University of Chicago Press ebook givaway

Beginning this month the University of Chicago Press is offering a free e-book every month. It's an effort to raise awareness about the Chicago Digital Editions program, to get the uninitiated to try out an e-book on their PC, Mac, or mobile reader, and to promote their authors. This month book is:

Censorinus

The Birthday Book

Edited and Translated by Holt N. Parker
120 pages, 9 line drawings 5 x 7 © 2007

E-book Free! (about e-books)

ISBN: 9780226099774

Cloth $25.00

ISBN: 9780226099743 Published February 2007

“[Roman grammarian and writer] Censorinus distills the wisdom of several strains of philosophy, extracting whatever seems to have any bearing on births, days and birthdays: theories of the origin of the human species, the formation of the individual foetus, the principles of astrology, the ages of man, the nature of time, eons, centuries, years, months, days and hours.”—London Review of Books

Get this e-book free!

2009 Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science

Final call for participation

Conference: Full Schedule

DHCS 2009 Conference Schedule

Saturday, November 14 (Pre-conference in McCormick-Tribune Campus Center)

1:00 - 5:00 Birds-of-a-feather Workshop Sessions


Sunday, November 15 (Main conference in Hermann Hall Ballroom)

8:30 - 9:15 Breakfast & Registration

9:15--9:30 Welcoming Statements

R. Russell Betts, Dean of the College of Science and Letters, Illinois Institute of Technology

9:30 - 11:00 Paper Session 1 Text Analysis

Citation Detection and Textual Reuse on Ancient Greek texts

Marco Büchler, Annette Geßner (University of Leipzig)

Metaforager: A Pattern-Learning System for Large-Scale Metaphor Extraction

Jenny Loomis (Stanford)

On the Origin of Theories: The Semantic Analysis of Analogy in a Scientific Corpus

Devin Griffiths (Rutgers University)

BREAK

11:15 - 12:15 Paper Session 2 Visualization and Data Mining

Big See: Large Scale Visualization

Geoffrey Rockwell, Garry Wong, Stan Ruecker, Megan Meredith-Lobay, and Stéfan Sinclair (University of Alberta and McMaster University)

New Insights: Dynamic Timelines in Digital Humanities

Kurt Fendt (MIT)

12:15--2:00 Lunch

2:00 - 3:15 Keynote Address: Vasant Honavar

Humanities as Information Sciences

BREAK

3:30 - 5:30 Poster and Demo Session (Hermann Hall Alumni Lounge)

5:45 - 6:45 Reception (MTCC Lew Collins Welcome Center)

7:00 - 10:00 Banquet (MTCC Pritzker Club)

7:45 - 9:00 Keynote Address: Roger Dannenberg

The Music Technology Revolution

Monday, November 16 (Main conference in Hermann Hall Ballroom)

8:30 - 9:45 Breakfast

Posters Sessions & Software Demos (redux)

9:45 - 10:45 Paper Session 3 Stylistics

Computational Phonostylistics: Computing the Sounds of Poetry

Marc Plamondon (Nipissing University)

Features from Frequency: Authorship and Stylistic Analysis Using Repetitive Sound

C. W. Forstall (SUNY Buffalo) and W. J. Scheire (U. Colorado at Colorado Springs)

Mapping Genre Space via Random Conjectures
Patrick Juola (Duquesne University)

BREAK

11:00 - 12:30 Keynote Address: Stephen Wolfram

What Can Be Made Computable in the Humanities?

12:30 - 2:00 Lunch

2:00 - 3:00 Paper Session 4 Algorithmic Tools

Who's Who in Your Digital Collection? Developing a Tool for Name Disambiguation and Identity Resolution

Jean Godby (OCLC), Patricia Hswe (UIUC), Judith Klavans (UMD), Hyoungtae Cho (UMD), Dan Roth (UIUC), Lev Ratinov (UIUC), and Larry Jackson (UIUC)

Discovering Latent Relations of Concepts by Graph Mining Approaches

Marco Büchler (University of Leipzig)

BREAK

3:15 - 4:00 Round-Table Panel

4:00 Closing remarks

New Digital Humanities Journal: Digital Studies / Le champ numérique

Digital Studies / Le champ numérique (ISSN 1918-3666) is a refereed academic journal, publishing three times a year and serving as a formal arena for scholarly activity and as an academic resource for researchers in the digital humanities. DS/CN is published by the Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour létude des médias interactifs (SDH/SEMI), an organisation affiliated with the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) through the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations (ADHO). Work published in DS/CN reflects the values of this community and the interdisciplinary diversity of those who comprise it, with particular emphasis on emerging digital humanities methodology and its application, on the engagement of that work in pertinent disciplinary contexts, and on multilinguality and complementarity with other ADHO publications (among them the journals Literary and Linguistic Computing, and Digital Humanities Quarterly).

Similarly, our publication technology, policies and practices will strive to promote and reflect the community’s best emergent and longstanding practices.

DS/CN invites contributions relating to work carried out in the digital humanities, broadly construed. In its open, thematic, and conference volumes DS/CN publishes academic articles, scholarly notes, working papers, field synopses, larger reviews, and well-documented opinion pieces. DS/CN privileges publications which explicitly demonstrate an awareness of interdisciplinary context(s) and a history of pertinent academic engagement.

- Flyer

Brill's new open access policy

Brill's new open access policy. What do you make of this?

When on Google Earth 78

Heather conceded my win at When on Google Earth 77, which was really only a guess on my part, but I guessed right and that seemed to be enough. (Though I still can't find the exact spot on Google Earth).

Moving on to When on Google Earth 78, where and when in the world is this?




If you can identify this site and its main period of occupation, then post your comment below.

Follow WOGE on the Facebook group.


The Rules of When on Google Earth are as follows:

Q: What is When on Google Earth?
A: It’s a game for archaeologists, or anybody else willing to have a go!

Q: How do you play it?
A: Simple, you try to identify the site in the picture.

Q: Who wins?
A: The first person to correctly identify the site, including its major period of occupation, wins the game.

Q: What does the winner get?
A: The winner gets bragging rights and the chance to host the next When on Google Earth on his/her own blog!

Good news on open access publication from De Gruyter

Press Release

2010 sees the launch of the series “Topoi. Berlin Studies of the Ancient World”

It is a pilot project for a combination of Open Access with publisher supervision

Berlin, 23rd June 2009

From 2010 onwards de Gruyter will be publishing the series “Topoi. Berlin Studies of the Ancient World”. It will encompass all the disciplines of Ancient Studies, from prehistory and early history through classical archaeology to antique philosophy, epistemology and theology. The series will be edited by the Excellence Cluster Topoi, with the prospect of the editorship being transferred to the projected Berlin College for Ancient Studies.

As well as being published in book form, selected titles from the series will also be available for open access as eBooks on the www.reference-global.com website. Dr Sabine Vogt, de Gruyter’s Senior Editor Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies has announced that “Our first joint pilot project for simultaneous publication in print and open access will be the volume Babylon – Wissenskultur in Orient und Okzident (‘Babylon – Knowledge Culture East and West’)”.

Since April 2009. de Gruyter Publishing has been offering an over-arching unified open access model with its de Gruyter Open Library; Topoi provides a first opportunity to apply this model to the humanities. Dr. Sven Fund, de Gruyter’s Managing Director, is confident that “The publishing model used for the Topoi series shows that de Gruyter is adapting to the changing needs and interests of authors, customers and business partners.” He continues. “With this cooperation agreement for the Topoi series we are able for the first time to do exactly what academic sponsoring institutions – including the German Research Foundation – have been demanding on an international level, namely to provide free access to research funded by the tax-payer.

The Series “Topoi. Berlin Studies of the Ancient World” presents research findings from the Excellence Cluster Topoi, a joint undertaking of the Free University of Berlin and the Berlin Humboldt University. Partners in the enterprise are the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Arts and Sciences, the German Archaeological Institute, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. The Topoi Excellence Cluster is engaged in the institutional preparations for the foundation of a Berlin College for Ancient Studies, that will provide a common institutional basis for leading-edge research in all the disciplines connected with Ancient Studies.

Contact
Ulrike Lippe
Public Relations
Telephone 030-260 05 153
ulrike.lippe@degruyter.com

Walter de Gruyter GmbH &Co. KG: The 260-year old independent academic publisher, with its headquarters in Berlin, publishes over 700 new titles each year; from the fields of humanities, medicine, life sciences and law, as well as 100 academic journals, and digital media.
http://www.degruyter.com/

Looking for a particular type of ancient hillside city

I am looking for comparative examples of ancient cities with these characteristics:

(1) Most or all of the residential settlement is on hillsides or mountainsides, and,
(2) Most or all of the civic architecture is at the BOTTOM of the hill.

At the Aztec site I'm working on, Calixtlahuaca, the housing was built on terraces and covered the sides of a small mountain (2-3 sq km total). The heaviest occupation was on the north face (the right slope in the above photo). The royal palace was built on the plain at the base of the hill, and the main temples were built on huge terraces near the base of the hill. There were also some (now destroyed) temples on top of the hill. The second photo, looking down from about 2/3 of the way up the hill, shows one of the large temples, and the palace is barely visible at the base of the hill (yellow ellipse).

Most Mesoamerican cities whose housing covered hillsides had their civic architecture on top of the hill (Monte Alban, Xochicalco, many more examples), and defense was a major consideration. At Calixtlahuaca, they put a lot of effort into living on terraced slopes and building big terraces for their temples, yet there are no defensive features (walls, ditches, caches of weapons, etc.) and the royal palace was the most exposed building in the city.

I'd appreciate hearing about comparative examples that might help me understand this strange urban layout. Someone suggested Ephesus, which seems to fit, although I can find no information about the hillside housing. The excavated "slope houses" or "terrace houses" at the site are in the civic center, not up on the hillsides. Are there other examples of ancient cities with these traits? And can they help interpret Calixtlahuaca, or do the idiosyncratic factors of each site dominate, making comparisons like this superficial and not informative?

Suggestions are welcome!

-Mike Smith