default keystroke sequence for Frontrow. I have no beef with the software, but it's been driving me crazy that I frequently overshoot CMD+GRAVE and hit CMD+ESC, which invokes a full-screen blackout, followed by a slow fade-in of the Frontrow interface, which can't be banished (using the ESC key) until it's fully displayed. Yes, it's all about my sloppy typing, but still .... Argh!

Given that I'm still re-adjusting to the Mac (having been moved to Windows ca. 1998 -- long before the advent of OSX -- and only recently re-mac'd), I wasn't sure where to look to fix this. Thanks to motulist and xUKHCx over at the Mac Basics and Help forum on MacRumors (by way of Google), I now have the answer.

Standby for a work speed-up!