Flavia Faustina, version 3: chi-rho, dolium, multiple editors, rationale

Ryan Baumann and Georgia Tsouvala have joined the mob!

Ryan forked my Mob Epigraphy repository on github and added markup to the EpiDoc XML file to represent the Chi-Rho and dolium(?) that appear below the inscribed text. Then he sent me a pull request. I merged his changes and pushed them back to github, and then I pushed a few more modifications to show his contribution in the EpiDoc/TEI header and to modify the stylesheets to handle whitespace and multiple editors better (and to write out an HTML doctype). Here's the result:

• Flavia Faustina 3 HTML
• Flavia Faustina 3 EpiDoc XML

Ryan's change -- which parallels the treatment in ICVR II as reported via EDB -- raises some questions in my mind:

1. Is the second illustration really a dolium? It doesn't look that much like what's illustrated at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolium. Why would a dolium appear on a Christian sepulchral inscription? Maybe someone like Sebastian Heath or Charlotte Tupman will have an idea about that.
2. Are those two items really glyphs that should be "read" as part of the inscription and therefore marked up using the TEI "g" element (as Ryan has done), or should they be treated as figures or illustrations and therefore marked up a different way? If they are "glyphs", then what would be the corresponding glyph definition markup (if any) and where should it go in an EpiDoc file? Maybe someone like Gabriel Bodard or Marion Lamé will have an opinion about that.

Meanwhile, Georgia wrote to me as follows:

I like version 2. For one, I could see it and read it without any problems; something I could not do with version 1. I like the idea of being able to see pictures, texts, and translations of inscriptions on a single page. My question is: what are you trying to do here? What's the purpose, goal, etc. of Mob Epigraphy? And how can others help, contribute, etc.?

My goal with Mob Epigraphy is two-fold. First, I want to create more on-line, open examples of real inscriptions marked up in EpiDoc. Secondly, I want to see how far we can push an openly collaborative model in the practice of digital epigraphy, welcoming all interested parties in editing the text and pushing the boundaries on what we can and can't do with standard encoding and web publication.

How to contribute? There are many ways. This post highlights two examples. Ryan saw something missing and, exploiting the digital collaboration infrastructure provided by github, pitched in to fill the gap. Georgia had comments and questions and, after having some trouble with Blogger's comment functionality, sent me an email. Both are great ways to contribute, and I bet readers of this post can come up with more -- like suggesting answers to my questions above, or proposing more robust or interesting documentation of the inscription or elaboration of the encoding or HTML representation.

Previous post.

Mob Epigraphy: Sepulchral Inscription of Flavia Faustina

First installment in an irregular series (entitled "Mob Epigraphy") exploring the collaborative encoding, enrichment and publication of epigraphic texts on the web.

Here's the deal: what follows is surely incomplete, or even wrong, from any number of perspectives (textual, historical, technical?). So, if you have ideas or expertise with respect to the text, translation, descriptive information, EpiDoc/TEI encoding of the XML, HTML encoding, etc.), then please weigh in via comment or another blog post (just make sure I discover it somehow!).

What do you think would make this a better digital publication?

Josh Greenberg on the Mellon/UVA "Shape of Things to Come" conference

The general perception of the academic humanities as far removed from the daily lives of the general public that is only heightened by isolationist jargon and publishing mechanisms that create rather than break down silos represents a massive failure to make the case for the value of that work to society ...

Epistemographer | Notes from “The Shape of Things to Come”

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.

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.

DM The Book Ex

Paul Jones posted at Facebook a link to this notice from Bull City Rising: "The Book Exchange to shutter in February after 75 years."

The Book Ex (in Durham, North Carolina) wasn't just for Law School students. I was a clueless freshman in the fall of 1985, sent there by Bill Willis (cf. APA Newsletter, 23.4, August 2000, p. 11 sub "Obituaries" [pdf]) to collect a copy of the then already out-of-print Allen's First Year of Greek.

Cluelessness on my part of course is proved by the fact I'd elected to take Greek. As a freshman. At 9:00 a.m. With no prior Latin. From a papyrologist. Some will of course already have guessed that that experience, harrowing as it was, is no small part of why I do what I do professionally today.

So long, Book Ex. And thanks.

Digital Archimedes Palimpsest

This just in:

Ten years ago today, a private American collector purchased the Archimedes Palimpsest. Since that time he has guided and funded the project to conserve, image, and study the manuscript. After ten years of work, involving the expertise and goodwill of an extraordinary number of people working around the world, the Archimedes Palimpsest Project has released its data. It is a historic dataset, revealing new texts from the ancient world. It is an integrated product, weaving registered images in many wavebands of light with XML transcriptions of the Archimedes and Hyperides texts that are spatially mapped to those images. It has pushed boundaries for the imaging of documents, and relied almost exclusively on current international standards. We hope that this dataset will be a persistent digital resource for the decades to come. We also hope it will be helpful as an example for others who are conducting similar work. It published under a Creative Commons 3.0 attribution license, to ensure ease of access and the potential for widespread use. A complete facsimile of the revealed palimpsested texts is available on Googlebooks as "The Archimedes Palimpsest." It is hoped that this is the first of many uses to which the data will be put.

For information on the Archimedes Palimpsest Project, please visit:
www.archimedespalimpsest.org

For the dataset, please visit:
www.archimedespalimpsest.net

We have set up a discussion forum on the Archimedes Palimpsest Project. Any member can invite anybody else to join. If you want to become a member, please email:

wnoel@thewalters.org

I would be grateful if you would circulate this to your friends and colleagues.

Thank you very much
Will Noel
The Walters Art Museum
October 29th, 2008.

I found it a bit tricky to find the Google Books version of this, so here's the link.

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.

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.

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.

Which archaeo-data-animal are you?

I think I'm a cranky space monkey in the Watkinson Archaeological Cyberverse.

Bill Caraher is a squirrel.

What critter are you, Eric Kansa?

Podcasts, at last

I've been wondering for a long time -- admittedly without yet having personally done anything about it -- why so few conference papers and lectures in ancient studies seem to get live-streamed or retrospectively web-cast.

Well, hats off to Kostis Kourelis, Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory and their panelists in Chicago! They've posted podcasts (with print abstracts) of their entire panel from the 2008 AIA Meetings on "The Archaeology of Xenitia: Greek Immigration and Material Culture." Now those who couldn't afford to go to the meetings, or had good personal reasons not to, can experience these papers. Moreover, the papers themselves now have a citeable, scholarly avatar.

Attention 2009 AIA and APA panel organizers: let's see how many panels we can podcast. Since I'm co-organizing the ASGLE panel, I'll have to put up or shut up myself.

My only criticism of the Xenitia podcasts: no license. What can I do or not do with these papers and their content? For next year, we'll want to work such details out in advance with our presenters.

Thanks to Bill Caraher for the tip by way of AWBG.

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)
  

Take the Digital Humanities Tool Developer's Survey

Susan Schriebman and Ann Hanlon have put together a survey that aims to redress the current lack of a "concerted effort to gather information about the perceived value of tool development, not only as a scholarly activity, but in relation to the tenure and promotion process, as well as for the advancement of the field of digital humanities itself."

This must be the meme of the month, as Bill Turkel just this week unveiled plans to co-author with Alan MacEachern a "book to teach practicing historians how to use programming to augment their ability to do research online."

Anyway, I'd encourage everybody who's ever built a digital tool for a humanities function (or who is thinking about it) to take the survey and pester Bill to finish the book.

IJGIS Special Issue on Digital Gazetteers

Mike Goodchild wrote yesterday to say that a "digital gazetteers" issue of the International Journal of Geographic Information Science (Taylor & Francis; ISSN-print 1365-8816; ISSN-online 1365-8824) is now in press and will appear in 2008. This issue arises from the 2006 Santa Barbara workshop on digital gazetteers and includes the following articles:

• M.F. Goodchild and L.L. Hill, Introduction to Digital Gazetteer Research
• C.B. Jones, R.S. Purves, P.D. Clough, H. Joho, Modelling Vague Places with Knowledge from the Web
• Q. Guo, Y. Liu, J. Wieczorek, Georeferencing Locality Descriptions and Computing Associated Uncertainty Using a Probabilistic Approach
• R. Mostern, I. Johnson, From Named Place to Naming Event: Creating Gazetteers for History
• J.T. Hastings, Automated Conflation of Digital Gazetteer Data
• K. Janowicz and C. Kessler, Rethinking Feature Type Thesauri -- An Ontological View