horothesia

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

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?

National Adoption Month

November is National Adoption Month:

Giving a child a strong foundation -- a home, a family to love, and a safe place to grow -- is one of life's greatest and most generous gifts. Through adoption, both domestic and international, Americans from across our country have provided secure environments for children who need them, and these families have benefited from the joy an adopted child can bring. Thanks to their nurturing and care, more young people have been able to realize their potential and lead full, happy lives. This year, we celebrate National Adoption Month to recognize adoption as a positive and powerful force in countless American lives, and to encourage the adoption of children from foster care. (President Barack Obama, Presidential Proclamation: National Adoption Month, 1 November 2010).

There is also a blog post and video from the Secretary of State.

Monday, November 1, 2010

Changes to Maia Atlantis

At the request of its author, Alan Lenzi, I have removed the Bible and Ancient Near East blog from the Maia Atlantis aggregator because it "is being used to send out spam."

Friday, October 22, 2010

One User's Experience with Pleiades

I just finished posting an extended comment on Hethre Contant's consideration of her initial experiences with Pleiades, entitled "Regarding the Pleiades: A Vision of the Future for Mapping the Past." She prepared it as a report for an Urban Media Archaeology class at New School University, taught by Shannon Mattern.

I assume my comment is in queue for moderation. Since I think it (and Heathre's report) are of potential interest to the Pleiades community, I'm re-posting my comments here:

Hi Heathre:

Thanks for giving us your perspective as a new user of Pleiades. It's really helpful to hear how people are trying to use this emerging resource and to see where they run into trouble.

The delay in signing you up initially is an occasional consequence of the fact that our signup procedure is manual and occasionally the editors are unavailable while on travel or the like. I apologize if it put you in a difficult situation time-wise.

We currently have funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support software and content development through April 2013, but editorial work is all volunteer.

We're not finished loading up all the legacy content from the Barrington Atlas. You can read more about the state of that process here: http://pleiades.stoa.org/Members/sgillies/news-items/data-import-round-1 with maps here: http://pleiades.stoa.org/Members/sgillies/figures-import-round-1 .

Since you last looked at the site, Sean has rolled out some improvements to the individual maps. They now show you nearby places as well. See further: http://pleiades.stoa.org/Members/sgillies/news-items/map-of-a-places-neighborhood .

The squares you see on the maps for many places correspond to the grid squares on the Barrington Atlas maps from which they derive. We are currently working with colleagues at Harvard, who have digitized the exact coordinates from the Barrington compilation materials and improved their precision by visually checking them in Google Earth. We anticipate these coordinates will be added to Pleiades by mid-2011, replacing the squares that frustrated you. We'll also have reciprocal links to the Harvard project's online system, the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization: http://darmc.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do

"Phokaia" is a transliteration of the ancient Greek, whereas "Phocaea" is the Latin version, used by the Romans and subsequently in the west during the Medieval and Renaissance periods. I'm glad Pleiades was able to help you sort this out, despite the fact that our resources do not yet comprehensively list all the variants for every site. This is something we're encouraging our users to help flesh out.

Please let us know if you have further observations or suggestions (or complaints) about the site.

Best wishes,

Tom

Updates to Maia Atlantis

The following changes have been made to the subscription list of the Maia Atlantis Feed Aggregator:

Additions:

Ancient Georgia
Ancient World Open Bibliographies
Digital Papyrology
eClassics Everyone's Blog Posts - eLatin eGreek eLearn (past problems with comment spam seem to have abated)
eClassics Forum (past problems with comment spam seem to have abated)
Egyptian Monuments
Insula: Le blog de la Bibliothèque des Sciences de l'Antiquité (Lille 3)
Minoan Language Blog

Modifications:

Deletions:

Ancient Mediterranean Musings (author has taken the blog private)
Ars Nesciendi (blog not found; presumed deleted)
Charles Watkinson's Blog (feed gone)
Dacian Archaeology (author has taken the blog private)
Iconoclasm (site reports error; will try again in 1 month)
Idle Musings of a Bookseller (content has been orthogonal to the focus of the aggregator for several months)
Japanese Archaeology (blog not found; presumed deleted)
Logos Bible Software Blog (feed is future-dating posts; will check again in 1 month)
Thoughts on Antiquity (domain no longer registered)
Novum Testamentum Blog (domain no longer registered)
Numismatics and Archaeology (author has taken the blog private)
The Oresteia Project (blog not found; presumed deleted)
Scarring the Past (author has taken the blog private)
Scribal Practices (blog not found; presumed deleted)
Transport Archaeology (blog deleted by author)
A Way Through The Hills (blog deleted by author)
What's New in Abzu (feed access has apparently been blocked for the aggregator: 403 forbidden)