Smithsonian 2.0

Smithsonian 2.0, a "gathering to re-imagine the Smithsonian in the digital age," is going on right now in Washington. You can follow the procedings via:

• The Smithsonian 2.0 Blog
• Tweets with the hashtag #si20
  

The Study and Publication of Inscriptions in the Age of the Computer

Update (7 January 2009): added links to abstracts

This Saturday, 10 January 2009, Paul Iversen and I will be co-chairing the following panel at the Joint Annual Meetings of the American Philological Association and the Archaeological Institute of America. The panel, on the topic of digital study and publication of inscriptions, is sponsored by American Society of Greek and Latin Epigraphy. I hope to see you there!

Saturday, January 10, 8:30-11:00 a.m. in Independence I of the Marriott Hotel, Philadelphia:

1. Publishing Image and Text in Digital Epigraphy
   Neel Smith (College of the Holy Cross)
   [ abstract not available ]
   
2. Topic Maps and the Semantics of Inscriptions
   Marion Lamé (Alma Mater Studiorum, Università di Bologna, Italy and Université de Provence, Aix-Marseille 1, France)
   [ abstract in pdf (courtesy APA) ]
   
3. An Efficient Method for Digitizing Squeezes & Performing Automated Epigraphic Analysis
   Eleni Bozia, Angelos Barmpoutis and Robert S. Wagman (University of Florida)
   [ abstract in msword (courtesy APA) ]
   
4. Opportunities for Epigraphy in the Context of 3-D Digitization
   Gabriel Bodard (King’s College London) and Ryan Baumann (Univ. of Kentucky)
   [ abstract in pdf (courtesy APA) ]
   

The DH Stack(s)

Lots of interesting posts in the last couple of days about Digital Humanities skills, software and cyberinfrastructure initiatives:

• Sean issues some service-oriented caveats for Project Bamboo and thinks about skillsets for DH-ready graduates
• Lisa surveys recent DH job postings, muses on DH 'fieldness' and visits the aspiring digital humanist's skillset too
• Bill T.'s whole blog remains essential reading in this meme-space (e.g., see his recent "Navigating Digital History")
  
• Liza provides an example of TEI+Python+lxml in publishing primary sources online (the same general stack the Duke/Heidelberg/King's/Columbia/UNC/NYU team has been using in the rework of the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri and Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichniss -- coming soon)
  

Osgood on Linderski's Roman Questions 2

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.

Feed me, Seymour

It will come as no surprise to the legions of loyal readers here that I'm giving a hearty +1 to David Meadow's call for more antiquity-oriented websites to highlight and alert us to changes by incorporating web feeds.

Growing Pains at BP3

I've been watching Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting and their Research Blogging aggregator with interest since learning about it from Alun Salt last week. I was taken aback by today's announcement from Dave Munger that they are turning down applications "because the blogs aren't written in English." My brain mumbled, "show-stopper." But I read on ...

I understand this problem: "The organization as it stands now simply doesn't possess the language skills to verify that blogs written in other languages are living up to our guidelines." Munger outlines some steps aimed at building community capability for handling non-English content. Since the BP3 model is predicated upon some human evaluation of a blog's "living up to [BP3] guidelines," they'll have to rise to the challenge or go out of business.

Another problem is poorly expressed: "readers might be turned off by a site that includes many posts written in a language they don't understand." How about (and this is clearly what Munger means if you read the whole post): users will need the ability to customize language and script settings. If I may, this will need to apply both to the interface, and to the filtering of content. And please don't bind these choices together! For example, I'd want an English-language interface but content in (at least) English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish. This is one of the reasons we chose Plone as the platform for Pleiades: it comes localization-ready out of the box, and with a minimum of work you can manage multilingual content.

If the site hopes to mature beyond Anglophone scientific content, it's going to have to go multilingual. There's a whole world of humanistic scholarship out there just waiting to go digital; and much of it is interestingly more than English.

This reminds me, I need to write a rant about Blogger's recently announced pseudo-support for bidirectional text editing. Hint: I can't embed right-to-left Arabic, Hebrew or Persian in this post, but if I were reset my blog's language settings to one of those languages then I could mix in left-to-right English (or whatever) here. I bet I'd have to manually hack the HTML to mark the "foreign" snippets for language and script per RFC4646 too ...

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.

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.

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.

Neel Smith: Vitruvian Design for Scholarship in the Humanities

Neel Smith has been blogging since October, and I've only now just noticed! Everything here is interesting -- it's well worth a scrollback.

CoDE: Center of Digital Epigraphy

One of the several interesting announcements made yesterday in the annual business meeting of the American Society of Greek and Latin Epigraphy was the establishment of a Center of Digital Epigraphy at Brown University. John Bodel (who directs the U.S. Epigraphy Project) and Michael Satlow (who oversees the Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine repertorium) have received startup funding for this co-directed center. As more details, and a web presence (I hope) emerge, I'll blog them over at Current Epigraphy.

Blogging Classics and Tech at APA/AIA 2008

I've made a series of entries on the Stoa blog providing details about, and abstracts for (where available) talks and panels intersecting on classics and technology at the joint meetings, now in progress.

Epigraphy Unveiled

It's been a true pleasure over the past few days to watch a public display of collaborative epigraphic text editing unfold over at Current Epigraphy. If you've ever wondered how experts work together to try to sort out problematic aspects of ancient inscribed documents, this is a rare glimpse into a process usually conducted privately at one's home institution, via email or at conferences.

Does this exchange mark the dawn of digital epigraphy as something more than static online publication?

AtomPub rubber meets the road

They've done it:

The Atom Publishing Protocol, RFC5023, has been published. The HTML is here.

Digital Humanities and Computer Science

Andrew Reinhard is blogging the Chicago Colloquium for Digital Humanities ...

evolve librum manualem futue!

Over at classics-l they're asking:

When is it ok to be incompetent?