Job: Senior Digital Humanities Web Developer/Architect

Reblogged from https://isaw.nyu.edu/jobs/available-staff-positions/

In order to shape and secure the future of innovative teaching and research at ISAW and beyond, we work with others to nurture new and important open information resources for the ancient world, especially those that connect and contextualize information across institutional, methodological, and technological divides. Accordingly, our Senior Digital Humanities Web Developer/Architects envision, create, and curate web applications that bridge gaps in content and function while handling the diversity of languages, scripts, geography, chronology, and methodology inherent in the study of the past-oriented humanities. You carry out this mission in constant, productive collaboration with scholars, students, and enthusiasts from both inside and outside the Institute, empowering them as co-creators, curators, and users.

Position description and application instructions may be found online at: http://www.nyucareers.com/applicants/Central?quickFind=57339

Citing Sources in Digital Annotations

I'm collaborating with other folks both in and outside ISAW on a variety of digital scholarly projects in which Linked Open Data is playing a big role. We're using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to provide descriptive information for, and make cross-project assertions about, a variety of entities of interest and the data associated with them (places, people, themes/subjects, creative works, bibliographic items, and manuscripts and other text-bearing objects). So, for example, I can produce the following assertions in RDF (using the Terse RDF Triple Language, or TuRTLe):

<http://syriaca.org/place/45> a <http://geovocab.org/spatial#Feature> ;
  rdfs:label "Serugh" ;
  rdfs:comment "An ancient city where Jacob of Serugh was bishop."@en ;
  foaf:primaryTopicOf <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suruç> ;
  owl:sameAs <http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/658405#this> .

This means: 'There's a resource identified with the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) "http://syriaca.org/place/45" about which the following is asserted:

• it is a "Feature" as defined in the NeoGeo Spatial Ontology;
• the human-readable version of its name is "Serugh";
• a human-readable description (in the English language) of it is "An ancient city where Jacob of Serugh was bishop.";
• it is the primary topic of a document that is identified by the URI "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suruç"; and
• it is the same resource as that identified by another URI: "http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/658405#this".'

(Folks familiar with what Sean Gillies has done for the Pleiades RDF will recognize my debt to him in the what proceeds.)

But there are plenty of cases in which just issuing a couple of triples to encode an assertion about something isn't sufficient; we need to be able to assign responsibility/origin for those assertions and to link them to supporting argument and evidence (i.e., standard scholarly citation practice). For this purpose, we're very pleased by the Open Annotation Collaboration, whose Open Annotation Data Model was recently updated and expanded in the form of a W3C Community Draft (8 February 2013) (the participants in Pelagios use basic OAC annotations to assert geographic relationships between their data and Pleiades places).


A basic OADM annotation uses a series of RDF triples to link together a "target" (the thing you want to make an assertion about) and a "body" (the content of your assertion). You can think of them as footnotes. The "target" is the range of text after which you put your footnote number (only in OADM you can add a footnote to any real, conceptual, or digital thing you can identify) and the "body" is the content of the footnote itself. The OADM draft formally explains this structure in section 2.1. This lets me add an annotation to the resource from our example above (the ancient city of Serugh) by using the URI "http://syriaca.org/place/45" as the target of an annotation) thus:

<http://syriaca.org/place/45/anno/desc6> a oa:Annotation ;
  oa:hasBody <http://syriaca.org/place/45/anno/desc6/body> ;
  oa:hasTarget <http://syriaca.org/place/45> ;
  oa:motivatedBy oa:describing ;
  oa:annotatedBy <http://syriaca.org/editors.xml#tcarlson> ;
  oa:annotatedAt "2013-04-03T00:00:01Z" ;
  oa:serializedBy <https://github.com/paregorios/srpdemo1/blob/master/xsl/place2ttl.xsl> ;
  oa:serializedAt "2013-04-17T13:35:05.771-05:00" .

<http://syriaca.org/place/45/anno/desc6/body> a cnt:ContentAsText, dctypes:Text ;
  cnt:chars "an ancient town, formerly located near Sarug."@en ;
  dc:format "text/plain" ;

I hope you'll forgive me for not spelling that all out in plain text, as all the syntax and terms are explained in the OADM. What I'm concerned about in this blog post is really what the OADM doesn't explicitly tell me how to do, namely: show that the annotation body is actually a quotation from a published book. The verb oa:annotatedBy lets me indicate that the annotation itself was made (i.e., the footnote was written) by a resource identified by the URI "http://syriaca.org/editors.xml#tcarlson". If I'd given you a few more triples, you could have figured out that that resource is a real person named Thomas Carlson, who is one of the editors working on the Syriac Reference Portal project. But how do I indicate (as he very much wants to do because he's a responsible scholar and has no interest in plagiarizing anyone) that he's deliberately quoting a book called The Scattered Pearls: A History of Syriac Literature and Sciences? Here's what I came up with (using terms from Citation Typing Ontology and the DCMI Metadata Terms):

<http://syriaca.org/place/45/anno/desc7/body> a cnt:ContentAsText, dctypes:Text ;
  cnt:chars "a small town in the Mudar territory, between Ḥarran and Jarabulus. [Modern name, Suruç (tr.)]"@en ;
  dc:format "text/plain" ;
  cito:citesAsSourceDocument <http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/255043315> ;
  dcterms:biblographicCitation  "The Scattered Pearls: A History of Syriac Literature and Sciences, p. 558"@en .

The addition of the triple containing cito:citesAsSourceDocument lets me make a machine-actionable link to the additional structured bibliographic data about the book that's available at Worldcat (but it doesn't say anything about page numbers!). The addition of the triple containing dcterms:bibliographicCitation lets me provide a human-readable citation.

I'd love to have feedback on this approach from folks in the OAC, CITO, DCTERMS, and general linked data communities. Could I do better? Should I do something differently?

---

The SRP team is currently evaluating a sample batch of such annotations, which you're also welcome to view. The RDF can be found here. These files are generated from the TEI XML here using the XSLT here.

Ancient Studies Needs Open Bibliographic Data and Associated URIs

Update 1:  links throughout, minor formatting changes, proper Creative Commons Public Domain tools, parenthetical about import path from Endnote and such, fixing a few typos.

The NEH-funded Linked Ancient World Data Institute, still in progress at ISAW, has got me thinking about a number of things. One of them is bibliography and linked data. Here's a brain dump, intended to spark conversation and collaboration.

What We Need

• As much bibliographic data as possible, for both primary and secondary sources (print and digital), publicly released to third parties under either a public domain declaration or an unrestrictive open license.
• Stable HTTP URIs for every work and author included in those datasets.

Why

Bibliographic and citation collection and management are integral to every research and publication in project in ancient studies. We could save each other a lot of time, and get more substantive work done in the field, if it was simpler and easier to do. We could more easily and effectively tie together disparate work published on the web (and appearing on the web through retrospective digitization) if we had a common infrastructure and shared point of reference. There's already a lot of digital data in various hands that could support such an effort, but a good chunk of it is not out where anybody with good will and talent can get at it to improve it, build tools around it, etc.

What I Want You (and Me) To Do If You Have Bibliographic Data

1. Release it to the world through a third party. No matter what format it's in, give a copy to someone else whose function is hosting free data on the web. Dump it into a public repository at github.com or sourceforge.net. Put it into a shared library at Zotero, Bibsonomy, Mendeley, or another bibliographic content website (most have easy upload/import paths from Endnote, and other citation management applications). Hosting a copy yourself is fine, but giving it to a third party demonstrates your bona fides, gets it out of your nifty but restrictive search engine or database, and increments your bus number.
2. Release it under a Creative Commons Public Domain Mark or Public Domain Dedication (CC0).  Or if you can't do that, find as open a Creative Commons or similar license as you can. Don't try to control it. If there's some aspect of the data that you can't (because of rights encumberance) or don't want to (why?) give away to make the world a better place, find a quick way to extract, filter, or excerpt that aspect and get the rest out.
3. Alert the world to your philanthropy. Blog or tweet about it. Post a link to the data on your institutional website. Above all, alert Chuck Jones and Phoebe Acheson so it gets announced via Ancient World Online and/or Ancient World Open Bibliographies.
4. Do the same if you have other useful data, like identifiers for modern or ancient works or authors.
5. Get in touch with me and/or anyone else to talk about the next step: setting up stable HTTP URIs corresponding to this stuff.

Who I'm Talking To

First of all, I'm talking to myself, my collaborators, and my team-mates at ISAW. I intend to eat my own dogfood.

Here are other institutions and entities I know about who have potentially useful data.

• The Open Library : data about books is already out there and available, and there are ways to add more
• Perseus Project : a huge, FRBR-ized collection of MODS records for Greek and Latin authors, works, and modern editions thereof.
• Center for Hellenic Studies: identifiers for Greek and Latin authors and works
• L'Année Philologique and its institutional partners like the American Philological Association: the big collection of analytic secondary bibliography for classics (journal articles)
• TOCS-IN: a collaboratively collected batch of analytic secondary bibliography for classics
• Papyri.info and its contributing project partners: TEI bibliographic records for  much of the bibliography produced for or cited by Greek and Latin papyrologists (plus other ancient language/script traditions in papyrology)
• Gnomon Bibliographische Datenbank: masses of bibliographic data for books and articles for classics
• Any and every university library system that has a dedicated or easily extracted set of associated catalog records. Especially any with unique collections (e.g., Cincinnati) or those with databases of analytical bibliography down to the level of articles in journals and collections.
• Ditto any and every ancient studies digital project that has bibliographic data in a database.

Comments, Reactions, Suggestions

Welcome, encouraged, and essential. By comment here or otherwise (but not private email please!).

Feeds of Flickr Photos Depicting Pleiades Places

Some months ago, ISAW started adding Pleiades machine tags to the Ancient World Image Bank (AWIB) photos we've been uploading to Flickr. This post will explain what that means, how it might be useful to you and how you can add Pleiades machine tags to your own photos so we can find out about them.

Updated: 8:45pm EDT, 10 September 2011 (changes highlighted in orange).
Updated: 10:43am EST, 20 December 2011 (some of what's here is now superseded by recent developments; see further this new post: Pleiades, Flickr, and the Ancient World Image Bank)

Pleiades Machine Tags

Pleiades is a collaborative, open-access digital gazetteer for the ancient world. AWIB is an open-access publication that uses the Flickr photo-sharing site to publish free, reusable photos of ancient sites and artifacts. Machine tags are an extension to Flickr's basic tag-this-photo functionality that "use a special syntax to define extra information about a tag" (Aaron Straup Cope, "Ladies and Gentlemen: Machine Tags," 24 January 2007).

A Pleiades machine tag looks like this:

pleiades:place=795868

where 795868 is the stable identifier portion of a Pleiades Uniform Resource Identifier (URI).  In this example, the URI corresponding to the machine tag above is:

http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/795868

Note what's in common between the machine tag and the URI (highlighted in yellow).

What Pleiades Machine Tags Are Good For

The Flickr API makes it possible to request lists of machine-tagged photos in the RSS webfeed format. So, to get a list of all photos in Flickr that are tagged with the example machine tag above, pop this into your feed reader:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=pleiades%3Aplace=795868&lang=en-us&format=rss_200

The same results can be viewed in HTML in a browser by resolving the following:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/pleiades:place=795868

To get a list of all photos in Flickr that are tagged with any Pleiades machine tag, try this (the API syntax supports wildcards!):

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=pleiades%3Aplace%3D&lang=en-us&format=rss_200

The same results, viewed in HTML on the Flickr site:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/pleiades:place

Feeds like these aren't just for feed readers anymore. You can add user-interface widgets to your blog or website to summarize the latest content for your readers (check out the right-hand column in this blog). You can hook up services like Networked Blogs or Twitterfeed to pass on the latest changes to your Facebook friends or Twitter followers. If you've got a web-facing numismatic database that you've already linked up with Pleiades for the mint locations, you could write custom code to pull a corresponding picture of the ancient site into your web interface (say, alongside the map you've already got).

Add Pleiades Machine Tags to Your Own Photos on Flickr

Many of you have been taking amazing photos of ancient sites and artifacts for years. Many of you have posted some of them to Flickr and shared them with great groups like Chiron, Visibile Parlare - Greek Inscriptions and Visibile Parlare - Latin Inscriptions. If you'd like these photos to appear in queries and feeds (like those described above), right alongside the photos that we're publishing via AWIB, all you have to do is add the appropriate Pleiades machine tags in Flickr. Just look up your site on Pleiades, copy the numeric ID from the URI in your browser's location bar, append it to the string "pleiades:place=" and tag your Flickr photos with it. In this way, you can help us improve findability of good photos of ancient sites and the artifacts found there for everyone on the web. Who knows ... maybe enough people will join us in this effort that we can someday get the Flickr development team to give Pleiades machine tags some extra love.

Kudos to:

• Aaron Straup Cope for his blog post "Wildcard Machine Tag URLs" (18 July 2008) that showed me how to construct the API queries necessary to get the RSS feeds described above. That, and the Flickr API documentation on feeds.
• Nate Nagy, Managing Editor of AWIB, who applies the tags and keeps AWIB rolling.
• Dan Pet, from the Portable Antiquities Scheme, and Ryan Baumann, from the Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments at the University of Kentucky, who put me onto machine tags in the first place and helped me get up to speed.

Linking to Google Books Content in an Ancient Geographic Way

I'm very interested in finding ways through Pleiades and other ISAW digital projects to support the efforts of Leif, Elton and Eric on the "Google Ancient Places (GAP): Discovering historic geographical entities in the Google Books corpus" project. In particular, I'd hope we can integrate this into the web interfaces for our projects:

ECS will work on a Web Service and Web Widget [that] will make it possible for Webmasters to add links to the ancient texts [in Google Books] within their websites, enabling the public and researchers to search for them easily.

ISAW has a news blog

ISAW now has an official news blog. I'm going to stop posting ISAW news here on Horothesia. If you want to catch up on the latest from ISAW (e.g., the recent announcement of our newest faculty member, Lillian Tseng), head on over to http://blogs.nyu.edu/isaw/news/.

ISAW New Faculty Appointment: Sören Stark

From ISAW's director, Roger Bagnall:

The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University is pleased to announce the appointment of Sören Stark as Assistant Professor of Central Asian Art and Archaeology.

Professor Stark studied Oriental Archaeology and Art History, Ancient History, and European Art History at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. He received his doctorate in 2005 with a study on the archaeology and history of the pre-Muslim Turks in Central and Inner Asia, which was published in 2008 as Die Alttürkenzeit in Mittel- und Zentralasien. Archaeologische und historische Studien (Nomaden und Sesshafte 6).

From 2005 to 2008 he led archaeological surveys and excavations in Northern Tajikistan. Before joining the faculty of ISAW he was a Junior Fellow at the Excellence Cluster TOPOI and teaching at the Freie Universität in Berlin.

His research ranges chronologically from the Iron Age up to the pre-Mongol Middle Ages and deals with various aspects of archaeology, art history, and history in Central and Inner Asia as well as in neighboring cultural areas. His main focus lies on the political and cultural interrelations between pastoral nomads in these areas and their sedentary neighbors. Currently, he is preparing a book on territorial fortifications in Western Central Asia. He is also co-editor of a Handbook of Central Asian Archaeology and Art which is presently under preparation at Oxford University Press.

Professor Stark will begin teaching seminars at ISAW in the fall. Please join us in welcoming him to our community.

Professor Stark's faculty profile is at http://www.nyu.edu/isaw/faculty.htm#stark

Bridging Institutional Repository and Bibliographic Management

As an institution, ISAW has an interest in disseminating, preserving and promoting the research products and publications of its faculty, research staff, students, affiliates and collaborators. Our parent institution, NYU, has made a commitment to the persistent dissemination of such materials when voluntarily contributed to its Faculty Digital Archive (FDA). We'll use the FDA as a locus for materials that fit well into DSpace (with which the FDA is realized) and that aren't rights-constrained. But we also need mechanisms for developing and publishing the whole bibliographic story of a particular faculty member, research group, project or conference with links from the individual entries to digital copies wherever they may be (e.g., the FDA, JSTOR, Internet Archive, Google Books). For this function, we like Zotero. Atop Zotero's robust and ubiquitous feed documents, we can build interoperability with our website and other tools and venues in a way that is also completely visible to commercial and third-party search and discovery tools.

There will be a number of iterations necessary to reach a fully robust solution, but we're already taking some of the first steps.

As an early experiment with the FDA, we had a student assistant input all of my boss's articles in PDF format, along with descriptive metadata (see: Roger Bagnall's Publications). The default metadata schema in the FDA wasn't a perfect fit for journal article citations, but the FDA staff is now working with us to extend the schema to meet our needs. We're using the Zotero data model as a guide.

Given that the metadata in this collection is the only structured dataset around for Roger's articles, I wanted to be able to get it all back out to use for other things. The FDA does provide web feeds, but (unlike Zotero) these aren't comprehensive for a given context and don't incorporate all the metadata fields. But we can use FDA's OAI-PMH interface to get the full metadata with a query like:

http://archive.nyu.edu/request?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&set=hdl_2451_28115

where "hdl_2451_28115" is the identifier for the "Roger Bagnall's Publications" container I linked to above. (Special thanks to Ekaterina Pechekhonova on the NYU Digital Library team, who helped me with syntax).

As a further experiment, I wrote an XSL transform to convert the OAI-PMH XML document into the RDF XML Zotero can import. There are a couple of inelegant hacks in the transform (mainly to get at substrings within single fields), but I'm still happy with the results. The import into Zotero went smoothly:

http://www.zotero.org/paregorios/items/collection/1505597

Next steps: move this to a shared Zotero library so Roger, a student assistant and members of our digital projects team can collaborate to enter the rest of the publications (books, book sections, etc.) and fix any errors in the article records. Then we'll look at the process for using that metadata (via another transform) to help us populate the FDA. We'll also start working on parsing and aggregating Zotero's feeds for use on our website (in Roger's online profile and aggregated with other affiliates' feeds to provide a "recent publications" section).

We're also experimenting with Zotero for the bibliography of our Pleiades project (a collaborative online gazetteer of the Greek and Roman world), and as a component in a potential replacement for the Checklist of Editions of Greek, Latin, Demotic and Coptic Papyri, Ostraca and Tablets. On a more personal level, I've taken to doing all my bookmarking with Zotero and have set up a folder in my library (with associated feed) so that colleagues can following what I'm citing on a daily basis.

The Horse is Man's Wings: Archaeological Science and the Changing Nature of the Human-Horse Relationship in Central and East Asia

Dr. Mim Bower (Cambridge University) will give a free, public lecture at ISAW on 27 October 2009 at 6:00 p.m.

More information, including an abstract of the talk, is available on the ISAW events page.

The Historian in the Future of the Ancient World: A View from Central Eurasia

ISAW has announced the third annual Leon Levy Lecture, to be held on November 5, 2009 at 6 p.m in the Oak Library, 2nd floor of the ISAW building, located at 15 East 84th Street in New York. The speaker will be Professor Nicola Di Cosmo of the Institute for Advanced Study. The lecture is free and open to the public but seating is limited. Interested individuals are requested to RSVP by calling 212.992.7818, or emailing isaw@nyu.edu.

More information (including abstract) is available on the ISAW events page. There is also an NYU press release with more details.

David Klotz: The Temple of Osiris in Abydos during the Late Period

2009-2010 Visiting Research Scholar Lecture Series
The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU

The Temple of Osiris in Abydos during the Late Period
Presented by: David Klotz, Visiting Research Scholar

Although the city of Abydos was one of the most important religious centers of Egypt from the Predynastic  Period through the New Kingdom, little remains of its monuments from the Late Period (c. 1000-300 BC).  In the early twentieth century, W.F. Petrie discovered meager traces of an Osiris temple dating to the reign of Amasis (Twenty-Sixth Dynasty, c. 570-526 BC), and recent New York University excavations have uncovered another temple built by Nectanebo I and II (Thirtieth Dynasty, c. 378-341 BC). Nonetheless, the intervening period - the era of Persian domination - remains a mystery, and the earlier temple of Amasis seems to have completely vanished.

Two new sources provide valuable information on this obscure chapter in the history of Abydos.  The first  is a statue in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA 1996.91) belonging to a prominent Egyptian general from the Thirtieth Dynasty.  This object includes a difficult autobiographical inscription text in which the owner narrates how he defended Egypt from invading Persian armies and restored massive damage inflicted upon Abydos. At Sohag, meanwhile, the church of St. Shenoute at the White Monastery (c.450 AD) incorporates Pharaonic and Graeco-Roman spolia reused from earlier monuments.  The Yale White Monastery Church Documentation Project (2007-2009) recorded over twenty granite blocks from the reign of Amasis, and the decoration indicates they derive from the Osiris temple at Abydos.

The archaeological and epigraphic record suggests the Osiris temple was badly damaged - if not completely destroyed - during the period of Achaemenid rule in Egypt.  Similar accounts of Persian looting are attested at multiple Egyptian sites, but they are often dismissed as mere propaganda intended to legitimize the subsequent Ptolemaic dynasty.  The case of Abydos leads us to reevaluate our assumptions concerning the religious policies of the Great Kings of Persia.

Date: Tuesday, October 20th
Time: 6:00pm
Location: Lecture Hall
The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
15 East 84th St.
New York, NY  10028
212-992-7843
isaw@nyu.edu

*This event is free and open to the public

David Taylor: A Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire?

A Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire? The View from New York
presented by
David Taylor,
Visiting Research Scholar
   
2009-2010 Visiting Research Scholar Lecture Series
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World

Tuesday, 6:00 pm
October 6th, 2009

Lecture Hall
ISAW Building
15 East 84th Street
New York, NY 10028
212.992.7818

*This lecture is free and open to the public

The overwhelming majority of the surviving epigraphic texts of the Late Antique Roman provinces of Syria and Mesopotamia are written in Greek, and in a number of recent books and articles it has been argued that Greek was in fact the ordinary daily language of the local populations. By examining examples of the full available range of ancient linguistic evidence, and drawing on sociolinguistic theory about multilingualism and diglossia, this thesis will be challenged, and a more complex pattern of language usage will be sketched out. The consequences of this for issues of local identity and culture will then be explored.

David Taylor is the University Lecturer in Aramaic and Syriac at the University of Oxford, and during 2009-2010 he is a Visiting Research Scholar at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU.

The next lecture of the series will be given by David Klotz on October 20th.

ISAW Job: Systems Administrator / Web Master

We have an immediate opening for a full-time web master / systems administrator at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. Job description and application instructions:

http://www.nyucareers.com/applicants/Central?quickFind=51252

Position Summary:
Design, develop, program and manage websites, databases, departmental servers and other computing and office automation systems for the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW).  Formulate policies, establish priorities, independently resolve routine and non-routine technical matters; provide technical analysis, user support and oversee repairs/upgrades for the full range of ISAW's computing and office automation needs; manage administrative and technical functions for the Institute; collaborate with central Information Technology Services and other university departments to ensure a complete, up-to-date and smoothly functioning IT infrastructure. Provide direct IT support for events and other special requirements.

Qualifications/Required Education        
Bachelor's degree in computer science, information science, computer engineering or a closely related field. 

Preferred Education    
Master's degree in computer science, information science, computer engineering or a closely related field. 

Required Experience    
Four years of relevant experience and/or combination of education. Must include administration of Macintosh servers, website creation and maintenance, and design, deployment and management of databases. 

Preferred Experience
Customization and administration of Plone-based web applications. 

Required Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities    
Macintosh and PC network and systems administration. XHTML+CSS, Filemaker Pro plus one or more of the following programming skills: Python, SQL, JavaScript/AJAX. Ability to communicate policies and procedures to a diverse population at all levels. Demonstrated knowledge and understanding of information technology applications in complex networked/on-line system environments. Ability to make decisions independently and without direct supervision. Ability to work cooperatively as a member of an interdisciplinary team, communicate effectively and persuasively to senior IT and administrative management, and represent the Institute in internal and external interactions. Excellent organizational, interpersonal and problem-solving skills. 

Preferred Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities    
Management of a major website re-engineering or information systems development project. Experience as a consultant working with clients to identify IT needs and developing a system responsive to those needs. 

Projected Position Start Date     10-15-2009  

Principal Duties:
1. Modify, maintain and update all ISAW websites and web applications including the Institute's legacy website, as well as existing "minisites" for excavations, exhibitions, conferences and other ISAW-related projects.  Train staff how to update sites and monitor results for quality and technical integrity. Plan for and implement upgrades and technology transitions to ensure all web assets remain functional and accessible, and reflect positively on the Institute's public image. Adapt existing or create new minisites for ISAW projects, excavations, exhibitions and conferences.

2. Collaborate with staff and leadership across the Institute to design, develop, program, deploy and administer a next-generation content management system, events management system and associated web application. Collaborate with Digital Projects staff in directing subcontractors working on programming and design tasks to support the effort, evaluate their work, communicate effectiveness to leadership and ensure on-time project completion. Manage the migration of content from the legacy website to the new system and the decommissioning of the legacy website. Assume primary responsibility for the systems administration, software upgrade and maintenance of the new site and associated systems.

3. Perform system and network administration duties for Macintosh server (file sharing and centralized backup services) and  Apple and PC laptop and desktop computers.  Ensure security, performance and optimal uptime of all systems. Ensure availability of network, internet access, printing and other services for guests as appropriate. Monitor and analyze system performance and resource usage to identify areas for improvement and potential economies.

4. Support the computing and office automation needs of staff, faculty, students, visiting scholars and other guests in accordance with Institute policy. Establish a help desk system and associated process for request submission and task management. Train personnel on its use and monitor it to provide quick and effective response to all tickets. Handle inquiries and requests in a congenial, professional and efficient manner. Assess nature and complexity of requests, responding to inquiries and resolving problems immediately whenever possible. Promptly report conflicts or other difficulties to the Administrative Director and Associate Director for Digital Programs. Provide "how-to" guides and other training and reference materials via internal web pages, emails and other means.

5. Ensure efficient and innovative flow and processing of information throughout the faculty and administrative staff and offices (to include non-local affiliates). Train staff in use of database and web applications for information management. Identify bottlenecks, research appropriate solutions and communicate recommendations to management. Design, develop, program, install and configure databases and web applications to support information management and processing.  Maintain and improve software and hardware for scanning and desktop publishing functions. Administer email lists.

6. Manage inventory, procurement and proper operation of computer and office automation hardware, software, licenses and associated supplies. Oversee supply closet, retain keys and authorize access to supply closet. Respond to requests about office equipment. Schedule both regular and emergency maintenance of shared equipment (fax, copy machines, printers, etc.) as appropriate.  Maintain inventory database in a complete and up-to-date fashion. Track expenditures and report to Administrative Director on budget concerns and major purchases.

7. Serve as liaison between ISAW and ITS, Telecomm, Asset Management and other University departments, as well as external service vendors to ensure that installations, upgrades, repairs and policy changes are implemented in a timely manner and perform as expected.

8. Ensure the smooth, professional and on-time execution of ISAW public and internal events (e.g., lectures) by conducting routine checks and preventative maintenance on all required audio-visual systems, laptops, projectors and the like; by ensuring all systems are set up in advance of each event; by liaising with presenters in advance to ensure their slides are properly prepared for presentation and loaded on appropriate machines; and by attending (or ensuring a subordinate attends) all appropriate events to assist in the event of difficulties. Smooth functioning of technology at these events, and ready access to technical assistance, is highly visible and has a significant impact on ISAW's reputation.

9. Supervise staff; identify and prioritize assignments to ensure deadlines are met and review work for accuracy.

Conference this weekend: The Sarcophagus East and West

October 2-3, 2009

The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
15 E. 84th Street
New York, NY 10028
(212) 992-7800

RSVP: isaw@nyu.edu (please indicate day(s) attending)

This conference, organized by Wu Hung and Jas' Elsner, focuses mainly on decorated stone sarcophagi from around the second century BCE to the third century CE, when this type of burial equipment not only continued to develop in the parts of Europe dominated by the Roman Empire, but also enjoyed considerable popularity in East Asia. Whereas the chronological and formal developments of each regional tradition remain an important research goal, this conference encourages comparative observations and interpretations of ancient sarcophagi in broader geo-cultural spheres and more specific ritual/religious contexts. It is hoped that by addressing these two research objectives simultaneously, this conference will help open new ways to think about the development of art and visual culture in a broadly defined ancient world, where the art historical materials available are subject to comparable methodological constraints both from archaeological excavation and from known literary and historical contexts.

This event is free and open to the public, please RSVP.

Program

Friday, October 2, 2009

9:00 Opening remarks: Roger Bagnall (Director of ISAW)

Panel 1   Chair: Roger Bagnall

9:20 Introductory Lecture 1
    Wu Hung (University of Chicago) - “Consistency and Variations in Han Sarcophagi”

10:00 Introductory Lecture 2:
    Jas Elsner (Oxford University) - “Rhetoric in Pagan and Christian Sarcophagi”

10:40   Coffee Served in Oak Library

Panel 2   Chair: Jonathan Hay (IFA, New York University)

11:10 Paul Zanker (Scuole Normale Superiore di Pisa) - “Understanding Images Without Texts”

11:50 Alain Thote (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes) - “The Chinese coffins from the first millennium BC and the early images of the after world”

12:30   Lunch Break

Panel 3   Chair: T. J. Clark (U.C. Berkeley)

2:15 Richard Neer (University of Chicago) - "The Polyxena Sarcophagus from Ilion"

3:00 Eugene Wang (Harvard University) - “The Jouissance of Death: Mapping the Bodily Cosmos on Chinese Sarcophagi”

3: 40 Tea Served in Oak Library

Panel 4   Chair: Wu Hung

4:10  Discussion: Barry Flood (IFA, New York University)

4:40  Discussion: Chris Hallett (U. C. Berkeley)

5:10  Open floor discussion

6:00   Reception

***

Saturday, October 3, 2009

Panel 5   Chair: Barry Flood

9:00 Verity Platt (University of Chicago) - "Horror Vacui: Framing the Dead on Roman Sarcophagi"

9:40 Zheng Yan (Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing) - “Sarcophagus Tombs in Eastern China and the Transformation of Han Funerary Art”

10:30   Coffee Served in Oak Library

Panel 6   Chair: Chris Hallett

11:00 Janet Huskinson (Open University, UK) – “Roman Strigillated Sarcophagi and 'How Societies Remember'”

11:40 Bjoern Ewald (University of Toronto) – “Sarcophagi in the Roman World: a Comparative Approach”

12:30   Lunch Break

Panel 7   Chair: Jas Elsner

2:15 Lillian Tseng (Yale University) - “Funerary Spatiality: Wang Hui’s Sarcophagus in Han China”

3:00  Edmund Thomas (Durham Center for Roman Culture) – “Inside and Outside: Roman Sarcophagi as Public and Private Monuments”

3:40   Tea Served in Oak Library

Panel 8   Chair: Jas Elsner

4:10  Discussion: Jonathan Hay

4:40 Discussion: T.J. Clark

5:10 Open floor discussion

ISAW now accepting applications for visiting research scholars 2010-2011

Each year the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World makes about 9 appointments of visiting research scholars... Academic visitors at ISAW should be individuals of scholarly distinction or promise in any relevant field of ancient studies who will benefit from the stimulation of working in an environment with colleagues in other disciplines. Applicants with a history of interdisciplinary exchange are particularly welcome. They will be expected to be in residence at the Institute during the period for which they are appointed and to take part in the intellectual life of the community.

ISAW is now accepting applications for 2010-2011. The deadline for submissions is December 14, 2009. 

Full details and application instructions are on the ISAW website.

ISAW Exhibition: Lost World of Old Europe (opens 11 November)

ISAW has announced its next exhibition (and associated public programming schedule).

The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley, 5000-3500 BC
November 11, 2009 -April 25, 2010
The Lost World of Old Europe brings to the United States for the first time more than 160 objects recovered by archaeologists from the graves, towns, and villages of Old Europe, a cycle of related cultures that achieved a precocious peak of sophistication and creativity in what is now southeastern Europe between 5000 and 4000 BC, and then mysteriously collapsed by 3500 BC. Long before Egypt or Mesopotamia rose to an equivalent level of achievement, Old Europe was among the most sophisticated places that humans inhabited. Some of its towns grew to city-like sizes. Potters developed striking designs, and the ubiquitous goddess figurines found in houses and shrines have triggered intense debates about women’s roles in Old European society. Old European copper-smiths were, in their day, the most advanced metal artisans in the world. Their intense interest in acquiring copper, gold, Aegean shells, and other rare valuables created networks of negotiation that reached surprisingly far, permitting some of their chiefs to be buried with pounds of gold and copper in funerals without parallel in the Near East or Egypt at the time. The exhibition, arranged through loan agreements with 20 museums in three countries (Romania, The Republic of Bulgaria and the Republic of Moldova), brings the exuberant art, enigmatic ‘goddess’ cults, and precocious metal ornaments and weapons of Old Europe to American audiences.

Get complete information and schedule at http://www.nyu.edu/isaw/exhibitions.htm. Other ISAW-sponsored events at http://www.nyu.edu/isaw/events.htm.

Bagnall on Amheida Excavations (NYC, 17 June 2009)

The American Research Center in Egypt Presents:
Roger Bagnall
NYU Excavations at Amheida
Date: Wednesday, June 17th
Time: 6:00 pm
Location: Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, 15 E 84th St., New York, NY 10028, Second Floor Lecture Room

Amheida is a vast archaeological site on the western edge of Dakhla Oasis in Egypt. A team of researchers led by Dr. Roger Bagnall, Director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU, began the Amheida Project in 2001 with an intensive investigation and survey of the site.

One of the most spectacular discoveries, near the center of the town in Area 2, is the house of Serenus, who was part of the city council in the middle of the 4th century. The structure contains fifteen rooms, one of which was painted with classical wall scenes. On the northern wall, to the left of the doorway, a mythological scene depicts the legend of Perseus rescuing the beautiful Andromeda who is about to be devoured by a sea-monster, while to the right of the door is the Homeric scene of the Return of Odysseus to Ithaca, from his long voyage which brought him to Egyptian shores.

The site at Amheida will be part of a long-term scheme for the Dakhla Oasis Project. Please join us for a presentation and discussion on Amheida and its archaeological significance.

This lecture is free and open to the public, but please be sure to RSVP to isaw@nyu.edu. For more information on the lecture and other ISAW events, please visit: http://www.nyu.edu/isaw/events.htm. You may also contact the ISAW events office directly at 212.992.7818. For press inquiries, please contact Suzan Toma at suzan.toma@nyu.edu.

Unraveling the Mysteries of Ancient Angkor's Water Management System

Tuesday, April 28, 6 pm
2nd floor lecture room
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
15 East 84th St.
New York, NY 10028

Dr. Dougald J.W. O'Reilly
Department of Anthropology, Yale University

A presentation on research undertaken by the Greater Angkor Project exploring the development and decline of this ancient civilizations water management network. Since 2001 the University of Sydney (Australia) researchers and their partners have been working to unravel the mysteries of the Angkorian network - an achievement that is often overshadowed by the scores of massive temples that dot the landscape. Dr O'Reilly, a member of the research team, will present the work done to date and present future research at Angkor.

This lecture is free and open to the public, but please be sure to RSVP to isawevents@nyu.edu. For more information on other ISAW events, please visit: http://www.nyu.edu/isaw/events.htm You may also contact the ISAW events office directly at 212.992.7818.

Another Persian Crisis: the Persepolis Fortification Archive in Chicago

A public lecture

Friday, April 24, 12 noon
2nd floor lecture room
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
15 East 84th St.
New York, NY 10028

Matthew W. Stolper
Professor of Assyriology, John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies in the Oriental Institute, The University of Chicago

Matthew W. Stolper is the Director of the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project. In 1933, Oriental Institute archaeologists working at Persepolis, clearing the ruined palaces of Kings Darius, Xerxes, and their Achaemenid Persian successors, found tens of thousands of clay tablets in a bastion in the fortification wall at the edge of the great stone terrace. These documents were pieces of a single, complex system, the Persepolis Fortification Archive, that proved-after decades of painstaking work-to be the largest and most important single source of information from within the Persian Empire on Achaemenid Persian languages, history, society, religion and art. Now, the Archive faces a legal battle that could well lead to its dismemberment and loss if it is seized and sold, and disappears into the holdings of private collectors around the world. Fueled by this crisis the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project is a new phase in recording and distributing the results of the study of the archive, responding to emergency conditions with electronic equipment and media alongside the conventional tool-kits of philology and scholarship.

A summary of the project is available on the website of the Oriental Institute (http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/projects/pfa/).

Background and news of the project and the controversy are available at the Persepolis Fortification Archive Weblog (http://persepolistablets.blogspot.com/).

This lecture is free and open to the public, but please be sure to RSVP. For more information on other ISAW events, please visit: http://www.nyu.edu/isaw/events.htm You may also contact the ISAW events office directly at 212.992.7818.

Publishing Archaeological Data on the Web (New York, 14 April)

Two Public Lectures on Publishing Archaeological Data on the Web

Sebastian Heath, Ph.D. (American Numismatic Society)
Eric Kansa, Ph.D. (University of California, Berkeley)

Date: 14 April 2009
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Location: Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, 15 E 84th St., New York, NY  10028, U.S.A. (lecture room)

Heath: Digital Publication and Linked Data at Troy

The Post-Bronze Age Excavations at Troy in Turkey, known as Ilion in the Greek and Roman periods, have begun a program of publishing ceramic vessels and coins from the site in digital format. Our goal is to provide the information in formats that are useful to archaeologists in the field and to students or anybody else interested in this material. Accordingly, all the files that make up these publications are available for download under Creative Commons licenses. Anybody can take this information and redistribute it for free. We are also working to express the inherent links within archaeological information. A user reading about pottery from North Africa found at Troy can easily link to secondary literature and internet resources that will increase their understanding of this material. We likewise hope to make such links discoverable by search engines as well as by researchers working on the digital processing of humanities resources.

Kansa: Open Context: Digital Dissemination of Field Research and Museum Collections

Publishing archaeological field data and primary documentation has received increasing attention and concern. Archaeological sites are threatened and archaeological methods themselves are often destructive. Often, excavation and survey records represent the only aspect of the archaeological record that can be preserved. This is especially worrisome, since so much of this documentation is in vulnerable, volatile digital formats. In addition to cultural heritage preservation issues, archaeologists often want to use pooled primary field documentation as a resource for investigation. Research may be enhanced by simplifying and speeding access to such documentation, or even by comparing across the results of multiple studies.

In an attempt to respond to these needs, several initiatives are exploring several approaches toward digital dissemination. Open Context (http://www.opencontext.org) is an open source system that provides a cost-effective dissemination solution for field research and museum collections. The system offers integrated access and services across datasets pooled from multiple research projects and collections. A long-term development goal is to help link field research and museum collections with active discussions and creative reuses, making these collections a much richer and integral part of continued cultural and scholarly production. Citation features and editorial control encourage researchers to consider publication in Open Context as a valid form of scholarly communication. At the same time, Creative Commons licenses give explicit permissions for users to freely and legally use the material so long as they properly attribute the original creator and abide by a few other optional terms.

A major challenge with Open Context’s approach lies in data integration and mapping different source data sets to Open Context’s common global structure. Open Context aims to provide Web-based tool for researchers and collections managers to upload, "markup" and publish diverse archaeological and museum collection datasets. It remains to be seen if this tool can be easy enough to use by individual contributors, or if trained staff will always be required to aid such markup.