We are pleased to announce that records from the Perseus Catalog have beed loaded into VIAF as “the first set of personal names from a scholarly resource.”
More information on this milestone may be found here: http://hangingtogether.org/?p=3455
Our thanks to OCLC Research!
Publishing Text for a Digital Age
Update: Submissions now being accepted!
March 27-30, 2014
http://sites.tufts.edu/digitalagetext/2014-workshop/
As a follow-on to “Working with Text in a Digital Age,” an NEH-funded Institute for Advanced Technologies in the Digital Humanities, and in collaboration with the Open Philology Project at the University of Leipzig, Tufts University announces a 2-day workshop for on publishing textual data that is available under an open license, that is structured for machine analysis as well as human inspection, and that is in a format that can be preserved over time. The purpose of this workshop is establish specific guidelines for digital publications that publish and/or annotate textual sources from the human record. The registration for the workshop will be free but space will be limited. Some support for travel and expenses will be available. We particularly encourage contributions from students and early-career researchers.
The Tufts University Department of Religion seeks a specialist at the rank of Assistant Professor in Early Christianity.
More information at the link above.
Perseus is now accepting applications for an Associate Research Programmer as part of the Perseids Project.
The position will start September 1, 2013.
Interested applicants are asked to follow the above link for further information.
Follow up questions may be emailed to lisa.cerrato@tufts.edu.
October 2013 – January 2014: Overview of Digital Philology (5 credits)
April – July 2014: Current Topics in Digital Philology (10 credits)
[Please re-circulate]
*Research assistantships for enrolled students are available to students enrolled in these classes*
The Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig is developing a sequence of English-language courses on digital philology that will begin in the Wintersemester and Sommersemester of the 2013/2014 academic year. The courses may be taken in sequence or individually. We particularly encourage participation by graduate students, not only from Leipzig but from elsewhere in Europe and beyond, who are preparing to begin careers as researchers, teachers or library professionals. A semester or an academic year at Leipzig can help you transform your career and to acquire the skills by which you can flourish in an intensively network, profoundly global intellectual world.
These courses are particularly unusual in that they are offered within a Computer Science department and provide students with an opportunity to connect more directly with experts in advanced technologies than is often feasible. Germany also is unusual in that Computer Science and the Humanities are both instances of Wissenschaft — we do not face the boundaries between funding for research in the Humanities and in Computer Science that many in the English-speaking world face. If you wish to acquire the full range of skills needed for both teaching and research, these courses in this environment provide you with an excellent space in which to develop.
Note: particularly promising students enrolled in these classes will have an opportunity to work as research assistants, where they can apply the skills that they acquire in their classes. We particularly encourage ambitious students from outside Leipzig to consider this option to help support their stay.
An Overview of Digital Philology (5 credits, Wintersemester) provides students with programming skills needed to work with text in a digital age. We particularly focus upon the integration of methods from computational and especially corpus linguistics, both of which fields are fundamental to the study of language and critical to all who wish to develop flourishing careers as teachers and researchers in philology. The course is organized so that students can also take the Leipzig eHumanities Seminar (5 credits). In 2013, the course will focus particularly upon familiarizing students with XML and with the use of associated technologies (e.g., xslt, xquery).
While students who have taken the Overview of Digital Philology will be able to build on their knowledge in developing course projects, the Sommersemester course, Current Topics in Digital Philology (10 credits, Sommersemester), is open to anyone with advanced experience in either computer science or philology. Current Topics in Digital Philology provides a framework within which students of language from various backgrounds can develop projects informed by new advances in corpus and computational linguistics and in the digital humanities. In 2014, students will develop skills in the use of Python to work with richly annotated linguistic corpora and then use these skills in course projects.
Contact: teaching@e-humanities.net
[Please re-circulate]
The Perseus Digital Library is pleased to announce new support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the development of the Perseids Platform for collaborative editing, learning and publication, under the direction of Perseus’ Associate Editor, Professor Marie-Claire Beaulieu. The Perseids platform integrates open source software and standards from a variety of projects including Perseus, Papyri.info, The Homer Multitext Project, the Alpheios Project, and the Open Annotation Collaboration. This $600,000 grant funds the expansion of Perseids to support new use cases for classroom collaboration on digital editions; scholarly curation of texts from scan through publication; and development of dynamic syllabi using managed resources. The grant will also enable continued collaboration across the variety of integrated projects and outreach to scholars interested in using the platform.
We are now accepting applications for an Associate Research Programmer to help with development of Perseids. Interested applicants are asked to follow the above link. Follow up questions may be emailed to lisa.cerrato@tufts.edu.
More information can be found on the Perseids project blog and documentation site at http://sites.tufts.edu/perseids.
The Perseus Digital Library is pleased to announce the 1.0 Release of the Perseus Catalog.
The Perseus Catalog is an attempt to provide systematic catalog access to at least one online edition of every major Greek and Latin author (both surviving and fragmentary) from antiquity to 600 CE. Still a work in progress, the catalog currently includes 3,679 individual works (2,522 Greek and 1,247 Latin), with over 11,000 links to online versions of these works (6,419 in Google Books, 5,098 to the Internet Archive, 593 to the Hathi Trust). The Perseus interface now includes links to the Perseus Catalog from the main navigation bar, and also from within the majority of texts in the Greco-Roman collection.
The metadata contained within the catalog has utilized the MODS and MADS standards developed by the Library of Congress as well as the Canonical Text Services and CTS-URN protocols developed by the Homer Multitext Project. The Perseus catalog interface uses the open source Blacklight Project interface and Apache Solr. Stable, linkable canonical URIs have been provided for all textgroups, works, editions and translations in the Catalog for both HTML and ATOM output formats. The ATOM output format provides access to the source CTS, MODS and MADS metadata for the catalog records. Subsequent releases will make all catalog data available as RDF triples.
Other major plans for the future of the catalog include not only the addition of more authors and works as well as links to online versions but also to open up the catalog to contributions from users. Currently the catalog does not include any user contribution or social features other than standard email contact information but the goal is to soon support the creation of user accounts and the contribution of recommendations, corrections and or new metadata.
The Perseus Catalog blog features documentation, a user guide, and contact information as well as comments from Editor-in-Chief Gregory Crane on the history and purpose of the catalog.
The Perseus Digital Library Team
Jobs at the Humboldt Chair in Digital Humanities
University of Leipzig
[Please re-post]
In February 2013, the Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities announced possible jobs. Funding from the European Social Fund has now been finalized (http://sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdates/2013/05/02/reinventing-humanities-publication-project-receives-e1-1-million-grant-from-the-saxon-ministry-of-science-and-european-social-fund/) and we are pleased to announce two positions: one for someone to supervise systems and text processing workflow; the other for someone with expertise in interactive design.
Applicants should have completed their most recent degree after January 4, 2011. Positions will begin June 1, 2013 or as soon as a suitable candidate is found, and will run through December 2014. Pay will be commensurate to experience under Saxon and ESF regulations.
System and workflow manager
We are looking for an addition to our team who will develop and administrate scalable systems and workflows for processing and visualizing billions of words. Our text analysis includes the latest technologies in OCR, linguistic annotation, named entity identification, text reuse and topic modeling. You will be working in an international and interdisciplinary group of young scientists, aiming to create a new generation of tools and methods for learning, analyzing and interacting with languages. The job will range from general systems administration to the planning, implementing, managing and monitoring of completely novel software systems.
Skills
Required skills and experience:
We are looking for an addition to our team who will join us in developing new methods by which users can interact with historical sources in general and with the collections in the Perseus Digital Library in particular. In this position, you will build ‘gamified’ user interfaces for eLearning applications which enable students to contribute to current research, to receive and give feedback, and to track and analyze their learning progress. You will be working in an international and interdisciplinary group of young scientists, aiming to create a new generation of tools and methods for learning, analyzing and interacting with languages.
Skills
Required skills and experience:
The Saxon Ministry of Culture has awarded the University of Leipzig a €1.1 million grant, with support from the European Social Fund and from the State of Saxony, to form an early career research group to help develop new methods of publication, predicated upon open data and open access, for the Humanities in general and for students of historical languages such as Greek and Latin in particular. This grant provides a first step towards reestablishing Leipzig as an international center for humanities publication, especially in technologically challenging areas such as ancient languages and music – and doing so in a framework that is born-digital from the start and that assumes the constraints and possibilities of an open, digital environment.
Continue readingGregory Crane
Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Digital Humanities
University of Leipzig
Professor of Classics
Tufts University
Editor in Chief, Perseus Project
This paper began as a contribution to the debate on whether or not the APA should change its name. A hundred and forty years later, the central leadership of the American Philological Association (APA) has resolved to abandon the name of philology and proposed to adopt for the association the name “Society for Classical Studies.” I would argue against this on three grounds. First, we need to retain a qualifier in our name that reflects the fact that the APA is the organization to which most professional students of Greco-Roman culture in the United States turn. Second, classics and classical studies are now problematic names for a group that focuses primarily upon Greco-Roman culture because the term “classics” has been used to assert the primacy of Greek and Latin and of Western culture in general.
Most of what follows, however, focuses more generally upon a third point, the nature and role of philology. The challenge for students of Greco-Roman culture is not to run away from, but to make the case for, philology. The members of the American Philological Association may draw upon the material record and upon methods from around the academic world, but they combine these sources and methods with the written record to understand the Greco-Roman world as broadly and deeply as possible. If few now in the English speaking world understand what philology is, then that presents an opportunity for those of us who have the privilege to work with Greek and Latin for a living. We should blow the dust off the ancient and (I believe) easily explained term philology — easily explained and easily justified if we use the term in its broadest and most dynamic sense. Philology entails — or should entail — everything that we can learn about the past from the linguistic record. Philology is neither narrow nor antiquated. It is an expansive set of practices, now undergoing a rebirth as students of the past adapt to the new opportunities of a digital space. If the twentieth century saw the rise of Classics in modern language translation, the digital technologies already at our disposal allow us to make the Greek and Latin sources directly accessible to a global audience.
For the full discussion, see Rediscovering Philology.