Friday, April 30, 2010

"The Scholarly Apparatus: When Should It Be There?"

In the most recent (April 2010) issue of the CSA Newsletter (Vol. XXIII, No. 1), is Nick Eiteljorg's short piece The Scholarly Apparatus: When Should It Be There? Citations, credibility, and pride of authorship. His comment is a plea to those who publish online to make an effort to make their works citable. I'm completely sympathetic. I am also quite sure that we need citation formats flexible enough to describe the evidence however it presents itself.

Dean Snow has already added a comment concerning this issue.
join the conversation by sending comment directly to CSA, or by using the comment function here.


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Exlibris von Ägyptologen

Kirsten Konrad and Peter Pamminger were kind enough to send me a copy of their very nice monograph Exlibris von Ägyptologen (Göttinger Miszellen Beihefte Nr. 7), Göttingen, 2010.

In September 2008 they sent me twenty bookplates and allowed me to present them in Bookplates of Scholars in Ancient Studies


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Thursday, April 29, 2010

Undue Diligence

In March there was a workshop entitled Undue Diligence: Seeking Low-risk Strategies for Making Collections of Unpublished Materials More Accessible at the OCLC San Mateo office.
The seminar concluded with a discussion of what was termed "well-intentioned practice." OCLC staff, with input from speakers and advisors, had drafted a reasonable approach to balancing risk and access when making collections of unpublished materials accessible online. The participants in the seminar discussed and improved the document. Following the meeting, the revised document was shared with the speakers, advisors, participants and a few other experts. More improvements were made. The one-page document offers a practical approach to selecting collections, making decisions, seeking permissions, recording outcomes, establishing policy and working with future donors.

Currently the document is being shared with other organizations in hopes that, with additional endorsement, we'll be able to establish a community of practice based on this approach.

This document is Well-intentioned practice for putting digitized collections of unpublished materials online.


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Monday, April 19, 2010

Looting Matters: Protecting the Cultural Heritage of Italy

Looting Matters: Protecting the Cultural Heritage of Italy -- SWANSEA, Wales, April 16 /PRNewswire/ --

The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Italy with Italy is under review. The Looting Matters press release includes a quote from Sebastian Heath, Vice President for Professional Responsibilities at the AIA: "The MOU between the US and Italy serves the interests of the international community by reducing looting and preserving information about the Ancient World".

The deadline for submissions is April 22, 2010.

Further details on how to submit comments from the AIA website.


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Friday, April 16, 2010

Search reopened: ASCSA Director of Publications

Director of Publications

Director of Publications

DIRECTOR OF PUBLICATIONS in Princeton, New Jersey SEARCH REOPENED

The primary responsibilities of the Director of Publications include the overall direction and management of the Publications Office; overseeing the assignments of the editorial staff and freelance editors and designers; working with excavation directors and authors to develop and produce assigned monographs; collaborating with the Editor of Hesperia; overseeing marketing and distribution; negotiating financial arrangements with printers and fulfillment agencies; investigating alternative sources of funding for publications; and exploring and developing new avenues--digital or other--for American School publications.

The Director is also expected to oversee staff in the Publications Office; write regularly scheduled performance reviews; create and administer an annual departmental budget; prepare regular reports for the American School Managing Committee, Board of Trustees, and Committee on Publications; and maintain and expand the American School Publications web page. The Director works closely with the chair of the Committee on Publications and reports to the chair of the Managing Committee.

Requirements: BA degree, with an advanced degree preferred; at least five years managerial experience in a publishing environment; background in classical archaeology, Classics, ancient art, or a related field preferred; and demonstrated knowledge of digital publishing and current trends in scholarly communication.

Alongside archaeological exploration, teaching, and research, publication is one of the core missions of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Since its founding in 1881, the American School has published almost 250 books. These include major reports and studies on material culture recovered during excavations at the Athenian Agora, Ancient Corinth, and other sites that are essential reference works for all scholars of the ancient world. Since 1932, the American School has also published the award-winning quarterly journal Hesperia, one of the leading periodicals in the field. The increasingly digital nature of scholarship is transforming the nature of publication in this field, and the Director of Publications contributes to institution-wide initiatives to support new modes of scholarly communication.

The position is full-time, beginning as soon as is mutually convenient. Excellent benefits, pleasant working conditions in the Princeton, New Jersey Publications Office, occasional travel to Greece, and salary commensurate with experience. Application review will begin as of April 14, 2010 and continue until the position is filled. Interested applicants should send a cover letter, curriculum vitae, and at least two letters of recommendation to:

Professor Jane Carter
Committee on Publications
American School of Classical Studies at Athens
6-8 Charlton Street
Princeton, NJ 08540

or
e-mail to application@ascsa.org, marked “Publication Job Application” in the subject area.


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Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Paragraph level open public commenting on online publication

University of Michigan press has just released a book online with an interesting feature. Using a platform designed by digress.it, readers can leave comments at the individual paragraph level, respond to others’ comments, and generally use the book as a springboard to meaningful discussions about autism and parenting.

Have a look here. The content is not related to the ancient world.

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Ithaka S+R's Faculty Survey 2009

Ithaka S+R issued their Faculty Survey 2009 today:

Two interesting cover articles are already out:

"Eroding Library Role?" in Inside Higher Ed

and

"Scholars Increasingly Embrace Some, but Not All, Digital Media" in The Chronicle


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Friday, April 2, 2010

Do religious universities serve the public good?

An article in Macleans.ca OnCampus by Todd Pettigrew, April 2nd, 2010 Do religious universities serve the public good? has the following interesting passage:

...Let me put it another way. Imagine three scholars were proposing to start new universities in Canada this year with mission statements that included the following:

Canadian Olympian University is an innovative university dedicated to the fearsome Gods of Olympus, rooted in the classical faith tradition, moved and transformed by the life and teachings of the epic poet Homer. Through teaching, research and service COU inspires and equips women and men for lives of service, leadership and reconciliation in Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite and their followers.

As a polytheistic community, Atlantic Egyptian University upholds pagan standards of behavior to which faculty and staff are required to conform. These standards derive not only from ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics, but also from the culture of the Pharaohs, the priesthood and their slaves.

The mission of Canadian Mesopotamian University, as an arm of Taimat and Abzu, is to develop sky-respecting leaders: positive, goal-oriented university graduates with minds dedicated to Enlil, god of storms; growing disciples of Nin-Khursag, the earth goddess,who glorify Enki, water god and patron of wisdom.

These all sound silly, of course, and we would all think twice before hiring a graduate from any of these schools to teach our children or treat our diseases. But they are all real statements from Canadian religious universities (Canadian Mennonite, Atlantic Baptist/Crandall, and Trinity Western) with the Christian references removed and other real, if ancient, religions put in their place...

It's interesting and worth reading.

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AWBG by email

Are you interested in the content in this blog? You can now use the convenient Ancient World Bloggers Group by email function right there in the right hand sidebar. Enter your address for notification of something new. You will get no spam from this.

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Thursday, April 1, 2010

NEH Awards in Ancient Studies, March 29, 2010

NEH announces $16 million in awards and offers for 286 humanities projects, March 29, 2010. Following are the funded projects relating to the Ancient World:

University of California, Berkeley Outright: $6,000 [Summer Stipends]
Project Director: Robert Goldman
Project Title: The Final Chapter: Introduction, Translation, and Scholarly Annotation of the Uttarakanda of the Critical Edition of the Valm

University of California, Berkeley Outright: $49,942 [Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants] Project Director: Niek Veldhuis
Project Title: Berkeley Prosopography Services: Building Research Communities and Restoring Ancient Communities through Digital Tools
Project Description: Development of the Berkeley Prosopography Service (BPS), an open source digital toolkit that extracts prosopographic data from TEI encoded text and generates interactive visual representations of social networks.

University of California, Berkeley Outright: $234,495 Humanities Collections and Reference Resources
Project Director: James Matisoff
Project Title: Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus: Sustainability
Implementation
Project Description: The development of an online etymological dictionary and thesaurus of
Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the common ancestor of languages spoken in China, India, and Southeast
Asia. The project would also implement strategies for sustaining this resource over the long term.

University of Southern California Outright: $24,933 [Enduring Questions: Pilot Course Grants] Project Director: David Albertson
Project Title: NEH Enduring Questions Course on the Power of Visual Images Project Description: The development of an undergraduate seminar on the significance

University of California, Los Angeles Outright: $50,000
[Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants]
Project Director: Lisa Snyder
Project Title: Software Interface for Real-time Exploration of Three-Dimensional Computer
Models of Historic Urban Environments
Project Description” The prototype development for a generalized, extensible platform that will
allow for real-time exploration, annotation, and tours in 3D computer models, using the NEH-
funded Digital Karnak as the test case.

National Geographic Society Outright: $800,000 [America's Media Makers Production]
Project Director: Maryanne Culpepper Project Title: In the Footsteps of Heroes
Project Description: Production of a six-part television documentary series about the history and culture of Ancient Greek civilization from the Bronze Age through the Roman annexation of Greece in 146 BCE.

Emory University Outright: $24,965
[Enduring Questions: Pilot Course Grants]
Project Director: Andrew Mitchell
Project Title: NEH Enduring Questions Course on How Does One Live a Life that Ends?
Project Description: The development of an introductory level undergraduate course that charts a three-part historical trajectory from ancient Sumerian and Greek texts to 20th-century thought.

University of Chicago Outright: $300,000
[America's Historical & Cultural Organizations Implementation]
Project Director: Anthony Hirschel
Project Title: Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan
Project Description: Implementation of a traveling exhibition, a website, an international
symposium, a catalog, and programs on the sculptures of Xiangtangshan caves in China.

Northern Illinois University Outright: $6,000 [Summer Stipends]
Project Director: John Bentley Project
Title: Dictionary of Ancient Japanese Orthography

Walters Art Museum Outright: $315,000
[Humanities Collections and Reference Resources]
Project Director: William Noel
Project Title: Parchment to Pixel: Creating a Digital Resource of Medieval Manuscripts
Project Description: Cataloging and digitizing 105 medieval illuminated manuscripts dating
mostly from the 9th to the 16th centuries that derive from diverse Christian cultures. Images and
catalog data would be freely accessible via the museum's Web site and a portal maintained by
Johns Hopkins University.

Harvard University Outright: $215,099 [Humanities Collections and Reference Resources] Project Director: William Fash
Project Title: Digitizing, Re-housing, Cataloging, and Creating Online Access to the Peabody Museum's Photograph Collection*
Project Description: The second phase of a project to catalog, digitize, and mount on the Internet 25,000 photographic images from the Peabody Museum Photographic Archives that document archaeological and ethnographic objects and major expeditions, dating from 1866 to the 1930s.

Mount Holyoke College Outright: $18,535
[Enduring Questions: Pilot Course Grants]
Project Director: Elizabeth Markovits
Project Title: NEH Enduring Questions Course on What Is Family?
Project Description: The development of a first-year seminar on the changing meanings of family from classical to modern times.

Documentary Educational Resources, Inc. Outright: $50,000
[America's Media Makers Development]
Project Director: David Lebrun
Project Title: The Royal Cup
Project Description: Development of an hour-long documentary film on ancient Maya pottery and the ethics of studying and collecting objects that may have been looted.

University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Outright: $6,000 [Summer Stipends]
Project Director: Alex Jassen
Project Title: Violence, Religion, and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Carleton College [Teaching Development Fellowships]
Project Director: William North
Project Title: Cultures of Empire: Byzantium, 711-1453
Outright: $21,000

University of Mississippi, Main Campus Outright: $6,000 {Summer Stipends]
Project Director: Steven Skultety Project
Title: Conflict in Aristotle's Political Philosophy

College of New Jersey Outright: $21,000 [Teaching Development Fellowships]
Project Director: Deborah Huton
Project Title: Arts of South Asia: Exploring Monuments in Depth

University of New Mexico Outright: $49,832 [Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants]
Project Director: Jennifer von Schwerin
Project Title: Digital Documentation and Reconstruction of an Ancient Maya Temple and Prototype of Internet GIS Database of Maya Architecture
Project Description: This project brings together an international team of archeologists, technologists, and cultural heritage site managers to develop a test implementation of a new online platform for virtual environments of significant cultural sites, using the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Copan, Honduras as a testbed

New York Botanical Garden Outright: $40,000 [America's Historical and Cultural Organizations Planning]
Project Director: Susan Fraser
Project Title: Medicinal Plants: Ancient Culture to Modern Medicine at The New York Botanical Garden
Project Description: Planning for a multiformat traveling exhibition and public programs that explore how plants have shaped the trajectory of medicine throughout the world.

Aquila Theatre Company, Inc. Outright: $800,000
[America's Historical & Cultural Organizations Implementation]
Project Director: Peter Meineck
Project Title: Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives: Poetry-Drama-Dialogue
Project Description: Implementation of a national program series exploring classical literature, to be presented at 100 libraries and performing arts centers in 20 states.

New York University Outright: $298,457 [Humanities Collections and Reference Resources] Project Director: Thomas Elliott
Project Title: Pleiades: Content and Community for Ancienty Geography Project Description: The continued development of an open-access digital gazetteer for Greek and Roman history with reusable open-source software that could be employed in other digital humanities publications.

Hartwick College Outright: $6,000 [Summer Stipends] Project
Director: Martha Zebrowski
Project Title: William Smith's 1753 Translation of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War

Cleveland Museum of Art Outright: $40,000 [America's Historical and Cultural Organizations Planning]
Project Director: Sue Bergh
Project Title: The Realm of the Condor: Wari, the Art of a Pre-Inca Empire Project Description: Planning for a traveling exhibition and a publication on the art of the Wari Empire which flourished in highland Peru from about AD 750 to AD 1000.

University of Pennsylvania Outright: $240,655 [Humanities Collections and Reference Resources]
Project Director: Grant Frame Project Title: Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period Project Description: Online publication of the official inscriptions of the rulers of ancient Assyria, which are preserved on clay tablets and other artifacts. The project would also provide transliterations, translations, and bibliographic information.

University of Virginia Outright: $50,000 [Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants]
Project Director: Bernard Frischer
Project Title: New Digital Tools for Restoring Polychromy to 3D Digital Models of Sculpture Project Description: The development of a set of tools that would allow for the accurate inclusion and display of color for Classical sculpture, using the Augustus of Prima Porta in the Vatican Museums as a case study.

University of Virginia Outright: $48,549 [Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants]
Project Director: David Koller
Project Title: Supercomputing for Digitized 3D Models of Cultural Heritage
Project Description: The development of new algorithms and software to process large-scale,
data-intensive 3D models of cultural heritage materials on supercomputers.

W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research Outright: $320,400 [Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions]
Project Director: Seymour Gitin
Project Title: Post-Doctoral Fellowships in Middle Eastern Archaeology Project Description: The equivalent of two twelve-month fellowships a year for three years.

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