Electra Atlantis: Digital Approaches to Antiquity

We all know that textbooks are often best in searchable PDF form.  But yesterday I came across a case where they were not.  I wanted a French grammar, so that I can brush up on stuff for Agapius.  I found a bootleg PDF, thereby saving myself $25.  But… I found that what I wanted to do was read the thing in bed, just a bit at a time, skip pages, and generally absorb interesting stuff by osmosis.  I needed a book, in short.

So, yes, I went out and bought one.  It was the only way!

Worth remembering, when we talk about the death of the book.  Only some books will die.

RACO (Catalan Journals in Open Access) is a cooperative repository for open access full-text scholarly jouranls from Catalonia.

Cota zero: revista d'arqueologia i ciència

Cota zero (ISSN 0213-4640) va néixer l'any 1985 com a plataforma editorial per a la divulgació de la recerca, la formació i el debat relacionats amb l'arqueologia científica. L'eix de cada número el constitueix un «Dossier» que tracta en profunditat i de manera transversal un tema monogràfic d'actualitat amb articles d'investigadors de reconeguda vàlua internacional. La interdisciplinarietat que presenta avui l'arqueologia és analitzada a l'apartat «Col·laboracions especials», una secció en la qual destaquen les anàlisis sobre metodologia, pensament i historiografia de la disciplina arreu del món. Un darrer apartat, «Notícies arqueològiques», informa sobre jaciments excavats recentment i en remarca les singularitats patrimonial, cronològica i científica.

Cuadernos de Arqueología Mediterránea

Cuadernos de Arqueología Mediterránea (ISSN 1578-1356) estudia i difon el món de l'arqueologia mediterrània. Es publica en volums monogràfics, que inclouen contribucions sobre temes específics. També inclou estudis descriptius i tipològics que permeten entendre millor alguna de les èpoques del Mediterrani protohistòric. S'incideix en qüestions de teoria i mètode de l'arqueologia, investigacions ecològiques i paleoambientals o de qüestions conceptuals, com el colonialisme, els orígens d'estat, la dinàmica social, etc.

Empúries: revista de món clàssic i antiguitat tardana

Empúries (ISSN 0213-9278) és una publicació bianual del Museu d'Arqueologia de Catalunya, que publica, des de l'any 1939, treballs científics de recerca generals sobre el món clàssic i l'antiguitat tardana de Catalunya i de la Mediterrània occidental fins l'alta edat mitjana. La revista desenvolupa una secció de tema monogràfic, amb articles de profunditat, tipus assaig o de síntesi; una d'estudis, amb articles d'assaig o de síntesi, analítics o concrets, de tema lliure i una secció amb ressenyes bibliogràfiques.

Fins l'any 1983 el títol era Ampúrias (ISSN 0212-0909)

Fòrum: temes d'història i d'arqueologia tarragonines

Fòrum (ISSN 1887-1704) és una publicació del Museu Nacional Arqueològic de Tarragona (MNAT), de periodicitat variable, orientada a la difusió científica de treballs referents, essencialment, a la història i l'arqueologia de Tàrraco i de l'Ager Tarraconensis.

Ítaca: quaderns catalans de cultura clàssica

Ítaca (ISSN 0213-6643) és una revista de recerca en estudis clàssics, publicada per la Societat Catalana d'Estudis Clàssics de l'Institut d'Estudis Catalans i que compta amb l'assessorament d'un comitè internacional d'especialistes. Amb aquesta publicació, la Societat pretén col·laborar en la redimensió de tota la cultura clàssica des d'una òptica interdisciplinària i amb rigor filològic. Té obertes les portes als estudiosos del país i d'arreu amb novetats per comunicar sobre el nostre àmbit d'estudi.

Treballs d'Arqueologia

Treballs d'Arqueologia (ISSN 1134-9263) és una publicació periòdica anual que edita el Centre d'Estudis del Patrimoni Arqueològic de la Prehistòria (CEPAP) i que recull les línies de recerca del centre. El contingut de cada volum és monogràfic amb aportacions d'investigadores i d'investigadors nacionals i internacionals especialistes en els temes als quals es dedica cada número de la revista.

The Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists
ISSN 0003-1186 (Print); ISSN 1938-6958 (Online)

The Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists has been the official journal of the American Society of Papyrologists since the publication of Volume 1, issue 1 in 1963 and is the only North American journal devoted to papyrology and related disciplines. This website makes all issues of BASP available electronically, except the two most recent issues.

BASP publishes a wide variety of articles and reviews of relevance to papyrology and related disciplines. From text editions to important synthetic articles, BASP has published studies on papyri, ostraca, and inscriptions in Greek, Latin, and Coptic. In the future, BASP will broaden its coverage to include Hieratic, Demotic, Aramaic, and Arabic texts.

Contents of the most recent volume: 43 (2006)

Naphtali Lewis (1911-2005)

Bagnall, Roger S.; pp. 5-8

Ostraca and Mummy Labels in Los Angeles

Muhs, Brian P.; Worp, Klaas A.; van der Vliet, Jacques; pp. 9-58

Un extrait du Psaume 90 en copte: Édition de P.Duk. inv. 448

Delattre, Alain; pp. 59-61

O.Col. inv. 1366: A Coptic Prayer from Deir el-Bahri with a Quotation from Tobit 12:10

Mairs, Rachel; pp. 63-70

Genealogy and the Gymnasium

Ruffini, Giovanni; pp. 71-99

The Modius as a Grain Measure in Papyri from Egypt

Mayerson, Philip; pp. 101-106

Mega Kankellon and Metron in Late Receipt and Expenditure Accounts

Mayerson, Philip; pp. 107-111

Ostraca from Western Thebes: Provenance and History of the Collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at Columbia University

O'Connell, Elisabeth R.; pp. 113-137

What's in a Name? Greek, Egyptian and Biblical Traditions in the Cambyses Romance

Venticinque, Philip F.; pp. 139-158

[Book Review] Michael Gronewald et al., Kölner Papyri (P.Köln), Band 10. Abhandlungen der Rheinisch-Westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Sonderreihe Papyrologica Coloniensia, Vol. 10. [...]

Papathomas, Amphilochios; pp. 159-164

[Book Review] Klaas A. Worp, Greek Ostraka from Kellis: O.Kellis, Nos. 1-293. With a chapter on the ostraka and the archaeology of Ismant el-Kharab by Colin A. Hope. Dakhleh Oasis Project, Monograph 13. [...]

Kraus, Thomas J.; pp. 165-168

[Book Review] William A. Johnson, Bookrolls and Scribes in Oxyrhynchus [...]

Kraus, Thomas J.; pp. 169-173

[Book Review] Thomas J. Kraus and Tobias Nicklas (eds.), New Testament Manuscripts: Their Texts and Their Worlds. Texts and Editions for New Testament Study 2. [...]

Parker, David C.; pp. 175-177

[Book Review] Claudio Gallazzi and Luigi Lehnus (eds.), Achille Vogliano cinquant’anni dopo, Vol. 1. Quaderni di Acme 59. [...]

van Minnen, Peter; pp. 179-180

[Book Review] Ugo Zanetti and Enzo Lucchesi (eds.), Ægyptus Christiana. Mélanges d’hagiographie égyptienne et orientale dédiés à la mémoire du P. Paul Devos, Bollandiste. Cahiers d’orientalisme 25.[...]

van Minnen, Peter; pp. 181-182

[Book Review] Hans Julius Wolff, Das Recht der griechischen Papyri Ägyptens in der Zeit der Ptolemaeer und des Prinzipats, Erster Band: Bedingungen und Triebkräfte der Rechtsentwicklung. [...]

van Minnen, Peter; pp. 183-188

[Book Review] Ranon Katzoff and David Schaps (eds.), Law in the Documents of the Judaean Desert. Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 96. [...]

Verhoogt, Arthur; pp. 189-191

[Book Review] Joseph G. Manning, Land and Power in Ptolemaic Egypt: The Structure of Land Tenure [...]

Verhoogt, Arthur; pp. 193-194

[Book Review] Arthur Verhoogt, Regaling Officials in Ptolemaic Egypt: A Dramatic Reading of Official Accounts from the Menches Papers. Papyrologica Lugduno-Batava 32. [...]

Whitehorne, John; pp. 195-197

[Book Review] John Matthews, The Journey of Theophanes: Travel, Business, and Daily Life in the Roman East [...]

Keenan, James G.; pp. 199-203

[Book Review] Malcolm Choat, Belief and Cult in Fourth-Century Papyri. Studia Antiqua Australiensia 1. [...]

Bagnall, Roger S.; pp. 205-209

[Books Received]

pp. 211-213

Papyrological Summer Institutes Reports, 2003-2006

pp. 215-218

An email from the British Library EThOS service popped into my inbox a couple of days ago.  It told me that a PDF of a PhD thesis was now available online for free download.  I’d “placed an order” (free) for this some time back, and here it was.

The thesis was The indica of ctesias of cnidus : text (incl. MSS monacensis gr. 287 and oxoniensis, holkham gr. 110), translation and commentary by Stavros Solomou, London 2007.  This link should find it.   The quality is excellent -  far better than the scans at the Bibliotheque Nationale Francais.

It would help if the site gave permalinks to theses.  Likewise, when an order is available, a link to the thesis details would help.

But I’m still dead impressed.  Whoever could have accessed something like this, before EThOS came along?  I have some slack time today; I would never have hunted this out, but now… here it is.  I get to read it, the author gets read, everyone benefits.

Well done the British Library.

The thesis itself is of considerable interest.  The Indica of Ctesias was used widely in ancient times, until John Tzetzes; and then suddenly is no longer mentioned.  This leads us to suppose that the last copy or copies perished in the sack of Constantinople in 1204 by the renegade army originally hired for the Fourth Crusade. 

An epitome exists in Photius.  But the author has obtained two additional unpublished mss, and edited these also.

We’re about to give away 72 ultra-premium versions of the most amazingly bound Bibles ever printed. From the finest you can imagine top-end offerings in leather and calfskin—to the limited production run—“only a handful in existence” type heirloom quality of ultra-premium goatskin in a custom-carved Rosewood box imported from England!

Wow, was that breathless or what? …but seriously, if you are used to the feel of the paperback Bible you got from church the first day you visited youth-group as a teenager, you won’t believe how different these bindings can be.

We know “…the Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” and we love it no matter what it is printed on and no matter what it is bound with. In fact, some of the most “heirloom quality” Bibles in the world are the most plainly bound, simple, worn and weathered Bibles. What makes many Bibles “heirloom quality” is the deep personal connection to God’s Word that they represent for those privileged to steward them.

So why are we giving away such high-end Bibles? Well, it all started when I received an ESV Study Bible in Premium Calfskin. I literally had no idea that leather could feel so supple, so smooth and so cottony-soft. I found myself wondering if it was fair to say that my new Bible could actually be creamy, velvety, and like butter all at the same time. When it came time to launch Bible.Logos.com I wanted to do something spectacular. I wanted to highlight the brand-new ultra-premium access to the Bible that Bible.Logos.com provides, with some ultra-premium print Bibles that people would be more familiar with.

Over the next 6 months Logos is giving away 72 premium print Bibles on Bible.Logos.com—worth over $11,500.00!

Every month from July thru December, we will give away 12 premium Bibles featuring the most popular translations from Bible.Logos.com, including ESV, KJV, NIV, NASB, NLT, and NKJV. These Bibles are the top-of-the-line versions and feature the highest quality leather and binding—some are valued at over $400.

This month we will be giving away these 12 Bibles:

1. ESV Study Bible, Black Calfskin (Retail $239.99) from Crossway
2. KJV Concord Wide Margin Reference, Black Goatskin (Retail $229.99) from Cambridge Bibles
3. NASB In Touch Ministries Wide Margin Edition, Burgundy Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation
4. NASB Large Print Ultrathin Reference, Black Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation
5. NASB Side Column Reference Wide Margin Limited Edition, Black Calfskin (Retail $149.99) from Lockman Foundation
6. NIV New Women’s Devotional, Espresso Renaissance Fine Leather (Retail $59.99) from Zondervan
7. NLT Tyndale Select, Black Calfskin (Retail $135.00) from Tyndale
8. NIV Study Bible, Black Goatskin (Retail $229.99) from Cambridge Bibles
9. NIV Study Bible, Black Renaissance Fine Leather (Retail $124.99) from Zondervan
10. NKJV UltraSlim Bible Signature Series, Black Calfskin (Retail $129.99) from Thomas Nelson
11. NLT Tyndale Select, Black Calfskin (Retail $135.00) from Tyndale
12. TNIV Reference Bible, Black Renaissance Fine Leather (Retail $99.99) from Zondervan

For details on how to enter, as well as the full contest rules and prize list, visit The Great Bible Giveaway page.

I’m now looking at including the original text in any printed version of Origen on Ezechiel.  We’re using the edition by W. Baehrens, published in the GCS 30 (1921) *, as reprinted in the Sources Chretiennes edition.

According to Wikipedia, Baehrens died in 1929, which is more than 70 years ago and so makes his work out of copyright in the EU (including Germany).  The US copyright position is less clear, but I doubt anyone will care, once it is out of copyright in its ‘home’ country.

So it looks as if I can just use this.

I do wish, tho, that I could actually obtain a copy of Baehrens’ edition!

* 30 Origenes Werke VII. Homilien zum Hexateuch (1. Aufl. 1921: W. A. Baehrens)

So, I am spending the night in London. My British Air flight left at 3:36 PM this afternoon (46 minutes late) and this always requires an overnight stay in London. It breaks the trip up, but makes it a 2 day trip to get home. It has been a long day of standing in lines (to check in, to pass Cypriot passport control, for security, to check in at the gate, to get on the bus, to get on the plane, to pass British passport control, to get on the hotel shuttle bus, and to check in at the hotel). It is almost like being in college again. Anyway, so far, so good.

RSM

There’s a new edition of Four Stone Hearth live at Afarensis. He’s done a great job with it, and he’s found plenty that I’ve missed.

Also, while I’m pointing at things, Michael E Smith has a thoughtful post on agency and the problems that happen when archaeologists try talking about it. I’ve found often agent is a synonym of individual. Someone else I know suggested soul. It might sound woolly, but a lot of talk about agency is, because people don’t often define what sort of agency they’re talking about. Smith’s post shows another sort, from the political sciences, which clearly could be have applications in archaeology.

Posted in Archaeology, Vidi

After sleeping on the problem, I’ve decided to continue with the translation of Origen’s Homilies on Ezechiel.  After all, just translating and uploading three would look a little sad, I think.  If my translator is willing to continue, then it will go ahead.  The only difference is that it will be much more difficult for me to sell any copies of a printed edition, so probably means that I just have to accept that I’ll lose the cost of this.  Oh well.  Fortunately I can afford it.

UPDATE: the translator has agreed to continue, and I have received the first draft of homily 3 which I will read over tomorrow night.  And I’ve thought up some possible new sales approaches on printed copies to help with the costs.

Imagine a world where everything you read is searchableso you can re-view any page containing a word or reference;where your computer is accessible from any other computer;and where you can instantly find any file you want.You can do all this now, with your present computer, for free. This posting will show you how, at zero cost, you can: have an electronic photographic memory

The Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies, Volume 1.
The Foundations of Research and Regional Survey in the Tsaghkahovit Plain, Armenia

Adam T. Smith, Ruben S. Badalyan, Pavel Avetisyan
With contributions by Alan Greene and Leah Minc
Oriental Institute Publications, Volume 134
Chicago: The Oriental Institute, 2009
ISBN-13: 978-1-885923-62-2
Pp. xlvi + 410; 72 figures, 82 plates, 7 tables
$90.00

Until recently, the South Caucasus was a virtual terra incognita on
Western archaeological maps of southwest Asia. The conspicuous absence
of marked places — of site names, toponyms, and topography — gave the
impression of a region distant, unknown, and vacant. The Joint
American-Armenian Project for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient
Transcaucasian Societies (Project ArAGATS) was founded in 1998 to
explore this terrain. Our investigations were guided by two overarching
goals: to illuminate the social and political transformations central to
the region’s unique (pre)history and to explore the broader intellectual
implications of collaboration between the rich archaeological traditions
of Armenia (former U.S.S.R.) and the United States.

This volume provides the first encompassing report on the ongoing
studies of Project ArAGATS, detailing the general context of
contemporary archaeological research in the South Caucasus as well as
the specific context of our regional investigations in the Tsaghkahovit
Plain of central Armenia. The book opens with detailed examinations of
the history of archaeology in the South Caucasus, the theoretical
problems that currently orient archaeological research, and a
comprehensive reevaluation of the material bases for regional chronology
and periodization.

The work then provides the complete results of our regional
investigations in the Tsaghkahovit Plain, including the findings of the
first systematic pedestrian survey ever conducted in the Caucasus.
Thanks to the results presented in this volume, and Project ArAGATS’s
ongoing excavations in the area, the Tsaghkahovit Plain is today the
best-known archaeological region in the South Caucasus. The present
volume thus provides archaeologists with both an orientation to the
prehistory of the South Caucasus and the complete findings of the first
phase of Project ArAGATS’s field investigations.

To order the printed book, in North America contact The David Brown Book
Company, PO Box 511, Oakville, CT 06779, Toll Free: 1-800-791-9354, Fax:
860-945-9468, e-mail: queries@dbbconline.com. In Europe and elsewhere,
contact Oxbow Books, Park End Place, Oxford, OX1 1HN, UK, Tel: (+44) (0)
1865-241-249, Fax: (+44) (0) 1865-794-449, e-mail: oxbow@oxbowbooks.com.
Website: www.oxbowbooks.com.

Papyrologist Roger Bagnall has a book out in September, in which he looks again at the physical books and papyri discovered in Egypt and generally has the drains up on the dates of them.   I only hope it isn’t a bit of revisionism; but I don’t get that sense from the little that I know.

Much of the established knowledge on this subject was done in some really rather splendid articles by T.C.Skeat, who did not seem to share the fear of numbers and statistics endemic in the humanities and consequently produced quite a  lot of hard data.  But much of this was now a long time ago, and a new take on it would be interesting.  Not that I will ever see the book, I suspect, being offline; but such a study ought to be interesting.

Thanks to What’s new in Papyrology for the tip, and more details.  The PDF link to chapter 1 does not seem to work, tho.

I am helping to curate an exhibition: Left in Vision 3.

My old friend John who teaches theory at Portsmouth University asked me. His original call for work reads: “As before all artists who identify with the left are invited to submit work, and all forms of visual art – figurative, abstract, conceptual, sculpture, film, relational etc – are welcome.”

Left in Vision 3

The exhibition will be at ULU (University of London Union, Malet Street, London), Room 3CD. It is part of ‘Marxism 09′, organised by the SWP. It opens Thursday 4th July and continues until Monday 6th July. Hours: early until late!

Today is my last day in Cyprus as I fly back to the States this afternoon. It will be a 2 day trip with a night in London since my BA flight leaves Cyprus late this afternoon. It has been a productive 47 days in Cyprus. In addition to a successful PKAP season I was bale to look at the pottery at two other current projects  and even do a little research at CAARI (the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute in Nicosia. It has been a long season, though, and I am ready to return home where I can hopefully relax a little bit before I start teaching again in the middle of July.

RSM

I have recently come across a new perspective on “agency theory” that makes lots of sense and has nothing to do with the “agency” literature in archaeology. My lack of enthusiasm for that literature is public knowledge (Smith, and Schreiber 2005); I have always found archaeological agency theory to be either obvious and trivial (the actions of people make a difference in the world! Leapin’ lizards!), or else so ethereal and philosophical that I lose interest. (Yes, I am a materialist and a skeptic, and I’m sure that any sophisticated archaeological theorists who read this will snigger at my simplistic views).

Over the past year, in exploring some areas of scholarship outside of anthropology, I have learned that the term “agency” has a very different meaning in political science and economics. I am now reading on comparative taxation systems (in preparation for a conference where I will have to put the data on Aztec taxation into a comparative framework, using terms and concepts from political science and economic history). It turns out that there is a body of scholarship focused on “agency theory,” and it has nothing to do with Bourdieu or Giddens or hand-wringing over whether the actions of people make a difference in society.

Agency theory in political science and economics is about the delegation of power and authority by rulers and governments. It concerns the ways in which “principals” (those in charge of some domain) ensure (or fail to ensure) that their wishes and orders get carried out by their delegates or “agents.” How does the king make sure that his tax collectors are doing their job and not ripping off the crown? Is it better to have a staff of salaried officials collecting taxes, or will tax-farming produce more revenue? How does President Obama know whether federal bureaucrats are carrying out his plans and not backsliding or subverting his orders?

According to agency theory, principals do better at getting their agents to do their bidding faithfully and efficiently when two conditions are met: (1) when the principal and agents share common interests, and thus desire the same outcomes; and (2) when the principal is knowledgeable about the agent’s activities. This approach was pioneered by Max Weber (1978); here are some modern studies I have found useful: (Cosgel, and Miceli 2009; Kiser 1999; Levi 1988; Lupia 2001; Swedberg 2003).

I have not seen any references in this literature to the divergent use of the concept of “agency” in other branches of the social sciences (including anthropology and archaeology), nor do I recall seeing any mention of the sociology/political science usage in the archaeological literature. It seems that two very different bodies of scholarship have been chugging along for more than a decade, using the same phrase—as a major concept—in very different ways. If I see the term “agency” in the contents of an archaeology journal, my eyes glaze over and I skip to the next paper, but now if I see it in a journal in comparative political science, economic history, or sociology, I stop and take a look.

That this kind of disciplinary isolation is not a good thing has been pointed out by many observers (Wallerstein 2003), including archaeologists (Butzer 2008). I know that my own graduate training emphasized that the only disciplines that matter for archaeologists—apart from technical fields like ethnobotany or geology—are anthropological archaeology and cultural anthropology. Today, I feel quite differently. The kind of archaeology I pursue is more usefully viewed as a comparative social/historical science than as a branch of anthropology. (I have nothing against anthropology. Some of my best friends are anthropologists. But as an intellectual context for archaeology, anthropology is incredibly confining and limiting).

I don’t have any recommendations about resolving the conflicting definitions of “agency” in different fields. But it is definitely the case that attention to broader realms of scholarship can be enriching for archaeologists. The only archaeologists I know who pay any attention to issues of agency theory (the kind I like, that is) are Richard Blanton and Lane Fargher, whose work I highly recommend (Blanton, and Fargher 2008; Fargher, and Blanton 2007).

References

Blanton, Richard E. and Lane F. Fargher (2008) Collective Action in the Formation of Pre-Modern States. Springer, New York.

Butzer, Karl W. (2008) Other Perspectives on Urbanism: Beyond the Disciplinary Boundaries. In The Ancient City: New Perspectives on Urbanism in the Old and New World, edited by Joyce Marcus and Jeremy Sabloff, pp. 77-94. SAR Press, Santa Fe.

Cosgel, Metin M. and Thomas J. Miceli (2009) Tax Collection in History. Public Finance Review 37:399-420.

Fargher, Lane F. and Richard E. Blanton (2007) Revenue, Voice, and Public Goods in three Pre-Modern States. Comparative Studies in Society and History 49:848-882.

Kiser, Edgar (1999) Comparing Varieties of Agency Theory in Economics, Political Science, and Sociology: An Illustration from State Policy Implementation. Sociological Theory 17:146-170.

Levi, Margaret (1988) Of Rule and Revenue. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Lupia, Arthur (2001) Delegation of Power: Agency Theory. In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, pp. 3375-3377. Pergamon, Oxford.

Smith, Michael E. and Katharina J. Schreiber (2005) New World States and Empires: Economic and Social Organization. Journal of Archaeological Research 13:189-229.

Swedberg, Richard (2003) Principles of Economic Sociology. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

Wallerstein, Immanuel (2003) Anthropology, Sociology, and Other Dubious Disciplines. Current Anthropology 44:453-465.

Weber, Max (1978) Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. 2 vols. University of California Press, Berkeley.

BELOW: "Agency" (an agent at work). The guy at the right is a labor boss in charge or organizing corvée labor for an Aztec king. Each face with a flag symbolizes 20 workers, and the face with the feather stands for 400 more workers. From the San Andrés Codex (Galarza, Joaquín, 1963 , Codex San Andrés (juridiction de Cuautitlan): Manuscrit Pictographique du Musée de l'Homme de Paris (II). Journal de la Société des Amréicanistes 52:61-90.

"Seit Herbst 2008 existiert am Institut für Vorderasiatische Archäologie der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München ein durch die LMU-Exzellenzinitiative gefördertes Projekt zur archäologischen Erforschung Nordirans. Im Rahmen dieses Projektes werden in enger Kooperation mit iranischen Kollegen seit dem Frühling 2009 gemeinsame iranisch-deutsche Ausgrabungen in Gohar Tepe durchgeführt. Geleitet werden die Grabungen vor Ort durch Ali Mahfroozi von der Cultural Heritage Organisation der Provinz Mazandaran und Dr. Christian Piller vom Institut für Vorderasiatische Archäologie der LMU München" (Added to ABZU: 2009-07-02 13:02:59)

(Added to ABZU: 2009-07-02 12:04:38)

"Cuneiform writing was invented some 5000 years ago in southern Iraq for the purpose of keeping accounts — and for the next few hundred years book-keeping remained its sole use. The last datable cuneiform tablet, also from southern Iraq, is an astronomical diary for the year 75 CE. For the three millennia spanning the rise and fall of cuneiform writing, and arguably for some time after, numeracy was an inseparable and essential part of literate culture throughout the Middle East.While the vast majority of cuneiform tablets contain numerical data, written by professional scribes, a smaller number are the outcome of teaching, learning, or communicating mathematical techniques or ideas as part of scribal education. This website presents transliterations and translations of around a thousand published cuneiform mathematical tablets; a similar number await decipherment and analysis in museums around the world." (Added to ABZU: 2009-07-02 11:30:06)

" Libyan museums are hardly known outside Libya and rarely listed in or covered by any of the specialist publications and organisations. Despite being the home of one of the most valued museums in the world, namely Assaraya Alhamra Museum, for its unique collection of artifacts dating from the Stone Age to the present day, Libyan museums still remain in total darkness. To this day, not a single museum has a website.It is for these reasons that Temehu.com has decided to build Libya’s first online museum, to allow people, students and researchers from all over the world, most of whom can not visit the country, a free access to this unique treasure. Temehu’s Online Museum was therefore created to collect information and photos and make them available online free of charge. You can access all the galleries and notes directly from the above menu without the need for registration. Any reviews, articles, photos or feedback will be greatly appreciated.Although Temehu’s Online Museum is still in its early stages, we have plans to include detailed reviews and analysis of all the museums of Libya, a photo gallery about the whole country, organised by town, a video gallery, Libyan jewellery & traditional crafts gallery, and prehistoric art galleries (some of which are currently live at Wadi Matkhandoush and Prehistoric Art ). All photos are copyright protected and never been published before. Copying or using these photos without prior permission or without proper linking and credit is strictly illegal. Please follow our instructions for further information..." (Added to ABZU: 2009-07-02 11:24:08)

(Added to ABZU: 2009-07-02 08:09:27)

(Added to ABZU: 2009-07-01 14:43:08)

(Added to ABZU: 2009-07-01 14:38:56)

"Until recently, the South Caucasus was a virtual terra incognita on Western archaeological maps of southwest Asia. The conspicuous absence of marked places — of site names, toponyms, and topography — gave the impression of a region distant, unknown, and vacant. The Joint American-Armenian Project for the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies (Project ArAGATS) was founded in 1998 to explore this terrain. Our investigations were guided by two overarching goals: to illuminate the social and political transformations central to the region’s unique (pre)history and to explore the broader intellectual implications of collaboration between the rich archaeological traditions of Armenia (former U.S.S.R.) and the United States.This volume provides the first encompassing report on the ongoing studies of Project ArAGATS, detailing the general context of contemporary archaeological research in the South Caucasus as well as the specific context of our regional investigations in the Tsaghkahovit Plain of central Armenia. The book opens with detailed examinations of the history of archaeology in the South Caucasus, the theoretical problems that currently orient archaeological research, and a comprehensive reevaluation of the material bases for regional chronology and periodization.The work then provides the complete results of our regional investigations in the Tsaghkahovit Plain, including the findings of the first systematic pedestrian survey ever conducted in the Caucasus. Thanks to the results presented in this volume, and Project ArAGATS’s ongoing excavations in the area, the Tsaghkahovit Plain is today the best-known archaeological region in the South Caucasus. The present volume thus provides archaeologists with both an orientation to the prehistory of the South Caucasus and the complete findings of the first phase of Project ArAGATS’s field investigations." (Added to ABZU: 2009-07-01 08:11:06)

Full Name: Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery

URL: http://www.daacs.org

Content: 100,000s of artifacts as well as excavated contexts from about 20 archaeological sites in the Chesapeake region, South Carolina and Jamaica, dating back to the 17th-19th century

Authorship: Department of Archaeology, Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, Charlottesville, VA

Host/Maintenance: Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies (Thomas Jefferson Foundation); ditto; frequency of updates unknown but, according to the news section, the last archaeological site was added in September 2006

entry page

Permanence/Archiving: Nothing mentioned

Licensing: The Thomas Jefferson Foundation holds All Rights Reserved copyright to “DAACS website content,” though it is not clear what all this covers; the contents of the database are freely available for research uses, but like fair use in general, this suffers from ambiguity (for example, what are the copyright issues that would arise from combining some of the DAACS data with other online data?); the site would benefit from the use of a standard Creative Commons license so that terms of reuse would be clearer; a separate page provides copyright and citation guidelines, even for data structures, query results, etc.; a contact is provided for commercial use and the like

Usefulness: By making readily available a large and expanding corpus of well-organized data, conforming to a single standard, DAACS seeks to catalyze inter-site comparative analysis that was previously impossible; archaeologists of the regions and periods covered have joined in to make it as comprehensive as possible

2nd screen in an artifact attribute by category query: step 3 can’t be skipped even though it requires detailed knowledge of a site

Ease of Use: The system allows for basic inventory searches, which provide a useful overview of the system’s collections; to get more information, the detailed inventory tool must be used, and it is not really easy to use, clearly meant specifically for archaeologists familiar with remains from this region and period; detailed queries require different steps and knowledge of individual site characteristics; general, cross-site requests are disallowed: how does this square with facilitating comparative research?; a handy glossary is provided

Appeal: The database is designed with a MS-SQL server back end, an Access front end and VBA customization to expedite data entry; it is a nice, professional-looking website

Accessibility: A web search for the project, even only by the acronym, is highly successful: no. 1; for “comparative slavery” it comes out on no. 3; however, individual finds don’t seem to be indexed by web search engines (i.e., a search for a specific item in the database is unsuccessful).

example of an artifact attributes by artifact category query result

Credibility: The site is professional with contributors from many respected institutions; the data are detailed and useful

Reuse: Query data can easily be exported in related or concatenated data format (see next figure)

example of an artifact attributes by artifact category query result: downloaded concatenated file

This is an eminent initiative with great promise. A nice feature is the Query Bucket, allowing the reader to manage his/her query results while exploring the database. At any time, a reader may preview, download, or delete query results saved to the Query Bucket. This is particularly helpful if he/she is running multiple queries. However, there are still some problems. User-friendliness could be improved, esp. for people who are not professional US historical archaeologists. Finally, post-2007 plans for DAACS are not addressed which doesn’t bode well.

As the National Education Computer Conference (NECC) celebrated its 30th Anniversary in the nation’s capital, the CHNM Outreach Team was on-hand Monday to enjoy a busy afternoon speaking with an international audience at the Convention Center in Washington, DC. The CHNM poster session highlighted free tools for teachers that promote digital literacy and critical thinking: Zotero, Omeka, ScholarPress, and the National History Education Clearinghouse Tools for Teachers.

The annual NECC conference—presented by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) and keyed to the National Educational Technology Standards (NETS)—features innovative workshops, including Model Lessons, BYOL (Bring Your Own Laptop) sessions, and Open Source Labs. The nonprofit ISTE focuses on improving teaching, learning, and school leadership by advancing the effective use of technology in PK–12 and teacher education.

On ScribD there is a downloadable PDF by Charles A. Sullivan full of very useful information about working with Patristic Greek, websites, tips, etc.  It’s here.

Thanks to Robert Bedrosian for pointing out that a search for “patristics” and “syriac” will produce results of considerable interest.  The same is true for “coptic”.

You have to register for a free account, and not all material is downloadable; but much is.  I suspect at least some of this is less than legitimate; other material; such as the PDF above, is undoubtedly legal.  I was amused to discover some material from my own websites appeared, reformatted, as well (which is all to the good, of course).

Every year we try to go at least to one large archaeoinformatics meeting in Europe (other than our Italian workshop). It's a neat way to meet new and old friends, keep ourselves (and our readers) updated about the latest achievements in the field, and let the world know what we have been doing lately, possibly gaining an increasingly wider audience for the whole “Open Archaeology” concept.
This year marks an epic fail in the organization of such conferences/meetings/workshops. Between November, 16th and 18th you can choose where you want to be: Heidelberg or Wien, “Archäologie und Computer” or “Scientific Computing and Cultural Heritage”. Both venues will do because both events have the very same dates, you see.

read more

Start: 2009-11-16

End: 2009-11-18

Timezone: Europe/Rome

Start: 2009-11-16

End: 2009-11-18

Timezone: Europe/Rome

Location: 

Heidelberg, Germany

Reference URL: 

SCCH09 website

Following the successful 1st SCCH conference in 2007, the Interdisciplinary center for Scientific Computing of the University Heidelberg invites authors and guests to the 2nd SCCH workshop in Heidelberg, Germany, November 16th-18th, 2009. The workshop is endorsed by the German Excellency Initiative and the Heidelberg Graduate School (HGS) and held in conjunction with the Heidelberg Modeling-Day on November 19th.

The main aim of this SCCH Event is to create a forum for discussions between the researchers of humanities and natural sciences as well as cultural heritage institutions. Our mission is to establish and strengthen interdisciplinary relations to provide and develop novel computing tools for experts in cultural heritage. The focus will be on applications for Cultural Heritage as well as the theoretical advances driving them.

Extended Abstract submission deadline: July, 8th 2009.

Start: 2009-11-16

End: 2009-11-18

Timezone: Europe/Rome

Start: 2009-11-16

End: 2009-11-18

Timezone: Europe/Rome

Location: 

Wien

Reference URL: 

Stadtarchäologie Wien

MAIN TOPIC 2009: ARCHIVING - or building an information system

Archiving is today central to nearly all aspects of Cultural Heritage Management.
Archives (Archaeological excavations, libraries, documents, data collections,...) are important data repositories.
The data contained in correctly treated and accessible archives makes wide and varied information available.
How can archiving in all its aspects best promote knowledge about and support the protection and conservation of cultural heritage?

The first museum pecha kucha night was held in London at the British Museum on June 18, 2009. I took rough notes during the presentations, and have included the slides and notes from my own presentation. The event used the tag 'mwpkn' to gather together tweets, photos, etc. The focus of this first museum pecha kucha was on sharing insights and inspiration from the Museums and the Web conference held in Indianapolis in April.

The event was organised by Shelley Mannion, who introduced the event, emphasising that it was about fun and connecting the museum tech community in an interesting way.

Gail Durbin (V&A), takeaways from MW2009
She's a practical person, looks for ideas to nick. Good idea as things get hazy after a conference, good intentions disappear.

First takeaway - Dina Helal let her play with her iPhone, decided she had to have one. She liked her mobile for the first time in her life.

Second - twittering was very important. Decided to do something with it. Twittering is hard, sending out messages that are interesting is difficult.

Enthusiasm at conferences is short lived - e.g. people excited about wedding site, but did they send in wedding photos? She talked to people about a self-portraiture idea, 'life on a postcard', but hasn't had a single response.

RSS feeds - came away knowing we had to review our RSS feeds, had been without attention for a long time.

Learnt that wikis are very hard work, they don't automatically look after themselves.
Creative use of Flickr - museum 'my karsh' collection

Resolved that had to work with Development. Looking at something like the British Library's - adopt a book for fathers day.

Something that bothers her - many museums think of 'Web 2.0' just as more channels to push out information, there's no sense of pulling in information about visitors.

Beck Tench, one of the most interesting people she met at the conference - practice and work go together very closely. Flickr plant project. She wants to get staff involved - has meeting on Fridays, in local bar, tweets to everyone, conducts something called Experimonth.

Last thing learnt - librarians have better cakes.

Silvia Filippini Fantoni (British Museum and Sorbonne University)
Silvia makes a plea for extra seconds as a non-native speaker (and synthesis not the best feature of Italians). Lecturer in museum informatics and evaluation methods at Sorbonne and project manager for multimedia guide project at British Museum.

So her focus at the conference was mostly on guides. Particularly Samis and Pau and others. Mini workshops and workshops on the topic before and during the conference. Demos from Paul Clifford (Museum of London). Exhibitors. Lots of museums are planning to develop applications.

Interest in using mobile technology as an interpretive tool is constantly growing, especially delivered on visitors own devices. Proliferations of mobile platforms. Proliferation of different functionalities - not just audio - visual, games, way finding, web access and communication, notes and comments. Have all these new platforms and functionalities improved the visitor experience? Yes, but there are some disadvantages.

Asks: aren't we trying to do too much? Are we trying to turn a useful interpretive tool into something too complex? Aren't we forgetting about core audio guide audience?

Are people interested in using their own devices? Do they have the time to pre-download, do they bring their devices? Samis and Pau - the answer is no/not yet. For the medium and short term still need to provide media in the museums. Touch screen devices are easier to use. Limited functionality makes interface simpler. Focus on content - AV messages, touch and listen.
Importance of sharing and learning from best practice. Some efforts at and after MW2009 - handheldconference.org. Discussion of developing open source content management system for mobile devices - contact Nancy Proctor.

Daniel Incandela (Indianapolis Museum of Art)
He's from America so should have extra time too. Also sick and medicated (so at least one of us will have a good time during the presentation).

Enjoys robots, dinosaurs, football and a good point. On holiday while here.

Slide - Shelley's twitter profile - she's responsible for him being here while on holiday.

He blogged about preparing for the presentation and got a comment from one of the pecha kucha founders - the main thing is to have fun, be passionate about something you love.

Twitterfall on the big screen was a major breakthrough at MW2009, (#mw2009 trended as a topic and attracted the attention of) pantygirl.

Digital story telling and tech can't happen without support, Max Anderson has been dream leader.

He's here representing IMA so going to showcase some projects - Roman Art from Louvre webisodes - paved the way for informal, agile, multiple content source creation.

Art Babble. IMA blog - ripped off other museums - gives many departments from museum a digital voice.

Half time experiment with awkward silence (blank slide). [In the pub afterwards, I discovered that this actually made at least one of the English people feel socially awkward!]

Brooklyn Museum - for him the real innovators for digital content for museums, won many awards at MW2009.

Te Papa's 'build a squid' had him at 'hello'. First example of a museum project that actually went viral?

Perhaps we could upgrade MW site? Better integration of social media, multimedia from previous conferences.

Loves Bruce Wyman - reason to go to MW2010.

art:21 - smart team, good approaches to publishing across platforms.

Wonders about agility - love new and emerging projects (?) we hear about at conferences, but how do we face an idea and deal with own internal issues?

The Dutch at Indy (were great) - but somewhere outside north America next for Museums and the Web?

Philip Poole (British Museum)
Everything I got from MW2009 can be put into one statement - spread it about. Enable your content to be spread by other people through APIs.

Does spreading out content dilute our authority? By putting it onto other websites, putting it in contact with other people. No, of course not.

Video was big at MW2009.

If going to use different platforms, will people come? We need to tailor content to different websites - can't just build it and assume people will come. Persian coins vs. ritual Mayan sacrifice on YouTube - which will get bigger audience? [Pick content delivery to suit audience and context.]

Platforms include ArtBabble, YouTube (shorter, edgier), iTunes U. Viral content - we can put features on our website, but a YouTube or Vimeo audience are going to spread things better. iTunes, U, can download and listen on train - takes out of website entirely.

Stats are important - e.g. need to include stats of video on different platforms, make sure people above you recognise the value in that. DCMS - very basic stats - perhaps they should be asking for different stats. "If DCMS ask how much video we put on YouTube, we'd all start doing it." [Brilliant point]

API - take content from website and put elsewhere. IMA Explore section - advertise the repeating pattern in their URLs - someone used them but wasn't going very well, they got in contact with him and helped him succeed, now biggest referrer outside search engines. He wants to do that for the British Museum - he knows the quirks, the data.

Why the 'softly softly' approach? Creating an entire API interface is huge mountain, people above you will want to avoid it if you show them the size of the whole mountain.

Digital NZ - fantastic example. Can create custom search, embed on website, also into gallery and people can vote for it

The British Museum is a museum of the world for the world, why should their web presence be any different?

Mia Ridge (Science Museum)
Yes, that's me. My slides on 'Bubbles and Easter eggs - Museum Pecha Kucha' are on slideshare - scroll down the page for full text and notes - or available as a PDF (2mb).

I talked about:

• keeping the post-conference momentum going, particularly the 'do one thing' idea;
• museum technologists as 'double domain experts';
• not hiding museum geeks like Easter eggs but making more of them as a resource;
• the responsibilities of museum geeks as their expertise is recognised;
• breaking down internal silos; intelligent failure;
• broken metrics and better project design (pitch the goal, not the method);
• audience expectations in 2009;
• possible first questions for digital projects and taking a whole museum view for new projects;
• who's talking/listening to your audiences? trust and respect your audiences;
• your museum is an iceberg (lots of the good stuff is hidden);
• (s)mash the system (hold a mashup day);
• and a challenge for your museum - has the web fundamentally changed your organisation?

Frankie Roberto (Rattle)
Went to the conference with a 'fan' hat on, just really enjoys museums. Loved the zoo - live exhibits are interactive, visceral. Role of live interpretation - how could it work with digital technology? Everyone loves dinosaur - Indy Children's Museum. All museums should have a carousel (can't remember what he was going to say about it).

The Power of Children; making a difference - really powerful stories.

Still thinking about the idea of creating visceral experiences.

ArtBabble - shouldn't generally create silos but ArtBabble spotted that YouTube wasn't working for certain types of content.

Davis LAB - kiosks and sofa. Said 'we are on the web'.

Drupal - lots of museums switching to it.

Richard Morgan (V&A) on APIS - ask, what is your museum good at?, and build an API for that - it may not be collections stuff.

'Things to do' page on V&A. Good way of highlighting ways to interact on website.

Semantic data, Aaron's talk on interpretation of bias, relocation from Flickr photos.
Breaking down ideas about authority on where an area is bounded by. OpenStreetMap - wants to add a historical layer to that so can scroll backwards and forwards in time. [I should ask whether this means layering old maps (with older street layouts like pre-Great Fire of London, or earlier representations?). Geo-rectification is expensive because it's time-consuming, but could it be crowdsourced? Geo-locating old images would be easier for the average person to do.]

Open Plaques - alpha project.

Thinks we won't need to digitise in the future as stuff will be born digital (ha, as if! Though it depends where you draw the lines about the end of collections - in my imagination they're like that warehouse scene at the end of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Arc and we won't run out of things to properly digitise any time soon. Still, it's a useful question.)

Dan Zambonini (Box UK)
'Every film needs a villain'. In his impressions and insights from MW2009 he'll say things we may or may not agree with.

Slide - stuff we can do vs. stuff we can't do on either side of a gulf of perceived complexity. It's hard to progress from one to the other. Three questions to bridge gap - how to make relevant to everyday job, how to show advantages, how to make it easy.

Then he realised should talk about personal things - people and connections made. About people, stuff that happens in the evening. The evening drinks don't happen at UKMW - it's a shame we have to go to the other side of the world to talk to each other. [It does it you're at an event like mashed museum the day before - another reason to open it up to educators, curators, etc.]

Small museums vs. big museums - [should make stuff accessible to small museums.] Can get value by helping people. (He tells his ex-girlfriend that ) small is the new big. Also small quick wins. Break down the big things into smaller things, find ways can get to them through small changes in behaviour, bits of information.

How small is small? Greater or less than one day. If less than a day, might as well try it. If it's going to take a week, not small.

Museums should share data - not just as API - share data on traffic, spill gossip on marketing costs, etc. [Information is power, etc]

Celebrate failure - admit that some things go wrong.

Bigger picture - be honest. Tell us when to shut up (on e.g. the MCG email list?). Sometimes feel like there's too much politics. I know some of us can be a bit hot-headed but it's frustration (not meanness).

"never willingly outsource creativity" - that's rubbish.

If not on twitter, get on it. The more people talking to each other, the more powerful we are as a group. [But what happens if you miss a few days of twitter? I like twitter, but it's inaccessible if you don't have time to constantly keep up, or don't have a computer at home. Still, getting more people talking is an excellentbl point, even if twitter itself doesn't work for some people.]

The sector is missing practical, specific blog, not news and opinions. [Do collections system specific user groups take the place of blogs?]

Use grants to innovate and produce open source stuff. Right now private agencies will take a lot of the strain of applying for grants.

Sort out that copyright stuff. How difficult can it be?

Final slide summing up and last bit of innuendo. 'Beer makes you more attractive' - it's the after sessions stuff at conferences that's so valuable.

Frankie, Dan and Daniel's slides are also available in the 'Museum Tech Pecha Kucha' event on slideshare (and mine has now got an audio track, thanks to Shelley).

Call me mildly obsessive (sad, even), but I got really excited when I read this and mentally replaced 'BBC programme' with 'museum object'. From the BBC Internet Blog:

Today sees the launch of Shownar; a new prototype from BBC Vision which aims
to track online buzz around BBC TV and radio programmes and reflect it back in
useful and interesting ways, aiding programme discovery and providing onward
journeys to discussion about those programmes on the wider web.

...

Shownar aims to track the wealth of activity that takes place around BBC progammes online and work out which are currently gaining the most attention.

...

So, how does it work? In the first instance, we decided to focus on tracking in-bound links to programme-related pages on bbc.co.uk, so we could be confident that the discussions were actually about a BBC programme ... We took a look at a range of possible suppliers, and for this initial prototype chose data provided by Yahoo! Search BOSS, Nielson Online's BlogPulse (which indexes over 100 million blogs), and Twingly (which searches microblogging services like Twitter, Jaiku and Identi.ca for links, even when they are shortened using URL shortening services such as TinyURL and bit.ly). We are also ingesting data from LiveStats, the BBC's own real-time indicator of traffic. Once ingested, this data is processed according to a specially created algorithm to calculate the 'buzz measure' for every BBC programme - more detail on the algorithm can be found on Shownar's Technical information page.

The post discusses some of the interfaces and benefits - I think the possibilities are pretty endless, and will be exploring how it might enhance the discoverability of and harness conversations about the Science Museum's online collections over the year.

Hat tip: @giv_p

By default RefTagger will tag only the bare Bible references on your site. If a Bible reference is already linked to Bible.Logos.com or another online Bible site, RefTagger will ignore it. So you won’t get the cool tooltips to show up on references you’ve already linked manually.

We’ve received some feedback from people who want to be able to link Bible references to Bible.Logos.com and have RefTagger add the tooltips, so we’ve decided to add support for it. It also works with Ref.ly links, which is perfect if you syndicate your Twitter feed to your blog.

Here are a couple of examples:

• Ro 8:28 (linked to http://bible.logos.com/passage/Ro8.28)
• Jn 3:16 (linked to http://ref.ly/Jn3.16)

All you need to do to enable this new functionality is add one additional line of code to the RefTagger script code in the footer of your site. Simply add

Logos.ReferenceTagging.lbsConvertHyperlinks = true;

to the RefTagger JavaScript code anywhere before the line

Logos.ReferenceTagging.tag();

This will tell RefTagger to add tooltips to all of the Bible references that are hard linked to Bible.Logos.com or Ref.ly.

Why would you want to do this? Well, since RefTagger uses JavaScript, Bible references in your site’s feed don’t get linked because the JavaScript code runs only on your site, not in your readers’ feed reader (e.g., Google Reader or Bloglines). If you want your Bible references to be linked in your feed, you’ll have to link them manually (or use this hack to save a little time). Before, you had to choose between linking your Bible references to Bible.Logos.com or using RefTagger. Now you can do both and enjoy the best of both worlds.

Quite by accident I today learn of another projected translation of Origen’s Homilies on Ezechiel.  It’s due to appear in January 2010 as part of the Ancient Christian Writers series, and translated by Thomas Scheck, who has translated several other volumes of Origen’s homilies.  The Amazon advert is here.

Frankly this is a nuisance and a half.  We’ll probably beat that deadline; but who needs two competing translations?  More to the point, is it a sensible thing to do with my money?

Not sure what to do now.

UPDATE: I’ve written to Dr Scheck to ask the status of his work; but from his home page it appears to be complete.

I’ve done some calculations.  The whole lot is about 200 pages of Latin in the SC edition, at $10 per page is $2,000.  Of this, about a quarter is done and indeed paid for.  So we’re talking about a further $1,500. 

Perhaps the answer is to go upmarket, and add a Latin text as well as a translation.

This homily now is translated and paid for, so we’re really making excellent progress.  12 more homilies to go!

I feel lost without my Palm. I can survive without its diary, word processor,reminders and most of the books, but the Bibles are indispensable.It is so much faster to look up a Hebrew word or find a text on a Palmthan to open up a book or a laptop program. I use BiblePlus which also hasextra-biblical books, linked lexicons and parallel windows.And the price couldn't be better: Free.Like many free

Yesterday afternoon, there was an American-style summer thunderstorm here in Loutro Elenis.  Complete with hail, lightening ground strikes, torrential downpours, and thunder, the storm represents (to my mind) another example of American cultural imperialism.  The Corinthia, typically, gets very little rain in the summer and thunder storms are relatively rare.

The nice thing about this storm is that it seemed to tell me that I should be going home.  And I am.  Tonight.

It also brought to mind a nice reminder of summer field seasons in the past.  In 2001, I was doing an extensive survey with the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey.  This involved hiking by myself through the mountains of the southeastern Corinthia and noting what I saw.  One late June afternoon, I came across the barely nucleated settlement that we now call Lakka Skoutara.  Just as I had finished doing a little walking tour of a few of the abandoned houses -- the very abandoned houses that we prepared for publication this summer -- a late June thunder storm rolled through the mountains.  I panicked and tried to find the biggest (but shortest) olive tree for some shelter when I caught the slightest glimpse of a tiny, whitewashed dome.  My keen, Byzantinist-trained mind immediately realized that there is only one kind of white-washed, domed building in the Greek countryside.  A church! 

It turned out to be a small, rural chapel dedicated to St. Katherine who is not particularly known for protecting wanderers, extensive surveyers, or travelers, but she obliged my immediate needs nonetheless and provided me shelter from the storm.

As I look forward to going home and returning to my more normal routine, I couldn't help but think that the rain yesterday put a nice bookend on our work here in the Corinthia.  First, it evoked my first experience of the Lakka Skoutara basin, where David Pettegrew and I concluded almost a decade of observation and documentation this year.  It also foreshadowed my return to the US with a quintessentially American weather.

So, thank for the patience with my somewhat erratic blogging schedule.  Once I get back to the US and settled in, I'll return to my normal blogging routine and post updates on my summer fieldwork, plans for the fall, and various other topics. 

A late posting, I did not have an internet connection for a while.

I am currently in Polis looking at pottery collected during the Polis excavations. Last week I looked at the pottery collected during a survey in Athienou. Looking at pottery from other projects helps me with analyzing pottery collected during PKAP's survey and excavations. I almost hit the trifecta here at Polis, it looked like rain this morning and I really thought that it was going to rain, but it never did. That would have been my third rainfall in 3 different cities in one season. It cleared up and the sun came out. Polis makes me appreciate Pyla-Koutsopetria and Larnaka, it is much hotter and much more humid here - or maybe it makes me appreciate the air conditioning at the Petrou Brothers...

RSM

Session Title: Digital Curiosities: Resource Creation Via Amateur Digitisation
Speaker: Melissa Terras

Overview: Review of 100 virtual museum websites and multiple flickr groups plus surveys of amateur website creators, memory institutions and Arts & Humanities academics leads to new perspective on digitization and creation of collections online by dedicated enthusiasts.

Session Highlights

Areas of “Amateur” endeavor  have a long history of launching collections, such as:

• cabinet of curiosities
• foundation of astronomical research
• british flora and amateur botanists
• weather observations
• open source software movement

Being an amateur doesn’t necessarily mean being bad at what you do!

Within the realm of self-defined museums some common topics often emerge:

• ephemera (advertising, packaging, nostalgia)
• comics
• technology – especially old tech, there is a surprising trend of being fascinated by technology approximately 10 years older than the collector
• personal and “embarrassing” collections
• genealogy

For these self-defined museums the scope is self-defined – these are self-delineated collections. Virtual museums can document aspects of cultural heritage considered socially taboo or in some way too sensitive to collect. A great example of this is the Museum of Menstruation which claims to have been created 14 years ago and is currently trying to establish a public permenant display for the public.

Platforms have evolved over the life of the web, starting with static html, then blogs and now Flickr images as a mode of presentation.

This is a list of successful amateur collections online:

• Today’s Inspiration – illustration from the 40’s and 50’s
• JonWilliamson.com – advertising 1940s-1960s
• Pulp Fiction Flickr Group – 882 members who provide basic metadata and often label stuff within the image – currently contains 3,385 items.
• Curio Cabinet Flickr Group – 1,206 members and 5,537 items

Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) is a more traditional site created by a cultural heritage institution. It contains 100,000+ images copyright cleared for use in teaching, learning and research in the UK. VADS is a very detailed static source of images with metadata, but provides no interaction.

Amateurs do provide metadata, but it is intuitive metadata. It might not fit into rigid buckets of data, but that doesn’t meant that the metadata available isn’t useful.

What are the boundaries between amateur and professional? Work vs hobby?

Many of these amateur sites get much more traffic than most standard museum sites. More than 50% of museum digitized images are never visited.

Memory institutions are starting to put things into the wider online community:

• Smithsonian: photos in Smithsonian Flickr Commons
• Tate: The How We Are Now project invited the public to contribute photos to the How We Are Flickr Group. The images were streamed to screens within the How We Are: Photographing Britain exhibit and 40 photos were chosen to be included as the last set of photos in the physical exhibit.
• Victoria & Albert Museum: created a Flicrk group of photos taken at the V&A museum along with a long list of other V&A Flickr groups and streams
• Oxford University’s Great War Archive: contains 6,500 items contributed by the public and related to the First World War.
• Facebook and Twitter are being used more often for informing the community about their collections

Much of amateur research has been driven by advances in technology. A great example of this is the advent of affordable metal detectors led to dramatic changes in archaeology. The internet and Web 2.0 technology are arming a whole new generation of enthusists who can find one another and collaborate more easily than might ever have been dreamed of 20 years ago.

Next Steps & Conclusions

Future research will involve looking at the psychology of collection: archives vs collections. For now it is important to realize that institutions are not the only hosts of “worthwhile” digital objects. Pro-am (aka, pro-amateur) are doing better with using web 2.0 & getting more traffic.

What can memory institutions learn from this?

• interact with user communities
• use the ‘grand central stations’ of flickr, twitter, facebook
• usability of flickr is better than what most memory institutions build for themselves

My Thoughts

This session considers the ways cultural memory institution can take advantage of the web by looking at what the successful enthusiasts are achieving. This research-backed approach confirms what I would have expected. Libraries, museums and archives are leaving a lot on the table when it comes to putting their collections online. Sites run by non-professionals are doing an amazing job of drawing in new audiences, keeping people around and then initiating conversation within that audience.

The Flickr Commons is a big step forward, but it isn’t the only option. There are also varying opinions about how successful the crowdsourcing aspect of the Flickr Commons is for memory institutions. A lot of this goes back to to a core question “how do we know if we have succeeded?”. There is much to be said for setting out clear goals when launching online initiatives. Is your goal increased traffic to your site or crowdsourcing of metadata? A great example of an initiative whose goal is clearly collection of crowdsourced metadata is the German Federal Archives who chose to use the Wikimedia Commons for their photo metadata initiative.

If you are trying to extend your mission of providing access to materials to the public, then how do you measure success? Putting your materials in what Melissa called “grand central stations” (or what I have also heard termed “public crosswalks”) definitely increases the chances serendipitous discovery by new individuals. That said, we can see from the successful blogs mentioned above that tackling a niche with enthusiasm and consistent posting can go a long way to building a following. JonWilliamson.com seems to have only launched back in November of 2008 with a post featuring a Scotch Tape Christmas ad from 1951. The author posted in May of 2009 that his images in Flickr had surpassed 100,000 views.

To conclude this post I leave you with a list of inspirational digitized collections online that were created by various cultural heritage institutions:

• Publishers’ Bindings Online – discussed in SAA2007’s Session: Publishers’ Bindings Online – Digitization, Collaboration, Standardization and Community Building, a multi-institutional project that includes galleries of topical images combined with an essay that gives the images context. Two of my favorites are:
  • From Domestic Goddesses to Suffragists: The Story of Women Told on Bookbindings, 1820-1920
  • Indians, the Frontier, and the West in American Bookbindings
• Calisphere – more than 150,000 digitized items organized for easy use by K-12 teachers. This is especially interesting in that it represents items already available in Online Archive of California, but organized in a way to make them easy to find and use with their target audience in mind.
• Yiddish Books Online – A project by the National Yiddish Book Center that uses the Internet Archive as a platform to host 11,000 digitized out-of-print Yiddish books. This project is a nice cross between a branded custom site and a grand-central station

Have a favorite online collection website? Please share it in the comments below.

As is the case with all my session summaries from DH2009, please accept my apologies in advance for any cases in which I misquote, overly simplify or miss points altogether in the post above. These sessions move fast and my main goal is to capture the core of the ideas presented and exchanged. Feel free to contact me about corrections to my summary either via comments on this post or via my contact form.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mms0131/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

We will discuss the technical realisation and efficiency of several dimensions of detecting citations and apply them in the field of the Plato's aftermath. Central parts of this presentation are graph based approaches. Based on substantial experience of an ongoing collaboration between researchers of Classical Studies and Computer Science we shall also reflect on the different approaches to working with text.

Go to academia.edu and build (or update) your profile. Encourage your students, colleagues and teachers to do so as well. Those of you whose institutions have an inadequate repostitory (or lack one altogether) can deposit your scholarly writing as a part of their profile on academia.edu.

Once you have a profile, find me at one or another of my manifestations there (merging of profiles for those with appopintments a more than one institution or department is an issue they are working on solving), and add me as a contact.

June 16th is Bloomsday, a day in 1904 Dublin that forms the subject of Ulysses by James Joyce. Philadelphia's Rosenbach Library and Museum, home of a Ulysses manuscript, celebrates every year with a public reading. Nothing can be better than a Spring day in Center City listening to readers like Ken Kalfus and his wife Inga Saffron (architectural critic of the Philadelphia Inquirer and bloger

I revel in the first few pages of Ulysses, tracing Stephen Dedalus's and stately, plump Buck Mulligan's ascents/descents in Martello Tower. The structure belongs to a series of defenses built to withstand a Napoleonic invasion, and it currently houses a Joyce museum. Last weekend, I surveyed a 15th century tower in Boeotia, so towers are on my mind. Mulligan wipes the sacramental shaving razor on

Without the pressure of ‘performing’ this year, I was able to sit back and enjoy the last day of the Lowdham Book Festival. Many of the events that I wished to attend clashed so I ended up choosing a poetry reading by local author Derek Buttress, then a talk by two short story writers Roberta Dewa and Frances Thimann. The highlights of the day were saved, however, for later: a talk by Chris Pyke about his entrepreneurial grandfather Montagu Pyke who founded a chain of cinemas in London in the early twentieth century (one of which is now a pub named after him in Charing Cross Road), followed by ‘From Demons to Dracula’, by Matthew Beresford, who traced the origins of vampirism from antiquity to the seductive, cape-wearing aristocrat of modern myth.

Réunion du comité technique du Projet PLUME à Toulouse les 24 et 25 nov 2008.
Dans le cadre du partenariat MutEC-Plume, Maud Ingarao et Raphaël Tournoy y participent en tant que responsables de la thématique SHS du Projet Plume : http://www.projet-plume.org/shs

Crédits photographiques : LAAS-CNRS Toulouse par _Asane_ , licence CC
<!--break-->

MutEC participe au Comité Technique du Projet Plume des 29 et 30 juin 2009 à Lyon et y représente la thématique Sciences Humaines et sociales : http://www.projet-plume.org/fr/shs

We are delighted to announce the release of v1.0 of the Open Database License (ODbL):

http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/

The Open Database License (ODbL) is an open license for data and databases which includes explicit attribution and share-alike requirements.

This license, the first of its kind, is a major step forward for open data. There are currently very few licenses available suited to data and databases and none which provide for share-alike (existing share-alike licenses such as the GPL, GFDL and CC By-SA are all unsuitable for data).

The development of the ODbL, has been a major effort extending over more than one and half years with an intensive consultation and review period for the last 6 months. We’d like to express our thanks to the communities and individuals who have contributed during this time.

Today's guest 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.

As mentioned in a previous blog, Logos released The John Piper Sermon Manuscript Library. Here's how to locate sermons on a particular topic or passage from the library:

• After installing the sermon library click the small black arrow next to the Home icon on the toolbar
• Choose Sermons from John Piper from the list of Home pages
• When his Home Page opens click the Browse tab

Now you can browse his sermons by Series, Topic, Occasion, or Scripture!

For more tips like this, be sure to visit Morris Proctor’s Tips & Tricks blog or subscribe to the RSS feed.

I have been thinking about writing an essay called "The House that Archaeology Built" that reviews architectural patronage by foreign archaeologists in Greece. From Heinrich Schliemann's house in Athens to Fred Cooper's house in Neohori, archaeologist houses present a fascinating type of home-making. The architecture of foreign archaeologists illustrate a physical, spiritual and scholarly

This entire last weekend, I was physically in Washington, D.C. but mentally in the Peloponnesos. Dumbarton Oaks' annual symposium on Byzantine Studies was devoted to "Morea: The Land and Its People in the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade." This was by far the most intellectually fulfilling symposium I have ever attended, brilliantly crafted by Sharon Gerstel (but more about that later). The

While researching America's relationship with Greece in the 1930s, it dawned on me that Greece occupied a parallel place in the American imagination as Ireland and Scotland. In other words, the American discovery of folk Greece happened at exactly the same time as the discovery of the Irish, Celtic and other less modernized regions of the United Kingdom. Similarities in constructing the Irish and

Digital History tells the deep story of the information revolutions the world is now experiencing. It looks back to earlier revolutions in information and technology, searching for analogous transformations in our notions of property, sociability, collaboration, and rule. By looking at these previous information revolutions -- including the print, urban, transport, and mass media revolutions -- historians come much better equipped to engage relevant, contemporary questions of copyright, property ownership, and the rule of experts. Such questions engage the historian in contemporary debates about the future of ongoing information revolutions for politics, society, and the self.

This search forces the historian to reprioritize new kinds of teaching, researching and publishing that may have little to do with traditional books, lectures, seminars, and conferences. As the world archive becomes digitized, the scholars who make the most persuasive and radical arguments become those who have mastered new techniques for mining information from the world-catalogue of maps, images, and automatically-translated texts of all eras. As reading shifts towards browsing, as writing becomes more collaborative, the very skills we teach undergraduates are shifting to emphasize the pithy, analytic, and interdisciplinary over the twelve-page essay within a particular discipline. As the university publishing houses collapse and university lectures become downloadable on the web, academic experts will find homes in institutions whose nature we can scarcely anticipate now.

The only way to prepare ourselves for those eventualities is to experiment broadly with the tools of participative education, writing, and publication now, testing them for the best advantages and most threatening shortcomings. What we’re attempting is actually a reflexive application of historical knowledge to self-understanding within the discipline of history. One hope of such an agenda is that the engaged historians of the present will become the architects of a new system for the future.

Goals:

• Experimenting as a class with web2.0 technology with an eye to understanding its role in collaborative research, publishing, and teaching
• Testing a set of new research tools each week by asking students to apply them to their current area of interest, dissertation list, and qualifying exams material, so that they may immediately begin executing more sophisticated ways of sorting their material and more public ways of making that knowledge available to others. To become comfortable assessing and reviewing new technologies’ potential for academic use.
• Charting the historiography of information revolutions capable of helping the historian effectively comment on contemporary experience, social change, and policy
• Establishing the grounds for comparing this scholarly historiography to contemporary uses of history and theories of technology
• Beginning a conversation about the future of the academy and the professional academic in a world where the university competes with the internet as a source of expertise.
• Leaving a relic of these discussions available to the public sphere in the form of information trails in web2.0 environments

Texts
(Not at bookstore. Please order through your favorite online retailer.)
Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication
Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture
Olivier Zunz, Why the American Century?
Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message
David Henkin, The Postal Age
David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous
Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone
Neil Headrick, When Information Came of Age
Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book


Required Software
All of the required software is free to download and use. The two recommended pieces of software that charge – Personal Brain and Devonthink – may be highly useful in the long term for dissertation students sorting massive quantities of data. Both have a free first-month trial, and personal brain allows you to use some of the basic features without upgrading from the free version.
Please create an account and friend the class in the following programs:
• Delicious
• Twitter
• Flickr
• Zotero
Please download and install:
• EverNote
Familiarize yourself with:
• Google Book Search
• Google Scholar
Recommended early installations – may take several weeks to master:
o Google Earth
o Firefox + Sharaholic extension (send stuff to facebook, dig, delicious) + Zotero extension (citation manager for books, articles, newspapers, websites) + Cooliris extension (better for photo browsing) + UChicago plugin (search Worldcat, lens, library catalog) + Ubiquity extension (translate on the fly)
o Personal Brain (~$100/hit) (optional)
o Devonthink/Agent (~$50 with student discount. Get the Pro Office edition so that it can recognize words from scanned archival documents) (optional)

Projects
WEEKLY ASSIGNMENTS. Each week, each student will select one technology from the “methodology” list, download/create an account, and begin integrating the technology with their workload. The student will perform experiments in using said technology to enhance their scholarship, and will report on their experience to the rest of the class.
It is hoped that the set of methodologies each student picks will remain in casual use for the duration of the semester, through various experiments, and so form a trial of the use of web 2.0 in a teaching situation. For instance, the syllabus begins with a list of everyday technologies like Facebook and Twitter, which are highly useful for signaling to the course’s professor, as well as the rest of the digital coffeehouse, that one is maintaining a critical interest in how digital technologies might enhance one’s engagement with other courses and matters of research interest.
PARTICIPATION. Conversational engagement is the most traditional way of assessing a student’s participation. This course will have a secondary record of backchanneled communication as well By the end of class, the student’s twitter, delicious, and flickr accounts should form a transcript of evolving experiments, interests, and ideas.
FIRST PROJECT (fifth week of class). The equivalent of a five page paper on the historiography of information, preferably making use of some cutting-edge methodology as a source of its overview, presented in the form of a series of flickr slides, blog entries, or an omeka project.
SECOND PROJECT (last week of class). A synthetic project aggregating material from at least 3 of the methodological categories. The project may extend the historiographical project or present research material from another research paper/dissertation chapter, made available to the public in the form of a series of flickr slides, blog entries, omeka project, podcast, videocast, annotated map, or concept map. To be presented, during class, the last week of class.




Schedule of Readings
Course readings are in two sections: I. Historiography and II. Methodology. The methodology readings are due on Tuesdays; the historiographical readings on Thursdays.
The reading list will go, like Merlin, backwards in time so that we should begin by facing contemporary prejudices about the workings of media, and end with the most distant mirror armed with new methodologies for drawing our own conclusions.

WEEK ONE

Tuesday: Class introductions and overview.
Install required software.
Friend everyone in the class on Delicious, Twitter, Flickr, and Zotero.

Thursday: Rethinking Pedagogy in the Age of P2P communication:
First Methodology Reports due in class. Software for Sharing and Annotating the web (CHOOSE ONE to report on):
• GoogleDocs
• Diigo
• Skim
• Slideshare
• PBwiki
• Scriblink
• ScienceCommons
• Gurteen.com
• Anything else from http://delicious.com/network/joguldi/sharing+tools
READING: (these are about 1 page each)
• Howard Rheingold, "Participative Pedagogy: For a Literacy of Literacies" http://freesouls.cc/essays/03-howard-rheingold-participative-pedagogy-for-a-literacy-of-literacies.html
• Charles Murray, "Are Too Many People Going to College?"
• http://www.american.com/archive/2008/september-october-magazine/are-too-many-people-going-to-college
• Stephen Mihm, "Everyone's a Historian Now," Boston Globe (May 25, 2008)
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/05/25/everyones_a_historian_now/?page=full
• Roy Rosenzweig, “Can History Be Open Sourced? The Future of the Past”
http://chnm.gmu.edu/resources/essays/d/42
• Gideon Burton, "Dear Students: Don't Let College Unplug Your Future", Academic Evolution (January 11, 2008)
http://www.alex-reid.net/higher_education/
• Alex Reid, various blog entries tagged "Higher Education" in Digital Digs: http://www.alex-reid.net/higher_education/
• Wikipedia Schools and Universities Project
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schools_and_universities_project
• Intro, section on mobiles, HORIZON Report 2008: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/CSD5612.pdf
• "Teaching as Lying," Chronicle of Higher Education (2008) http://www.alternativeculture.org/content/view/114/63/

WEEK TWO
Tuesday: Historiography of Information
Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near (excerpts, handed out in class)
Michael Angelo Garvey, The Silent Revolution (1852) (online - skim)

Thursday: Bibliographic Methodologies
Choose one and generate a bibliography with metadata. If you are working on a dissertation or other major project, use some books from your dissertation. Otherwise, use the readings for this course.
o Zotero
o Papers
o Librarything
o Lens
o Connotea
o Edtags
o Webcitation
o Zotz
o Citeline
o Scholar
READING:
• "Are Online Articles Changing Scientists' Reading Habits?"
http://www.endofcyberspace.com/2008/08/are-online-data.html
• Thomas Mann, "The Peloponnesian War and the Future of Reference, Cataloguing, and Scholarship in Research Libraries"
http://guild2910.org/Pelopponesian%20War%20June%2013%202007.pdf
• Daniel H. Pink, "Folksonomy," New York Times (December 11, 2005)
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/11ideas1-21.html?_r=1&ex%1291957200&enP937f27a0973e6e&eiP90&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
• "Harvard Forum on Social Tagging"
http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/harvard_forum_on_social_taggin.html
• Google Scholar Bibliography (via Dean Giustini): http://hlwiki.slais.ubc.ca/index.php/Google_scholar_bibliography

WEEK THREE

Tuesday: Historiography of the Internet
Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture
Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication

Thursday: Methodologies of Publishing
Choose one:
• Blog: Wordpress, Blogger
• Podcast: Podomatic
• Videocast: Blip.tv, Archive.org, Vimeo
• Flickr

READING:
• Alf Rehn, "Academic Publishing: A Rant," Text Sushi, 2007
http://www.alfrehn.com/blog/2007/11/24/on-academic-productivity-%E2%80%94-a-rant/
• Various articles on the future of scholarly publishing from Nines
http://nines.org/about/readings.html
• "Harvard Opens Up Publishing"
http://www.oculture.com/2008/02/harvard_opens_scholarship_freeing_up_knowledge_and_budgets.html
• Robert Darnton, "The Case for Open Access," Harvard Crimson, 2008.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=521835
• George Siemens, "Scholarship in an Age of Participation," 2007.
http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/journal.htm
• Lev Grossman, "Books Unbound," Time (2009)
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1873122,00.html

WEEK FOUR

Tuesday: Historiographies of c20 Media Explosions
FILM: CRAIG BALDWIN, SPECTRES OF THE SPECTRUM (I’ll see about arranging a viewing)
Intro, Mark Kurslansky, 1968 (on Chalk)
Excerpt, Alex Wright, Glut (on Chalk)

Thursday: Mass Digitization
Choose one in each category:
• Text Databases:

EEBO (c17), ECCO (c18), Old Bailey (c19 English Courts), NINES (c19 literature) GoogleBooks (includes some German, Spanish), Gallica, ArtFL

• Image Databases:

Flickr Commons, LoC (American), National Library of Australia, David Rumsey Map Collection, Perseus (Classical), Europeana

For the bigger picture, start here: http://delicious.com/bibliparis4

READING:
• Jim Naughton, "Google Pays Small Change to Open Every Book in the World"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/nov/02/google-books-scanning-libraries
• "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto" (2008)
http://guerillaopenaccess.com/

WEEK FIVE

Tuesday: Historiography – Universities, Think Tanks, and Public Relations Experts
VIRTUAL EXHIBIT: http://www.prmuseum.com/
Mark Crispin Miller, “Introduction,” and Ch 1, in Edward Bernays, Propaganda (online)
Olivier Zunz, Why the American Century?

Thursday: Methodologies for Sorting
Choose one:
• PhiloLogic
• Juxta
• Collex
• TAPoR
• TagCrowd
• uClassify
• Topicalizer
• UsingEnglish.com
• SemanticHacker
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPSS
• *Devonthink
• *Many Eyes
• Google Timeline


READING:
• David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellanious
• Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companionDLS/
• Chris Forster, "How to Measure Text" (2008)
http://scholarslab.lib.virginia.edu/index.php/grad-fellows/how-to-measure-text/
• The Institute for the Future, "The Future of Libraries as Places"
http://digitalhistorysyllabus.pbwiki.com/The-Future-of-Libraries-as-Places

WEEK SIX

Tuesday: Historiographies of Victorian Connections
Dionysius Lardner, The Steam Engine (online - skim)
David Henkin, The Postal Age
Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message


Thursday: Methodologies of Visual/Spatial Analysis

Image mining/sharing:
• Flickr + flickr tag browser: http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/related_tag_browser/app/
• http://maker.geocommons.com
• http://www.tagzania.com/
• http://www.placeopedia.com/
• http://www.wayfaring.com/
• Omeka
• Wikimapia
Readings:
• "Biblical Statistics"
http://scholarslab.lib.virginia.edu/index.php/digital-humanities/biblical-statistics/
• "Iterative Cosmologies"
http://scholarslab.lib.virginia.edu/index.php/grad-fellows/iterative-cosmologies/
• "The Next Big Thing in Humanities, Arts and Social Science Computing: Cultural Analytics," HPCWire (July 29, 2008)
http://www.calit2.net/newsroom/release.php?id=1447
• "Geo-Everything", HORIZON Report 2008: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/CSD5612.pdf

WEEK SEVEN

Tuesday: Historiographies of Urbanism
Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone
M. H. Ebner, “Urban History: Retrospect and Prospect,” Journal of American History (1981)

Thursday: Methodologies of Mind-mapping and Concept-mapping
Choose one:
• Personal Brain (there is a free edition which allows you to take notes but not to zoom or make attachments)
• Bubbl.us, MindMeister, XMind (collaborative!) (Free registration)
• http://cmap.ihmc.us/ (look especially at "synchronous collaboration" and "knowledge soups")
• Ivanhoe (literary) (free registration)

WEEK EIGHT

Tuesday: Historiography of the Age of Experts
Headrick, When Information Came of Age
FILM: The League of Nobel Peers, Steal This Film (available online at stealthisfilm.com)

Thursday: Rethinking Publishing
Investigate one of the following:
• Patricia Fumerton's Ballad Project: http://emc.english.ucsb.edu/ballad_project/
• Itunes U
• Digital Installation Art, e. g. http://emergenceproject.org/
• http://www.seriousgamesinstitute.co.uk/
• http://kids.generationcures.org/play
Reading:
• Clive Thompson, "Why a Famous Counterfactual Historian Loves Making History With Games", Wired (May 21, 2007)
• David Parry, Assignments from Digital Storytelling
• Bill Turkel's class's interactive, real-object models of Hervey's circulatory system and the sky: http://digitalhistory.wikispot.org/
• Peter Gallison's CV
• http://www.bigthink.com/

WEEK NINE

Tuesday: Historiography of the Print Revolution
Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book
Intro, Elizabeth Eisenstein, the Print Revolution (on Chalk)

Thursday: No Class. Work on your final projects.

WEEK TEN

Presentation of final projects

I’d very much like to know more about the astonishing revival of monasticism that has taken place among the Copts in modern Egypt.  A central figure is the mysterious Fr. Matta al-Maskeen (various spellings seem to be around).

Quite by chance I’ve stumbled across a digest of translated newspaper articles on him here.  Sadly you have to be a subscriber to access the articles, but the summaries alone are interesting.  The site itself says that

We publish Arab-West Report, an independent weekly electronic magazine. It is dedicated to fostering understanding of the Arab World. We do this partly through summary translations of Arabic newspaper articles into English…

Guys… you’ll foster understanding better if you make it possible for people other than specialists to read the articles!  You need free content, really you do. Make the current year and last year subscription only, and let everyone read before then.

Back to Fr. Matta.  I think there may be a book or two about this renewal by John H. Watson, but I haven’t seen any of them.

The search in Google on “matta al-maskeen monks” brings back such interesting results.  I find there is a Coptic forum here, where the merits (and otherwise) of Fr. Matta are hotly debated.

Well that was a good day’s work; starting late morning, continuing this afternoon with a couple of breaks, and finishing now — I’ve translated the remainder of Agapius, some 38 pages.   The first draft of the whole work is done!  Frankly I am delighted.

Thankfully I had scanned the page images before I began, presumably whenever I scanned the last chunk.  Then I marked up the pages for scanning, corrected the OCR, and got a French text in an RTF file.  Then I ran it through a programme that split it into sentences.  I took the output and ran it through the machine translator.  Then input both the French and the English into another tool to interleave automatically the French and English sentences.  From there on, it was just a task of working through the file, making the English version correct, and removing the French as I did so.  I suppose it took, what, seven hours?  Hmm… that’s longer than I thought.

Not bad on a day when the outside temperature hit over 27C.

I’m done for today, now; the days when I could work to midnight on Friday and Saturday in order to work on the website are sadly behind me. 

The next stage, when I get some time, is to go through these files, add page numbers, correct awkwardnesses, check things, and so on.  That may be a couple of days work.  But we’re getting close to a free, online English version of Agapius! 

I have resumed work on turning the French translation of Agapius, published by A. Vasiliev in the Patrologia Orientalis, into English.  In fact I never totally halted on this, except when I was working at full speed on the Greek translator.  My work has no scholarly value, but there must be 2bn people who can read English and cannot read French, so I hope that making this freely available will promote interest in this text.

Long term readers will be aware that Agapius was a 10th century Arabic Christian writer, who has left us a world chronicle.  This is best known for supposedly containing a unique version of the so-called Testimonium Flavianum of Josephus; and also has a fragment of Papias not otherwise known.  His work is largely made up of material from earlier chroniclers, mostly Syriac and Byzantine.  The text was published in 600 pages of the PO, in four parts, all of which are now on Archive.org.  I have made a translation of parts 1, 3 and 4, and am halfway through part 2 at the moment *.  The current text is taken from legendary material about Alexander which circulated through the east.  In truth it is quite tedious, but I hope that easier access to this text will promote study of this material.

Here is a sample.  Alexander has just defeated the Indians by rolling red-hot brass elephants (with a coal furnace inside each) into the ranks of the enemy, who happen to be downhill.

The troops of Alexander pursued them in all directions and killed a very great number of them. After this the auxiliary troops of the king of China, agitated and drawn out, came to the king of India, with their tired beasts of burden. They halted in the camp of the Indians without movement or resources. Alexander, who was unaware of their situation, thought, after having seen their camp, that this was a trick on their part. So he gathered his philosophers and said to them: “You have already seen with which speed their reinforcements arrived and what a state of exhaustion we are in; [you see] that we have fewer resources than they do. Yesterday, at nightfall, we had massacred them and made them perish. But hardly has the day begun, and their army has returned more numerous than before. What is your opinion on this, our situation and our position?” While they were reflecting, the oldest of their philosophers said: “I believe that we must attack them and fight them next Tuesday.” However this opinion was pronounced on Wednesday, seven days before Tuesday.

In Agapius, Alexander is always hanging around after battles, and asking his philosophers what he should do next.  Of course the Arabic word using is probably hakeem; usually translated “doctor”, but often “philosopher”, and in any case a learned man of some sort, of the kind that might be met with in the Arabian nights in the Bazaar.  The word might even mean “magician” or “sorceror”, as Sinbad the Sailor found to his cost.  There is an Arabic correspondance of Alexander and Aristotle, in which the former seeks ways to defeat the Persians, and the latter advises him on spells and incantations to do so!

In a sense all this is tedious.  Yet in another sense it is salutary to be reminded that the rise of superstition in the west during the Dark Ages was paralleled also in the East, even without the barbarian invasions.

* Postscript: I was translating away and suddenly found myself at the end of the chunk.  I divided each part of Agapius into three chunks, you see, each of 50 pages.  So I have in fact completed two-thirds of part 2.  Only another 38 pages to go!

Abu’l Barakat was a medieval Arabic Christian.  In one of his works, he devoted a chapter to listing Arabic Christian literature.  Of course this catalogue of what exists or existed is an invaluable guide to someone who is starting to explore patristic material surviving in that language.  Riedel published it long ago, with a German translation * , and a kind friend sent me a copy in PDF form today.  It urgently needs to go online.  If he’s OK with it, I’ll upload the PDF to Archive.org.

But we also need an English translation.  It’s about 154 words per page and 36 pages, in the German translation; if the Arabic is similar, that makes 5,544 words, or about $500 at my usual 10c per word.  I can afford that, I think.  I need to find a translator!

* Wilhelm Riedel, Der Katalog der christlichen Schriften in arabischer Sprache von Abu’l-Barakat, in Nachrichten der K. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. Philologisch-Hist. Klasse, 1902 (Heft 5), pp. 636-706.

when the news broke, the Internet slowed down.

I was actually in the hotel lobby at UMUC, just waiting to leave from DH09. Someone came into the lobby and screamed the news - and everyone turned to the web to verify, amongst a chorus of "no ways!" and some screams.

• OINE 2. Ausgrabungen von Khor-Dehmit bis Bet El-Wali. H. Ricke. Originally published in 1967.
• OIP 106. The Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak, Volume 1, Part 1: The Wall Reliefs. By Harold Hayden Nelson. Edited by William J. Murnane. Originally published in 1981
• OIP 94. Medinet Habu, Vol. VIII: The Eastern High Gate with Translations of Texts. The Epigraphic Survey. Originally published in 1970
• OIP 87. The Egyptian Coffin Texts 7, Texts of Spells 787-1185. By Adriaan de Buck. Originally published in 1961
• OIP 86. The Tomb of Tjanefer at Thebes. By Keith C. Seele. Originally published in 1959
• OIP 82. The Egyptian Book of the Dead: Documents in the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago. Edited by Thomas George Allen. Originally published in 1960
• OIP 66. Post-Ramessid Remains. The Excavation of Medinet Habu, Volume 5. By Uvo Hölscher. Originally published in 1954
• OIP 71. Coptic Ostraca from Medinet Habu. By Elizabeth Stefanski and Miriam Lichtheim. Originally published in 1952
• OIP 64. The Egyptian Coffin Texts 3: Texts of Spells 164-267. By Adriaan de Buck. Originally published in 1947
• OIP 54. The Mortuary Temple of Ramses III, Part 1. The Excavation of Medinet Habu, Volume 3. By Uvo Hölscher. Originally published in 1941
• OIP 41. The Excavation of Medinet Habu, Volume 2: The Temples of the Eighteenth Dynasty. By Uvo Hölscher. Originally published in 1939

Most readers will be aware that I sell a CDROM of the collection of the Fathers that I have online.  Quite a few copies have been sold lately.  So I’d like to thank all those readers who have recently bought one.  These sales are helping directly to pay for the translation of Origen’s Homilies on Ezechiel, never previously translated into English.  These will go online in the end; and your money is helping this along enormously. 

I don’t know most of you, but I appreciate your support more than I can say.  Thank you.

It’s funny how you can have a fairly quiet time of things, then suddenly everything happens in one week…

So Monday was the first Open Source GIS conference in the UK, affectionately known to it’s friends as OSGIS 2009. The event was sold out in advance (150 people) ,  and seemed to be well received, though it was hectic, with two streams and workshops going on through most of the day.  I quite enjoyed the quick-fire aspect of the talks, with most being limited to 15-30 minutes. Perhaps my favourite was from Rob Booth, who talked about using Open Source for Spire- the UK Department for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs’ (DEFRA)  SDI. While there were issues with scaling, the flexibility, response and community/developer support were all big plus points in choosing that solution. This is a good counter-example to bring up whenever anyone says that open source is just for the little guys.

We had the first AGM of the OSGeo UK local chapter after the conference, and many thanks to those hardy souls who stayed around for it. The main point of discussion was whether the chapter should become an ‘organisation’, in the voluntary sense, which would allow us to have a bank account and various useful things like that. We also discussed putting a bid together for FOSS4G in 2011, and decided that 2012 would be a better bet, it being Olympic year and all that. Mateusz had some really good points to make about using social networking to get people involved, and the idea of having informal get-togethers outside of the big conferences. So- we now have a linkedin group, a facebook group and some tools for helping people plan meetups will be following shortly. Lunch-time pub get-togethers were very popular. Can’t imagine why… join the groups though- the more the merrier!

So- to next year. Bigger, better, and shinier. There’s a date for OSGIS 2010 already, and plans are afoot to spread it over 1.5 days, with an afternoon of workshops either before the main event or after it. See you there!

These comments are from Peter Suber's Open Access News, Monday May 11, 2009

"Elsevier confirms 6 fake journals; more comments Bob Grant, Elsevier published 6 fake journals, The Scientist, May 7, 2009.

Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did not disclose sponsorship, the company has admitted."

[Elsevier called these pseudo-journals "sponsored article publications." --MES]

----------------------------------------------------

"When is peer review not peer view? (hint: when Merck pays Elsevier), Small Gray Matters, May 8, 2009.

... The bitter irony is that Elsevier, along with the other major academic publishers, have spent the last few years ceaselessly lobbying against the open access movement, on the grounds that open access journals can’t be trusted to maintain the high quality of peer review that the commercial publishers provide. Any guesses as to whether Elsevier will rethink that stance following this fiasco? ..."

-----------------------------------------------------------

Peter Murray-Rust, Trust in scientific publishing, A Scientist and the Web , May 9, 2009.

... So – as many have noted – here is a commercial company which has campaigned to rubbish Open Access as “junk science” behaving in a manner which totally destroys any trust in their ethics and practice. I have no option but to say that I now cannot absolutely trust the ethical integrity of every piece of information in Elsevier journals.

The need for Open, trusted, scientific data and discourse is now clear. The scientific societies are well placed to help us make the change from closed paper to open trusted semantic digital. They clearly need a business model that transforms the new qualities into a revenue stream. This will not be easy but it has to be tried – there is no alternative. Some of the modern tools will help – the ability to mashup, aggregate, etc. will lead to new forms of high-quality information that will have monetary value. Certified validated information will lead to productivity gains and may be a valuable commodity. ...

------------------------------------------------------------

Archaeology, of course, does not have anywhere near the level of commercial incentives that can generate this kind of unethical practice in journal publication. But what about junk edited volumes? Could commercial incentives trump scientific value for some of these? I remain puzzled at the program of evidently non-peer-reviewed edited books put out by Nova Scientific Publishers, but I have no evidence that commercial factors outweigh scientific factors in these books. And most professionals could tell a story or two about cases where journal peer review went out the window for one reason or another. But then we don't have a venue for discussing such activities. I hear from one or two colleagues each year with complaints about unethical or capricious or bizarre behavior by editors, reviewers, publishers, and others. Other than give personal advice, there is not much I can do because I typically lack both definitive data and some kind of official status that might warrant meddling in other peoples' business.