Ancient Studies -- New Technology: The World Wide Web and Scholarly Research, Communication, and Publication in Ancient, Byzantine, and Medieval Studies
December 8-10, 2000 Salve Regina University Newport, RI
Sponsored by:
Philosophy Department, Salve Regina University
An Online Encyclopedia of Roman Emperors
The Perseus Project
The Stoa Consortium
PANELS AND ABSTRACTS
SESSION I: CONTEXTUALIZING ARCHAEOLOGY ON THE WEB
Friday, 8:45-11:00
"Digging for Data"
Amy C. Smith
Perseus Project
Tufts University
While the ever-expanding breadth of the Perseus Project renders it useful for pedagogy, to what depths can a scholar delve into this digital library? Perseus is rapidly acquiring rich new data -- image and text -- from museums, Web collaborations, and the digitization of traditional text resources. Simultaneously its staff is developing standards and tools to help scholars mine the data more effectively. Navigational tools within a digital library consist of three broad categories: search options, the interconnection of discrete objects, and access to further resources. This paper discusses techniques used to optimize these navigational tools.
Although users are now given many ways to access data in Perseus -- a user-driven table of contents, an image browser, and even maps and QTVR walkthroughs--the word search tool remains the primary way to access data. But the word search is only as good as the underlying data. It can barely come up with the variety of names given to one hero or place. Similarly, how can a search engine make distinctions between the many ancient individuals and places that share names? We are currently reworking the ontological basis for our data, so that the search tool should in the future be able to distinguish between people and places, places in different regions, and so on. The ontology should also serve as a source of keywords and thus a separate research tool.
>Hypertext links are the basic advantage of a digital versus a conventional library. Some connections rely on thoughtful database design, as in the case of our sculpture database. But automatically generated links between discrete texts are improved with a good ontology. When comparanda, ancient and modern texts, and Greek and Latin words are included in the archaeology databases, they must also be tagged so that relevant links will be generated. Further resources may be accessed only if the data is consistent or thorough, with, for example, standardized bibliographic citations.
"Building Geographic Information Systems for the Ancient World"
Robert F. Chavez
Perseus Project
Tufts University
For many years desktop geographic information systems (GIS) have been a useful means of organizing, retrieving, and querying data through visual geospatial query. More recently groups such as the Open GIS Consortium have composed a set of standard data formats and functionalities for porting GIS to the Internet. Perseus is adopting GIS data and mapping standards and implementing a web GIS as a portal to the historical and cultural materials in its various databases.
This paper will discuss the implementation of a geographic information system component for the Perseus Digital Library and the way in which geographic information system standards can help provide new ways of accessing information in Perseus and the web in general. The aim of implementing a GIS for the Perseus web site is to unify our own disparate classes of data (i.e. literary sources, papyri, inscriptions, maps, plans, and object collections) while allowing for integration and sharing of data with other digital library projects. City level topography provides the test-bed for the Perseus GIS.
Because topographical landscapes of cities, such as Rome or the Roman port city of Ostia, change over time, maps linked to geospatial data provide good interfaces for users to access entire collections of data through geospatial and temporal query. This kind of interface provides visual ways of posing the questions of "what?", "where?" and "when?". For example, a useful query might be phrased "What resources in Perseus can illustrate the changes in the topography of Ostia from the first century BCE through the first century CE?" or "generate a map of features in the Roman Forum in 14 BCE".
In developing interactive map interfaces that are linked to geographic and temporal databases, we can begin to address the complex spatial questions that students and researchers ask of ancient material culture. We can also provide easier access to the information that pertains to these questions.
"New Approaches to Old Excavations:
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Giza Pyramids"
Peter Der Manuelian
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Between 1905 and 1942, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, excavated the Egyptian cemeteries (Old Kingdom, Dynasties 4-6, ca. 2630-2250 BC) surrounding the famous Giza Pyramids outside of modern Cairo. The Museum anticipates integrating a portion of the expedition's thousands of artifacts, archaeological maps, plans, drawings, field diaries and glass plate photographic negatives into a fully searchable, online research tool on the Internet ("the Giza Archives Project"). In addition, returning MFA expeditions to Giza have recently been experimenting with digital and immersive photography in and around the tombs of the necropolis. QTVR and IPIX immersive panoramas are supplementing the original excavation materials from the early 1900s, making the site accessible to scholars in a variety of new ways. Moreover, "digital epigraphy," or the production of facsimile line drawings of tomb wall decoration using high resolution scanned images and vector drawing software, is streamlining the documentation process. The ability to download and print vector (instead of simple bitmap) illustrations right from the Internet using formats such as Flash, hold great promise for the future. Both the projected Giza Archives Project website and the MFA's continuing print publications (the Giza Mastabas Series, vols. 1-7) will be summarized and discussed.
>"Spacing Out: Web 3D and the Reconstruction of Archaeological Sites"
Thomas L. Milbank
Perseus Project
Tufts University
The emergence of high-speed processors with 3D graphics acceleration and the accessibility of high-speed internet connections have propelled web 3D from a frustrating to a viable internet technology. Without a doubt, the addition of spatial dimension to customary 2D web graphics can be visually gripping. But greater potential for the technology lies beyond its ability to command attention. Web 3D presents students and scholars alike with a new tool for visualizing and understanding ancient sites. Fundamentally, 3D digital reconstruction allows architecture, sculpture, and other remains to be considered in their respective contexts as a whole, rather than as individual items divorced from their intended settings. At the same time, digital reconstruction can incorporate a distinction between the "real" and the "hypothetical" just as found in other types of modern restoration work.
The Perseus Project is currently preparing 3D models of various archaeological sites. These will be linked to other related materials already in its digital library: maps; plans; photographs; QTVR walkthroughs; site, architecture, and object catalogs; and literary and historical documents. In part, the models are intended as databases of geographic and architectural information in their own right. They are also intended to serve as the underpinning for a contextual presentation of architectural and freestanding sculptures. This paper surveys Perseus' work on the Apollo sanctuary at Delphi. It addresses both the process of digital modeling and the method used integrate to the model with Perseus' existing tools and databases.
"Images as Content and Interface: QTVR and Image Cataloging in a Digital Library"
Genevieve Gessert
Yale University
This paper will discuss conceptual and technical aspects of images in on-line publication, using the Perseus digital library as a case study. As electronic publication evolves swiftly from a novelty to a commonplace, scholars can now publish not just a few representative images, but instead entire archives of visual materials. Without the costs of print publication, and aided by the growing sophistication of tools like digital cameras, scanners, and drafting software, we can reasonably consider including all relevant images in on-line resources. This development is particularly dramatic in the field of archaeology, where excavations such as the Hacimusalar Project in southwestern Turkey can publish every photograph and drawing from a field season almost as quickly as these visual resources are created.
With this opportunity for more extensive publication of images, however, come the twin responsibilities of image cataloging for scholarly value, and technical standards for longevity. A discussion of the evolving standards for image cataloging and archiving at the Perseus Project will illuminate some of these responsibilities, and highlight the importance of long-term planning in image capture, storage, and delivery.
Beyond the treatment of images as content lies the relatively unexplored territory of using the images themselves as interface. Technologies such as QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR) can transform photographs into portals, interconnecting the images of a place, object, or structure with catalog data, bibliography, commentary, or even video or audio clips. Recent Perseus QTVR work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Roman site of Ostia, and the American historical sites at Lowell, Plimoth Plantations, and the Paul Revere House will demonstrate new directions in using images as interface.
Electronic publication brings an unprecedented audience to educational materials that have been difficult, traditionally, for people outside of academia to use. With careful cataloging and innovative use of images as an access point into their research, scholars have an opportunity to disseminate their knowledge to this audience in a newly compelling way.
SESSION II: TECHNICAL ISSUES
Friday, 11:15-12:15
"Optimizing Graphics for Web Delivery"
Samuel B. Fee
Assistant Professor
Coordinator of Instructional Technology
Centre College
Effective visuals are vitally important to the study of classical archaeology. Photographs, illustrations, drawings, and computer-generated content are often essential for the careful delivery of archaeological concepts, particularly to those with limited knowledge or experience in the field. Therefore, as we attempt to educate others by electronic means, such visual content can become even more important as students without the means for field experience attempt to understand basic archaeological concepts. The need then for quality visual content raises several new challenges when considering the limitations of web delivery. Due to bandwidth issues, the delivery of rich visual content can be quite slow, creating a significant delay and cognitive fragmentation. This of course, creates a trade-off between quality content and the realities of the effective web-based delivery of such content. There are technological solutions of varying levels of success for this issue, however. By considering bit depth as well as varying compression options, modifications can be made to electronic images that will enable them to load more quickly. This presentation will illustrate specific technical methods for creating smaller graphic images for web delivery. This will enable participants to develop smaller images with nearly the same level of quality, which will in turn, aid them in the development of better web-based materials for the study of classical archaeology. Given the prevalence of Adobe PhotoShop as a graphic development tool, we will focus our examples on this application.
"An Historical Event Mark-up Scheme"
"An Historical Event Mark-up Scheme"
Bruce G. Robertson
Dept. of Classics
Mount Allison University
Arthur Miller
Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science
Mount Allison University
This paper describes the Historical Event Markup and Linking Project <http://www.heml.org>, an effort to develop standard XML markup and transformation tools useful to historians world-wide.
Though there exists a wealth of electronic resources which represent the historical events of antiquity, these are each sui generis, and their data cannot be compared or combined. Indeed, typically their data are accessible only in the form of html text. This is unfortunate since data recording historical events are rich with information, such as dates and locations, which can be manipulated by computational means.
This paper will describe a generalized scheme for electronically publishing historical events, including the following:
1. An XML namespace representing historical events and related concepts. These will be flexible enough to represent most known events in the past while working well with existing document encoding schemes, such as XHTML.
2. XSL transformations on the historical event elements. Our goal is to produce useful, and possibly new, view of historical events, through charts, time-lines and maps, and add to these the linking capabilities of marked-up text.
SESSION III. PEDAGOGY
Friday, 1:30-3:45
"The Assyrian Palaces at Nimrud --
Digital Publication Projects and the Implications
for Archaeology and Education on the Web"
Donald H. Sanders
Learning Sites, Inc.
http://www.learningsites.com
Samuel M. Paley
SUNY, Buffalo
Thenkurussi Kesavadas
SUNY, BuffaloAn important step in the transition from codex-based archaeology to digital archaeology is the use of visualization and presentation techniques that take advantage of what cannot be done on paper, such as the use of moving images, sounds, and hyperlinks. Digital archaeology, especially one that takes full advantage of the World Wide Web, need not depend upon the visualization tools, linear format, or two-dimensional display methods of past archaeological reporting. Java, virtual reality, and computer animations can all be seamlessly integrated into the basic methods of disseminating archaeological data. The shortcomings of traditional paper-based archaeological reporting include: limits on number of images; limits on types of images; limits on size of images; prescriptive, static, and linear presentation; the difficulty of updating the data, ideas, and images; packaging costs; mailing costs; warehousing costs; and the expensive of production per unit of data published.
Electronic reporting, integrating the Internet, can overcome these and other profession-wide barriers to information because it can: reduce the long time lag between data gathering and data dissemination; provide more information, more creatively, to more people; vastly increase the amount of data that can be included in a publication; increase the options for visual presentation of the data; and provide hyperlinked presentations and customizable search and retrieval formats.
We intend to demonstrate some of those advantages through discussion of two VirtualSiteMuseum(TM) projects: the Northwest Palace of Ashur-nasir-pal II (Ancient Nimrud, Assyria) Digital Publication Prototype and the Central Palace of Tiglath-pileser III -- the Final Report of the Polish Center of Archaeology's Excavation at Ancient Nimrud, Assyria. A team of archaeologists and architects from the United States and Poland are working with Learning Sites, Inc., to create massive research resources based on virtual reality re- creations of the Palaces as they were excavated and as they have been digitally reconstructed. The virtual models have links to drawings, photographs, descriptive and analytical text, and high-resolution renderings of the building complexes. The projects will also include intelligent agents, virtual Assyrians acting as virtual site interpreters that will be able to answer user queries about the Palaces. The results will be published both on DVD and on the Internet, for integration of live updates, distance education features, and links to new information as they arise. Access to Internet and the technologies of the Immersidesk(TM) and CAVE(TM) are also planned. Issues of future data format standards and conversion, archiving, peer review, and authorship guidelines will also be discussed.
"Wheelock on the Web (or, Going it Alone)"
Dale Grote
University of North Carolina -- Charlotte
I propose to talk about the materials I've put on the web to accompany the Wheelock Latin book. A couple of things about it go a little beyond the ordinary and could prove illustrative of interesting problems facing authors of web materials. The first is that the web site itself complicated my tenure case -- is it a publication? It also made it a little more difficult to find a "real" publisher when the time came for a second edition to take into account the changes in the Wheelock text. Secondly, I found myself ahead of the university's ability to support some of the materials technically. For instance, I wanted to create streamed discussions of the answered tutorials in the back of the book, but our university server didn't have, and still doesn't have, a streaming program. Not being terribly skilled in information technology, I nevertheless managed to assemble a streaming server from my office computer using freeware. I could briefly describe the process. (If I can do it, anyone can.) Here are the sites I'll discuss:
Wheelock site: http://hermes.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Wheelock-Latin/ Streaming audio site: www.uncc.edu/dagrote/Wheelock/RealAudio_frame. htm.
"King Alfred: New Software for Old English"
Michael D. C. Drout
Wheaton College, Norton, MA
with David Dudek
and Rachel Kapelle
To improve language instruction in an Old English class that is required to be "at least 50% literature" we have developed "King Alfred", a web-based tool that allows students to practice, at their own convenience and pace, translating Old English sentences. We see King Alfred as an example of the next generation of web-based instructional tools. A majority on-line references are forms of "brochure ware," using the cost-savings power of the web to disseminate material that would work just as well in print form (in fact, King Alfred's grammar book is exactly this sort of web-based tool). But King Alfred is in fact truly interactive: The program remembers and analyzes a student's work and provides individually customized feedback. This "mass customization" is the new paradigm for web-based tools, and holds out the promise of making the study of ancient and medieval languages and cultures more accessible to more students.
King Alfred provides a student with a sentence in Old English and a "scratch pad" line where he or she can type a working translation. After making an attempt to translate the sentence without help, the student requests assistance from the program. King Alfred provides a hyperlinked set of words in the sentence, and the student can click on any word he or she does not understand. King Alfred presents a list of the word's potential linguistic characteristics (part of speech, number, gender, case, tense, mood, definition, etc.) that the student can work through. The program keeps track of each help request. When the student has determined, with King Alfred's help, exactly what each element in each sentence is doing syntactically and semantically, he or she can finalize the translation in the "scratch pad" line. King Alfred then provides a translation of the Old English that the student can use to determine the quality of his or her translation. After the student has translated a number of sentences, the program, using various algorithms, prioritizes three grammatical areas for the student to review in the form of hyperlinks to the relevant sections of the grammar. King Alfred also provides students with a list of vocabulary words for which they requested definitions or translations. King Alfred is also designed to keep control in the hands of the individual classroom teacher. Sentences can be entered by individuals with no expertise at all in computer programming or web design. From the teacher's point of view King Alfred provides for increased feedback. From the student's point of view the program makes learning Anglo-Saxon less of an exercise in flipping through lexicons or grammar book chapters and more of an intellectual engagement with language, culture, and ideas.
A test version of King Alfred has been made available at the URL: http://KingAlfred.wheatoncollege.edu. Simply click on the "King Alfred" icon. When prompted for a user id and password and user id, enter "demo" and "demo" -both words all lowercase.
"Web Design for the Average Professor:
The Development of the 'Rood and Ruthwell' Web Site"
Alexander M. Bruce
Florida Southern College
"Pedagogical Uses of Information Technology in Classics
at Cambridge University"
John Lewis
Faculty Web Advisor
University of Cambridge
This presentation will be a general discussion of the use of information technologies at the Cambridge University Faculty of Classics. The presentation will focus on specific steps taken to increase the information available to students of Classical Studies. The Faculty of Classics has made a major investment in Information Technology Systems both via Intranet and with respect to WWW interface. The faculty has appointed a classical scholar as Faculty Web Advisor to act as a liaison between the full-time technical officer and classical scholars. The primary task of the Web Advisor is to evaluate and upgrade the Web resources and make them more easily accessible by students and non-professionals as well as scholars. Three linked web sites are maintained: the Faculty, the Classical Library, and the Museum of Classical Archaeology. The Faculty web site has a dedicated Links Gateway page, organized around the Faculty's caucus system: Literature, Philosophy, History, Art / Archaeology, Linguistics and General, the latter reserved for studies that do not fit easily into one of the other categories, e.g., reception studies and modern Greek. The caucus divisions are augmented with a series of topics that are not transparently part of a specific caucus, e.g., numismatics, epigraphy and palaeography. This organization reflects the nature of classical studies as an integrated discipline that can be approached from various perspectives using specialized skills. Internally, used in conjunction with the Faculty Intranet and Databases, every student can access from his college, the Faculty or his college room resources such as TLG and Perseus, and graduate students are afforded mainframe space for the storage of research. Externally those not associated with the University have increased access to information from the Web. The sheer volume of materials has made necessary a disciplined approach to evaluating what is to be included in the links.
SESSION IV. DATABASES.
Friday, 4:15-5:15
"The Georgian Icons Electronic Register Project"
Irakli Iakobashvili
Institute of Manuscripts, Academy of Science, Tbilisi, Georgia
<opentext@flashmail.com>
Irine Nikoleishvili
(Tbilisi State University, Tbilisi, Georgia)
Mattew Driscoll
(The Arnamagnnaean Institute, The University of
Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark)
Konstantinos Chandrinos
(Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications
NCSR "Democritos", Athens, Greece)
Nana Burtshuladze
(Georgian State Art Museum, Tbilisi, Georgia)
Eliso Akhvlediani
(Institute of Georgian Art History, Academy of Science,
Tbilisi, Georgia)
Kakhi Todua
(Independent Expert & Art Historian, Tbilisi, Georgia)
Kakha Khimshiashvili
(Institute of Georgian Art History,
Academy of Science, Tbilisi, Georgia)
Georgia posses a rich cultural heritage, an important part of which comes from the Medieval period. Especially significant is the ecclesiastical cultural heritage of the period, among which Christian icons represent a notable part. The idea of the project is to create an electronic register for Georgian icons, by which is meant Christian icons preserved on Georgian territory. In order to accomplish this all icons (an estimated 4000) must be indexed, on the basis of which an electronic database will be set up. The objective of the project is to make information about Georgian icons accessible for researchers and interested parties and persons in Georgia and all over the world. Within the frame of this project all icons, which are published and/or mentioned in scientific publications, should be indexed and described using a unified questionnaire. The majority of Georgian icons have been published and reliably dated in scholarly publications (in Georgian and other languages) from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In order to ensure that all relevant information can be included we have looked into various possibilities for electronic cataloguing. Our aim is to structure the catalogue in an easily accessible way enabling scholars to identify the particular icon images. The most obvious solution would appear to be SGML (Standard Generalized Mark-up Language), either using the EAD (Encoded Archival Description) or TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) implementations. While EAD has certain advantage over TEI, it was designed especially for archival material. We think that the TEI will provide the best long-term solution. Unfortunately, although some work has been done in this area, at present there is no accepted standard for data of this kind. These images can be linked to marked-up texts, making it easier to read the texts and enabling searches of various kinds.
"The Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (TML)
Thomas J. Mathiesen
Indiana University
Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature
http://www.music. indiana.edu/chmtl
The Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (TML), a full-text database of Latin music theory opened to the public in late 1990, currently offers in machine-readable form more than 4.6 million words of text, accompanied by more than 4,500 graphics. The TML includes all the Latin texts in the collections of Gerbert and Coussemaker; in such series as Greek and Latin Music Theory, Divitiae musicae artis, Corpus scriptorum de musica, and the Colorado College Music Press; in individual editions published in journals and by various publishers; and in more than eighty-one manuscripts. The texts are distributed world-wide free of charge on the Internet and can be searched and displayed on any type of machine--a mainframe, Macintosh, a machine running DOS or Windows, and so on. The database is also available, together with the Gregorian-chant database CANTUS, on CD-ROM for a nominal charge.
Each month on average, the TML web site is accessed more than 1100 times and responds to more than 265 searches. Since 1997 (the year in which the TML web site replaced the old TML Gopher), the site has been accessed more than 29,000 times and has responded to more than 6,500 searches. Meanwhile, the TML-FTP and TML LISTSERV have delivered more than154,000 files since 1995. In this presentation, the various operations of the database, including text searching, display of graphics, and appearance of the database on the World Wide Web (emulated on the CD-ROM) will be demonstrated, followed by a discussion of the design and background structure of the database and its servers. Printed materials pertaining to the TML will be distributed.
SESSION V: "DIES LONGAE ET NOCTES BREVES: THE DE IMPERATORIBUS ROMANIS WEB SITE"
Saturday, 8:30-9:45
De Imperatoribus Romanis: an On-line Encyclopedia of Roman Emperors was founded in 1996. Over the the last four years, the website has grown by leaps and bounds and has surpassed even the expectations of its original founders in relation to its contents and the ways it can be accessed. In this presentation, the history of the website and its editorial board will be chronicled; Dr. DiMaio, one of the website's orginal founders, will also discuss what it takes to manage a major academic website as well some of the pitfalls that should be avoided. The basic philosophy of its organization and coding of information will also be treated. Some thought to the future directions of the website will also be a focus for discussion.
Michael DiMaio, Salve Regina University, "The Labors of a Junk Yard Dog"
Richard Weigel, Western Kentucky University, "Sitting on a WEB Site Editorial Board"
Jacqueline Long, Loyola University (Chicago), "Keeping it Going: Administering the Site"
SESSION VI. SCHOLARLY DIALOGUE AND INTERCHANGE.
Saturday, 10:15-11:45
"Web resources and Scholarly Readers"
Steve Muhlberger
Nipissing University
The World Wide Web is often spoken of in terms of "promise." Now that the Web is no longer entirely new, it is time to ask how well it is delivering on that promise, how well it works as a scholarly medium. Who uses scholarly web sites? What do they like about those sites? How many users are academic or independent scholars, how many are students, and how many are general readers? This paper investigates these questions by drawing on the author's experience in administering a general-purpose scholarly site on Late Antiquity.
"The 'Drunkard's Search' and the 'Philosopher's Salon': The Web as an Effective Research Resource for Ancient and Medieval Studies"
R. Laval Hunsucker
vakreferent Klassiek cultuurgebied
(subject specialist / bibliographer - for classical philology,
ancient history, archaeology, + postclassical Latin)
Bibliotheek (Humaniora / UB)
University of Amsterdam
It is of course individual researchers who generate scholarly information: editions, commentaries, studies, interpretations, lexica, bibliographies, data- collections, reports, handbooks, and further sorts. But it is likewise in large part these same researchers who form the principal user-group for these same 'commodities' (regardless of publication format). A peculiar kind of marketplace, this -- where producer and consumer are in fact one and the same party, collectively viewed.
The line of communication should then be uncomplicated, one might say (or at any rate, wish). But the reality has for a very long time been -- and necessarily so -- quite otherwise. Intermediaries enough: filterers, validators, packagers, marketers, distributors, vendors, more filterers, systematizers, access providers, and -- not to forget -- funders and subsidizers. They all make their own, understandable, contributions to bringing together the scholar as producer, and the scholar (and his or her student) as user, of reliable information.
But couldn't we in fact better do without all these 'outside' parties? Isn't the Web going to make that at last possible? A dream come true? Or, perhaps, an unrealistically simplistic scenario? This presentation considers these questions, and suggests that it is not in the interest of the 'academic enterprise' that the <i>functionalities</i> of intermediation mentioned above should disappear or be circumvented. In that sense, the transition from print to digital era need not (I would even say, is hardly likely to) ring in any widespread simplification in the 'knowledge chain'.
By the same token, the form, the organization, to some extent the visibility, of intermediation will have to change -- but that process is already well underway, probably further than many are aware. And what we call the intermediary parties is not so important. A number of the essential functions which the "library" now performs (some of them old, some new) are for example no less important in the Internet than in the print world -- as administrators and funders too have recognized -- whether or not the word "library" itself may later come to be used only to designate a sort of book-museum.
The presentation also gives attention, in the context of intermediation, to:
- the increasing complexity of preparing and sustaining www-based access to (proprietary) scholarly resources -- based on the experiences of the speaker's own organization;
- the increasing significance of psychological/communicative factors in information services (including the demonstrated differences among the various academic disciplines, and between different kinds of scholars);
- the important role played by the differences between the students of the past and those of the future -- particularly important since in fact it is the students who are the principal subsidizers of the scholarly enterprise and the critical link to the social context in which we function.
SESSION VII. SCHOLARLY PUBLICATION ON THE WEB: ISSUES AND ANSWERS
Saturday, 1:00-3:15
A panel that would discuss issues regarding the nature of publication on the web, that is, issues involving peer review, dissemination, the use of new technology.
Thomas Martin (Holy Cross): Chair and Commentator
Anne Mahoney (Perseus Project, Tufts University) , "Creating the Infrastructure for Scholarly Publication"
The Stoa Consortium aims to promote collaborative scholarship, published on line and freely available to other scholars and general readers. As a publisher, we must provide the mechanisms for making these scholarly works available. As an on-line publisher, we intend to provide more than what a good print publisher can provide: electronic texts can be explicitly connected as books cannot.
A digital library project generally produces and controls its own texts and images. This makes it relatively easy to interconnect those resources. A digital publisher, on the other hand, does not produce texts itself, and indeed the works published under its auspices need not all live on the same computer system. Interconnection in this environment requires more explict co-operation by the authors and editors of the text: specifically, use of the same markup rules.
Markup for us means SGML or XML, conforming to the TEI DTD and following Stoa conventions for which features to mark, which values to use for certain attributes, and which meta-data to include in the document header. We have found that most scholars wishing to publish texts with us do not know SGML in general, or this DTD in particular. Although they quickly see the benefits of structured markup, they must learn the language and the local idiom. The first piece of publishing infrastructure, then, is support for markup: documentation, editing software, and validators.
Many authors also want detailed control over the appearance of their work. They expect, sometimes unconsciously, that the technology of the Web as it exists today is and will be the final, best way to publish their work. While we prefer to take a longer-term, more general view, we recognize that on-line publication today does in fact mean the Web. The second piece of infrastructure is display formatting, whether for the Web, for printing, or for some future delivery medium.
The third piece of infrastructure is interconnection, which is what makes on-line publication fundamentally different from print. Interconnection means that references to other objects, outside the text, can automatically be hyperlinked to those objects. The typical digital library model is that objects within the library can be hyperlinked to each other, while objects outside are not linked. Since the digital publishing house does not "contain" its texts, on the other hand, there is no reason for it to restrict these reference connections to only works it has published itself. The Stoa has developed a reference database that allows any work published by the Stoa to refer to any resource elsewhere on the Internet. Hyperlinks are generated when the text is displayed, which means they are always as current as the content of the database.
The Stoa's tool set will be made available as open-source software, and we hope that other on-line publishers and digital libraries may wish to share reference information.
Chris W. Blackwell (Furman University), "Bringing Athenian Democracy to 21st Century Readers"
Dêmos: Classical Athenian Democracy is a demonstration project of The Stoa, a consortium for scholarly electronic publication in the humanities. The goal of Dêmos is to give a broad audience a level of access to Classical Athenian Democracy that has hitherto been available only to professional classicists and ancient historians. Dêmos will present a core of articles on the institutions, concepts, places, and people of Athenian democracy. These articles will be firmly and obviously based on the primary sources. Our readers will have direct access to these sources, in Greek and in translation. Dêmos will not merely serve up the text of the sources‹which, in the absence of context, will mean little to a audience unfamiliar with ancient history ‹but will provide, along with the text, descriptions of the source¹s genre, its author, and the work from which it comes.
The overall goal is to provide articles that meet the highest standards of scholarship without excluding non-professional readers, who will have immediate access to the sources and to the context necessary to evaluate those sources critically.
In addition to the core of descriptive articles linked to primary sources, Dêmos will include other, interpretive or argumentative articles, representing new scholarship on Athenian democracy. These will also be held to a high standard, but will be aimed at inviting a broad public to explore the ongoing study of Athenian democracy.
The technology behind this project poses the most significant challenge for us collaborators in this project. We will need to link many different kinds of electronic documents together, in different ways under different circumstances; we will need to ensure that new documents can be integrated seamlessly into Dêmos, and that other projects can easily interact with Dêmos. We will answer these challenges with a combination of: data in structured documents, TEI-conformant SGML, server-side scripting to deliver the SGML to as HTML, and authority lists to mediate between significant terms (citations, names, geographic places) and databases of texts, atlases, and other resources both inside and outside of Dêmos.
This approach, though, present its own challenges for a collaborative, open project like Dêmos. A site like the Perseus Project, which employs similar technologies, is designed, implemented, and maintained by a staff of full time scholars with extraordinary technological skills. Dêmos, to be effective and durable, will have to be accessible to scholars with ordinary technological skills. Accordingly, the editors of the Stoa Consortium Ross Scaife and Anne Mahoney are working in collaboration with the Perseus Project to design a system and develop tools that will allow individual authors to create, mark, review, and integrate their own documents into the infrastructure of Dêmos.
Sebastian Heath (American Numismatic Society/Univ. of Michigan) "Cross Project Resource Discovery for American Numismatic Society Publications"
The American Numismatic Society holds an internationally renowned collection of coins and paper money that records the economic, political, and art historical traditions of many of the world's great cultures and civilizations. As such, it presents a very narrow view, that of the numismatist, on a very wide field, potentially all of human history from the introduction of coinage in the 7th and 6th centuries BCE. This paper discusses how such a cultural institution can use the internet to achieve its public mission of promoting the study and understanding of its collection. For example, the Society's coins document the reigns of emperors and kings as well as the terms of presidents and prime ministers. But it is not feasible for the Societ to write its own histories of these individuals or of the countries they
Bill Hutton (William and Mary), "Editorial Strategies for the Suda On-Line Project"
The Suda On-Line project was begun in early 1998 with a simple goal: using the World-Wide Web to compile and disseminate a collaborative annotated translation of the Suda lexicon. In pursuit of that goal the project has developed an increasingly sophisticated interface for users and contributors and has evolved into a unique experiment in electronic publishing in Classics. Though we have been actively recruiting translators for just under a year now, over 110 scholars world wide have signed on to work on it and (as of 8/1/00) well over 2000 entries have been submitted. In order to maximize the advantages of Web publication we have developed an unusual editorial policy: draft submissions are made available immediately on the project's Web site, and their improvement and annotation is carried out in a transparent process that is visible to all users of the site.
The presentation will review the rationale for the project and its editorial policy, discuss some of the triumphs, pitfalls and pratfalls we have experienced in building it, and suggest some possibilities for the future of the project and of the system that has been developed for it.
Ross Scaife (Univ. of Kentucky), "Electronic Publication and the Classics: Thinking about Copyright"
"Digital Workflow Concepts for Dynamic Reference Works "
Stanford University
Edward N. Zalta (Stanford University)
Stanford University
A problem often faced by the members of an academic discipline is how to find the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and authoritative information about an important topic in one's discipline. If one wants an introduction to a topic that is organized by an expert, a summary of the current state of research, or a bibliography of print and online works that has been filtered on the basis of informed human judgment, there are few places to turn other than standard reference works. But standard reference works go out of date even before they are published and aren't responsive to advances in research.
In response to this problem, we have developed and implemented the concept of a `dynamic reference work'. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/) is a dynamic reference work in which each entry is written and maintained by an expert or group of experts in the field, and the authors can update their entries at any time to reflect advances in research. However, the entries and subsequent updates are not made publically available on the web until they are refereed by the members of an Editorial Board. Dynamic reference works therefore require a highly customized work-flow system, mediated by password-protected web interfaces through which authors and editors can conduct such transactions as uploading and remotely-editing entries, refereeing entries, comparing updated entries with originals, etc. In this way, a dynamic reference work organizes an academic discipline so that it can collaboratively maintain an up-to-date reference work.
SESSION VIII. LANGUAGE, TEXTS, AND ELECTRONIC EDITIONS
Saturday, 3:45-5:15
"The Archimedes Project:
A Test Case for the Digital Research Community"
Brian Fuchs
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
The Archimedes Project is a collaborative project at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science which aims to create a complete working environment for the digitization and web-based study of artefacts relating to the history of classical mechanics. My paper will give an overview of the project, and then discuss some practical problems encountered in building a working environment and our solutions to them.
The project's core work consists in the digitization of ancient and early modern texts on mechanical theory and practice and in research utilizing these digitized texts. The project differs from most other digital libraries in that it also provides an environment for creation of content in the form of commentary, which is in turn made available in the library. The project is now at the point where we are ready to attempt the creation of an integrated workplace. We have completed a lengthy pilot phase, in which we tested a variety of data formats, workflows, and software solutions. My contribution has been to design the work flow for the new workplace, and in particular to write a set of guidelines which will coordinate the work of taggers, programmers and scholars.
In particular, my paper will address problems arising from the division of sgml labor between taggers and scholars working on highly structured primary texts: how can a tagger encode text structure so as to make it available for scholarly research, without at the same time either second-guessing the scholar as to what the structure of the text might be or forcing the scholar, who may know little about sgml, to change the tagging of the text itself when s/he detects an error in the structure encoded by the tagger? When changes have to be made, how can they be added to the text most effectively?
"Linking Past and Future:
An Application of Dynamic HTML for Electronic Manuscript Editions"
Robert Sanderson
University of Liverpool
Up until the present day, electronic documents have tended to mirror their physical counterparts with respect to form as well as content. In the mindset of most editors and typesetters, such documents have only a single layer of information since this is all that can be produced on a piece of paper. On paper there is no possibility for providing the reader with different content levels, as it is an inherently two-dimensional means of presentation.
With the release of the 4.0 versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer, 'Dynamic HTML' - page content generated on-the-fly - has become a real possibility. We can now transcend the old self-imposed two dimensional restrictions and add a facility for presenting information of various kinds not only across and down the page, but up out of it as well. This allows us to produce documents that are to traditional documents what holograms are to photographs.
The proposed paper will present a working model using the Pierpont Morgan Library's "A" redaction manuscript of Book 1 of Froissart's 'Chroniques' (a 14th Century chronicle). This will be used to explore the implications of this new technology for the conceptualisation and development of electronic editions of manuscripts from any era of history.
SESSION IX. WEB-BASED JOURNALS
Sunday, 8:30-9:30
"Indo-European Studies Bulletin:
A Case Study for Publishing with XML and Unicode"
Deborah W. Anderson
Visiting Scholar, Dept. of Linguistics
University of California -- Berkeley
This paper will discuss the development of an electronic version of the UCLA Indo-European Studies Bulletin, a test case for online publication using two new technological standards, XML and Unicode. The IES Bulletin is a small scholarly publication devoted to ancient Indo-European languages (including Greek and Latin) and the archaeological remains associated with the IE cultures. The project was developed in conjunction with the Electronic Text Unit from the UC Berkeley Library (with seed-funding from Bryn Mawr Reviews) as a way of seeing what kinds of problems arise in creating such an electronic publication using XML and Unicode, the solutions that are available, and whether e-publication is a viable alternative to print publication.
The impetus for this project was twofold:
--The field of ancient Indo-European studies is one that requires access to a number of small publications that are often difficult (or impossible) to find in libraries. Does electronic publication better suit the field? The Bulletin could itself serve as a case study for other small scholarly publications in ancient and medieval studies. XML was chosen as it is becoming the new standard for the Web and allows searching capabilities better than other e-publishing options (i.e., PDF).
--Because the IES Bulletin includes a wide variety of ancient and modern scripts, it is critical that these scripts display correctly on the Web, independent of computer platform. Unicode, the universal encoding standard, is intended to solve this problem, but not all languages have been accepted and many software products do not yet support it. What can be done in the interim? What can be done to adequately cover the fonts needed, i.e., is a downloadable font the answer, or embedded fonts?
The paper will discuss its findings and end with a short demonstration of this electronic publication (on the Berkeley Digital Library SunSite).
"Running an Electronic Journal: The Medieval Review"
Deborah Deliyannis
Editor, Medieval Review
Western Michigan University
The Medieval Review (TMR) is a book review journal, run in much the same way as a print review journal, with the difference that we do almost all of our correspondence by e-mail. Instead of printing reviews in groups, we send each one out as e-mail to all the electronic subscribers of the distribution list, as soon as we have received and edited it. The electronic medium is ideally suited to book reviews, which, since they are not that long, can easily be read as e-mail. Once they have been posted, reviews are archived on a web site; they can be browsed by the date of their appearance, or searched by author, title, or keyword.
This talk will consider the issues we encounter, and the advantages we enjoy, by running a journal electronically. Advantages include: speed, no length limits, the potential to include images, and availability to anyone with a web connection (not just people in scholarly libraries). Our major issue has to do with costs: currently both the subscription list and the website are free, but we do incur costs which must be met. We are in the process of experimenting with various ways to raise revenue without passing the costs along to the readers, and some of these are possible specifically because of the electronic format.
SESSION X: Integrating Archaeological Field Work via the WWW
Sunday, 9:45-12:00
Organizer: Neel Smith (College of the Holy Cross)
Archaeologists working in the field record vast quantities of observations that cannot be replicated, and that offer only indirect evidence for the true subject of archaeology: human activity in the past. Small wonder that field archaeologists have often been early adopters of information technologies such as databases, geographic information systems and text markup languages. The World Wide Web now challenges us to move beyond applying information technologies to isolated components of a field project, and reconceive a field project's information system as an integrated whole. A unified information system more closely reflects the continuity of activity that should ideally characterize the collaborative activity of fieldwork. Our presentations describe how we are addressing that challenge in practice in the Turkish-American field work at Hacimusalar (ancient Choma, in Lycia).*We highlight four ways that delivering information over the WWW changes our activities as archaeologists.
1) Easy delivery of information widens the SCOPE of material we can consider. To take one example, each season we shoot thousands of photographs. Shot in film, these might be available only as contact sheets: digital photographs are available on our web server the same day as thumbnails linked to full-size images. A field director trying to review activity across a large site now has constant access to a complete photographic archive.
2) The Web changes WHO has access to material. We find, for example, that students on the dig now routinely refer to the photographic documentation mentioned above -- material that would have been unavailable to them without the Web. In like fashion, the same data archives can now support specialist publications, more general publicity like newsletters, and pedagogical or educational materials. There are still distinct audiences for these different types of publications, but they are no longer cut off from fuller information. Perhaps the most dramatic example in the Hacimusalar project is the use of excavation archives normally inaccessible to all but project members in a collaborative, on-line archaeology course offered through the Associated Colleges of the South, and coordinated with courses at DePauw and Holy Cross.
3) A unified information system fights isolation along traditional disciplinary boundary lines. Using distribution maps automatically generated from queries over the Web, archaeologists studying ceramics can explore the relation of their material to finds of bones studied by faunal specialists. Specialists can explore the work in progress of other team members, and so in their own work better take account of other contributions to the project.
4) A unified information system encourages collaboration. The Hacimusalar project includes participants from a dozen institutions in the U.S. and Turkey. Beginning in the 1999 field season, we set up a small local network with a Web server for team members to use during the field season in Turkey. Following the season, this Web server was then connected to the internet, where team members can continue to work with and develop their materials, while simultaneously making them available to other team members, archaeologists elsewhere, students and the broader public. Participants in the 2000 field season can work with new material as it comes on line, before ever getting to the project site in Turkey.
The Hacimusalar Project, a multidisciplinary archaeological project centered on the Elmali basin in southwestern Turkey, is conducted by Bilkent University (Ankara) in conjunction with the Associated Colleges of the South, DePauw University and the College of the Holy Cross. The participants in this panel would like to thank the director of the project, Dr. Ilknur Ozgen (Bilkent University), for making this collaboration possible.
"The Archaeological Field Director and the WWW"
Mark Garrison
Trinity University
Dr. Garrison, the field director of the Hacimusalar project, will introduce the session. The WWW changes how the field director meets the entire range of his professional responsibilities, from daily decision making in the field, to fund-raising, outreach and professional publication.
"An On-line Archaeology Course based on the Hacimusalar Project"
Suzanne Bonefas
Director of Technology for the ACS
Associated Colleges of the South.
Dr. Bonefas describes the development of an innovative on-line archaeology course based on the Hacimusalar project. During class meetings, students follow class material on the WWW while logged into a chat room, where they can post questions to the lecturer, whose talk is simultaneously broadcast in RealAudio. This allows students at small schools without an archaeologist to take part in a course that would otherwise be unavailable to them.
"The Classification and Chronology of Ceramics Using the WWW"
Hal Haskell
Southwestern University
Since most of the pottery found at Hacimusalar consists of little studied or unknown wares, Prof. Haskell is working out the basic classification and chronology of ceramics from the site. Working on the WWW, he is developing a wide range of interlinked material. To support his original scholarly interpretations, he is able to provide direct links into the project archives; he is also writing handbooks for students working at the site. These, too, include links into archival material as well as to his own conclusions.
"Archaeological survey, data comparability and the WWW"
Kenny Morrell
Rhodes College
Pedar Foss
DePauw University
The Hacimusalar Survey uses an integrated data strategy to digitally manage all of the project's media and information. While this strategy works seamlessly for internal analysis by project members, the larger question is how we will share this information with other projects in a way such that survey results can be compared, and supra-regional settlement patterns can be explored and explained. The WWW offers a medium through which the data can move, but data which originates in highly complex relational databases must be made available in a clear, workable way, and there must be significant points of comparability with other projects. This suggests that survey archaeologists should be discussing methodological and recording standards as well as technical standards -- a difficult task, considering the uniqueness of each region and the individual questions of the researchers. And yet, the WWW may be the solution here as well, by allowing survey archaeologists to develop such standards outside of conferences and publications.
"Integration of Information Technologies in the Field using the WWW"
Neel Smith
(College of the Holy Cross).
Creating a unified information system requires the collaboration of all team members, and coordinated planning. Since 1998, Prof. Smith's primary responsibility on the Hacimusalar project has been the integration of information technologies in the field. His presentation will outline how databases, geographic information systems and structured text are served from a WWW server, and why we have chosen to rely on open-source software.
"The Ancient Civilizations Distance Learning Program"
Samuel B. Fee
Assistant Professor
Coordinator of Instructional Technology
Centre College
The Ancient Civilizations Distance Learning Program brings the excitement and the experience of archaeology in Greece directly to students in the United States. This program builds on the OSU Excavations at Isthmia Web Site (http://isthmia.ohio-state.edu/) and Multimedia Program as well as electronic resources from long-term archaeological exploration in Greece, by making them available to students from several institutions throughout the country.
This initiative cannot, of course, replace a direct international field experience in classical archaeology, but it can provide the resources and some of the "flavor" of an archaeological expedition. The program makes use of a variety of integrated technologies, including digital video, electronic databases, text-based and photographic resources, ancillary Internet material, and e-mail interactions along with web-based discussion boards. The goal of the program is not simply to provide resources, but to allow students at their home institutions to take part in the experience of working and learning at an archaeological site in Greece. The program is innovative and modular, so that its various parts can be used by teachers in different courses such as ancient history, classical archaeology, classical mythology, history of art, and Modern Greek culture, among others.
This presentation will discuss the nature of the project as well as demonstrating the electronic materials. Some limited data from the first year of implementation will also be available.