Electra Atlantis: Digital Approaches to Antiquity

I’m pleased to announce a new occasional series here on Electric Archaeology: “New Talent Tuesdays”. I have been getting queries from grad students, talented amateurs, avocational archaeologists and historians, about the possibility of contributing to this blog. At first, I was reluctant… but then I thought, why? And no good reason presented itself. So, if I can help someone else join the conversation then that certainly fits the mission of this blog, and academe more generally! If you are interested in contributing, send me a note with a brief background, links to your work, and your ideal topic.

Without further ado, I am pleased to introduce Steve Donlin and his work on 3d representation. Steve is a graduate of University of Maryland with a Bachelor’s Degree in Ancient History.  He currently works outside of the field, but volunteers for numerous historical societies and blogs at 3dhistoryblog.com

Bringing History to Life through 3d Visualization

I graduated in 2007 from the University of Maryland with a History Degree.  Unimpressive GPA, but still over a 3.0.  I was happy with my path in college but I was a little afraid of the prospect of finding work.  I had tons of student loan debt already so I wasn’t thinking Grad School.  I took the first job I could find.  I began working at the Four Seasons Washington, DC doing Audio Visual work.  Setting up events and selling clients on all the wonders fancy AV could bring to their meetings-  not exactly groundbreaking research on Rome or Egypt!

After a year of working for the company,  I was introduced to a program that really has begun to change my life and my direction.  I began creating 3d models and renderings with Google Sketchup.  Sketchup is a free program distributed by Google that is a more user friendly version of AutoCAD.  Coupling that together with Kerkythea, a free open source rendering program, I began creating 3d renderings of our events and hotel space for our clients.  You can see some of my work here.  I am still learning and hope to increase my talents.  My career path had gone in a new direction.

One evening I was sitting around watching the History Channel and the old series Engineering an Empire came on.  It hit me; I have found a way to meld both parts of my life.  3D Visualization is a perfect way to bring Ancient History to life.  Not only are so many famous monuments from history destroyed or badly damaged; the ones we currently have are not even as impressive as they would have been in their day.  A great example is that Trajan’s Column originally would have been in lush color.  Check out a report here.  What a way to bring this back to life!

How did I get involved in Historical 3d Visualization?  Well I started reading articles about creating your own business, your own blog, or just simply starting your own project.  One great piece of advice was to start tweeting about what you are interested in.  So I created 3dhistory on Twitter.  I began to document all the work I was planning on trying or just some interesting posts that I found.  I am now up to 52 followers, not impressive, but hey they are real people!

About a month in something amazing happened.  I began tweeting about a company I read an article about in Archaeology Magazine: CyArk.  CyArk is a nonprofit, noncommercial project of the Kacyra Family Foundation located in Orinda, California.  CyArk’s mission statement is that they are

“[...]dedicated to the preservation of cultural heritage sites through the CyArk 3D Heritage Archive, an internet archive which is the repository for heritage site data developed through laser scanning, digital modeling, and other state-of-the-art spatial technologies.”

Pretty cool stuff I thought.  I mentioned them in a few posts and they sent me back a message saying they had a lot of very accurate laser scans of Pre-Columbian monuments that could be used to create 3d models.

This started a dialogue that ended up with me creating a 3d Model of their laser scan of Monte Alban, the original capital of the Zapotec Empire.  I was able to use their cloud point technology and Sketchup to recreate the largest building at Monte Alban for their website.  Check it out.  I currently am working on sites at Chichen Itza for them.

I give all my thanks to social networking and the urge to actually put in extra time and put myself out there.  I volunteered for a job I did not know I could finish.  I took a different approach and now I have a great contact in a bourgeoning field which interests me greatly.  I plan on continuing this work as much as I can.  If you are not currently involved in social networking you should be!  I was able to  get in contact easily with a company I read about in a magazine.  I do not know how that would have been possible years ago.

I hope to continue to show these projects more and promote the use of 3d Visualization in history.  Soon I will be launching 3dhistoryblog.com where I will document my work and the tireless work of others.  There is amazing stuff out there that truly can bring history to life.

I've been invited to give the Elwyn B. Robinson lecture at the library at the end of the month. This is a fun event where a nice cross-section of the university community shows up to commemorate the life and work of the historian Elwyn Robinson. So, as per usual, I am being overly ambitious in putting together a paper for this event and trying to articulate the historical and practical links between technology, practice and basic assumptions about archaeology as a discipline. In practical terms, I am trying to tout our new Working Group for Digital and New Media by arguing that digital technology (broadly construed) holds particular potential as a medium for cross/trans/post-disciplinary dialogue.

To make this argument, I first suggest that a kind of "heroic archaeologist" characterized the earliest days of "modern" archaeology in the Mediterranean. Think Carl Blegen, not Indiana Jones. The vision of these heroic archaeologists adhered closely not only to the data that they produced, but also the conclusions they drew from this data. The legacy of these men's work can be seen even today when we refer to certain archaeological field notebooks as "Blegen's Notebooks". The importance of the paper notebook as the locus of the primary data that these men collected from the field (and through which they actualized their vision of a scientific archaeology) led to incredible steps being taken to prevent these notebooks from being lost or damaged. As a result, we have the notebooks today, but access to them, up until very recently, has been limited. I think that this is both institutional and technological. In the case of the former, these notebooks became so closely related to the heros of archaeology's early days that they acquired relic status. The preservation of the notebooks was regarded as an crucial requirement for the preservation of knowledge in part because notebooks were and are fragile. Moreover, publishing raw notes by traditional means was both prohibitively expensive and perhaps even intellectually risky as it exposed the heroic underpinnings of archaeology to the outsiders' gaze. To get access to the notebooks then, the institutional keepers of the data had to approve. This was both a matter of preserving the fragile media and preserving the past's heroic legacy. In the most extreme cases, notebooks become family possessions and completely removed from any academic circulation.

For the past decade, this trend has reversed. Digital technology has made it easier and easier to publish archaeological data. Numerous projects are underway both to preserve and make accessible archaeological field data once hidden deep within the bowels of the archive. The increasing use of digital technology in the field has increased the amount of born digital data and streamlined (in most cases) archaeological workflow to the point where it is feasible in some cases to release data directly from the field into circulation. For example, at the end of every season on my project in Cyprus, we can circulate a completed (albeit provisional) data set that encompasses plans of trenches, (some) finds data, study photographs, and preliminary analyses, and we are far from unique in this respect. The born-digital character of this data makes it particularly easy, then, to circulate data sets. Moreover, the act of circulating even relatively "raw" (that is unanalyzed) data serves as a means to curate this data as well. This is the opposite of the old style notebook which is locked away (after perhaps being copied) at the excavation house under the careful eye of the excavation as an institution or the director. The responsibility that the institution or the person of the director feels toward this data contributes to the status of the notebook as the property of the excavation (or, in some cases, the director). There are obviously other issues at play as well, but I'd contend that the tremendously fragile nature of the archaeological notebook is a significant contributor to the idea that archaeological data is property.

With the increasingly easy circulation of archaeological field data, however, there is a growing sense that the data collected from intensive surveys and excavations in the Mediterranean should be made freely available. Sebastian Heath is among the biggest advocates of this idea and he has explored some of the intellectual justifications and consequences of this movement in his blog. He makes, for example, the link between curating archaeological data and sharing it. On the simplest level: when digital data is shared it is inevitably copied. When archaeological data is made available, the community will put forth increasing efforts to make sure that it is preserved. The simple practice of circulating data freely from a server will not only ensure that at least several copies of the data exist as a result of server architecture, but it will be accessible for people to download and copy onto their own computers, backing it up, and then recirculating it. In effect, the curation is left to the community because the data becomes their possession. The solitary, heroic, archaeologist gives way to the collective community who replace the person or institution as both archive and interpreter of data.

While this all sounds pretty cool, I am not naive, however, and recognize that some provision of long-term archiving must exist. After all, the collective effort to preserve the "most important knowledge" from antiquity has produced a body of texts filled with lacunae and hardly suitable to answer every question of significance for every age. Long-term, "deep" and stable storage of archaeological data should remain a key component of any archaeological enterprise, but the easy proliferation of digital texts will surely complement these efforts by creating an environment where the archiving and circulation of data are not incompatible.   

At the same time that digital technology and intellectual shifts within the discipline of archaeology has made it easier to access and circulate data from projects, scholars like Ian Hodder and Michael Shanks have pushed for a greater reflexivity in archaeological practice and have come to see archaeological knowledge as product of far more sophisticated forces than the singular vision of a project director or the weight of a seemingly enduring historical problem. The heroic archaeologist is under assault not just from the perspective of technological change. As scholars have articulated the profoundly anti-modern aspects of archaeological practice -- some with closer parallels to craft production or even punk rock music, the hard edges of the discipline have begun to erode. For example, the growing recognition of indigenous archaeologies which articulate how traditionally alienated groups understand their material history has shown that archaeological practice in a modernist mode offers only one of any number of perspectives on the past. Even within the traditional boundaries of the discipline itself, the growing number of specialists involved on even a modest sized archaeological project has produced a space of overlapping and often times conflicting discursive, disciplinary, and even interpersonal agendas and practices. The heroically linear flow from the fieldwork to documentation to publication is now a very crowded space filled with voices. In such a context, archaeological knowledge is negotiated.

Digital technologies have made it far easier to document and to disseminate the negotiated character of archaeological knowledge. For example, my wife and I were just talking yesterday about our experiences on archaeological project not that long ago that had only one "official" camera. Typically, this was a pretty nice camera -- often the nicest on the project or with the highest quality film. Now it is common for everyone in a trench to have a good quality digital camera. Unlike just 15 years ago, when developing and circulating slides was an expensive and time consuming process, now we can instantly develop and circulate photographs of the archaeological experience. While there might still be a limited number of "official cameras", the official photograph of a trench is now just one of any number of competing photographs of that archaeological space. Moreover, it is possible to capture this diversity of perspectives and even to publish it on the internet at limited cost. The ease in disseminating the numerous perspectives on a project comes through with inexpensively captured digital audio and video. Consider how easy it is for archaeologists to produce their own documentary films that compete in quality and content with the professional productions of just decades ago. Low cost, HD video cameras and YouTube even hold forth the prospect of making everyone on the project a documentary filmmaker. At my project in Cyprus, we've used blogs to publish instantaneously myriad perspectives offered by undergraduate, graduate students, and even within the senior staff.

As the collaborative environment within archaeology reveals archaeological practice as inherently transdisciplinary. There are too many moving parts to subject archaeology to a singular disciplinary practice. This should be no surprise; the disciplines are a product of a particular moment in the development of the academy. The influence and faith in modernity and in systematic scientific approaches to knowledge about the past allowed archaeology under the watchful gaze of its heroic founding fathers to carve out a lasting place within the academia and the university. The archive of notebooks protected and preserved the modern disciplinary achievements of the archaeological method. Digital data, however, resists the enclosed space of the "finite" archive just as digital technologies make it more and more difficult to maintain a singular voice in archaeological research. Any effort to accommodate the myriad voices produced by any archaeological project challenges the notion of a "project" and an "archaeology". The easy dissemination of both archaeological data (in a proper, modernist sense) and the various "unofficial" voices of archaeology make it impossible to limit the multi-vocal character of archaeological research and reinforce the centuries old disciplinary strictures. Moreover, the inability necessary to distinguish between data produces by "amateurs" and that produced by "professional" (professionalism is the hallmark of a discipline) suggests that the end of the discipline is near.

This is not suggest that people will not continue to use archaeological methods for studying the past; after all, the methods of indigenous archaeologists, undergraduate bloggers, fine art photographers, and casual videobloggers will not answer every question that an individual or community might have about the remains of a past community, building, or event.

One thing that Shapely has lacked is one or two example programs to keep the API real and explain its use. I did something about this over the past couple of nights: 1.2a6 includes two easy to understand, easy to run scripts. I hope users profit from them. Myself, I found that they demanded a new and improved API feature. I'll explain.

First, here's an example of using Shapely to construct patches by growing buffer regions out from a set of points and dissolving those regions together as they intersect, and plotting the results with Matplotlib. This is run-of-the-mill GIS stuff, yes, but done in style.

A plate of blue-speckled brains splattered on the floor, or is it just me?

The interesting part of the complete, amply-documented dissolve.py script is here:

import pylab
from shapely.ops import cascaded_union

patches = cascaded_union(spots)

pylab.figure(num=None, figsize=(4, 4), dpi=180)

for patch in patches.geoms:
    x, y = patch.exterior.xy
    pylab.fill(x, y, color='#cccccc', aa=True)
    pylab.plot(x, y, color='#666666', aa=True, lw=1.0)
    for hole in patch.interiors:
        x, y = hole.xy
        pylab.fill(x, y, color='#ffffff', aa=True)
        pylab.plot(x, y, color='#999999', aa=True, lw=1.0)

pylab.text(-25, 25,
    "Patches: %d, total area: %.2f" % (len(patches.geoms), patches.area))

pylab.savefig('dissolve.png')

The xy property is completely new in 1.2a6, inspired by how awkwardly I had to slice and dice coordinates when writing this example against 1.2a5. It provides two Python arrays that are immediately usable with Numpy or Matplotlib. Speaking of Matplotlib: I'd love to know how to fill a patch but not its holes (you'll notice that I'm faking the emptiness of the holes in this example).

What would would you have to go through to pyplot ArcGIS scripting results?

Shapely doesn't just make grey matter go splat, it can also toss brains in the air and pierce them with lasers:

Or make a fair facsimile thereof. What's really going on in intersect.py is an analysis of a HTML5 geolocation (latitude, longitude, heading, and speed) trajectory's intersection with a cluster of patches. The intercepted patches are plotted in red and the intersecting segments of the trajectory itself are also plotted in red. Finally, scalar properties of different geometries are used in a text label:

import pylab
from shapely.geometry import LineString

# Represent the following geolocation parameters
#
# initial position: -25, -25
# heading: 45.0
# speed: 50*sqrt(2)
#
# as a line
vector = LineString(((-25.0, -25.0), (25.0, 25.0)))

# Find intercepted and missed patches. List the former so we can count them
intercepts = [patch for patch in patches.geoms if vector.intersects(patch)]
misses = (patch for patch in patches.geoms if not vector.intersects(patch))

pylab.figure(num=None, figsize=(4, 4), dpi=180)

for spot in misses:
    x, y = spot.exterior.xy
    pylab.fill(x, y, color='#cccccc', aa=True)
    pylab.plot(x, y, color='#999999', aa=True, lw=1.0)
    for hole in spot.interiors:
        x, y = hole.xy
        pylab.fill(x, y, color='#ffffff', aa=True)
        pylab.plot(x, y, color='#999999', aa=True, lw=1.0)

for spot in intercepts:
    x, y = spot.exterior.xy
    pylab.fill(x, y, color='red', alpha=0.25, aa=True)
    pylab.plot(x, y, color='red', alpha=0.5, aa=True, lw=1.0)
    for hole in spot.interiors:
        x, y = hole.xy
        pylab.fill(x, y, color='#ffffff', aa=True)
        pylab.plot(x, y, color='red', alpha=0.5, aa=True, lw=1.0)

pylab.arrow(-25, -25, 50, 50, color='#999999', aa=True,
    head_width=1.0, head_length=1.0)

intersection = vector.intersection(patches)
for segment in intersection.geoms:
    x, y = segment.xy
    pylab.plot(x, y, color='red', aa=True, lw=1.5)

pylab.text(-28, 25,
    "Patches: %d/%d (%d), total length: %.1f" \
     % (len(intercepts), len(patches.geoms),
        len(intersection.geoms), intersection.length))

pylab.savefig('intersect.png')

Grab the new distribution with easy_install or pip (as well as Numpy and matplotlib) and give them a try:

$ python /usr/local/bin/dissolve.py
$ python /usr/local/bin/intersect.py

I think this is pretty much the last 1.2 alpha.

For those of you transitioning from old HTML knowledge to our work with XHTML in ITL 370 , you may find this Quick Primer on XHTML Markup to be a handy quick reference for translating what you already know into what we’ll be working with this term. Actually, I think its likely useful for folks learning it the first time too - at least as a reminder of some of the materials we’re going through here at the beginning of class…

Adam McCollum has kindly translated for me Riedel’s text of the catalogue of Arabic Christian literature by Abu’l Barakat.  It’s here: Abu l-Barakat’s Catalog (trans) 

I’m placing this file and its contents in the public domain.  Please do whatever you like with it, for personal, professional, educational or commercial purposes.  It’s free to use for any purpose.  Adam also invites comments.

I intend to get an HTML version together as well, but this will take a day or so for me to do.  Then I hope to make people in various email lists aware that it exists, and particularly classicists and patristics people, who might be interested to see what has made its way into Arabic.

Following the recent rainstorms that filled the reservoirs in Cyprus to almost fifty percent capacity, the Agriculture Minister announced that water restrictions on the island have now ended. Despite the fact that the island's reservoirs are not full, the government feels that they can manage the water situation as long as:

• "...that the desalination plants don't break down, that it continues to rain and that water is not wasted, either through domestic users or leakage."

This will certainly make the summer more pleasant on the island, even though the hotels have not generally been affected. It does sound though like there will be more vegetation to deal with in the fields.

RSM

As we begin Photoshop work in my New Media course, this MacWorld article outlining some of the application’s history is proving to be quite timely. I have a love/hate relationship with the software. I’ve been using it for nearly 20 years myself and it’s remarkably versatile and useful. But the pricing and availability of it at this point has me looking for alternatives for my classes. I suppose I love the software, but hate the Adobe business practices. In any event, it’s always provided an excellent production platform for considering the various social and ethical implications for our current use of media. One of the more recent dramas has been the result of the image below. You can read all about it in the National Post article. BTW, if you haven’t checked out Photoshop Disasters, you ought to give it a look. SOme of the commentary is pretty funny.  

I just read a paper about possible political and cultural biases in scholars’ interpretations of early China. It presents a shockingly naïve interpretation of the evidence.

Li Liu (2009) Academic Freedom, Political Correctness, and Early Civilization in Chinese Archaeology: The Debate on Xia-Erlitou Relations. Antiquity 83:831-843.

The issue at hand is the perhaps legendary earliest dynasty, the Xia. Did it exist, and can it be associated with the Erlitou archaeological culture? Early written accounts that mention Xia as a pre-Shang polity have been questioned by many historians as biased and inaccurate. Nevertheless, a good number of scholars and others—mostly in China—argue that the Xia did indeed exist, and that Erlitou is its archaeological manifestation. Many western scholars evidently believe that this viewpoint derives more from political ideology or patriotism by Chinese archaeologists than from the evidence.

The article by Li Liu describes a survey of two groups of archaeologists: a “China group” consisting of archaeologist living and working in China, and an “Outside China group” of foreigners. Participants were asked questions about whether they thought that Xia was “historically factual,” and whether it was associated with Erlitou. They were also asked how they reached their opinion. Was it based on the evidence, or was it motivated by political bias (e.g., patriotism, or worry about being accused of pro-western tendencies).

More members of the China group accept the Xia-Erlitou association, but these respondents report that their views are NOT based on political considerations. This is hardly surprising. But what I find astonishing is that Li Liu takes these responses at face value and concludes that political factors do not account for the differences between the China group and the Outside China group. The differences, we are told, cannot be explained by political ideology, political correctness, or patriotism. Rather, it is due to “different approaches and methods” between the two groups.

This conclusion is not warranted. No scholar is going to admit that their views are determined more by politics than by evidence. Even the most absurdly politically biased interpretations are not seen as such by their holders. Scholars will almost always insist that their opinions are empirically based. Issues of bias cannot be investigated by asking people whether they are biased. No one will admit to this; the very idea is absurd. This survey and its results are interesting, but it strains credulity to assert that bias does not play a role in thee views reported.

Archaeological Institute of America Free Public Lecture Series:
http://excavate-aia.blogspot.com/2010/02/aia-talks-korea-silk-road-730pm-2-11.html

Flutes, Wine and Astronomy: Shamans in Early East Asia?
Dr. Sarah Milledge Nelson, University of Denver
12:45 p.m.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Wilson Hall 168
University of Alabama in Huntsville

Sponsors:

• UAHuntsville Global Studies
• Archaeological Institute of America
  

Archaeological Institute of America North Alabama Society Free Public Lecture Series:
http://excavate-aia.blogspot.com/2010/02/aia-talks-korea-silk-road-730pm-2-11.html

Korea and the Silk Road
Dr. Sarah Milledge Nelson, University of Denver
7:30 p.m. Thursday, February 11, 2010
Chan Auditorium
University of Alabama In Huntsville

Sponsored by:

• UAHuntsville Global Studies
• Archaeological Institute of America
  

The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon

What is CAL?

A new dictionary of the Aramaic language, to be called The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon, is currently in preparation by an international team of scholars, with headquarters at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. This major scholarly reference work will cover all dialects and periods of ancient Aramaic, one of the principal languages of antiquity, with a literature of central importance for history and civilization, and especially for the Jewish and Christian religions.

Why a New Lexicon?

Many dictionaries of some part of Aramaic exist, but individually and as a whole they are inadequate in important ways. Lexical treatment of Aramaic has been fragmented. Existing dictionaries treat one dialect, or one body of literature, but not the whole language. It is as though we had a dictionary of Shakespeare, and one of Hemingway, without having a dictionary of English! An additional hurdle in the path of users is that Aramaic dictionaries are written in an imposing variety of living and dead languages: not only English but also German, French, Russian, and Latin! Many of the existing dictionaries do not come up to modern standards of accuracy, and practically all are seriously incomplete and out-of-date. Practically every area of Aramaic studies has been enriched by recent discoveries: new inscriptions, new papyri, new scrolls, and new fragments from the Cairo Genizah, a synagogue store-room where a trove of manuscripts was discovered in the 19th century. These recently discovered materials demand inclusion in a lexicon.

A Comprehensive Lexicon

The new lexicon is to be comprehensive in the following ways: 1) it will take in all of ancient Aramaic, not just selected portions; 2) it will be based on a new and thorough compilation of all Aramaic literature, not just on existing dictionaries; 3) it will take account of all modern scholarly discussion of the Aramaic language...

Search the CAL textual databases

Search the CAL Bibliographic Archives

What is Aramaic?

What is CAL?

CAL Publications

Links

The 16th International Patristics Conference (for summer 2011) is now putting out invitations for papers.  The infinitely smarter-looking web site is here.

The conference takes place in Oxford.  The days are filled with papers, each of 15 minutes.  There is a book display by publishers, often with very good deals.  Accomodation is available (at a fairly substantial charge) in an Oxford college.  I tend to stay in my old college instead.

I’ve been to the last couple, although only for a day or two.  If you are an academic, especially one starting out, you need to go for the networking and career opportunities.  For amateurs it is quite optional.  I suspect I will book, but go for only a day or two.

UPDATE: The registration fee for the conference this time is £180.  That’s a lot.  It doesn’t include any accomodation either, which this year is at £50 or 70 a night for a room with only a sink.  I don’t recall what the fee was in 2007, but nothing like that, surely?  Oh dear…  For that fee alone you could spend a week in Egypt, including air-flights. 

It also doesn’t include any car parking — in Soviet Oxford, only the commissars get free parking.

I suppose most attendees will get all these fees paid by their employers — i.e. by the taxpayer.  But it is a bit disturbing to see prices so high.  I know that these conferences have to pay their way, and indeed are a substantial source of profit to the colleges.  It’s still sad, tho.

Someone just found this blog by Googling for “What happened to Lady Brilliana Harley in the English Civil War”. Well, Lady Brilliana Harley is famous for taking charge of the defence of her home when it was besieged by the king’s soldiers. This was something she did. She wasn’t a passive object that things just happened to. This is only one example, but I suspect that it’s not unusual to ask what happened to a woman during a war and to ask what a man did during a war. Actually both women and men do things and and have things done to them in war and peace. This is basic empirical fact. But language and culture bias us to think of men as active and women as passive.

Another banner month for Corinth related articles! This past week saw the publication of A.H. Rohn's, E. Barnes's, and G.D.R. Sander's "An Early Ottoman Cemetery at Ancient Corinth," Hesperia 78 (2009), 501-615. It's fantastic that Hesperia is so flexible to publish what is, in effect, a short archaeological monograph! The highly-detailed article documents with great care the 17th century Ottoman cemetery excavated in Panayia Field in Ancient Corinth. The 133 individuals excavated from 81 graves represented both the Christian and Muslim community at Corinth. The excavators suggest that the presence of both groups in the same cemetery and the common appearance of "boot-heel reinforcement cleats" may associate the cemetery with the Ottoman garrison in the town.

If the cemetery is indeed associated with the garrison the ratio of 11 Muslim-style graves to 55 Christian-style graves based, in large part, on the arrangement of the bodies in the graves (p. 516), suggests that the Ottoman garrison may have been relatively well integrated with the local population. This is further indicated by the cross-section of the local demographic represented in the graves with adult men (54), adult women (23) and children of all ages (54) present (pp. 527-528). The analysis of the skull types seem to indicate that many of the women were local while most of the men were from elsewhere (pp.530-531). This would reinforce the notion that this cemetery served the local garrison. The graves also showed some wealth in the community with numerous examples of jewelry (although mostly featuring non-precious metal and stones) and the regular occurrence of the bodies being interned wearing boots suggesting at least some disposable wealth. At the same time, only a few of the graves preserved indications of wooden coffins with nails preserved in a neat halo around the body in at least one grave (p. 512)

It seems that whenever someone excavates a cemetery, there is at least on creepy grave (this is not a technical term), the description of which is worth quoting in full:

Grave 20 contained the body of a young 20–21-year-old male lying extended with his head pointing westward, but face down (Figs. 24, 25). A thick iron rod projecting out of the left side of his neck turned out to be an iron hook that had been inserted into his left shoulder beneath his left clavicle (collarbone). Apparently, he had been suspended from this hook until he died, because both legs and feet extended fully and parallel to one another as they would have while he hung and rigor mortis set in. His right hand had balled up into a fist that clutched the spot where the hook had been inserted into his shoulder. His left arm dangled behind his back. Presumably, once he had died, his punishers had taken down his rigid body and placed it face down (a position of disgrace?) into his final resting place, leaving the hook still embedded. We suspect this represents a death sentence for an individual who defied the order of the local governing body. Ottoman rule at Ancient Corinth during the early 17th century apparently tolerated Christian religious practice, but only as long as the Christians obeyed their rulers and did not cause trouble for them. (p. 521)

The cemetery appears to have fallen out of use during the Second Venetian period at Corinth (1687-1715) and perhaps forgotten by the 18th century. I can't help wonder how quickly the cemetery fell out of use as place of burial or even commemoration for while the men in the group may have represented Ottoman power, the women would have tied at least some members of that group to the local community. Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory has noted that in the Modern period, Greek graves can fall into neglect very quickly if there are no long any close relatives in the community to maintain them. By the Early Modern period (19th century in Greece) the area had been built over with houses. It is remarkable (and a useful reminder) that there was little evidence of the cemetery in the plow-zone. Thus, the function of this area would have been virtually invisible to intensive survey techniques.

With the recent publications of Lita Tzortzopolou-Gregory on the modern period, the work of Joe Rife on the Late Roman and Roman period, it should now be possible to present an almost comprehensive survey of mortuary practices in the Corinthia from Roman times to the present.

I’m going to have to load-shed a bit over the next week.  I don’t seem able to shed this cold that I have, and my job is not helping.  So … not a lot of action from me for a while.  Don’t expect much!

The Digital Classicist will once more be running a series of seminars at the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, with support from the British Library, in Summer 2010 on the subject of research into the ancient world that has an innovative digital component. We are especially interested in work that demonstrates interdisciplinarity or work on the intersections between Ancient History, Classics or Archaeology and a digital, technical or practice-based discipline.

The Digital Classicist seminars run on Friday afternoons from June to August in Senate House, London. In previous years collected papers from the DC WiP seminars have been published* in a special issue of an online journal (2006), edited as a printed volume (2007), and released as audio podcasts (2008-9); we anticipate similar publication opportunities for future series. A small budget is available to help with travel costs.

Please send a 300-500 word abstract to gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk by
March 31st 2010. We shall announce the full programme in April.

Regards,

The organizers
Gabriel Bodard, King's College London
Stuart Dunn, King's College London
Juan Garcés, Greek Manuscripts Department, British Library
Simon Mahony, University College London
Melissa Terras, University College London

* See http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/4/ (2006), http://www.gowerpublishing.com/default.aspx?page=637&calctitle=1&pageSubject=1064&sort=pubdate&forthcoming=1&title_id=9797&edition_id=12252 (2007), http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/index.html (2008-9). | |

Jeremy Bentham's body, preserved and on display at UCL.

We at UCL are all terribly proud of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)- whose body, or "Auto-icon" is on display in the South Cloisters. It is widely told that he was the founder of UCL - which isnt true, although he did influence those who did found our University. I dont think I'll ever get bored in saying "Good morning!" to him every day as I walk past. You'll be pleased to know his case gets locked up tight every evening to allow him some rest.

He was a prolific writer, scholar, jurist, philosopher, and social scientist. A.J.P. Taylor described him as `the most formidable reasoner who ever applied his gifts to the practical questions of administration and politics’. Since the 1950s, The Bentham Project has been working towards the production of a new scholarly edition of his works and correspondence, although they've only dented the surface of the 60,000 pages of writing he produced which remain in UCL's special collections.

The Bentham Project did receive some AHRC money a few years ago to start digitising the material, although it was time for a rethink. Enter the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s highly competitive Digital Equipment and Database Enhancement for Impact (DEDEFI) scheme.

I've been asked to join the project in an advisory role. It became clear to me very quickly that in a one year project there was never going to be enough time for two (maximum, under the funding) research assistants to digitise and transcribe tens of thousands of pages of manuscript material. So what, I thought, if we change the focus of the transcription initiative?

The Guardian Newspaper had run a very successful investigation into the UK MP's expense scandal in 2009, using an online crowdsourcing application to let their readership help sort though the 450,000 documents that needed closer study. Would it be possible, I thought, to develop a similar tool for cultural heritage documents? Can we persuade the wider historical community to contribute to the transcription effort?

I am pleased to say that UCL Laws, in conjunction with UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, UCL Department of Information Studies, and UCL Library Services, can announce the launch of the Bentham Papers Transcription Initiative, which has secured £260,000 funding from the AHRC DEDEFI scheme.

The Bentham Papers Transcription Initiative is a highly innovative and novel attempt to aid in the transcription of Bentham’s work. A digitisation project will provide high quality scans of the papers, whilst an online transcription tool will be developed which will allow volunteers to contribute to the transcription effort: providing a “crowdsourcing” tool which will be used to manage contributions from the wider audience interested in Bentham’s work, including school students, and amateur historians. It will be the job of the research assistants to manage interaction with the wider historical community, and monitor the quality of the transcriptions which are added to the database.

The use of such a tool for the transcription of cultural and heritage material is novel (although do shout if you know anyone else planning something similar), and UCL’s CIBER group will monitor the use of the online tool, providing an in-depth study of how such a crowdsourcing application was used during the year- long project.

Work on the project begins on March 1st 2010, and the project shall be shortly hiring for two research assistants. The online tool will be launched mid-summer 2010, when you can contribute to transcribing the works of Jeremy Bentham yourself!

Did I mention I was super excited about this? Grin.

Last Tuesday, I asked 'If you follow a museum on twitter, is it friendly or weird if it follows you back?' after calls from some quarters for #followavisitor #followamember or #MuseumsFollowYouBack days after followamuseum day on Twitter.  The poll gathered 50 responses overall and I've presented an overview of the results here.

Question 2 was added in response to a suggestion from a respondent after 20 responses had already been given, so for this reason alone, the results should not be taken as anything other than an interesting indication of responses.  I've shared the written responses to various questions, and provided a quick and dirty analysis of the results.

1. If you follow a museum on twitter, do you want it to follow you back?

Yes 49% No 26.50% It depends 26.50%

13 further comments were given for 'it depends':

• if they're conversational or broadcasting
• I hope they do, they don't have to.
• Depends on what the account is doing. If it's just sending out announcements, who cares if it follows you back? If they're actually using Twitter, and there's an actual person back there somewhere doing something interesting, I'd be pleased if they decided to follow me, like any other user.
• Of couirse I'd like it, but I understand if they don't due to over-following capacity!
• If the museum is going to engage w/ me then yes; if it's just to broadcast I'm on the fence
• I'm an art historian, so if an art museum started to follow me, I would be flattered! But if another kind of museum followed me, I would be slightly confused. So I think it would depend entirely on the profession of the person and if they use their account in a professional way
• If they start wanting to be my best bud, I'd probably get creeped out and block them.
• I wouldn't mind being followed, but not as a data point in a marketing database or to get impersonal spam.
• I don't think I really have a strong view either way.
• Why?
• If I've started a discussion with said museum through twitter
• Don't mind either way in most cases
• it has no material effect -- I don't gain anything from it following me.

I also posted the question on Facebook, and two people said it was weird. One went further, "I think it's weird, unless you primarily tweet about museums. I assume that anyone following me that is following more than 200 people doesn't actually read my tweets.".

2. If you follow a museum on twitter, do you mind if it follows you back?

Yes 2% No 44% It depends 14% Skipped 40% [See note above about the number of 'skipped' responses]

7 further comments were given for 'it depends':

• I'd rather be able to look at who you follow to find other twitterers of interest. Can't do that if you follow thousands of people back. Be selective so we can look thru them.
• not unless my tweet is museum related
• It depends on whether I know who is behind the tweets. Being a museum professional, sometimes they are colleagues, and that's okay with me.
• I don't really care, but I think it's silly.
• I just don't see why they would, it doesn't help either of us
• See above :)
• I would prefer it to follow back, especially if it's relevant to my own areas of historical interest, but no one has to follow anyone they don't want to.

So it looks like you can't win - almost 50% of new followers expect you to follow them and 50% either don't, or only do under some circumstances.  As you can see from the responses to questions 3 and 4 (below), the results have presumably been skewed as 50% of respondents have a close involvement with museums, and a whopping two-thirds have a professional or academic interest in social media. I'm using the free version of SurveyMonkey so can't easily split out the 'social media' or 'museum professional' responses from the rest to see if people who are neither have different views on reciprocal following.

The only way to get a sense of whether followers of your particular museum account expect to be followed back, or mind being followed back, may be to ask them directly.

Of the people who were able to answer question 2, a very small minority unequivocally minded being followed by a museum account, but 44% of those who answered don't mind if a museum account doesn't follow them back.

Another interesting question would have been 'is it friendly or weird if an organisation follows you after you mention them?' - if you do any more research into the issue, let me know.

Question 6 asked for 'Any other comments?'.

• Though I don't work in a museum, I work in or with museums. I think the main issue is that museums tweeting should have personality, you should feel it's a person (or group of people) that want to engage with you. I think if they follow me, it's more likely they will hear me and engage.
• By following and being followed by a museum it creates a sense of community (although of course I realize the museums won't have time to read all the tweets).
• I run a twitter account on behalf of a library, and think it's good manners to follow back someone who follows you (like returning a hello). I always try to reply to people who want to talk to us, but try not to butt into conversations that are *about* us, but which don't want us to reply to them (this can be tricky). As a user, by and large - I only want to talk to museums when I know the people doing the tweeting - and in New Zealand, I know most of these people anyway. Internationally, I do the same thing. Courtney Johnston, @auchmill, @nlnz
• I like when museums respond to my comments or @ replies, but I'm not as comfortable with them following me. Being responsive is different than following.
• Twiter has become one of the best sources for professional info & contacts @innova2
• It would be more useful for the museum to keep track of hashtags, etc.
• I want to communicate with people I follow, so following me back makes it easier. I don't expect them to read all/most of what I say, but it's nice...especially on my protected account (otherwise they never see the @)
• Museums rock!
• I don't really mind either way. I find it flattering if an institution wants to follow me. They must think I have something to say!
• I feel that museums have a great opp to get more individuals involved in history and the arts via social media - personally I follow a few and am always pleased to hear about new exhibits, events, etc.
• I work with museums, that's why I would like them to follow me back. I use Twitter for work, so I don't mind if they follow back. If I would talk to my friends over Twitter about private stuff maybe I WOULD mind....
• If a museum (or anyone) didn't follow back, I would probably unfollow after a while unless their tweets were really something special.
• I want people/institutions to follow me if they have genuine interest in my tweets - the same criteria I apply when choosing who to follow myself!
• The real question probably should have been (or maybe an additional question should have been): do you MIND if a museum you follow follows you back. Because really, I don't necessarily want them to, but I don't mind if they do. I have the power to block if need be.
• I think if the Museum was clear about WHY it was following me on twitter it would be less "stalkerish". In general I somewhat expect to be followed by those I am following. Although I am not sure if organizations (Museums) really need to follow individuals. I would imagine the Museum's staff would be overwhelmed with the number of completely unrelated tweets. What would be the advantage that couldn't be obtained better by simply searching twitter for key terms related to the museum, content, exhibit, etc? (Note: I do not work "in" a museum but have worked with over 6 museums to define and develop their websites and web marketing activities)
• I manage a twitter feed for a project at a science center. I follow people, organizations and businesses that are in the service area for the project (a watershed). I also follow other organizations that are working on similar issues (water quality).
• I think not following people back is poor Twitter etiquette. That is like saying to someone, "Listen to me! But I won't listen to you!"
• 1. Personally, I find follow bots mildly more insulting than not being followed back. 2. In my professional capacity tweeting for a museum, if someone @mentions us, I follow them (I consider it friendly). The fact that this could be done equally well (and more efficiently) by a bot disturbs me a bit.
• I tweet with an interest in culture, art, and museums in mind. It's more of a compliment for museums to follow back than a feeling of being stalked, as it shows interest in its reader's tweets.
• Leave the poor souls alone, they only want to know what's going on at your museum. I've blocked Museum of London (and I have every reason to trust them. Or not)
• How is it stalkerish...dumb survey
• Happy to be followed if it would help the museum understand more about its audience  

So that's that.   I thought 'being responsive is different than following' summed things up quite nicely, but whatever your view, some interesting opinions have been expressed above.

I hadn't considered before that not following someone back was rude - I must appear terribly rude on my personal accounts but I just can't keep up with so many accounts, especially as I can have lots of time away from the keyboard.

Finally, the demographic questions (kept brief to keep the survey short)
3. Do you work, study or volunteer in a museum?
Yes 56%
No 44%

4. Do you work, study or volunteer in social media?
Yes 68%
No 32%

5. Where in the world are you?

Countries	Total respondents
Australia	2
Belgium	1
Canada	2
Germany	1
Netherlands	4
New Zealand	1
Norway	1
Spain	2
Switzerland	1
UK	17
USA	18

Today's post is from Morris Proctor, certified and authorized trainer for Logos Bible Software. Morris has trained thousands of Logos users at his two-day Camp Logos training seminars.

The various guides in Logos Bible Software 4 contain numerous sections. For example, the Passage Guide lists Commentaries, Cross References, Parallel Passages, and so on. Each section searches different resources and is identified with a section title bar. When you click the title bar, that section collapses or expands. What’s more, if a guide opens with a section collapsed, the search in that section is delayed until you expand the section.

So here’s a strategy for using the sections in a guide:

• Open a guide from the Guides menu
• Generate a report for a passage or word
• Collapse all the sections in that guide
• Close the guide
• Return to the Guides menu and open the same type of guide
• Again generate a report for a passage or word

You’ll notice the sections stay collapsed just the way you closed the guide. Now expand a section at a time. Use the information in it and then collapse the section again. This process speeds up searches and allows you to use only the information you need when you need it!

Already a Logos Bible Software user?
Visit our custom upgrade discount calculator to see what discounts you qualify for on an upgrade to a brand new Logos 4 base package.

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WÖRTERLISTEN aus den Registern von Publikationen griechischer und lateinischer dokumentarischer Papyri und Ostraka

kompiliert von Dieter Hagedorn unter anfänglicher Mithilfe von Pia Breit, Wolfgang Habermann, Ursula Hagedorn, Bärbel Kramer, Gertrud Marohn, Jörn Salewski und mit Dank für die Überlassung elektronischer Dateien an Charikleia Armoni (für P.Heid. IX und P.Köln XI), Marja J. Bakker (für P.Worp), Alette V. Bakkers (für P.Minnesota), Adam Bülow-Jacobsen (für O.Claud. IV), Willy Clarysse (für P.Count); Nahum Cohen (für P.Berl. Cohen), James Cowey (für P.Paramone), Hélène Cuvigny (für O.Krok.), Ruth Duttenhöfer (für P.Lips. II), Traianos Gagos (für P.Thomas), Nikolaos Gonis (für P.Oxy. LXVIII, LXIX, LXX, LXXI, LXXII, LXXIII und LXXIV), Ann Hanson (für P.Sijp.), Hermann Harrauer (für P.Horak, P.Eirene II und CPR XIX), Francisca A. J. Hoogendijk (für BL XII), Andrea Jördens (für P.Louvre I, P.Louvre II, SB XXI und SB XXIII), Demokritos Kaltsas (für P.Heid. VIII), Bärbel Kramer (für P.Poethke), Johannes Kramer (für C. Gloss. Biling. II), Claudia Kreuzsaler (für SPP III2.5); Nico Kruit und die Herausgeber der BL (für BL XI), Csaba Láda (für CPR XXVIII); Herwig Maehler (für BGU XIX); Klaus Maresch (für P.Ammon II, P.Bub. II, P.Köln IX; P.Köln X; P.Köln XI; P.Phrur. Diosk. und P.Polit. Iud.), Henri Melaerts (für P.Bingen), Fritz Mitthof (für CPR XXIII, P.Erl. Diosp. und SPP III2.2), Federico Morelli (für CPR XXII), Bernhard Palme (für P.Harrauer und CPR XXIV), Amphilochios Papathomas (für CPR XXV), Patrick Sänger (für SB XXV), Philip Schmitz (für P.Iand. Zen.), Paul Schubert (für P.Yale III), Sven Tost (für SPP III2.1), Klaas A. Worp (für O.Kellis und P.NYU II)
kompiliert von
Dieter Hagedorn
13. Fassung vom 7. Februar 2010

KONTRÄRINDEX Rückläufiges Verzeichnis der in den Abschnitten 02, 03 und 05 der WörterListen in der Fassung vom 7. Februar 2010 enthaltenen Namen und Wörter

I have been fascinated by the implications of the speculative turn for archaeology for some time now (Graham Harman's blog provides a conduit to the world of speculative realism; Harman currently has several books in press on the topic). I have been pulling together several pieces--aspects of which were presented in previous Theoretical Archaeology Group Meetings (Columbia and Stanford) and at the recent CHAT in Oxford--for forthcoming publications. What appears here is an extremely condensed version of a chapter for Brent Fortenberry and Laura McAtackney's CHAT proceedings volume.

Archaeologists and historians inscribe the past as that which exists in advance of the present. Here, to exist in advance of has been synonymous, at least under a pervasive modernist empiricism, with existing apart from. By rendering the past as separate from the present, archaeologists and historians have enjoyed the ability to endow those things regarded as of the past with a determinative specificity that renders subsequent actor-relations as purely derivative. In other words, irrespective of any later adventures that may befall the marbles sculpted under Phidias in the 5th century BCE—that is, short of their utter destruction—they persist as enduring objects. No matter where they go, the marbles will always be, and have always been, the Parthenon Marbles whose genesis occurred in the Athens of 2500 years ago. This, as it is well known, is the stance taken by the Greek Ministry of Culture, which seeks the restitution of the sculptures.

“There is nothing which floats into the world from nowhere,” Alfred North Whitehead famously stated, because “[e]verything in the actual world is referable to some actual entity” (1978, 244). With this “ontological principle”, the past, which the modern empiricism mentioned in the preceding paragraph rendered as detached and broken from the present, is, from the angle of this former past, redistributed. For despite the fact that we all had childhoods that we may recall in various ways, what exists of our childhoods (well, my childhood)—boxed-up Atari video games, Kenner action figures, books, journals, photographs, marks of height at birthdays inscribed on the closet doorway—are simultaneously present in the various recesses of our parents’ house. To be alive is to coexist with such ‘mnemonic traces’ of what was (refer to: Gonzalez-Ruibal 2006; Jones 2008; Lucas 2005; Olivier 2004 and 2008; Schlanger 2004; Witmore 2006 and 2007). Even the supposed continuity I perceive through the ordering of experience in grey-matter recall is located in an occasion; more precisely thinking constitutes an actual occasion (see, for example, Hutchins 1995; also Malafouris 2008). With the ontological principle all pasts are our contemporaries.

‘Traces’ and ‘pasts’, ontologically speaking, are grounded in actual entities and no such entity can ever exist separate from its relations. For an entity to be so would, for Whitehead, result in a ‘vacuous actually’. As Steven Shaviro puts it “[n]othing comes into being once and for all; and nothing just sustains itself in being, as if by inertia or its own inner force” (2009, 20). Whether the Parthenon Marbles or a box of odd and ends associated my childhood, the past has to be worked for (also Shanks 2007).

Stated differently, “an object can only endure insofar as it renews itself, or creates itself afresh, over and over again” (Shaviro 2009, 20). This is not to say objects do not have a history or genesis—their composite nature is inherited from past occasions. Rather, to speak of the Parthenon Marbles is to speak of efforts by Melina Mercouri, the Greek Ministry of Culture, UNESCO, descriptions in Pausanias, protests by impassioned Greek Students in London, the new Acropolis Museum, numerous articles and books, and a former temple, turned church, turned mosque, turned munitions depot, turned target-for-artillery, turned ruin, turned World Heritage Monument in Athens (see Hamilakis 2008; Kaldellis 2009; Yalouri 2001; also see Hamilakis’ entry from April of 2008 http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/2008/04/the_other_acropolis_project.html). To mention the Elgin Marbles is to refer to the Duveen Gallery, information cards on displays, the tenacious trustees of the British Museum, notions of common heritage, a Parliamentary Select Committee in 1816, a contentious firman, the 7th Earl of Elgin, Thomas Bruce and his country house at Broomhall (see Hitchins 1997). Incidentally, the cardboard box containing relics of my childhood will last only so long; without sufficient work to ‘rescue the contents’ from the closet other entities will intervene—nieces and nephews in search of new treasures or relatives who will see excess hordes off either through eBay or the dumpster (also see Auslander et al, 2009).

The past is both precedent and product. The past as precedent has always already perished. In this, the past that perishes is actualized in ever-burgeoning legions of material entities (Edensor 2005; Olivier 2008; Olsen 2003), but the past that perishes looses its immediacy in the lived moment. No one can encounter the same occasion twice. “A perished occasion subsists only as a “datum”: a sort of raw material, which any subsequent occasion may take up in its own turn, in order to transform it in a new process of self-creation” (Shaviro 2009, 18). The past as product is that which archaeologists and historians co-produce (co, as many other entities play a role in this) and that with which they co-emerge (for other angles on this process see Lucas 2001; for the past as an outcome of archaeological practices see, for example, González-Ruibal 2006; Witmore 2004). Marble torsos, display pedestals, Francesco Morosini (the Venetian commander who fired his cannons upon the “beautiful temple” in 1687), long chains of negotiation, selection, transportation, controversy and acquisition; all contribute to the co-emergence of the Parthenon Sculptures—architectural sculptures become art works which become world heritage for some, objects of cultural patrimony for others. Working for these pasts is a perpetual and most necessary struggle.

Controversies revolve around things. An object-orientation suggests a particular angle of association with respect to the matter at hand (Harman 2002 and 2009). Here, the word ‘object’ is not to be construed in opposition to the word of ‘subject’. With an awareness of the shortcomings of the term (Webmoor and Witmore 2008), objects also participate in a given controversy, but the nature of that participation will vary depending on the associations it gathers. A particular object-orientation will always be one of many (Latour 2005). In this way, an object is not so much a substance as it is a performance (Harman 2009, 44; Webmoor and Witmore 2008 have discussed this as mixture). Because objects, as actual entities or occasions, become something entirely novel with every new relation—even if what they transform into bears a striking resemblance to their former selves—their nature is highly variegated and uncertain. Put another way, “there is no difference which does not make a difference” (Bryant 2009).

Consider a section of stonewall in Nafplion, Greece. Running at an oblique angle along the rear of two former residences at 24 and 26 Zygomala Street is a large, polygonal wall of grey limestone.

It stretches 19.5 meters from a short segment of rubble wall, which forms the southeast corner of 26 to the edge of Zygomala street. At this junction, the wall abruptly turns a few meters shy of the street into an adjacent building. Resting directly upon bedrock, segments of this wall stand as high as 3 meters. Sections are still covered in wall plaster of various colors: red ochre, teal green, and white. This wall is not merely a static, impassive object across which historical events have washed—the most recent being its incorporation into the fabric of two former houses, the decay of these structures or the subsequent clearing of the debris. What is a relic wall for some is a matter of contention for others. A point of orientation for property boundaries, the rear support for a structural wall, a plastered interior edifice, the external defenses of an ancient citadel: the polygonal wall is all these things; which occasion we encounter is matter of orientation and gathering. We can no longer be indifferent to all these realities. Any thing held to be of the past by archaeologists or historians, under different fields of relation is something entirely novel, which may have nothing to do with a past orientation.

Thus far, it is fair to say archaeologists have missed this ontological multiplicity (although see Knappett and Malaforis 2009; Lucas 2009; Olsen 2003; Witmore 2009). Whether we are dealing with indigenous (Watkins 2000), interpretive (Hodder 1999), social (Meskell and Preucel 2004) or even processual archaeologies rooted in solid ‘fact’ (Binford 1972), diversity is squarely situated in the realm of competing stakeholder interests, multiple interpretations, beliefs and different social groups; all are to be respected, all are erected on the bedrock of a durable substance or a singular natural world (also see Latour 2003; from a yet another archaeological angle, see papers in Alberti and Bray 2009). In this, ‘data’, ‘heritage’, ‘evidence of a definitive past’ are prematurely conflated with reality and utilized as the final arbiter of disagreement. Phenomenological archaeologies have faired no better. With the latter, privilege is granted to human access to the world with relations between nonhumans consigned to the sciences (Brück 2005; Tilley 2004; for more of how phenomenology brackets the world as presented to human consciousness see Harman 2009, 78; and 2010). Understanding the lively, variegated nature of things poses a challenge to any bifurcation of nature into social multiplicity, on the one hand, and natural unity, on the other. Arguing for multiplicities of meaning, interpretation, belief, has left intact a determinative substance, a definitive core, which assumes one reality at the expense of others. Marbles in London and Greece, a wall in Nafplion, a humble relic from our childhoods; all these things must be understood in the plural (Latour 2005, 116).

While things are clearly much more interesting than archaeologists have previously allowed, our freedom as archaeologists to follow things, formerly considered to be of the past, wherever they may go will run up against a snag contained within the very etymology of archaeology—the study of ‘ta archaia’, literally ‘old things’. So long as archaeology holds fast to the cares specified by its etymology—a duty to stuff out-of-date; a concern for those forgotten associations covered by ‘ta archaia’—there is nothing wrong with this commitment. Difficulties ensue, however, when, in spite of its etymological roots, ‘archaeologists’ expand beyond this remit to encompass all things implicated within other webs of concurrent relations. In other words, while marbles, monuments, walls may be ‘ta archaia’, they are also a lot of other things in addition. We can no longer assume that that materials we archaeologists engage are of the past, in advance.

If to be of the past is now an orientation among many, then perhaps it is time for we archaeologists concerned with concurrent relations with things to consider a new banner under which the range of motion required to do such concerns justice could be granted—might it be labeled pragmatology? Pragmatology is a reversal of what was taken for granted under a modernist empiricism. Pragmata are starting points, ontological grounds, for archaia, but in this the importance of archaia is not subverted. Archaeology continues to encompass that creative action for linking fragments to build temporally framed accounts. Pragmatology might provide a surrogate umbrella under which archaeologists who are concerned with stakeholder associations, questions of heritage, contemporary archaeology, archaeological ethnography, and reflexive method might operate.

References

Alberti, B. and T.L. Bray (ed.) 2009: Animating Archaeology: of Subjects, Objects and Alternative Ontologies, A Special Section for Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 19(3), 337-441.

Auslander, L., A. Bentley, L. Halevi, H.O. Sibum, and C. Witmore 2009: AHR Conversation: Historians and the Study of Material Culture. American Historical Review, 114(5), 1354-1404.

Binford, L. R. 1972: An Archaeological Perspective. New York: Academic Press.

Brück, J. 2005: Experiencing the past? The development of a phenomenological archaeology in British prehistory. Archaeological Dialogues 12(1), 45-72.

Bryant, L. 2009: The Ontic Principle: The Fundamental Principle of Any Future Object-Oriented Philosophy. Larval Subjects. Available at: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/01/09/the-ontic-principle-the-fundamental-principle-of-any-future-object-oriented-philosophy/

DeSilvey, C. 2006: Observed decay: Telling stories with mutable things. Journal of Material Culture, 11(3), 318-38.

Edensor, T. 2005: Industrial Ruins: Space, aesthetics and materiality. Oxford and New York: Berg.

González-Ruibal, A. 2006: The past is tomorrow: Towards an archaeology of the vanishing present. Norwegian Archaeological Review, 39(2), 110-25.

Hamilakis, Y. 2008: The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology and National Imagination in Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Harman, G. 2002: Tool-Being. Chicago: Open Court.

Harman, G. 2009: Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Melbourne: Re.Press.

Harman, G. 2010: Technology, objects and things in Heidegger. Cambridge Journal of Economics 34, 17-25.

Hitchens, C. 1997: The Elgin Marbles: Should they be Returned to Greece? London: Verso.

Hodder, I. 1999: The Archaeological Process. Oxford: Blackwell.

Holtorf, C. and A. Picinni (eds) 2009: Contemporary Archaeologies: Excavating Now. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Hutchins, E. 1995: Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Jones, A. 2007: Memory and Material Culture. Cambridge: CUP.

Kaldellis, A. 2009: The Christian Parthenon: Classicism and Pilgrimage in Byzantine Athens. Cambridge: CUP.

Knappett, C. and L. Malaforis (eds) 2009: Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach. New York: Springer.

Latour, B., 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press: Oxford.

Lucas, G., 2001: Critical Approaches to Fieldwork: Contemporary and Historical Archaeological Practice. Routledge: London.

Lucas, G. 2005: The Archaeology of Time. London: Routledge.

Lucas, G. forthcoming, Dead Things Walking. Journal of Science Technology and Human Values.

Malafouris, L. 2008: At the Potter’s Wheel: An Argument for Material Agency. In C. Knappett and L. Malaforis (eds) 2009: Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach. New York: Springer, pp. 19-36.

Meskell, L., and R. Preucel (eds) 2004. A Companion to Social Archaeology. Blackwell Publishers: Oxford.

Olivier, L. 2008: Le sombre abîme du temps. Mémoire et archéologie. Paris: Seuil.

Olsen, B. 2003: Material culture after text: Re-Membering things. Norwegian Archaeological Review, 36(2), 87-104.

Schlanger, N. 2004: The Past Is in the Present: On the History and Archives of Archaeology. Modernism / Modernity 11(1), 165-67.

Shaviro, S. 2009: Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Shanks, M. 2007: Digital Media, Agile Design, and the Politics of Archaeological Authorship. In T. Clack and M. Brittain (ed.) Archaeology and the Media. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, pp. 273-89.

Tilley, C. 2004: The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 1. Oxford: BERG.

Webmoor, T. and C.L. Witmore, 2008: Things are us! A commentary on human/things relations under the banner of a ‘social’ archaeology. Norwegian Archaeology Review, 41(1), 53-70.

Whitehead, A.N. [1929] 1978: Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: The Free Press.

Watkins, J. 2000: Indigenous Archaeology: American Indian Values and Scientific Practice. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press.

Witmore, C.L. 2004: ‘On Multiple Fields. Between the Material World and Media: Two Cases from the Peloponnesus, Greece’. Archaeological Dialogues 11(2): 133-64.

Witmore, C.L. 2009: Prolegomena to Open Pasts: On Archaeological Memory Practices. In K. Ryzewski (ed.) Archaeology, Experience, Modes of Engagement, Archaeology, a special issue of Archaeologies 5(3), 511-45.

Yalouri, E. 2001: The Acropolis: Global Fame, Local Claim. Oxford: Berg.

This is a selection of First World War photos from my collection, mostly bought from ebay. I’ve posted some horse photos over at The horse in history and culture. The ones here have more of a gender theme. Click on the thumbnails to see bigger versions.

Four male prisoners of war, two in drag. This was taken in the theatre at Cottbus PoW camp, where my great-grandad was held from 1917 to 1918. He performed in the theatre but there’s no evidence that he dressed as a woman. One of the paradoxes of the hyper-masculine environment of the 20th century British Army was that it often forced men into stereotypically feminine roles in order to stand in for the women who were excluded.

Royal Army Medical Corps group, taken in France, 1919. It clearly shows how uniforms reinforced gender roles. The men are wearing army service dress, just like combat soldiers, although their role is to provide medical care. The women are wearing long skirts and big head-dresses. Also notice that some of the men are very short. The man on the left of the middle row, standing between the corporal and the nurse with a dog at their feet, looks shorter than some of the women. If you look very closely you can see that some of the group are holding puppies.

A man and woman called Fred and Kitty, but I don’t know their surnames. Fred is a sergeant in the Army Service Corps, and Kitty is in civilian clothes. The poses reinforce the differences in dress, suggesting male dominance and female submission.

Territorial Royal Field Artillery corporal with a small boy. Probably taken in Cardiff or Pontypridd. Like the Sergeant in the previous photo, the corporal is wearing spurs. These were standard equipment for troops classed as mounted, which included field artillery and service corps because they relied on horses for transport. I love the little boy’s pose. Although man and boy are both male, they illustrate the hierarchy of masculinity: the corporal is more of a man because of his age, independence and military service.

A group of female munitions workers. The unprecedented expansion of both the British Army and the arms industry in the First World War, along with the assumption that women couldn’t or shouldn’t fight, led to more women working in munitions factories. This temporarily gave some women increased pay and freedom, but 90 years on women as a group still earn less than men as a group. Although the uniforms make some concessions to the practicalities of working in a factory, they also signify femininity.

This looks interesting: “The Virtual Environments for Research in Archaeology (VERA) project aims to produce a fully-fledged virtual research environment for the archaeological community. It will address user needs, enhancing the means of efficiently documenting archaeological excavation and its associated finds, and create a suitable Web portal that provides enhanced tools for the user community. VERA aims to develop utilities that help encapsulate the working practices of current research archaeologists unfamiliar with virtual research environments.” The project is undertaken at the  University of Reading and  University College London. It was funded through 2009. I’m curious for the results of this study.

And now for something a bit different: “… volunteers are gathering in cities around the world to help bolster relief groups and government first responders in a new way: by building free open-source technology tools that can help aid relief and recovery in Haiti. ‘We’ve figured out a way to bring the average citizen, literally around the world, to come and help in a crisis,’ says Noel Dickover, co-founder of Crisis Commons (crisiscommons.org), which is organizing the effort.” (source: NYT article)

The translator of the fragments of Eusebius found in the Coptic catena published by Paul de Lagarde — I’m never sure whether to write “de Lagarde” or “De Lagarde” — has asked for a translation into English of his preface, written in Latin.  I have hastily asked Andrew Eastbourne for a construe, and he has kindly said he will produce one in a few days.

The preface contains non-Latin material.  So here I am, OCRing it.  Chunks of it are in English, although containing misleading information.

According to de Lagarde, Joseph Lightfoot mentions the catena ms. in A plain introduction to the criticism of the New Testament by F. Scrivener, Cambridge, 1874, p. 335, and says:

The volume, *Parham 102, described in the printed Catalogue (no. 1, vellum, p. 27) as a MS of the Gospels of St Matthew and St Mark, is really a selection of passages taken in order from the four Gospels with a patristic catena attached to each. The leaves however are much displaced in the binding, and many are wanting. The title to the first Gospel is + [coptic], etc. ‘The interpretation of the Holy Gospel according to Matthew from numerous doctors and luminaries of the church.’ Among the fathers quoted I observed Athanasius, Basil, Chrysostom, Clement, the two Cyrils (of Jerusalem and of Alexandria). Didymus, Epiphanius, Eusebius, Evagrius, the three Gregories (Thaumaturgus, Nazianzen and Nyssen), Hippolytus, Irenaeus, Severianus of Gabala, Severus of Antioch (often styled simply the Patriarch), Symeon Stylites, Timotheus, and Titus.

In the account of this MS in the Catalogue it is stated that ‘the name of the scribe who wrote it is Sapita Leporos, a monk of the monastery, or monastic rule, of Laura under the sway of the great abbot Macarius,’ and the inference is thence drawn that it must have been written before 395, when Macarius died. This early date however is at once set aside by the fact that writers who lived in the sixth century are quoted. Prof. Wright (Journal of Sacred Literature vii. p. 218), observing the name of Severus in the facsimile, points out the error of date, and suggests as an explanation that the colophon (which he had not seen) does not speak of the great Macarius, but of ‘an abbot Macarius.’ The fact is, that though the great Macarius is certainly meant, there is nothing which implies that he was then living. The scribe describes himself as [coptic], I the unhappy one (talaipwroj) who wrote it’ (which has been wrongly read and interpreted as a proper name Sapita Leporos). He then gives his name [coptic] (Theodorus of Busiris?) and adds, [coptic], ‘the unworthy monk of the holy laura of the great abbot Macarius.’ He was merely an inmate of the monastery of St Macarius; see the expression quoted from the Vat. MS lxi in Tattam’s Lexicon p. 842. This magnificent MS would well repay careful inspection; but its value may not be very great for the Memphitic Version, as it is perhaps translated from the Greek …

And I think there is a note in the ms. which reads:

Mr Rt Curzon brought this volume from the Coptic Monastery of Souriani on the Natron Lakes, to the west of the villiage of Jerraneh, on the Nile; in the month of March. 1838. It consists of 254 leaves of vellum, which contain 2 indexes, and the Gospels of St Mathew, & St Mark, with the commentaries of St Cyrill, St Chrysostom, Eusebius, Gregory the Patriarch, Titus, &c.

The leaves are not in their proper places, the two Gospels being mixed together, they have been put together just as they came over, to prevent their being lost. The name of the scribe who wrote this MS, is Zapita Leporos, a monk of the monastery of sic Laura, under the rule of the Abbot Macarius. Macarius of Alexandria, Abbot of the Monks of Nitria, died according to the Art de verifier les Dates; either in the year 395, or 405. it would therefore apper sic that this manuscript must have been written before the end of the fourth century, in which case it is the most antient book in existance sic with a date, several of the Syriac MSS which were brought to England from the same monastery in which this was discovered, are supposed to be of equal antiquity, the earliest of those which have any date given in them, is a quarto of Eusebius, which was written in the year 411. it is now in the British Museum, it seems however that this manuscript is even more antient, as it was probably written about the year 390.

These little snippets of information, or misinformation, may make us smile but they do show scholarship emerging from ignorance, little by little.

I’ve been rummaging through the depths of my hard-drive and found a few things I’d forgotten about. Here’s one of them, from 2006 I see, a presentation on the contemporary archaeology of Mars.

The reason I’ve pulled it up is I might want to go back and think this over again. I’m not happy with it, which is why it was left on the drive, but it might have potential.

The Archaeology Of Mars

View more presentations from Alun Salt.

The slide on the 1980s probes is intentionally blank, because there were hardly any probes sent in the 1980s to Mars. The reason is that the competition between the major powers has moved to Earth Orbit, with the USA building the Shuttle and the USSR building long-term space stations. Recent events have highlighted a couple of reasons why it’s worth looking at this again. One is the registration of lunar heritage by California, which is grabbing headlines for something that Alice Gorman and Beth O’Leary have been saying for a while. The other is Obama’s cancellation of the return to the Moon.

It could be a scientific re-prioritisation, but like the Mars gap in the 1980s, it could also be due to politics. The Nobel laureate already has wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to manage, and he wants to keep his options open for a war with Iran. That could turn very nasty as Iran is next door to his two other problems. It’s possible that there simply isn’t a threat on the Moon, but there is in the Middle East. Unless China develops lunar ambitions, the discovery of water on the Moon could be a scientific curiosity rather than a stepping stone to colonisation.

There’s a few reasons why I don’t like this presentation as it stands. I think the biggest problem is that one of the big factors for making it was that I needed a presentation. It wasn’t an idea that was ready, and to some extent the problem was “there’s something archaeology could say about this, but what?” Now I’m thinking about the social, political and economic effects of Mars exploration. This time around I see archaeology as a tool to finding out about these factors, rather than ‘being archaeological’ as the purpose of project.

Related Posts:

• Space Archaeology II
• Liquid Water on Mars
• Happy Birthday Ariane
• Mapping Mars by Oliver Morton
• The Adjacent World: Archaeology Version
• Powered by Contextual Related Posts

A translation of more of the fragmentary material has come through this evening.  There is now very little more to translate.  Once it is all done, the editorial task of assembling the book will begin.  I feel very unqualified for this, and I intend to look around to see if I can hire some help!

I have picked up Hunger's edition of the epilogue to Tzetzes' Theogony, so I can now fill in some of the questions left open in my previous post, and correct some misunderstandings I had, In a separate post, I'll speculate further on the etymology of μουνί. I've changed my mind on it, btw.

But first, to Tzetzes.

We know of five manuscripts of the text

• V₁: Vindobonensis phil.gr. 321 (second half of 13th century)
  
• C: Casanatensis gr. 306 (1413)
  
• P: Vaticanus Palatinus gr. 424 (16th century)
  
• B: Vaticanus Barberinus gr. 30 (15th century)
  
• V: Vindobonensis phil.gr. 118 (turn of 14th century)

and most of them give up about the epilogue completely. Here is the translation of the epilogue Language Hat cites from Alexander Kazhdan's Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. I've tweaked the translation where appropriate, and added the reconstructed Proto-Ossetic:

[V₁ already gave up copying 45 verses ago: We left out the entire epilogue, because it just went on too long]
One finds me Scythian among Scythians, Latin among Latins,
And among any other tribe a member of that folk.
[P stops copying]
When I embrace a Scythian I accost him in such a way:
"Good day, my lady, good day, my lord:
Salamalek alti, salamalek altugep."
And also to Persians I speak in Persian:
"Good day, my brother, how are you? Where are you from [Missing in C], my friend?
Asan khais kuruparza khaneazar kharandasi?"
To a Latin I speak in the Latin language:
"Welcome, my lord, welcome, my brother:
Bene venesti, domine, bene venesti, frater.
Wherefrom are you, from which theme [province] do you come?
Unde es et de quale provincia venesti?
How have you come, brother, to this city?
Quomodo, frater, venesti in istan civitatem?
[C stops copying: And there were many other verses of sundry dialects, but I omitted them as useless. We're down to V and B]
On foot, on horse, by sea? Do you wish to stay?
Pezos, caballarius, per mare? Vis morare?"
To Alans I say in their tongue:
"Good day, my lord, my archontissa, where are you from?
Tapankhas mesfili khsina korthi kanda," and so on.
(dæ ban xʷærz, mæ sfili, (æ)xsinjæ kurθi kændæ)
If an Alan lady has a priest as a boyfriend, she will hear such words: [verse only in V]
"Aren't you ashamed, my lady, to have a priest fuck your cunt? [missing in B, only given in V]
(οὐκ αἰσχύνεσαι, αὐθέντριά μου, νὰ γαμῇ τὸ μουνίν σου παπᾶς;)
To farnetz kintzi mesfili kaitz fua saunge."
(du farnitz, kintzæ mæ sfili, kajci fæ wa sawgin?)
[Literally: "Aren't you ashamed, my lady, to have a love affair with the priest?"]
Arabs, since they are Arabs, I address in Arabic:
"Where do you dwell, where are you from, my lady? My lord, good day to you.
Alentamor menende siti mule sepakha."
And also I welcome the Ros according to their habits:
"Be healthy, brother, sister, good day to you.
Sdra[ste], brate, sestritza," and I say "dobra deni."
To Jews I say in a proper manner in Hebrew:
"You blind house devoted to magic, you mouth, a chasm engulfing flies,
memakomene beth fagi beelzebul timaie,
You stony Jew, the Lord has come, lightning be upon your head.
Eber ergam, maran atha, bezek unto your khothar."
So I talk with all of them in a proper and befitting way;
I know the skill of the best management."

The language names aren't what they seem:

• I recognised ἀλτή as Turkic, confirmed that altı is Turkish for "lady", and so assumed "Scythian" was Turkish. It was a bit odd that the Turks were being placed in Scythia—modern Ukraine and Kazakhstan; but maybe Tzetzes was thinking of some Turkic tribe up north.
  In fact he was: Hunger's manuscript has the interlinear gloss Cuman at "when I embrace a Scythian". And Cuman was indeed a Turkic language.
  
• With the "Persians", I committed a thinko. I noticed that "friend" in Persian, kharandasi, looked like Turkish kardaş "brother, friend". I also know that by the 14th century, classicising Byzantine historians referred to the Turks as Persians, referring back to the Achaemenids. But surely, I thought, Tzetzes would have actually been familiar with Persians, being part-Georgian. (More on that later.) So he wouldn't have made that Chalcocondylian conflation. As for kardaş, I dunno, maybe it is a Turkish loan from Persian.
  Not so. Hunger's manuscript also glosses "Persian" as "Turkish". I'm not game to suggest a (Seljuk) Turkish rendering of ἀσὰν χαῒς κουρούπαρζα χαντάζαρ χαραντάση; I may get lucky and have a passing commenter do so.
  
• Latin is Latin. Tzetzes' dates are ca. 1110-1180; certainly not too late for Latin to have been spoken by scholars, at least.
  
• Alanic is Proto-Ossetian. Ironically, Alanic *is* a Scythian language, the Scythians and Alans being Iranic peoples.
  
• I also wouldn't object to hearing the wisdom of the crowds on the Arabic.
  
• The Ros are the Rus', i.e. Russia. The manuscript actually reads sdra, but Hunger consulted a Slavicist who said it was unattested, and Hunger assumed the ste dropped out as a haplology. Tzetzes, perversely (but unsurprisingly) put the foreign language fragments in the same metre as the rest of the poem; and there is indeed a missing syllable there.
  Hunger finds the orthography δόβρα δένη interesting, because the words still end in full vowels (dobra deni, cf. Modern Russian dobryj denj).
  
• The Jews get Tzetzes' anti-Semitism in Hebrew, although the Jews of Byzantium certainly spoke Greek as their everyday language. But admitting that would be admitting they were not space aliens who didn't belong in Byzantium; and Tzetzes couldn't do that. Tzetzes' use of Latin also suggests that his language command was of the debate hall, rather than the marketplace—learnèd Hebrew, rather than spoken Judaeo-Greek. Language Hat's comment thread has some information on Tzetzes' Hebrew.

The Greek interest in the epilogue is on its use of μουνί, and that use is surprising, because it's not what the Proto-Ossetian says. That's not the only thing strange about the Greek translations, though: they are in red ink in the manuscript, and don't fit the metre like the foreign originals do. Moreover, "fuck your cunt" look a bit over-colloquial to us—although the rest of the translation is consistent with Tzetzes' Koine (πόθεν εἶσαι καὶ ἀπὸ ποίου θέματος ἦλθες;), and the correlation of vulgar with colloquial we make can be anachronistic.

• As Modern Greek readers will have noticed, "that he fucks" is γαμῇ, not γαμᾷ: the original verb is γαμέω, and while the vernacular was already conflating -αω and -εω conjugations by then (something that had started in the Koine), Tzetzes knew that the original verb is γαμέω—and he'd want you to know that he knew it.

Still, it's a reasonable question to ask: can we be sure the translations are from Tzetzes himself? Hunger agrees with Moravcsik that we can, because Tzetzes was pedantic enough to gloss everything in sight. That's not a compelling reason in my book: if he was that pedantic, why aren't the glosses in metre? The fact that glosses show up in all four manuscripts is more convincing to me.

In particular, whoever wrote the translation "fuck your cunt" in V knew enough Proto-Ossetian to render its meaning misleadingly. Tzetzes did; I'm less certain a random scribe would, especially when most scribes ran away as fast as they could from this Berlitz job application.

Only two scribes persevered with it, and it's interesting what B left out: not just the νὰ γαμῇ τὸ μουνίν σου παπᾶς, but any reference to the lady shacking up with a priest at all. It wasn't just the four-letter words that offended the scribe of the Barberinus, but the social faux pas.

It's an odd thing to do, though, translate "to have a love affair" as "to fuck your cunt". Nikos Sarantakos asked me whether this is some indication of Georgian–Ossetian enmity being a thousand years old.

Let's go to Wikipedia University. Tzetzes *was* Georgian and not Ossetian, right?

• John Tzetzes: "was Georgian on his mother's side. In his works, Tzetzes states that his grandmother was a relative of the Georgian Bagratid princess Maria of Alania who came to Constantinople with her and later became the second wife of the sebastos Constantine, megas droungarios and nephew of the patriarch Michael I Cerularius. [Garland, Lynda (2006), Byzantine Women: Varieties of Experience, 800-1200, pp. 95-6. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. ISBN 075465737X.]"
  
• ("Of Alania", meaning "Ossetian". Crap.)
  
• Maria of Alania: "was a daughter of the Georgian king Bagrat IV of the Bagrationi (1027–1072) and spouse of the Byzantine Emperor Michael VII Doukas and later also Nikephoros III Botaneiates. She is frequently known as Maria of Alania in apparent confusion with her mother Borena of Alania, the second wife of Bagrat of Georgia."
  
• Borena of Alania: "was a sister of the Alan king Durgulel "the Great", and the Queen consort of Georgia, as the second wife of Bagrat IV (r. 1027-1072). [...] This was just one of the several intermarriages between the medieval Georgian Bagratids and their natural allies, the royal house of Alania."

Phew. So Borena was Alan, but her daughter was born in Georgia, and her daughter's granddaughter was related to Tzetzes. So we're probably safe.

Of course, instead of Wikipedia University, we could just turn to what Tzetzes himself says. In his Chiliades, Tzetzes dedicates a chapter to the proposition

ΟΤΙ Ο ΤΖΕΤΖΗΣ ΚΑΤΑ ΜΗΤΕΡΑ ΙΒΗΡΤΩι ΓΕΝΕΙ, ΚΑΤΑ ΔΕ ΠΑΤΕΡΑ ΚΑΘΑΡΩΣ ΕΛΛΑΔΟΣ ΓΟΝΗΣ
THAT TZETZTES IS OF IBERIAN (= Georgian) STOCK ON HIS MOTHER'S SIDE, AND OF PURE GREEK DESCENT ON HIS FATHER'S (Chiliades 5.17)

It's worth going on, because it offers a hint as to Tzetzes dissing the Ossetians:

(5.591) Τῆς Τζέτζου μητρομήτορος ἡ Ἀβασγὶς ἡ μήτηρ
σὺν τῇ δεσποίνῃ Μαριάμ, τῇ Ἀβασγίσσῃ λέγω,
ἣν οἱ πολλοὶ Ἀλάνισσαν φασὶν οὐκ ἀκριβοῦντες,
ἦλθεν εἰς μεγαλόπολιν ὡς συγγενὴς καθ’ αἷμα,
Tzetzes' mother's mother's Abkhazian (Ἀβασγὶς) mother,
together with Lady Mariam—I mean, the Abkhazian (Ἀβασγίσσῃ),
whom most people incorrectly call the Alan (Ἀλάνισσαν),
came to the Great City [Constantinople] as her blood relative
[--- snip two generations ---]
(5.612) Τούτου θυγάτηρ σὺν δυσὶν ἑτέραις θυγατράσιν
τὴν κλῆσιν Εὐδοκία μέν, μήτηρ δ’ αὐτοῦ τοῦ Τζέτζου.
Ἔγνως κατὰ μητέρα μὲν Ἴβηρα τοῦτον ὄντα·
πατὴρ δὲ τούτου Μιχαὴλ ὃς καὶ παιδεύει τοῦτον
ἐν λόγοις καὶ τοῖς πράγμασιν ὡς τὸν υἱὸν ὁ Κάτων.
She was this man's daughter, together with two other daughters;
she was Eudocia by name, and mother of this Tzetzes.
So now you know that he is Iberian (Georgian) from his mother.
And his father was Michael, who taught him
in words and deed like Cato taught his son.
[--- snip ---]

• We pause here for the Modern Greek readers to stop guffawing at Ἀλάνισσα, which meant "Alan" in Byzantine Greek, and means "tramp" in Modern Greek.

Ossetians, Georgians, and now Abkhazians? What is this, a Russia-NATO impasse? But yes, Georgia had that diversity of peoples back then too. Abkhazia was part of the Kingdom of Georgia at the time, and not yet a separate principality, and Wikipedia at least says the Abkhazian nobility of the time spoke Georgian. So even if Tzetzes' great-grandmother was Abkhazian, she would have spoken Georgian—and would not necessarily have felt affinity with the Alans.

Tzetzes names Maria of Alania as Mariam, which is the Georgian form. But was Maria Alan, Abkhaz, Georgian, or what? Rather than Wikipedia University, we can refer to the roman-emperors.org article on Maria written by Lynda Garland, who actually is a Byzantine historian (and who's cited by Wikipedia U): as far as I can tell, the Georgian monarchy was described by both Georgians and Byzantines as "of the Ap'xaz/Abasgia", but the Bagratid heartland was further south than Abkhazia, and the name doesn't mean the Abkhaz were running things.

But just before Tzetzes confuses us further with the Abkhazians, he says why:

(5.585) Ἡ τοῦ δὲ μητρόμητωρ μὲν Τζέτζου τοῦ Ἰωάννου
τοῦ ἱστοριογράφου τε καὶ συγγραφέως πόσων,
μητρὸς ἧν Μασσαγέτιδος, ἤγουν ἐξ Ἀβασγίδος.
Ἴβηρες δὲ καὶ Ἀβασγοὶ καὶ Ἀλανοὶ ἓν γένος·
οἱ Ἴβηρες πρωτεύοντες, οἱ Ἀβασγοὶ δευτέραν,
οἱ Ἀλανοί δ’ ἐσχήκασι τάξιν τριῶν ὑστέραν.
Tzetzes, John, historian, and author
of so many works: his mother's mother's
mother was a Massageta, namely from Abkhazia.
The Iberians [Georgians] and the Abkhazians and the Alans are one race;
the Iberians hold the first rank; the Abkhaz the second;
and the Alans hold the third and last rank.

Do ignore the Massagetae: an Iranic people in Herodotus, which gave Tzetzes a classical pedigree to hang on to the Abkhaz. Ammianus Marcellinus hanged the label onto the Alans, and Procopius of Caesaria picked the Huns; so the label doesn't mean much.

The Alans were allies of the Georgians, which is why Borena and Maria married into Georgian royalty. Tzetzes could say they were "the same" in some sense; shortly after his death, the Alan prince married the queen of Georgia, which effectively merged the countries for a couple of decades, until they both were conquered by the Mongols.

But the Alans were not the same country yet while Tzetzes lived: they were a neighbouring country, while the Abkhaz were a province of Georgia, and their nobility was assimilated. The Abkhaz were sort of Georgian; the Alans were not, and Tzetzes is eager to put them at the bottom of the heap.

He's also adamant to point out that Maria was not "of Alania"—and true enough, it's her mother that was. We know her as Maria of Alania because most Byzantine historians called her that; and they called her that, as Garland explains, because they didn't give a toss what nowheresville principality she came from. Psellus, for instance, would just as soon not mention where she came from at all. ("Maria may have been a Georgian princess, but in fact her homeland and royal parentage cut little ice with the Byzantines as a whole.")

So Psellus, as Garland mentions, casually disses the Alan Kingdom:

(The emperor) fell in love with a girl, as I have mentioned above, who was a hostage with us from Alania. That kingdom was not particularly distinguished in itself, nor had it any great prestige.
ἐρᾷ τινος μείρακος, ὥς μοι καὶ ἄνω που τοῦ λόγου λέλεκται, ἐξ Ἀλανίας ὁμηρευούσης ἡμῖν· βασιλεία δὲ αὐτὴ οὐ πάνυ σεμνὴ, οὐδὲ ἀξίωμα ἔχουσα. (Chronographia 6.151)

But Psellus wasn't any more respectful to Georgians. As far as he was concerned, "all you Caucasians look alike".

Tzetzes cared though. Yes, he said "we're all the same race (γένος)". But if they were all the same race, the Alans wouldn't have had the last rank. And Tzetzes was enough of a walking rancour machine, that I wouldn't put the uncomplimentary mistranslation "fuck your cunt" past him.

The cold that I have had over the last couple of weeks has fairly thoroughly disrupted my work schedule on editing the Eusebius.  We all take the energy we have for granted; until it vanishes under the onslaught of a virus.  

Now I have the translation of everything, aside from the Coptic; but it all needs licking into shape.  I need someone to retype the bits of Greek in the footnotes into unicode, and generally work it all together.  I am reluctantly concluding that I will not have the time to do this.

Is there anyone out there with editorial skills (and familiarity with Greek letters!) willing to help me, for money?  If so, please get in touch!

I’ve also had a contract for use of the Greek text of part of the work from the Sources Chretiennes, which I have managed to read and is really quite sensible.  I need to get onto that too.

The Swedish Institute in Rome. Projects and Seminars

• 1. Pecus. Man and animal in antiquity. Proceedings of the conference at the Swedish Institute in Rome, September 9-12, 2002, ed. B. Santillo Frizell, 2004.
• 2. Roman villas around the Urbs. Interaction with landscape and environment. Proceedings of a conference at the Swedish Institute in Rome, September 17-18, 2004, eds. B. Santillo Frizell & A. Klynne, 2005.
• 3:1. Art, Conservation, Science. The collection of antiquities at the Palazzo Lancellotti ai Coronari, Rome. The West wall of the courtyard, work in progress, eds. M. Barbanera & A. Freccero, 2005.
• 4:1. Via Tiburtina. Space, movement and artefacts in the urban landscape, eds. H. Bjur & B. Santillo Frizell, 2005. COVER - CONTENTS
• 5:1. A. Freccero, POMPEIAN PLASTERS. Insula I 9 and Forum

Helma Dik left a comment on my post on comparing TLG AD and BC through Wordle, suggesting I use Dunning's Log-Likelihood measure of differential word frequencies in corpora, as Wordled by Martin Mueller. That lets you work out what the real shifts in frequency are, rather than trying to eyeball them through the aggregate word counts.

Here for instance is his comparison of the Iliad to the Odyssey—which words are more frequent in the one, or the other:


I looked up Ted Dunning's paper, failed to understand it :-( , and used instead the walkthrough of the computation on the user manual of the Wordhoard corpus software package.

And this is the more statistically sound Wordle comparison. Words more frequent BC are in red, words more frequent AD are in black. I'm leaving in stop words this time, and not cleaning up the ambiguity, because this says some interesting things about the changes in Greek grammar between Classical and Late Greek. Do click:


Here's my impressionistic notes, that haven't already been covered in the previous post (where I was working through rankings):

• Both corpora talk about θεός God, but the big jump, of course, is Χριστός Christ. The second biggest jump is in ἅγιος holy, displacing ἱερός. (Was ἱερός too pagan-sounding?)
  
• But the biggest discrepancy between BC and AD Greek is the avoidance of δέ but, on the other hand, followed by avoidance of μέν on the one hand. That tells you that AD Greek used different sentence structures, such as a lot more ἀλλά but. Tucked away, there's also more καί and (i.e. more coordinating constructions) and a lot less τε and (a very archaic phrase-second construction).
  
• There are a lot more ἤγουν and τουτέστι that is, and a lot less ἐάν if and ἄρα therefore; I'm tempted to think that says something about changing rhetoric in the genres popular in the respective periods—less logic, more exemplification. It's foolhardy, but not impossible.
  
• There is a lot more τίς who? being reported, and that's an error in ambiguity, but it's an illuminating error. τοῦ in Attic (though not Late Greek) is ambiguous between "whose?", and the genitive definite article. And there are a lot more definite articles in Late Greek, as you can see by the black ὁ. (My friend Io Manolessou actually wrote her PhD on that shift; nice to see it visually confirmed.)
  
• There's also more ἵνα in order to, which suggests Late Greek was already moving towards more subjunctive constructions rather than participles and infinitives, even before Early Modern Greek made the switch completely.
  
• Clearly less ὦ Ο!—A very Classical way of addressing people.
  
• Some of the odder looking words more prevalent in BC Greek are there because there are a lot more geometric texts in the BC corpus: Ἄβ is actually mistakenly picking up the line ΑΒ, and you can also see in smaller print ΑΒΓ, ΒΔ, ΓΔ, ΕΖ, ΞΖ.

Hm. Yes, that was somewhat more illuminating. Thanks, Helma!

Some of you may be familiar with Wordle, an online tool which displays the words in a text with different sizes, depending on their frequency. Wordle is a convenient tool for seeing what the frequently mentioned concepts are in a text, so it gets a fair amount of use in blogs. It's the same concept as Word Clouds; but done with much more typographical finesse. This, for instance, is Wordle run over the English text of Plato's Republic:


And courtesy of The Crazy Australian, this is the ESV New Testament:

(As The Crazy Australian noted, you can learn one thing immediately from that: the Third Person of the Trinity doesn't get as much stage presence as the Other Two in Holy Writ. Not really a surprise, but the point of Wordle is as much to visualise the obvious as it is to discover the not as obvious.)

Wordle works quite well with English, because most words don't have a lot of inflection, to multiply the instances of the concept you're looking for. In a language like Greek, on the other hand, lemmatisation—or as it's more often called in search engines, stemming—is essential. Otherwise, you get not one instance of "Jesus" or "state", but four or five, with no material difference.

Funnily enough, I do lemmatising. So what happens when you put the TLG through Wordle?

Images created by the Wordle.net web application are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Well, what you get is this:

I've highlighted the top seven verbs in green, and the top seven nouns in green. You can see the nouns, right?

Of course you can't, because there's a whopping great big ὁ and another rather outsize καί there, crowding everything else out. And being told that Greek texts have a whole lot of instances of the and and is unlikely to be what most people are curious to know.

What we have here is the notion of stop words: grammatical words that don't convey a lot of content, and which search engines traditionally ignore. Wordle also ignores them, which is why you don't see a lot of the and and in English-language Wordles. But Wordle doesn't happen to be configured for Classical Greek.

So what happens if we whittle away at the stop words? Let's do this slowly. We'll start by getting rid of ὁ and καί.

Woah. Where did all that come from? You can see something now: θεός, λόγος, and if you really squint, ἄνθρωπος. But that's still making life too difficult, because there are more stop words to dismiss. I've highlighted the next batch in red: τίς, δέ, αὐτός, εἰμί, who?, but, he/himself, be. Of these, τίς "who?" is inflated through ambiguity with τις "someone"; because the lemmatisation is not disambiguated by context, a few word counts are more sizeable than they should be.

With those four out of the way, we have:

An improvement; you can see ἄνθρωπος now, and maybe even πατήρ "father" next to θεός "god". But we still can do better. We have eight more stop words that we don't really need to hear about: ἐγώ "I", ὡς "as, that", ὅς "who, that", τις "someone", οὐ "not", γάρ "because", ἐν "in", and οὗτος "this".

With them left out, we have:

Still better: you can make out ἔχις "viper" now, at the bottom left hand edge. Not that Greeks spent a lot of time talking about vipers; they just spent a lot of time using the verb ἔχει "has", which happens to be ambiguous with the dative of ἔχις. It's automated lemmatisation, this kind of thing can happen.

We have sixteen more stop words, and as you may have worked out, the easiest criterion is to bundle up all function words—prepositions, adverbs, conjunctions, interjections, pronouns. With some of the ambiguity inherent in the venture—is πᾶς "every" a pronoun or an adjective?—but we can keep slicing nonetheless:

And again:

We're not making as much of a difference now; but notice that the screen is being crowded out by verbs: λέγω "say" (and "pick", as a synonym that used to be the same verb—just like "count" and "recount" in English); γίγνομαι "become", ἔχω "have". These are verbs, and are properly considered content words. But I already got rid of εἰμί "to be" (which as a copula is not a content word; and I'm happy to also throw out "have", "become" (close to a copula itself), and verbs for "say". (There is a lot of "he said she said" in the TLG, because there is a lot of narrative.)

If we get rid of those verbs?

And tidying up getting rid of the next hundred and fifty function words, which are a distraction as you squint for content:

You could argue there's still some guff there: ποιέω "do" doesn't tell you much more than ἔχω "have", and πολύς "much" doesn't really deserve its disproportionate size. But we have enough cleaned up that we can say now something about what the texts talk about. It's certainly a sight better than this:

So what do the TLG texts talk about? You may well be starting to come up with ideas if you can read Greek. But before you do, remember that there a whole lot of Christian texts in the TLG, and they quantitatively crowd the ancient texts out. The texts of John Chrysostom alone in the TLG are almost as sizeable as all surviving Ancient literature between Homer and Aristotle.

So yes, the TLG as a whole talks about God and logos a fair bit. But we'd expect that of John Chrysostom; it doesn't mean its what Plato or Homer talk about.

What'd be useful is to split up the corpus, say BC and AD, and see how they differ. Sounds like the next blog post to me...

Btw, I've been stamping out stop words, but stop words are of interest if you're looking at grammar; and Nikos Sarantakos did ask me to pony up the word counts that I was tossing out. So, for the TLG and the lemmatiser as of last night, these are the twenty five most frequent lemmata of Greek, with their textual frequency:

πᾶς	534,845	every
ἕ	547,255	he
ἀλλά	548,203	but
διά	561,813	for
ἐπί	566,238	on
πρός	566,476	towards
κατά	643,767	by
εἰς	694,035	to
τῷ	732,938	therefore (ambiguous with "to the")
μέν	762,890	on the one hand
ἐγώ	767,104	I
ὡς	771,416	as, that
ὅς	801,401	who, that
λέγω	811,330	say
τις	834,155	someone
οὐ	926,059	not
γάρ	951,810	because
ἐν	1,128,716	in
οὗτος	1,228,627	this
αὐτός	1,646,014	he, himself
εἰμί	1,704,651	be
δέ	2,265,028	but
τίς	2,624,172	who?
καί	5,765,491	and
ὁ	14,335,717	the

Of the lemmata we have not thrown out, θεός "god" is the 39th most frequent, with 388,933 instances.

In the previous post, I used Wordle to illustrate stop words in Greek (and, by the by, the exponential distribution of function words following Zipf's Law). After getting rid of a whole bunch of stop words, I ended up with a Wordle of the lemmata of the TLG:

But I stopped short of making sense of the Wordle, because the TLG contains both Ancient and Mediaeval texts, and they talk about different things. I promised Wordles of the texts in the TLG from BC and AD, which will give at least a rough sense of the difference.

So here they are:

Images created by the Wordle.net web application are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

The Wordle images are hyperlinked to the Wordle applets hosted there, so you can play with the applets by eliminating words. The stopwords are as before, but I also got rid of πολύς "much", which was crowding the BC texts a bit much.

A few things jump out quickly: there's a lot more God AD, as you'd expect (θεός), slightly more talk of "people" than of "men" (ἄνθρωπος, ἀνήρ), less talk of the City and more talk of power (πόλις, δύναμις).

But I'm not really a visual person, so I'm going to use more quantitative ways of working out the changes in vocabulary.

To begin with, the two Wordles show the 150 most frequent lemmata for each period, not counting stop words. These are the differences between the two—words in the top 150 of one period, but not the other.

Ancients talked more about...	and less about...
Ἕλλην, Ἀθηναῖος, Ζεύς, ἀμφότερος, διαφέρω, ἑκάτερος, ἐλάσσων, εἶμι, εὐ, ἤλιος, ἡγέομαι, ἱερός, κεῖμαι, κύκλος, ναῦς, νέος, νομίζω, ὀρθός, οἶκος, πλέως, πλεῖστος, πλῆθος, πόλεμος, πολέμιος, ποταμός, θάλασσα, θεά, σημεῖον, ταχύς, ὔστερος, χρῆμα, χώρα, ζῷον	Χριστός, ἅγιος, ἁπλόος, ἄξιος, ἀδελφός, ἀλήθεια, βασιλεία, δέχομαι, δηλόω, δόξα, ἐκκλησία, ἐνέργεια, εἶδος, φωνή, κίνησις, κόσμος, νόος, οἰκεῖος, οὐρανός, οὐσία, πάθος, πίστις, πνεῦμα, πρόσωπον, θάνατος, θεῖος, σάρξ, τέλος, τρίτος, χάρις, ζητέω, ζωή
Greek, Athenian, Zeus, both, to differ, either, less, go, good, sun, to lead, dawn, holy, to lie, circle, ship, new, to think, right, house, full, most, crowd, war, enemy, river, sea, goddess, point, fast, last, need, land, animal	Christ, holy, simple, worthy, brother, truth, kingdom, to accept, to declare, glory, church, activity, form, voice, movement, world, mind, own, heaven, substance, passion, faith, spirit, face, death, divine, flesh, end, third, grace, to ask, life

The effect of Christianity on vocabulary use is pretty obvious. A few other changes are worth noting:

• Byzantines nominalised a lot more than Ancients did. That's at last some of the reason for ἀλήθεια "truth" (instead of the more Attic τὸ ἀληθές "the true"), and it may relate to other nominalisations like κίνησις "movement" and ἐνέργεια "activity". (βασιλεία "kingdom" has a Biblical pedigree—but that is also because the Bible was not written in Attic.)
  
• Many of the differences are a matter of language change, rather than different ideology. For all that most Byzantines did not write in the vernacular, their language was usually more akin to Koine than to Attic. That explains the absence of εἶμι, εὐ, ναῦς, πλέως, ἐλάσσων, ἱερός, πολέμιος (replaced by στέλλω, καλός, πλοῖον, πλήρης, μικρότερος/ὀλιγότερος, ἄγιος, ἐχθρός) "send, good, ship, full, less, holy, enemy", and presumably also the avoidance of ἀμφότερος and ἑκάτερος "both, either".

I've left out from those lists words that show up in the top 150 only because they're ambiguous with other legitimate words. (Yes, I should have pruned the Wordles.)

• BC: δίκαιον, δοκεύς, ἠώς, θέα: rights, beam, dawn, view
  
• AD: ἅγιον, βασίλειος, ἴδιον, κενόω, πρόσωπος, ζωός: sanctuary, royal, particularity, make void, face, alive

There's one further comparison I'll attempt: the words whose frequency changed the most between the two periods. To track this, I'm going to use the 2000 most frequent lemmata for each period—including both normal words and stop words; that constraint means we're only looking at words that are likely to matter. I'll go through the lemmata in those lists whose ranking changed by the greatest amount (e.g. from #1537 to #10342).

Because it's a pretty heterogeneous list—and different kinds of words tells us different things, I'll split them up into categories. (And I will do some silent suppressing of ill-recognised ambiguous words.)

These are the biggest shifts in proper names:

Ancients talked more about...		Rank Shift
Ἔφορος	Ephorus	-8530
Ποσειδώνιος	Posidonus	-8397
Πελοποννήσιος	Peloponnesian	-6655
Αἰτωλός	Aetolian	-5399
Ἑκαταῖος	Hecataeus	-5157
Θεόπομπος	Theopomus	-5046
Ἀπολλόδωρος	Apollodorus	-4948
Φωκεύς	Phocian	-4786
Τυρρηνικός	Tyrrhenian	-4587
Χρύσιππος	Chrysippus	-4043

Two things are going on here. First, some ancient authorities—primarily historians, if I read the names right—were of interest to several ancient writers, but of less interest to the Byzantines. They tend to be the historians whose texts didn't survive, which is related to them being of less interest to the Byzantines. (I don't know offhand whether that's cause or effect.)

Second, Greece was very important to Ancient Greeks, and so were the various regions of Greece. To the Byzantines though, Greece was a backwater, and the old regions did not survive into the Byzantine system of themes. So there was no reason to talk about Aetolia or Phocia outside of Ancient History; and less reason to talk about the Peloponnese than you might think, even while the name survived. The same goes for Tyrrhenians: it wasn't Etruscans that the Byzantines were having to deal with in Italy, but Lombards.

Ancients talked less about...		Rank Shift
Κύριλλος	Cyril	+214,509
Κωνσταντινούπολις	Constantinople	+214,399
Γρηγόριος	Gregory	+214,391
Ἀθανάσιος	Athanasius	+214,154
Γεώργιος	George	+85,856
Κωνσταντῖνος	Constantine	+47,064
Πέτρος	Peter	+40,947
Χριστιανός	Christian	+36,162
Βασίλειος	Basil	+28,217
Χριστός	Christ	+23,988

The only surprise is that Christians turn in BC texts at all; there's only 5 instances though, and the dating of texts in the corpus is porous (late citations can appear as testimonia of earlier authors).

These are the biggest shifts in common nominals:

Ancients talked more about...		Rank Shift
εὔδοξος	reputable	-8805
κύλινδρος	cylinder	-6569
ἀσύμμετρος	asymmetrical	-5939
δημοκρατία	democracy	-5389
πυραμίς	pyramid	-4714
ναυμαχία	sea battle	-4274
κῶνος	cone	-4205
παραλληλόγραμμος	parallelogram	-3837
παρεμβολή	interpolation; encampment	-3668
ψήφισμα	decree passed by vote	-3194

If the AD texts have more theology, they clearly have a lot less geometry, and a lot less to do with representational systems of government. The drop in εὔδοξος is surprising, given it's in Plato; I wonder if the change of -δοξ- in compound from "reputations" to "glory" made the adjective confusing for later writers.

Ancients talked less about...		Rank Shift
ἀποστολικός	apostolic	+214,282
θεοτόκος	God-bearing (Theotokos)	+85,966
βάπτισμα	baptism	+85,945
θεότης	divinity	+59,016
μόδιος	bushel	+58,616
μοναστήριον	monastery	+57,696
σεβάσμιος	reverend	+57,691
αἱρετικός	heretic	+35,602
χάρισμα	(spiritual) gift	+35,588
πατριάρχης	patriarch	+27,001

No surprises again; the only non-religious term is μόδιος "bushel", both as a vessel and a measure.

These are the biggest shifts in verbs:

Ancients talked more about...		Rank Shift
διαπορεύω	pass across	-5939
βλώσκω	go	-5710
εἰσοράω	look upon	-4134
ἄημι	blow (wind)	-4113
κλύω	hear	-3392
ἐπιζεύγνυμι	join to	-3039
ἀμφισβητέω	doubt	-2436
ἐφάπτω	hang on	-2122
ἱκνέομαι	come	-2088
μεταπέμπω	send for	-1974

Many of the missing verbs are poetic and/or dialectal, and would not have a natural place in Byzantine prose; that includes βλώσκω, εἰσοράω, ἄημι, κλύω, ἱκνέομαι. The surprise here is the vanishing of doubt in the Middle Ages.

... Yes, yes, the jokes just write themselves, I know...

Ancients talked less about...		Rank Shift
ἐνάγω	persuade	+10,366
βαπτίζω	baptise	+8529
ψάλλω	chant	+5021
φανερόω	reveal	+3988
καταδικάζω	condemn	+3483
φωτίζω	illuminate	+3308
περισπάω	take a circumflex	+2948
βαστάζω	carry	+2911
ἀνέρχομαι	go up	+2809
προλαμβάνω	anticipate	+2769

I admit to being less sure about some the shifts here, such as ἐνάγω and προλαμβάνω. The Christian influence is clear in βαπτίζω, ψάλλω, φανερόω and φωτίζω. Language change accounts for βαστάζω and ἀνέρχομαι replacing φέρω and ἄνειμι, and I assume καταδικάζω for "condemn" replaced what came to look like more generic verbs, in καθαιρέω or καταγιγνώσκω. And unlike the Ancients, the Byzantines had to learn about polytonic orthography; so what word took a circumflex and what word took an acute was a matter much ink was spilled about.

Finally, these are the biggest shifts in function words:

Ancients talked more about...		Rank Shift
τοτέ	at times	-5796
αὖτε	again	-4707
δισχίλιοι	two thousand	-4676
αἴ	alas	-3334
πεντακόσιοι	five hundred	-2859
ἠέ	or	-2844
νή	[I swear] by [deity]	-2663
διακόσιοι	two hundred	-2597
μά	yea	-2470
πω	yet, at all	-2466

There is some Epic dialect here, in αὖτε and ἠέ; some strictly Attic rather than Koine words in τοτέ, πω, and δισχίλιοι; and a rather different approach to exclamations, with the old oaths by the Gods dispensed with, and the ai!'s of tragedy avoided in theological discourse. (There are 2100 instances AD of φεῦ "alas"; maybe αἴ was too specific to tragedy? *shrug*) Not sure why the written-out 500 and 200 were less popular. Maybe the armies just got bigger, so historians talked in the thousands instead of 300...

Ancients talked less about...		Rank Shift
ἀμήν	amen	+19,195
νά	to (Modern Greek)	+18,984
ἀλλαχοῦ	elsewhere	+7689
δηλαδή	that is	+7587
ἤγουν	that is	+6367
ιζ΄	XVII	+4541
καθό	insofar as	+4524
ιϛʹ	XVI	+4001
ιηʹ	XVIII	+3727
ιδʹ	XIV	+3196

It's obvious why amen is there; it's also obvious why να, the Modern Greek equivalent of the ancient infinitive inflection, is there. ἀλλαχοῦ for "elsewhere" is attested in Sophocles and Xenophon, but it became prevalent much later, and LSJ reports that Moeris proscribed it as vernacular, in favour of ἄλλοθι. The other conjunctions are run-in phrases, which Byzantine texts in general are rather more sympathetic to treating as single words than are ancient texts: δῆλα δή "so [they are] obvious", ἤ γε οὖν "or indeed then", καθ’ ὅ "according to what".

Finally, the numerals aren't there because the Byzantines were more numerate than the Ancients. After all, the Byzantines had given up on geometry, from what the counts tell us. (And that's a silly enough thing to conclude that you should not take much of this too seriously.) No, the reason there's a whole lot of XVII's and XIV's in the AD corpus is that there are a lot more chapter headings in the theologians...

I thank my esteemed commenters on the last post, and have a post-length response to them, concerning:

• The Complaint of the Anonymous Naupliot
  
• The Byzantinicity of the Greek insulting gesture of the moutza
  
• The controversy over the etymology of μουνί "cunt"
  
• The curious editorial fate of Tzetzes' Theogony

... Ah yes. There is a Language Advisory on this post.

The Complaint of the Anonymous Naupliot

Nauplion: Ever onward. You should add this one:
http://angiolello.net/Anonymous.html

The Complaint of the Anonymous Naupliot is not currently in the pipeline to my knowledge, but it's a fascinating text, and I commend to everyone else your post on it.

The Byzantinicity of the Greek insulting gesture of the moutza

Peter: If I'm not mistaken, the μούντζα gesture, not the name itself, goes all the way back to classical times: Greek Sicily.

Hadn't heard that. Everything's possible, but does the source make it clear it's the same gesture?

The Greek insulting gesture of the moutza, involving the spread palm directed at the target (or at oneself, in a Greek equivalent of the facepalm), is traditionally derived as cognate to μουτζούρα "smudge", and referring to pillorying criminals by smearing ash (or worse) on them.

I did find a blog saying someone's written the gesture is Ancient and represents the rays of Helios, which is uh, yeah. The blogger doubts the gesture is Byzantine, because if it was, wouldn't it be attested outside Greece. Well,

1. who said the gesture was use throughout the Empire,
2. who said every part of the (increasingly shrinking) empire has had cultural continuity to this day—especially with the massive population movements since the Goths first came for a visit,
3. who said the gesture isn't used outside Greece? Oh, you mean Nigeria wasn't part of the Byzantine Empire? Damn...

(I have to wonder though: has anyone checked in Albania? Or, given Pierre's comment, the Roma?—these phenomena don't come to a halt at borders finalised in 1912, after all.)

The blogger also disputes that the moutza originated in pillorying, because the Dodecanesian "moutzes and ash on you" is a major curse, and pillorying was meted out for minor infractions.

• It wasn't limited to minor infractions, as this extensive excerpt from Koukoules' encyclopaedia of Byzantine realia shows: it included adultery, theft, and rebellion; and it could be combined with blinding.
• She's underestimating the potency of shame culture.
• If the moutza combined with ash isn't about pillorying, I can't see what else it's about.

The controversy over the etymology of μουνί "cunt"

Pierre: In reference to your last remark, is μουνίν related to the gypsy gesture, the μούντζα? I have always believed with Colin Edmonson that it probably is. (The gesture has power. There is a wonderful story of Eugene Vanderpool, exasperated by a pestilential taxi driver while trying to give an introduction to the "white tower" on the Elusis road. He finally gave the driver all ten, and the taxi ran , not fatally, into a power pole.)

I'd have thought, as much as anything, the taxi driver was astonished that the Frank knew the local gestures: not just the moutza, but the double moutza, at that.

Relate μουνίν to moutza? I don't see it: I don't know where the /dz/ would come from, and the semantics doesn't fit either.

I've seen an obscure Hesychian lemma proposed for μουνί "cunt" (was it Korais?), and Venetian. The etymologies I'm finding in the dictionaries are far-fetched enough to show why scholars have been confused. Not that they're wrong necessarily, they're just not obvious.

Triantafyllidis dictionary: Ancient εὐνή "bed, wedding bed" > Hellenistic diminutive *εὐνίον > Mediaeval *βνίον > *μνίον (cf. εὐνοῦχος > μουνοῦχος "eunuch, gelding", ἐλαύνω > λάμνω "arrive") > *μουνίον (cf. *μνοῦχος > μουνοῦχος)

Hm. I mean, the developments proposed all could have actually happened in Greek: /evnion/ as a diminutive, /vnion/ with deletion of initial vowel, /mnion/ with assimilation, /munion/ with epenthesis. But /mnuxos/ > /munuxos/ is surely repeating the /u/ already there for its epenthesis, and the only mn- word I know survived into the modern vernacular, μνημόρι "memorial stone", didn't go to *μουνιμόρι. (Although given what μουνί means, it couldn't.) I'm not sure /u/ is a regular epenthetic vowel in Greek, but to be honest I can't think of epenthetic vowels in Greek right now.

The semantics seems stretched too. The word εὐνή seems to have been poetic, particularly in any marital connotation; I'd be very surprised if it survived alongside κοίτη. Modern Greek does admittedly use καριόλα "orig. wooden bed" (Italian carriola) to mean "whore": it's a straightforward metonymy, although the carriola was originally a cradle.

(So the Greek dictionary tells me; carriola in Italian now seems to mean "wheelbarrow"... Oh, I see, it was both: "The characteristics of a carriola were that it was a small bed and that it had wheels; this made it easy for a servant or young person to push it under the great bed occupied by the owner of the bedchamber". Thornton, Peter. 1991 The Italian Renaissance interior, 1400-1600. H.N. Abrams. p. 153.)

But the further claimed step of *εὐνίον from "bed" to "cunt"... well, I dunno, anything's possible.

The Triantafyllidis institute isn't convinced by its derivation from "wedding bed" either, because they suggest another derivation:

Ancient μνοῦς "soft feather, down" > Hellenistic diminutive *μνίον > Mediaeval *μουνίον (as in the previous hypothesis) > Mediaeval μουνίν

At least that's slightly more plausible semantically than "little bed", although the attested dimunutive (in the Latin-Greek glossaries) is μνούδιον—and, um, "fine, soft down, as on young birds"? Oooo-kay...

But then, it's all blown skyhigh by the third option:

(But also cf. Venetian mona, same meaning)

As long as we can get a Romance etymology for mona, we can dispense with the epenthetic acrobatics... Except that Tzetzes is a bit early for Venetian loanwords.

Looking at Andriotis' Etymological Dictionary, it turns out all three proposals are pedigree. The "bed" derivation is from Georgios Hatzidakis, the founder of Modern Greek linguistics (though not infallible). The "down" is from Menos Filintas, a good etymologist who hasn't gotten enough attention (although you'll see him very often in Andriotis.)

The Venetian etymology? Gustav Meyer. The contemporary of Hatzidakis who performed an even more valuable service. Thanks to Hatzidakis, we know the rules which derived Modern Greek words from Ancient. Thanks to Meyer, we know that there are words in Modern Greek from other languages. :-) (Meyer did the pioneering work in identifying Albanian, Aromanian and Venetian loanwords in Greek.)

If Tzetzes is early enough to disprove Venetian influence (not a given), and if the Hunger manuscript is preserving Modern Greek as written from Tzetzes, and not the scribe's ad lib on an earlier, cleaner, and more accurate rendering of the Ossetian (which is also not a given)... then I'll go with "down" over "little bed".

Babiniotis' dictionary has another couple of guesses:

• "*μνίον derived from Ancient βινεῖν 'to fuck'". There are other instances of ancient infinitives turned into modern nouns—φαγεῖν "to eat" > φαΐ "food", φιλεῖν "to love" > φιλί "kiss". And the verb did stick around until the Magical Papyri and Philogelos—the latter dated 4th century AD. But unlike the mn- guesses, there's no obvious reason for /vinin/ to go to /vnin/ > /munin/.
  
• "mona may be derived from Greek βυνῶ "to fill" (cf. βυζαίνω), in which case it would be a Rückwanderer [loanword reborrowed into source language]". That "Rückwanderer" (αντιδάνειο) is not an innocent comment: it's vengeance against Meyer. And ultimately it's not that important: if the word came into the language that way, then as far as everyone was concerned, it was Venetian.
  I'd defer to an Italianist on the plausibility of the derivation, but while βυνέω ~ βύω has useful semantics ("to stuff, to plug"), the βυνέω variant occurs only once in Greek literature, in Aristophanes Peace 645, in a decidedly non-sexual context: "sealed their lips with gold". It looks like a pretty far-fetched way to account for a Venetian vulgarity to me—far-fetched enough I'm happy to blame an Italian scholar who doesn't actually know Ancient Greek. If we're going to look for Venetian etymologies that way, βινεῖν is far likelier than βυνεῖν.
  
• Babiniotis' dictionary also repeats Hatzidakis' and Filintas' derivations; my memory of Hesychius as an etymology must be his entry μνοιόν "soft", used here to support *μνίον "soft down". God alone knows what Hesychius was referring to with μνοιόν, but I haven't changed my mind: Venetian (ultimate origin unknown) is the most plausible etymology, then "down", then maybe "to fuck".

OK, that's enough four-letter words for one post.

The curious editorial fate of Tzetzes' Theogony

Nikos Sarantakos: Curiously, the TLG text of Theogony does not contain the Ossetian verses -the showing off is cut (abruptly?) after the Latin verses, with a note that "there were many more verses in various dialects but I omitted them as useless"

Yes; I had to do some digging to work out what happened.

• Tzetzes wrote an epilogue to the Theogony, showing off his command of exotic languages.
  
• One scribe got as far as Scythian (Turkish), Persian and Latin, before deciding "screw this, I'm copying a lineage of Gods here, I don't care about Tzetzes' job application to Berlitz". And left the note Nikos cited.
  
• That scribe's copy is what Bekker published in 1840.
  
• Other scribes had the same reaction: "We have left the entire epilogue unwritten because it just went on too long (διὰ τὴν πολυλογίαν)"
  
• Fortunately for Caucasian linguistics, Herbert Hunger discovered another copy of the Theogony, with the epilogue intact. He published the epilogue in: Hunger, H. 1953. Zum Epilog der Theogonie des Johannes Tzetzes. Byzantinische. Zeitschrift 46, 302-7
  
• Thanks to Ronald Kim for putting a googleable draft of his paper online, to allow me to discover this. The final paper is Kim, R. 2003. "On the Historical Phonology of Ossetic: The Origin of the Oblique Case Suffix." Journal of the American Oriental Society 123: 43-72. The online draft is Kim, R. 1999. "The origin of the Pre-Ossetic oblique case suffix and its implications". U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 6.1.

I'll pick up the Hunger edition when I'm next in the library (it's passé in most circles to physically walk to consult a journal article, but Melbourne University has no motivation to fork out for a subscription of the electronic version). But this is how the epilogue starts, before the scribe fell asleep:

And you'll find me a Scythian to the Scythians, a Latin to the Latins,
and to all other nations, as if I'm of the same race.
And embracing a Scythian, I shall address him thus:
[Good day to you, my mistress; good day to you, my lord]
salá malék altí salá malék
And Persians, I shall address in Persian thus:
[Good day to you, my brother; where are you going? Where are you from, friend?]
asaŋxáis karúparza. xatázar xarantási
And A Latin I shall address in the Latin tongue:
[Welcome, my lord, welcome, brother]
véne venésti, ðómine; véne venésti, fráter.
kómoðo, fráter, venésti in ístan tsivitátem?
[And there were many other verses of sundry dialects, but I omitted them as useless.]

Language Hat has a translation of the entire epilogue up. Which is hardly a surprise. (The "Scythian" is slightly different in that version.)

The TLG has just released a new update to its corpus. As of tonight, the automatic recognition of lemmata in the TLG which I've been working on has just reached 95% of all wordforms. With these two milestones, I'll be posting a few things about the current corpus; I've already put up some Wordles, as you will have seen.

First, about the new texts.

• Early Modern Greek is well represented in the update. Readers of this blog will have noticed as much, because I've spent some time dealing with the peculiarities of those texts. Romances are the genre that attracts the most scholarly interest—they make the most sense as literature to contemporary readers. Accordingly, this update includes redaction α of Livistros and Rodamni as recently published by Panagiotis Agapitos of U Cyprus (who also writes Byzantine detective novels); the War of Troy (on which I've already posted); and the four redactions of the Tale of Belisarius.
  
• Jumping forward a couple of centuries, the update also includes Cretan Renaissance drama: George Chortatzes' tragedy Erophile, and the intermedios from Erophile, retelling Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered.
  1595 isn't the latest date of TLG texts; the Chapbook of Alexander the Great (h/t Diver of Sinks) was published in 1750, and while the collections of monastic documents are normally late Byzantine and Ottoman, one collection goes up to 1968. But Chortatzes is the first representative of Cretan dialect, and I was quite happy to tweak the lemmatiser to accomodate it.
  I'll pause to note something which shouldn't be an oddity, but is. Chortatzes writes his stage directions in the same Cretan dialect as his dialogue. Of course he would; our stage directions are in the same language as the rest of the text. But now that there is a Standard Greek, and Cretan isn't it, that comes across as quizzical. If anyone now writes drama in dialect (not Cretan, but possibly Pontic, and certainly Cypriot), the metalanguage of the drama is going to be Standard Greek.
  That's because the metalanguage is the dramatist's own voice; and while hillbilly dialect might be good enough for the dramatists' characters, it will not do for their own directions. I'd imagine it's the same for other Dachsprache languages (language variants under the "roof" of a prestige language), like say German or Italian dialect.
  
• A few texts are recent re-editions. Moeris' Atticist dictionary has been updated. By telling us which colloquial forms not to use, Moeris and the other Atticists (Phrynichus is the main one) tell us a lot about what their colloquial language actually looked like.
  There is also a new edition of Cyril of Alexandria's Paschal Letters, and Eudocia's Homeric Centos. The centos are rearrangements of verses from an old poem, to tell a new story—in this case, Homer rearranged into an account of the Passion of Christ. This sounds like a very postmodern thing to do. But then again, there's nothing new in postmodernism, apart from its bankruptcy of an intellectual programme, as it magpies any flotsam that gets it out of having to tell a story.
  Not that you need to hear about my cultural conservatism.
  
• The TLG also has an updated edition of the fragments of John of Antioch. There has been a controversy about whether the fragments attributed to John belong to one or two authors (there are two different linguistic registers in what we have); as a result, we're in the odd situation by Classical standards of having two new editions of the author, within three years, from the same publisher: Roberto 2005 and Mariev 2008. (The Bryn Mawr Classical Review gives context in its review of Mariev.) The TLG has gone with Roberto, which considers both registers to belong to the same author; that has the added advantage of not throwing half the fragments out of the corpus.
  
• In gathering up bits left out from Middle Byzantine authors, the update also includes Michael Psellus' commentary on Aristotle's Physics, and Constantine Manasses' Moral Poem.
  
• Finally, the update includes the irascible John Tzetzes' retelling of the Theogony.
  We already have the original Theogony from Hesiod; so Tzetzes' retelling might have some interest for cultural history, but is not telling us much we don't already know. Tzetzes' retelling has attracted attention for different reasons. Tzetzes was Georgian on his mother's side; and he sees fit to show off his command of foreign languages, in the epilogue to his poem. That makes his Theogony the earliest attestation of Ossetian. (And in his loose Greek translation, as linked, it may well be one of the first attestations of Greek μουνίν: er, "pudendum muliebre".)

The British School at Rome’s celebrated ‘South Etruria Survey’, conducted by the School in the 1950s to the 1970s was partly in response to the rebuilding of Italy in the wake of World War II. As a research assistant on the BSR’s Tiber Valley Project in the late 1990s, I was helping to re-evaluate the SES. We would examine the original files & maps, unpack the original finds crates, and enter all of it into a GIS. The results from the restudy are still coming out.

How I wish we’d had something like Google Earth! Google has just added imagery from World War II to Google Earth. We did have access to the original military maps of the region, and aerial photographs, but what I love about Google’s implementation is the sliding ‘clock’ bar. Watch how a zone has changed over time… So the connection with the SES – some of the Google material overlaps the study region; hopefully more is to come…

French internetter Albocicade has been busy at Archive.org, uploading material of considerable value.  You can see his efforts here.

Among the jewels is an index to a French translation of the 19th century of the complete works of Chrysostom.  We don’t possess a complete Chrysostom in English, so it is something to know that Bareille’s exists.  And Albocicade has uploaded it!

There is also a French translation of the Demonstration of the Faith by the early Arabic Christian writer Abu Qurra, plus a file compiled from Migne of all the Greek works of this author.

And not least, an abbreviated French translation of Nicephorus Callistus, translated in 1676.

Thanks for CH for sending along this video that ties together a couple of my primary interests: archaeology and social networking. While the fieldwork described in the Onion New Network piece might not be as glamourous or exciting as that conducted in the Mediterranean or the southwest US, it’s a lot less dirty and smelly… Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins Of ‘Friendster’ Civilization Now you know what happened to Friendster.

Arqueología Suramericana/Arqueologia Sul-Americana

South America is an active region in the production of archaeological knowledge and in the formulation of alternative approaches to the past, both from a disciplinary and a contextual point of view. Yet, there was no written medium to disseminate the cultural production of the sub-continent related to the discourses on the past based on objects. That is the reason behind the collective work of South American archaeologists for the creation of a new journal, Arqueología Suramericana/Arqueologia Sul-Americana, published by the Department of Anthropology, Universidad del Cauca (Colombia) and the Ph.D. Program on Social Sciences of the School of Humanities of the Universidad Nacional de Catamarca (Argentina), with the support of the World Archaeological Congress. According to WAC purposes, the journal aims to promote and spread the production of archaeology and related disciplines in South America, emphasizing a critical perspective that allows a dialogue with representations about the past that have been traditionally marginalized from academic spaces. The journal hopes to create bridges of understanding, communication, and discussion between the two large South American worlds, Brazil and the Spanish-speaking countries, which have consistently ignored each other for so long. It is sad that the barrier of two similar languages have split the sub-continent in such a way, especially because South American countries share similar problems and possibilities that can be tackled with collective enterprises, such as this one, that strive go beyond the borders erected by the deliberate ignorance of the others. Arqueología Suramericana/Arqueologia Sul-Americana is an international, peer reviewed journal published twice a year (January and July). The journal publishes papers on archaeology or related disciplines discussing issues whose geographical or geopolitical locus is South America . Contributions can be sent to the following account: mailto:mailto:arqueologiasuramericana@yahoo.com. Subscriptions can also be solicited by writing to that account.

Volume 1, Number 1
Volume 1, Number 2
Volume 2, Number 1
Volume 2, Number 2
Volume 3, Number 1
Volume 3, Number 2
Volume 4, Number 1
Volume 4, Number 2
Volume 5, Number 1

See the full List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies.

Some odds and ends on a snowy Friday.

• Ryan Stander, who is rapidly becoming the star of this blog, has some photos showing with this project here.
• I've been thinking about the recent vogue in photographing abandoned buildings. Kostis posted on it this past week, he linked to an article by Camio Jose Vergara, and I've been mesmerized by the photographs of James D. Griffioen. I wonder what this all means...
• A thoughtful review of PBS's Digital Nation by Henry Jenkins that offers some interesting observations on writing in our digital age.
• I'm not a huge fan of the 20-20 format in Cricket, but this must have been an exciting game, and it's great to see Shaun Tait be successful again.
• My public history intern's blog, The Muses' Web is so far pretty successful.
• Some fun articles came across my desk this week: from Ottoman cemeteries to digital Catalhoyuk (via Shawn Graham)
• For those interested in seeing me in the flesh: February 24, 2010 - I'm giving the Elwyn B. Robinson lecture at the Chester Fritz Library on campus at the University of North Dakota; the talk is "Digital Archaeology: Technology in the Trenches". On April 29, 2010, I am going to give one of the Faculty Lecture Series Lectures, probably at the North Dakota Museum of Art, paper title tbd.
• So this kid is going to put Bear, Delaware on the map. Sweet.

I am ready for the weekend! Enjoy the big game and the unofficial start of NASCAR season.

I’m still looking for Eznik Petrosyan’s book on Armenian bible commentaries. I have now found somewhere online where this item is available.  My interest is in catenas, of course.  The book is published by the Armenian Bible Society, who have a website.  It’s here.

Bibliography of Armenian Biblical Commentaries
( Bishop Yeznik Petrossian & Armen Ter-Stepanian )

Code  BIBLIOGRAPHY | ISBN  9993052841 | Pages   129 | Format  300 X 210 X 13 | Language  Armenian Eastern | Weight (kg)  0.600 | Publisher  The Bible Society of Armenia | Published  2002 |

Compiled by Bishop Yeznik Petrossian (Holy Etchmiadzin) and Armen Ter-Stepanian (Matenadaran). This volume represents many years of tireless effort to unearth details of Biblical commentaries authored by Armenian scholars.

The price is “5.000″ AMD.  This is the Armenian Dram, the currency of Armenia.  I think we would say 5,000AMD, which is about $13. 

But … there seems no way to place an order for a copy!  How very, very weird.  So I have sent them an email.

Multidisciplinary and Discipline-Specific Collections at JSTOR
The following journals have been added to the JSTOR archive. More detailed information about titles and collections, along with delimited lists, can be accessed from JSTOR's Available Collections page.

International Journal of the Classical Tradition (Arts & Sciences VIII)

Release Content: Vol. 1, No. 1 (Summer, 1994) – Vol. 13, No. 2 (Fall, 2006)
Moving Wall: 3 years
Publisher: Springer
ISSN: 1073-0508
Journal Description: The first journal exclusively dedicated to the reception of Greek and Roman antiquity by other cultures, from the ancient world to the present time, International Journal of Classical Tradition's primary focus is on the creative use of the ancient Greco-Roman heritage in a broad range of scholarly endeavors. Articles are published in five languages. The journal includes articles, short notes, research reports, review articles, and news of the field. The official journal of the International Society for the Classical Tradition.

Materiali e discussioni per l'analisi dei testi classici (Arts & Sciences VIII)

Release Content: Nos. 1-53 (1978-2004)
Moving Wall: 5 years
Publisher: Fabrizio Serra editore
ISSN: 0392-6338
Journal Description: The journal, MD has contributed enormously to the methodological renewal of classical philology studies, reviving and renewing the most effective and respected techniques of the last two centuries, from traditional philology to contemporary hermeneutics. MD first came out in 1978, at the initiative of a team of young Italian Classical scholars. The most signal among them were the Latinists Gian Biagio Conte and Alessandro Barchiesi, and the anthropologist Maurizio Bettini. The Board soon became International, attracting especially what were then avanguard scholars engaged in bringing poststructuralist literary criticism to the study of Classical texts. Today MD typically includes studies of literary criticism alongside shorter notes and studies of the textual transmission of the Classics. Each issue numbers between 200 and 220 pages, and the total number of pages so far has reached 15,000 pages.

Moving Wall Reduction
The moving wall for the following title has been reduced from 5 years to 3 years at the request of the publisher.

The Annual of the British School at Athens (Arts & Sciences V)

Release Content: Vols. 100-101 (2005-2006)
Moving Wall: 3 years
Publisher: The British School at Athens
ISSN: 0068-2454

Previously Missing Issues
The following previously missing issues have been added to the JSTOR archive.

Classics Ireland (Ireland)

Release Content: Vol. 9 (2002)
Moving Wall: 3 years
Publisher: Classical Association of Ireland
ISSN: 0791-9417

Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society (Ireland)

Release Content: Vol. 12, No. 3/4 (1924/1925);
Vol. 54 (2002)
Moving Wall: 4 years
Publisher: Galway Archaeological & Historical Society
ISSN: 0332-415X

Speculum (Arts & Sciences I; Language & Literature)

Release Content: Vol. 49, Index (1974)
Moving Wall: 5 years
Publisher: The Medieval Academy of America
ISSN: 0038-7134

The Ancient World in JSTOR: AWOL's full list of journals in JSTOR with substantial representation of the Ancient World.

The Digital Classicist will once more be running a series of seminars at the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, with support from the British Library, in Summer 2010 on the subject of research into the ancient world that has an innovative digital component. We are especially interested in work that demonstrates interdisciplinarity or work on the intersections between Ancient History, Classics or Archaeology and a digital, technical or practice-based discipline.

The Digital Classicist seminars run on Friday afternoons from June to August in Senate House, London. In previous years collected papers from the DC WiP seminars have been published* in a special issue of an online journal (2006), edited as a printed volume (2007), and released as audio podcasts (2008-9); we anticipate similar publication opportunities for future series. A small budget is available to help with travel costs.

Please send a 300-500 word abstract to gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk by
March 31st 2010. We shall announce the full programme in April.

Regards,

The organizers
Gabriel Bodard, King's College London
Stuart Dunn, King's College London
Juan Garcés, Greek Manuscripts Department, British Library
Simon Mahony, University College London
Melissa Terras, University College London

* See http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/4/ (2006), http://www.gowerpublishing.com/default.aspx?page=637&calctitle=1&pageSubject=1064&sort=pubdate&forthcoming=1&title_id=9797&edition_id=12252 (2007), http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/index.html (2008-9).

I’ve been putting together a workshop on social media for the Physics department here at Leicester. It’s two hours to cover Web 2.0, so to cover it all I’d have to work at the rate of 1.0 per hour. Instead I’ve opted to cover a small range of the most useful tools. delicious, Google Reader and blogging, which I’m using Posterous for. The more services you sign up for the more diffuse your presence, so I’m putting Friendfeed at the centre of the workshop to pull it all together.

The model I’m using is one I’ve stolen from Alan Cann which is that Friendfeed is Facebook for scientists. I know it’s not exactly, but it’s close enough as an introduction. In some ways it’s a Twitter substitute too. I’ve left Twitter out of the workshop, which I know is a big hole, but Twitter takes a couple of days to understand because it doesn’t make sense without the replies and interaction, while Friendfeed has more tools for sharing stuff. Friendfeed needs interaction too, but it is at least a bit easier to see the point of Friendfeed using the Facebook model. If you’re not really plugged into the idea of networks then Twitter looks like a dull and crippled rip-off of Facebook.

So while I’ve been putting this together I’ve also been thinking about how I use websites. Blogs are still the place for gathering longer ideas like this, and reflecting on them. They’re not so good for some other things. I find interesting things on the web and I want to share them. This is a problem, and it’s one that Brett Holman blogged on while I was putting this post together.

How do you put together links for a blog post? You could just put up the links and titles, but that doesn’t make for much of a post. You could blog on each one, but that’s a lot of work. In the past I’ve used things like delicious or ma.gnolia to compile posts from bookmarks. The problem with that is that you need a certain number of bookmarks in a post else almost every posts is Links for %date%. On the other hand if you store up links in groups of 10, then link 1 could be out-of-date by the time you have ten links to make a post. Blogging used to be the best way to share links, but now there are better ways. Brett Holman is using Twitter. I’m using Friendfeed, because the way it handles comments is easier and it can post to Twitter anyway; it’s not an either/or choice.

I don’t see it as blogging versus twittering as some people have either. You could see the move to put links onto Friendfeed as cutting back on blogging. I prefer to see it as freeing the blog from having to carry posts that don’t suit it. Friendfeed or Twitter is the perfect place for point to this photo of cute nuzzling cheetahs.

There are some problems with Friendfeed. People import their twitter streams, and that doesn’t usually work very well. Conversations appear out of context, but it’s an easy enough issue to solve. Friendfeed has a ‘hide’ button, and you can hide all entries from Twitter unless they get a ‘like’. You’re relying on other people to find the noteworthy tweets for you, but if you’re on Friendfeed you’re probably also on twitter too – so it’s no great loss.

Following that, I’ve made a slight change to the front of the blog, with the Friendfeed stream going to the front instead of the features gallery. If you want to follow me, then you can find my Friendfeed account at http://friendfeed.com/alun and if you tell what account you’re using I can follow you back.

I’ll be posting a link to the worksheets for the workshop once the class has started on Friendfeed.

Related Posts:

• Friendfeed: Tech Tuesday
• Meanwhile in the Lifestream today
• Linking like it’s 2005
• Teaching, Web2.0 and Teaching Web2.0
• RSS: Tech Tuesday
• Powered by Contextual Related Posts

My learned Armenian correspondant Seda Stamboltsyan has been looking in the electronic catalogue of the Matenadaran at Yerevan for us.  She reports at least one Armenian catena in the catalogue, which includes material by Eusebius.

Doing so was not entirely straightforward, as the search tool is somewhat cranky.  You have to get the exact word correct — searching for “euseb” will not bring up “eusebius”.  Since the endings will vary, depending on case, this is a little bit of a pain.  But typing “eusebi” (genitive case) gave 53 results; “eusebios” produced 14.  Among them was this entry:

667662
     Խմբագիր մեկնութիւն է. վկայութիւններ են բերուած հետեւեալ հեղինակներից՝ Կիւեղ Աղեկսանդրացի, Պիմեն, Սեւեռիտոս, Ներսէս, Յովհան Ոսկէբերան, Բարսեղ Կեսարացի, Իսիքիոս Երուսաղէմացի, Դիոնեսիոս Աղէկսանդրացի, Որոգինես, Թէոդորիտոն, Ապողինար Լաոդիկեցի, Եւսեբիոս Կեսարացի, Դիդիմոս, Ամոն, Տիմոթէոս, Աթանաս, Եփրեմ Ասորի։

Translated:

“[Manuscript number] 667662
This is a collective commentary [i.e. catena]. Testimonies are brought from the following authors: Cyril of Alexandria, Pimen, Severitos, Nerses, John Chrysostom, Basil of Caesarea, Hesychios of Jerusalem, Dionysius of Alexandria, Origen, Theodoriton, Apolinarius of Laodicea, Eusebius of Caesarea, Didimus, Amon, Timothy, Athanasius, Ephrem the Syrian.”

Clicking through gave more info.  Folios 1-235 are commentaries on the Catholic epistles, and the authors above are for this.  Plainly this is a catena.  There was also a bit of bibliography: “cf. Vienna N 48 (Tashian, Bibliography, 234-243). Also: PO, t43, N193.”  The shelfmark is Mashtots Matenadaran ms. N 1407. Date: 1596. The place where it was written is not mentioned. Scribe: Priest Pawłos (Paul).

Seda reminds us that not all the manuscripts in the Matenadaran have been catalogued to this level of detail yet.  Four volumes were published, and the electronic catalogue is based on these.  The fifth volume has just been published, but not yet incorporated into the online catalogue.  However there are about 17,000 mss. in the Matenadaran.  Each volume is around 500 mss, so there is a considerable distance still to go.

There is a brief catalogue of all the mss, but it doesn’t go to this level of detail.

PO 43 does indeed contain a publication of an Armenian catena on the Catholic epistles:

Volume 43. La chaîne arménienne sur les Épîtres catholiques. I, La chaîne sur l’Épître de Jacques / Charles Renoux…

So there is a publication with French translation in PO 43/1 (N193), Turnhout 1985; 44/2 (N198), 1987; 44/1-2 (205-206), 1994; 47/2 (N210), 1996.   I queried the manuscript numeral, as that didn’t look like a shelfmark to me.  (It’s probably the electronic catalogue’s database primary key!)

Seda Stamboltsyan tells me that she has been doing  translations from Classical Armenian into modern Armenian, also editing and proofreading texts in Armenian, preparing critical editions of Classical Armenian texts.  I think those of us that are illiterate, at least in Armenian, can be very grateful to her for her efforts!

This week I have actually been doing some real GIS work for a change, rather than going to meetings, writing bids, writing reports, fixing computer problems and showing other people how to do stuff. I think this is the first time in approx 2 years that I’ve done this, and I was pathetically excited about the prospect at the beginning of the week.

It has also been an opportunity for me to really put my money where my mouth is, regarding using open source GIS, since last time I did some real analysis it was with the Redlands offerings. So, I loaded up PostgreSQL and PostGIS, and Quantum GIS with the Grass plugin and Shapefile to PostGIS Import Tool (SPIT), and wrangled half a million polygons of historic landscape data into submission (ie merged, dissolved, reclassified, cut, pasted and cleaned).

I have a confession to make. It was easy! It was quick! I hardly had to go near the command line (with the exception of creating indices and merging tables in postgis).  OK, I had a few crashes (mainly python errors in windows) and I had to try a couple of different approaches to get my dissolves and merges to work, but I would expect that with any program dealing with large amounts of data.

I’ve been evangelising about open source GIS for a number of years now, but until now I’ve had to take other people’s word on the performance aspect. It’s always nice to get your own personal confirmation about something (albeit in a totally un-scientific, non benchmark sort of way), and even better, to have it exceed expectations.

So, to all you developers out there- thanks!

We are pleased to announce a new partnership between Baker Books and Logos Bible Software. In the next few weeks, we will begin to convert hundreds upon hundreds of Baker titles into our electronic format. This list includes brand new releases, commentary series, bestsellers, and top books from the field of biblical scholarship and theological study.

This is a major partnership, and one of the biggest agreements we’ve ever reached with a publisher. So big, in fact, that if you’ve ever requested a Baker title, it will more than likely appear on the Pre-Pub page in the coming weeks.

For years, Baker has published books and ministry resources for pastors and church leaders, concentrating on topics such as preaching, worship, pastoral ministries, counseling, and leadership. Their academic division publishes scholarly works in the field of biblical studies, history, theology, and more. The new partnership with Baker means that you’ll soon be able to add many of these books to your digital library.

The first books have already been posted on the Pre-Pub page, and this is only the beginning:

• Theology of the New Testament, by Udo Schnelle
• Scripture As Communication: Introducing Biblical Hermeneutics, by Jeannine K. Brown
• Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture: Second Corinthians, Thomas D. Stegman
• Encountering the Book of Psalms: A Literary and Theological Introduction, by C. Hassell Bullock
• Women in the World of the Earliest Christians, Lynn H. Cohick
• Paul: His Life and Teaching, John McRay
• Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church, James K. A. Smith

Here’s what you can do:

• Pre-order the books you’d like to add to your library! Just like other Pre-Pubs, we will begin converting the titles to our format once we have enough interest in the project. Place your pre-order to move each collection along.
• Support the project. By pre-ordering, you are also sending a message to Baker that you’re interested in seeing more of their books available in Logos.
• Stay on top of the titles. You can be the first to know when new Baker titles are posted by subscribing to the Pre-Pub feed. As soon as a new title is posted, you’ll see it right away in your RSS reader.
• Send your suggestions to suggest@logos.com for any Baker books you’d like to see. Although we can almost guarantee that your title will appear on Pre-Pub very soon, your feedback will help us prioritize our work and shape the direction of the partnership.

What are you waiting for? Head on over to the Pre-Pub page to check out the new books!

You should follow us on Twitter here.

Microsoft has made a deal with the NSF to offer free cloud computing services to scientists, says The New York Times. “The goal of the three-year project is to give scientists the computing power to cope with exploding amounts of research data. It uses Microsoft’s Windows Azure computing system, …” “[Those systems] allow organizations and individuals to run computing tasks and Internet services remotely in relatively low-cost data centers.” “Microsoft’s commitment to scientific computing comes two years after a similar service was introduced by Google and I.B.M. … hoping to differentiate the new service by offering scientists a set of custom applications that simplified access to Azure and use of existing software applications like Microsoft Excel easily.” “… the explosion of data being collected by scientists had transformed the needs of the typical scientific research program on campus from a half-time graduate student one day a week to a full-time employee dedicated to managing the data. He said this kind of exponential growth in cost was increasingly hampering scientific research.”

This post is just a brief notice that I have begun a test suite of xhtml+rdfa and related documents to facilitate my work on digital publication for ancient world scholarship. It's very much "pre-release" at this point so I'm putting the suite out there for the sake of sharing, not because it's useful in its current state.

Right now, there are a few files in a git repository at http://github.com/sfsheath/awdp-test/. To download, try http://github.com/sfsheath/awdp-test/archives/master.

As the files become more useful, I'll talk more about what I'm trying to achieve with this project.

I’m still trying to find out about Armenian catenas and biblical commentaries.

It seems that there are not many references to books in Armenian on the net. Apparently the Mesrop Mashtots Matenadaran, the Institute of Old Manuscripts, Yerevan (not the same as the Armenian National Library) has a new website. Unfortunately it is only in Armenian now. But you may see there many beautiful miniatures. One can search on that site in the bibliographies too, to find what is there in the Matenadaran collection (although presumably only if you know Armenian and can type Armenian text).

There is also a website of publications by the Gandzasar Theological Centre where my contact works and the Publishing House of Holy Etchmiadzin. She adds:

I’m still adding annotations in that section of the website and there are still many books that need to be added there. I think I’ll put there also that bibliography of biblical commentaries when I get it. So you’ll have more references for published Armenian texts. You may check our website from time to time to see the additions.  http://www.vem.am/en/topics/books-1/

The bibliography of biblical commentaries and catenas in Armenian is something we should all be interested in, and I will add more details as I find out more.

UPDATE: some commentaries in classical Armenian are available here and here.  There is also a critical edition of the classical Armenian translation of Gregory of Nyssa, On the making of man!

Over the last week, we’ve seen more thoughts and impression on the Apple tablet device published. One thing that I’ve been personally interested in is the information regarding some the accessories, as that resolves my own issues with USB and SD capabilities (more info on the tech specs page). And, Engadget has a guide published that they’ve been updating as they learn more. But I remain struck by the discourse concerning the product and the seeming unwillingness to see it as something other than what people expect to see. This isn’t a laptop. This TechCrunch article does a good job of representing the idea - and that may be the thing that folks are missing: This device isn’t really for technophiles. Its not a computer - its a media interaction unit. Brian Caulfield from Forbes has a short piece up based upon his short experiences working with the device - though any of us with an iPod Touch could likely extrapolate. And his closing line articulates what I’ve been saying for a year now, and why I’m interested in the device: “Make a PC really small and it kind of sucks. Make an iPod really big, however, and it’s kind of great.” So, I’ve decided I’m getting one, and I’ll post some substantial reviews once I work on it for a while.

A researcher from a Canadian film company wrote to me, saying they were doing a documentary on Constantine, would be in Rome and was there an original or an old copy of this work there, because they wanted to film it.  I went and looked in the GCS 7 volume online, and I thought I’d share the results.

The Mss of the “Vita Constantini” and the “Oratio ad sanctum coetum” are

1)

• V. — Vaticanus 149 [XI S.].
• R. — Vaticanus 396 [XVI S.].

IIa) 

• J. — Moscoviensis 50 [XI S.].

IIb):

• M. – Marcianus 339 [XII vel XIII S.].
• B.  — Parisinus 1432 [XIII S.].
• A.  — Parisinus 1437 [XIII vel XIV S.].

IIc):

• E. — Parisinus 1439 [XVI S.].
• D.  — Parisinus 414 [XVI S.].
• Sct. — Scorialensis T-I-7 [XVI S.].

IId)

• N. — Marcianus 340 [XIII S.).
• P. -- Palatinus 268 [XIII S.].
• G. — Parisinus 1438 [XV S.].
• Sav. — (only Vita books I-III) Savilianus [XV S.] = N + M.
• Scr. — Scorialensis R-II-4 [XVI S.] = C + ?

Mss. called “Parisinus” will be in the French National Library. Marcianus is a library in Venice.  Palatinus is a sub-collection in the Vatican library (books originally from the library in Heidelberg of the Rhineland Palatinate, and transferred to the Vatican as part of the settlement of the 30 Years War).  Scorialensis is the Escorial in Madrid.  Cantabrigiensis = Cambridge University Library in the UK. Ottobonianus is another Vatican sub-collection (made up of the books once owned by the long-dead Cardinal Ottoboni).

It’s not a bad collection, for an ancient Greek text.  Fourteen mss, one of the 11th century.  Apparently they all have gaps in, tho!

There is an interesting discussion on Savage Minds about journalism and cultural anthropology. The first post, "Why is there no anthropology journalism?" generated a lengthy series of comments, and the second post covered remarks by a science journalist, with good comments by one of the SM authors.

In archaeology, we have lots of play in the print media, with ready access to the public through journalists, Archaeology Magazine, websites, and the like. But this coverage tends to focus on spectacular new finds, and most coverage is far from the intellectual heart of archaeology. I think that the main intellectual research done by academic archaeologists is almost as poorly served in the media as is cultural anthropology.

If I were to find a royal tomb at Calixtlahuaca, the media will come running. But if I find, after a bunch of artifact analysis, that the Aztec Empire had a greater impact on households here than in other parts of the Empire, this would be a real yawner for most journalists. Now this finding could be made interesting and relevant for the media and public, but it would take creativity and effort on my part. I'd like to think I could and would do that, but then maybe my time is better spent analyzing some more data?

These are issues archaeologists should think about, and the posts and discussion on Savage Minds are very relevant. If you don't follow SM, you probably should!

I'm part of the JISC funded project LinkSphere at Reading University. They are building an online social media tool to do cross institutional repository searching, and facility research relationships. While the guys there are getting up to speed on programming the first demos, we set our research assistant, Claire Ross, a task: why not write up a paper on how people use social media. And why not do one on twitter. And why not study how Digital Humanities folks use it, within conference settings (thereby giving a nice corpus on which to base the study).

The results are here. A nice full, paper which has been submitted to a journal for consideration. Let us know if you have any comments!

Archaeologia Polona: Journal of Archaeology

Archaeologia Polona is a Polish archaeological journal edited and published in the English language annually by the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, intended for an international audience. Its main purpose is to present a wide range of various approaches to the most important problems of contemporary archaeology.

It was established in 1958 with intention to popularize Polish archaeology abroad by publishing translations of the most important papers which previously were published in Polish in journals edited by the Institute, mostly in "Archeologia Polski". Until 1990 the journal was published by the Ossolineum Publishing House.

Vols 1 (1958) - 40 (2002) available in full text, subsequent volumes in abstract.

See the full List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies.

February 11: Exhibition Lecture

Speaker: Peter Biehl
Location: 2nd Floor Lecture Hall
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
15 E 84th St.
New York, NY 10028
Date: Thursday, February 11
Time: 6:00 p.m.
*reception to follow

Deconstructing the Myth of the Great Mother Goddess: Masking and Breaking the Human Body in Old Europe

Dr. Biehl will provide an overview of how the people of Old Europe represented the human body in the form of anthropomorphic figurines made of clay, bone and marble in the 6th and 5th millennium BC and discuss how studying visual representations of the human body can aid us in understanding identity and personhood in the past. One of the main ...

Click here for permalink and full description

Call for Presentations

The Digital Classicist will once more be running a series of seminars at the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, with support from the British Library, in Summer 2010 on the subject of research into the ancient world that has an innovative digital component. We are especially interested in work that demonstrates interdisciplinarity or work on the intersections between Ancient History, Classics or Archaeology and a digital, technical or practice-based discipline.

The Digital Classicist seminars run on Friday afternoons from June to August in Senate House, London. In previous years collected papers from the DC WiP seminars have been published(*) in a special issue of an online journal (2006), edited as a printed volume (2007), and released as audio podcasts (2008-9); we anticipate similar publication opportunities for future series. A small budget is available to help with travel costs.

Please send a 300-500 word abstract to gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk by March 31st 2010. We shall announce the full programme in April.

Regards,

The organizers

Gabriel Bodard, King’s College London
Stuart Dunn, King’s College London
Juan Garcés, Greek Manuscripts Department, British Library
Simon Mahony, University College London
Melissa Terras, University College London

* See http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/4/ (2006), http://www.gowerpublishing.com/default.aspx?page=637&calctitle=1&pageSubject=1064&sort=pubdate&forthcoming=1&title_id=9797&edition_id=12252 (2007), http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/index.html (2008-9).

We are almost ready to release the online version of Ryan Stander's photo exhibition, Topos/Chora. For the last week, the exhibit has been up at the Empire Arts Center in Grand Forks, North Dakota where it will stay all February.

Here's the press release (comliments of our most excellent Office of University Relations):

The exhibit Topos/Chora: Photographs of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project is featured now through the end of the month at the Empire Arts Center. The exhibit features the photographs of UND Master’s of Fine Art student Ryan Stander. These images were produced during Stander’s time as the artist-in-residence at Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Project in Cyprus.

Since 2003, the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project has conducted archaeological fieldwork in the Republic of Cyprus under the direction of Bill Caraher of the UND Department of History. It is one of very few archaeological projects in the Mediterranean to support an artist-in-residence program, Caraher said.

Stander's photos seek to present the relationship between the archaeologist at work in the field and the physical and natural environment. Portraits, landscape views, and dynamic work images capture the intersection of physical energy, personality, and the striking archaeological and natural landscape of the Cypriot coastline.

Stander’s photos will be at the Empire Arts Center through the end of the month. The exhibit is free and open to the public and is open during Empire Arts Center events and by appointment. Check the Center’s Web site for a calender of this month’s events. An online exhibit supported by the Working Group in Digital and New Media will be released later this week.

Useful links
William Caraher home page www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/HomePage.html
Ryan Stander blog Ryan's blog Axis of Access http://axisofaccess.blogspot.com/
Pyla Koutsopetria Archeological Project Web site www.pkap.org/
Pyla Koutsopetria Graduate Student Perspectives http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/

Contacts:
Bill Caraher, assistant professor
UND Department of History
william.caraher@und.edu

Empire Arts Center
415 Demers Ave, Grand Forks
701-746-5500
www.empireartscenter.com

And here is the first part of a three-part interview prepared by my public history internship program (for a reflectve, behind the scene's view of their work check out the intern's office blog: The Muse's Web). The interview was produced by Kathy Nedegaard, Sara McIntee, and Chris Gust, conducted by Chris Gust and edited by Sara McIntee. It was conducted in our almost-finished Working Group in Digital and New Media Laboratory.

Interview, Chris Gust, Ryan Stander, (Part 1: 13:01)

Stay tuned for Parts 2 and Part 3 which will appear with the online exhibit!

Speaking of the open web, here's Mark Pilgrim's take on HTML5 geolocation:

Geolocation is the art of figuring out where you are in the world and (optionally) sharing that information with people you trust. There are many ways to figure out where you are — your IP address, your wireless network connection, which cell tower your phone is talking to, or dedicated GPS hardware that receives latitude and longitude information from satellites in the sky.

You can also pick your location, or any other location at all that suits your needs, from a map using René-Luc's Firefox Geolocater.

Community Pricing offers some amazing deals on classic works in the field of biblical and theological studies. Thousands of Logos users have gotten books for less than the price of a latte or a gallon of gas (which is around $3.00 in Bellingham, Washington).

For example, a few years ago, the R.A. Torrey Collection went for $15 on Community Pricing, $69.95 on Pre-Pub, and it now sells for $119.95. Even better—until Friday at noon, you can pick up Henry Alford’s New Testament for English Readers for $16 or less!

How Does Community Pricing Work?

We estimate how much it will cost to produce a book. Let’s say a book costs $10,000 to produce. It could get into production under a number of scenarios:

• If 100 people bid $100
• If 1,000 people bid $10
• If 10,000 people bid $1

These are just examples, and this is a hypothetical book. There are also lots of other combinations of orders and prices that would get this to $10,000. But it should be clear that the more people bid, the lower the price is for everyone. It makes no difference what the final price is, as long as the costs are covered. The book will go into production whether one person bids $10,000 or whether 10,000 people bid $1. The math is the same.

What Does the Graph Mean?

Because there are endless combinations of orders and prices that push a project over the cost estimate, the progress for each book is tracked on a graph. This graph will give you an idea where most people are placing their bids.

You place a bid at the highest price you’re willing to pay. To do this, simply click on the dollar amount on the graph. Once the peak of the graph crosses the 100% threshold, bids are placed on the following Friday.

How Should I Bid?

Let’s say a project crosses the threshold at $16. If you bid $16 or higher, your bid is placed. That means if you placed a bid for $20 or $30 for Alford’s New Testament for English Readers, you’ll still get it for $16 (or less). Unfortunately, if you bid less than the closing price, your bid won’t be placed.

The bottom line? Bid the maximum possible price you’d be willing to pay for a book. If you bid high you'll never miss out on a deal, but if you bid too low you won’t be able to change your bid after the title moves from Community Pricing over to Pre-Pub.

If you’re still not sure what to bid, check out Phil’s post on A Bidding Strategy for Community Pricing from a couple years ago.

How Can I Help?

• Bid on the books you want. Remember, you should bid the maximum amount you would be willing to pay for a book.
• Spread the word! The more people who bid on Community Pricing, the lower the price is for everyone.
• Subscribe to the Community Pricing RSS feed. That way you’ll be the first to know when a new title is posted.

What are you waiting for? Check out all the deals on Community Pricing today!