Tuesday, March 10, 2015

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Project Mosul is a volunteer action by the fellows of the Initial Trianing Network for Digital Cultural Heritage (www.itn-dch.eu), a Marie Curie Actions training project that is part of the Seventh Framework Programme.

The fellows of the ITN-DCH are asking Project Mosul:

Call For Action

 We are looking for volunteers to help virtually restore the Mosul Museum. This includes finding photos, processing data, contributing to the website and generally helping out with organising the effort to identify the museum artefacts. If you can help, drop us a line here, or e-mail us directly at projectmosul@itn-dch.net. For an example of how crowd-sourced images can help restore artefacts, check out this example here Thanks!

How can I help?

Upload Pictures We need pictures of the artefacts found in the Mosul Museum. These pictures allow us to digitally reconstruct the original artefacts, and can eventually aid in the restoration those artefacts. The more pictures the better, and as many angles and perspectives, even better still! If you have pictures to contribute, search for the artefact in the list of artefacts and simply edit that artefact, adding your photos to the collection.

Develop the Web Platform Know how to code in Ruby on Rails, Angular, or Go? Why not contribute to the web framework and help combat the destruction of ISIS with your coding skills. Visit the GitHub project page (https://github.com/neshmi/projectmosul) and check out the issues. Fork the repository, make a change and issue a pull request.

Mask Some Images Our results will be improved if we can mask the artefacts in the images. Help us by masking some of the images in Photoshop (we are working on developing a web platform for the masking), save the mask in an alpha channel. This takes time, so the more hands we have the easier this task wll be!

Get the word out Know someone who has visited Mosul? Let them know about the project. We need as many pictures from inside and outside the building, the more people we can reach the greater the possibilities are of virtual restoration.

Process an artefact! Do you know how to use automated photogrammetry to create three-dimensional models? Help us by downloading some of the photosets and processing the images.

Project Mosul: A Manifesto The video circulated around the 26th of February, 2015 shows the horrific destruction of the Mosul Museum by ISIS Fighters. This is not the first time this museum has suffered during times of conflict, but the destruction is nearly absolute, and this time we can respond through the application of digital technologies to cultural heritage.

We assume that much of the museum’s contents were looted, and anything small enough to be easily removed will be appearing soon on the antiquities market. Anything too large to remove for sale, appears to have met a violent end at the hand of ISIS extremists. In both cases, it is possible to virtually recreate the lost items through the application of photogrammetry and crowdsourcing. Given enough photographs, digital or scans of analogues, it is possible to reconstruct the artefacts and create digital surrogates of those artefacts. This provides two immediate benefits: helping to identify looted items and recreating destroyed items.

We propose to coordinate a volunteer effort of experts and amateurs in the crowdsourcing of the necessary digital imagery and the creation of digital surrogates for the artefacts in the museum. We would like to work with the local management of the Mosul Museum as much as possible, as well as with experts familiar with the collection and material. All data generated from this project will be freely available to the public. This project is a direct response to the senseless destruction of cultural heritage by extremists, not only ISIS, but to any group who uses heritage as leverage or political power. Instead, we want to bring heritage back to life through digital tools, giving the public access to any destroyed heritage, starting with the Mosul Museum.

We ask for your support in this endeavour, a project we are voluntarily doing and hope that it will make heritage accessible to all the public.

Sincerely the undersigned:

 Marinos Ioannides, project coordinator Matthew L. Vincent, Early Stage Researcher Chance M. Coughenour, Early Stage Researcher Created by Matthew Vincent for the Initial Training Network for Digital Cultural Heritage This website and project are volunteer effort by the fellows of the ITN-DCH project.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the European Commission, the European Union, the FP7 PEOPLE Programme, the Marie Cure Actions, the partners and the entire consortium of the project or any other financial backers of the ITN-DCH. We are grateful for their support, and the funding that makes it possible for us to undertake these sorts of volunteer actions to protect and preserve our heritage, within and outside of Europe. 

Friday, March 6, 2015

(Via Lt-Antiq list)
 
Dear Colleagues,

Friday, March 6, beginning at 10 AM Eastern US time please join us for the online streaming of Hugoye Symposium IV: Syriac and the Digital Humanities.

Project presentations include tools for digital philology, manuscript studies, Linked Open Data, hagiography, OCR for middle eastern languages, and prosopography.

Full schedule and details of the stream are at
http://www.bethmardutho.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=627| |

 
David A. Michelson

Assistant Professor of the History of Christianity
Vanderbilt University 

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Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Attitudes to Digital Data Sharing within Archaeology
This survey is for users of digital archaeological data services. It is an attempt to gain a snapshot of the archaeological community’s current attitude towards certain digital data sharing practices and tools. How familiar are archaeologists with the practicalities and advantages of Open Access and Open Data practice? Is Linked Data a methodology that the community might consider using at some stage in the future? Or perhaps it is already very much in use today? Is there such a thing as the Semantic Web for archaeologists and if not, why not?
This survey has been compiled by Frank Lynam as part of his doctoral research as a member of the Digital Arts and Humanities PhD programme at Trinity College Dublin.

|http://linkedarc.net/surveys/arch-datasharing | Join the Yahoo! Contributor Network