Bodin Project at the PDL

Bodin Project starts digitizing Jean Bodin for the PDL

A Tufts Innovates seed fund grant will help Yannis Evrigenis and the Bodin Project at Tufts University to digitize Jean Bodin’s Les six livres de la republique. The work, which was published in French, Latin and English and contains copious references to other works, will form the basis of a dynamic variorum edition and will be used as a test-case for identifying text re-use across linguistic boundaries.

Yannis has assembled a team of six undergraduate students and one graduate student to work on the digitization of Bodin’s Latin and French text, with help from Bridget Almas and Lisa Cerrato, as well as other members of the Perseus team.

At the same time, the Tisch Library at Tufts has acquired a 1577 copy of Bodin’s French text and a 1609 copy of the Latin, which it has also digitized through the Internet Archive at the Boston Public Library. The extraction of the Latin text began in June 2013 and was completed in July 2013, while that of the French began in August 2013 and is continuing at present, albeit at a much slower pace, since several of the students have left to study abroad and everyone has returned to a regular schedule.

Two of the students are continuing to work on the project under Evrigenis’s supervision, and in the spring semester, Evrigenis will be devoting a political theory methods seminar to Bodin and the parallel edition of the Six livres that will be open to undergraduates and graduate students who can read Latin. We will continue to work on the French simultaneously, and we expect to have the full French text by the end of the 2013-2014 academic year.

In the meantime, Bridget Almas has begun to test the Latin text against Morpheus, to identify word tokens that are not recognizable by a dictionary and may need to be corrected. We intend to subject the French to the same preliminary test, although the additional difficulty in that case will be to identify a suitable lexicon that will incorporate Renaissance French. We expect that workable editions of all three versions of the text will be available by the middle of the summer of 2014.

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Bruce Robertson and Federico Boschetti at Digital Humanities Leipzig

Ancient Greek OCR at Digital Humanities Leipzig

Bruce Robertson and Federico Boschetti presented their latest work on ancient Greek OCR at an Open Philology workshop organised by Digital Humanities Leipzig at the University of Leipzig in August.

Boschetti's CoPhi editor at work
Boschetti’s CoPhi editor at work

You can follow their latest work on Github: Bruce’s work is here. Federico’s work is now in the Open Philology repository on github.

Read the Digital Humanities Leipzig blog entry.

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Sharing Ancient Wisdoms

SAWS Project

The international  SAWS  project has been funded by HERA, Humanities in the European Research Area.

“The aim of the SAWS project is to present and analyse the tradition of wisdom literatures in Greek and Arabic. Throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages collections of wise or useful sayings were created and circulated, as a practical response to the cost and inaccessibility of full texts in a manuscript age; the project will focus on those which collected moral and social advice.”

This first programme of trans-European research ends in summer 2013, and is being marked by a Festival of the Humanities in London. This will include a discussion of the implications of this programme for Digital Humanities.

The SAWS Dynamic Library of Wisdom Literatures is due for preliminary publication in June, with a final version due by 15 August 2013.

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Libhpc

Imperial College Libhpc infrastructure workshop

The Social Computing Group at Imperial College London will be holding a workshop on its infrastructure project libhpc, which develops some of the ideas for scaling trialled in DVE.

Libhpc is a framework for running computational intensive applications over a range of different resources (sometimes called heterogeneous computing). It uses an approach called co-ordination forms (or algorithmic skeletons) to re-structure applications so that they can take full advantage of parallel systems, especially those with diverse resources such as GPGPUs and FPGAs. It is especially designed to support scaling using cloud computing resources.

The workshop will look at the current state of the art with frameworks for large infrastructures, with projects from science and industry presenting overviews of their approaches.

Read more and book a place...

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Open Philology Project

Open Philology Project

Gregory Crane, who was an investigator in DVE,  has posted the research plan for his Open Philology Project at the University of Leipzig, where he is Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities.

This is a very exciting project, which will be looking at many of the same issues as DVE.

The project will focus on

“converting as much Greek and Latin, available as scanned printed books, into an open, dynamic corpus, continuously augmented and improved by a combination of automated processes and human contributions of many kinds.”

and will address

“the challenge of creating comprehensive open resources, providing the education needed to understand and to contribute to those resources, and integrating open resources from many different sources into an integrated computational framework for analysis, annotation, and preservation.”

 You can find the post here: http://sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdates/2013/04/04/the-open-philology-project-and-humboldt-chair-of-digital-humanities-at-leipzig/

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Perseids at Perseus

Online Community Editing for Ancient Texts

The Perseus Project has announced the development of Perseids:

“…a web-based, fully audited, version-controlled editing environment built on the Son of SUDA Online (SoSOL) platform, originally developed for the papyrological community but designed for applicability to other editing communities.” ( http://sosol.perseus.tufts.edu/sosol/)

Perseus is adding support to SoSOL for the CTS/CITE Architecture and OAC core data model. It will enable the collaborative editing of texts in a framework of rigorous and transparent peer-review and credit mechanisms and strong editorial oversight.

You can read more here: http://sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdates/beta-features/perseus-sosol/

Perseids/SoSOL is being used at the Leipzig Atheneus hackathon.

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