A scholarly digital edition of Codex Sinaiticus, published on the internet

May 28, 2008 at 1:25 pm · Filed under web2.0

Serious content from the world of Digital Humanities. This project is not on line as yet, but is part of a three year project.

This project will create a full scholarly digital edition of Codex Sinaiticus, one of the two oldest Greek Bibles and the oldest complete New Testament, arguably the most important of all surviving ancient manuscripts. It is part of a larger project to bring together all surviving leaves of the manuscript, divided among four different countries, into a virtual whole, and to provide access at every level from the general reader to the most advanced scholar. Within that larger project, this scholarly edition will focus on the needs of researchers, scholars, and educated readers, offering meticulous detail in image and transcript, with highly-developed tools in a sophisticated interface, to enable research hitherto impossible (link)

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How stupid can university rankings get?

May 25, 2008 at 7:17 pm · Filed under pedagogy, pod casts

This is an indication on just how relative, simplistic, and self-serving the so-called university ‘global’ rating system has become. A university in Melbourne , unable, it seems, to compete on the rather insane ranking system created by newspapers like the London Times, has decided to create its own ranking system. And who comes on top of this ranking system do you think? The city of Melbourne and a university that doesn’t even have a humanities school. Subjective or what? Apples and Pears or what? (link)

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Repository Interface for Overlaid Journal Archives

May 19, 2008 at 10:16 am · Filed under collaboration, e-science

This project is in part an attempt to address the issue of data re-use in research (but not the Humanities).

RIOJA will create a tool to support automated interactions between journal software and public repositories. The project will also build a pilot “overlay journal”, which will demonstrate interactions between the arXiv subject repository and OJS journal software, facilitated by the RIOJA tool. Additionally, RIOJA will explore some of the social and economic aspects of building certification onto repositories. A large-scale survey of researchers from the field of Astrophysics and Cosmology will be carried out, and a feasibility study on the costs and sustainability of an overlay journal in this field will be published.

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Digital Classicist Work-in-Progress seminars (ICS, London)

May 2, 2008 at 11:12 am · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing

Subject: Digital Classicist Work-in-Progress seminars (ICS, London)

**Digital Classicist Work-in-Progress seminars**
Institute of Classical Studies

Fridays at 16:30 in NG16, Senate House, Malet St, London, WC1E 7HU
(June 20th, July 4th-18th seminars in room B3, Stewart House)
(June 27th seminar room 218, Chadwick Bdg, UCL, Gower Street)

**ALL WELCOME**

6 June (NG16)
Elaine Matthews and Sebastian Rahtz (Oxford), The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names and classical web services

13 June (NG16)
Brent Seales (University of Kentucky), EDUCE: Non-invasive scanning for classical materials

20 June (STB3)
Dot Porter (University of Kentucky), The Son of Suda On Line: a next generation collaborative editing tool

27 June (UCL Chadwick 218)
Bruce Fraser (Cambridge), The value and price of information: reflections on e-publishing in the humanities

4 July (STB3)
Andrew Bevan (UCL), Computational Approaches to Human and Animal Movement in the Archaeological Record

11 July (STB3)
Frances Foster (KCL), A digital presentation of the text of Servius

18 July (STB3)
Ryan Bauman (University of Kentucky), Towards the Digital Squeeze: 3-D imaging of inscriptions and curse tablets

25 July (NG16)
Charlotte Tupman (KCL), Markup of the epigraphy and archaeology of Roman Libya

1 Aug (NG16)
Juan Garcés (British Library), Digitizing the oldest complete Greek Bible: The Codex Sinaiticus project

8 Aug (NG16)
Charlotte Roueché (KCL), From Stone to Byte

15 Aug (NG16)
Ioannis Doukas (KCL), Towards a digital publication for the Homeric Catalogue of Ships

22 Aug (NG16)
Peter Heslin (Durham), Diogenes: Past development and future plans

**ALL WELCOME**

We are inviting both students and established researchers involved in
the application of the digital humanities to the study of the ancient
world to come and introduce their work. The focus of this seminar series
is the interdisciplinary and collaborative work that results at the
interface of expertise in Classics or Archaeology and Computer Science.

The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.

Audio recordings and slideshows will be uploaded after each event.

(Sponsored by the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London,
and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London.)

For more information please contact gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk or
simon.mahony@kcl.ac.uk, or visit the seminar website at
http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2008.html

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May 1 and Online Academic Labour

May 1, 2008 at 10:35 pm · Filed under collaboration, digital humanities, e-science, humanities computing

Dear Humanist,

This project from a student at MIT (User Labor Markup Language (ULML)is pertinent given that today is May 1. And I find the question of the fair and productive use of labour online, including academic labour, one of the most interesting at the moment. For instance ‘My Experiment, a project from the Science community here is the UK, is a good model of ‘online collaboration’ as it ’saves’ (or efficiently uses) academic labour through the process of sharing academic energies and resources. It doesn’t add unnecessary layers to the research process, but perhaps does what computing has always promised to do, and this is make our tasks more efficient and less labour intensive. http://www.myexperiment.org

We are probably on the verge of some major structural shifts in how universities manage academic labour through their computing networks and indeed this is reflected in broader social and economic arrangements. The city where I live, London, is the archetype of post-industrial city that doesn’t make a damn thing. All London makes are sandwiches for people who work in offices. It is almost impossible to get a decent pair of locally made boots and the idea of an English made car is a foreign to England in the 21st Century as sheep and whale blubber are to modern Australians.

The point is that a lot of universities and large organisations are building systems (cyberinfrastructure or otherwise) that exploit labour of some form, but often without an equal understanding of the labour relationships that occur through these systems. The value of any collaborative system, that are increasingly being used by humanists everywhere, is the value of the small steps taken to reach useful intellectual goals. However, it is how these small steps are managed and exploited that raises some very interesting questions. Are we creating ill-considered ‘Dikensian’ factories of the mind, or are we using our efforts and energies wisely to build useful knowledge about the world where we still critique the tools at our disposal to reach those goals?

Kind regards,

Craig Bellamy

Message: 1
Date: Thu, 1 May 2008 07:59:37 -0400
From: Burak Arikan <arikan@media.mit.edu>
Subject: [iDC] User Labor
To: idc@mailman.thing.net
Message-ID: <C1B300AA-927C-4214-94F9-4D324D12D35E@media.mit.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=”us-ascii”

Hi everyone,

Today is May Day, we celebrate the social and economic achievements  of the labor movement ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Labor_movement ). In this important day, we wanted to announce our  project User Labor.

User Labor Markup Language (ULML), is an open data structure to  outline the metrics of user participation in social web services. Our  aim is to construct criteria and context for determining the value of  user labor for distribution. We believe that universality,  transparency, and accessibility of user labor metrics will ultimately  lead to more sustainable service cycles in social web.

Please see the examples on the User Labor website. Your feedback and  contribution is very important to improve this project.

http://userlabor.org/

Thank you,
Burak

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