Thursday, October 21, 2010

Request for Comment: Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day: Building a Cyberinfrastructure for Digital Classicists

Infrastructure for Humanities Scholarship
CLIR and Tufts University are engaging scholars and academic librarians in examining the services and digital objects classicists have developed, the future needs of the discipline, and the roles of libraries and other curatorial institutions in fostering the infrastructure on which the core intellectual activities of classics and many other disciplines depend. We envision a set of shared services layered over a distributed storage architecture that is seamless to end users, allows multiple contributors, and leverages institutional resources and facilities. Much of this architecture exists at individual projects and institutions; the challenge is to identify the suite of shared services to be developed.

Prior research supported by public and private agencies has created digital resources in classics, which are arguably the most developed and interconnected set of collections and associated services in any discipline outside of the sciences. Questions now posed test the limits of project-based services. The findings of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, the Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), and two symposia hosted by CLIR (the second with co-sponsorship by NEH) demonstrate that managing digital information requires libraries to play an active role in the research process to ensure appropriate curation and preservation of digital resources. This project will help library professionals understand the challenges of supporting new kinds of publications (e.g., treebanks, or syntactic databases for texts) and services (e.g., named entity identification services optimized for domains such as classical studies) and engage them in designing solutions. The project will also be relevant to areas such as medieval studies, archaeology, and ancient and near eastern languages.

CLIR is seeking public comment on a literature review that identifies existing services, resources, and needs in the field of classics. The report, Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day: Building a Cyberinfrastructure for Digital Classicists, was produced by Alison Babeu of the Perseus Project at Tufts University. It is intended to inform planning for the next phase of work: description of an infrastructure to support digital classics and related fields of research. (The report is a 1.8 MB .pdf file, please allow time for it to download).

Comments on the draft report should be submitted to Kathlin Smith (ksmithatclirdotorg) by December 1, 2010. We especially encourage the identification of topics or projects that are missing in the report, or that might be represented more fully. 
Table of Contents

Introduction............................................................................................................................................................ 5

Classics and Computers: A Long History.............................................................................................................. 5

Multidisciplinary Classical Digital Libraries: Advanced Technologies and Services .......................................... 10

Bibliographies/Catalogs/Directories............................................................................................................. 11

Document Analysis, Recognition and OCR for Historical Languages ........................................................ 14

Ancient Greek ......................................................................................................................................... 14

Latin ........................................................................................................................................................ 17

Sanskrit.................................................................................................................................................... 20

Syriac ...................................................................................................................................................... 23

Cuneiform Texts and Sumerian ............................................................................................................... 23

Computational Linguistics (Treebanks, Automatic Morphological Analysis, Lexicons) ............................ 27

Treebanks ................................................................................................................................................ 28

Morphological Analysis.......................................................................................................................... 29

Lexicons.................................................................................................................................................. 31

Canonical Text Services, Citation Detection, Citation Linking ................................................................... 33

Text Mining, Quotation Detection and Authorship Attribution................................................................... 37

The Disciplines and Technologies of Digital Classics.......................................................................................... 38

Ancient History................................................................................................................................................ 38

Classical Archaeology ..................................................................................................................................... 40

Overview ..................................................................................................................................................... 40

Electronic Publishing and Traditional Publishing........................................................................................ 40

Data Creation, Data Sharing, Data Preservation .......................................................................................... 42

Digital Repositories, Data Integration & Cyberinfrastructure for Archaeology .......................................... 44

Designing Digital Infrastructures for the Research Methods of Archaeology ............................................. 47

Visualization & 3D Reconstructions of Archaeological Sites...................................................................... 51

Classical Art & Architecture............................................................................................................................ 55

Classical Geography ........................................................................................................................................ 56

The Ancient World Mapping Center............................................................................................................ 57

The Pleiades Project .................................................................................................................................... 57

The HESTIA Project ................................................................................................................................... 59

Digital Editions & Text Editing........................................................................................................................ 61

Introduction ................................................................................................................................................. 61

Theoretical Issues of Modeling and Markup for Digital Editions................................................................ 62

New Models of Collaboration, Tools & Frameworks for Digital Editions .................................................. 67

The Challenges of Text Alignment & Text Variants ................................................................................... 70

Epigraphy......................................................................................................................................................... 73

Overview: Epigraphy Databases, Digital Epigraphy and EpiDoc............................................................... 73

Online Epigraphy Databases ........................................................................................................................ 77

EpiDoc-Based Digital Epigraphy Projects ................................................................................................... 81

The Challenges of Linking Digital Epigraphy and Digital Classics Projects............................................... 85

Advanced Imaging Technologies for Epigraphy.......................................................................................... 88

Manuscript Studies .......................................................................................................................................... 89

Digital Libraries of Manuscripts .................................................................................................................. 90

Digital Challenges of Individual Manuscripts and Manuscript Collections................................................. 94

Digital Manuscripts, Infrastructure and Automatic Linking Technologies.................................................. 98

Numismatics .................................................................................................................................................. 101

Numismatics Databases............................................................................................................................. 101

Numismatic Data Integration and Digital Publication................................................................................ 104

Palaeography.................................................................................................................................................. 107

Papyrology..................................................................................................................................................... 109

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Digital Papyri Projects............................................................................................................................... 109

Integrating Digital Collections of Papyri and Digital Infrastructure .......................................................... 113

EpiDoc, Digital Papyrology and Reusing Digital Resources ..................................................................... 116

Collaborative Workspaces, Image Analysis and Reading Support Systems.............................................. 117

Philology........................................................................................................................................................ 122

Tools for Electronic Philology: BAMBI and Aristarchus .......................................................................... 123

Infrastructure for Digital Philology: the Teuchos project.......................................................................... 124

Prosopography ............................................................................................................................................... 127

Issues in the Creation of Prosopographical Databases ............................................................................... 128

Network Analysis & Digital Prosopography.............................................................................................. 129

Relational Databases and Modeling Prosopography.................................................................................. 131

Other Prosopographical Databases............................................................................................................. 134

The Use and Users of Resources in Digital Classics and the Digital Humanities .............................................. 136

Citation of Digital Classics Resources............................................................................................................ 137

The Research Habits of Digital Humanists..................................................................................................... 138

Humanist Use of Source Materials: Digital Library Design Implications..................................................... 141

Creators of Digital Humanities Resources: Factors for Successful Use........................................................ 144

“Traditional” Academic Use of Digital Humanities Resources...................................................................... 146

The CSHE Study ....................................................................................................................................... 146

The LAIRAH Project ................................................................................................................................ 147

The RePAH project ................................................................................................................................... 149

The TIDSR Study...................................................................................................................................... 151

Overview of Digital Classics Cyberinfrastructure .............................................................................................. 152

Requirements of Cyberinfrastructure for Classics.......................................................................................... 152

Open Access Repositories of Secondary Scholarship ................................................................................ 153

Open Access, Collaboration, Reuse and Digital Classics........................................................................... 153

Undergraduate Research, Teaching and E-Learning.................................................................................. 158

Looking Backward: State of Digital Classics in 2005............................................................................... 164

Looking Forward: Classics Cyberinfrastructure, Themes and Requirements in 2010............................... 165

Classics Cyberinfrastructure Projects ............................................................................................................. 169

APIS—Advanced Papyrological Information System ............................................................................... 169

CLAROS—Classical Art Research Center Online Services...................................................................... 169

Concordia .................................................................................................................................................. 169

Digital Antiquity........................................................................................................................................ 170

Digital Classicist........................................................................................................................................ 170

eAQUA...................................................................................................................................................... 170

eSAD—e-Science and Ancient Documents ............................................................................................... 170

Integrating Digital Papyrology & Papyri.info ............................................................................................ 171

Interedition: an “Interoperable Supranational Infrastructure for Digital Editions”................................... 171

LaQuAT—Linking and Querying of Ancient Texts .................................................................................. 172

Building A Humanities Cyberinfrastructure ....................................................................................................... 172

Defining Digital Humanities, Cyberinfrastructure and the Future ............................................................. 172

Open Content, Services and Tools as Infrastructure .................................................................................. 173

New Evaluation and Incentive Models for Digital Scholarship & Publishing........................................... 178

Challenges of Humanities Data & Digital Infrastructure ........................................................................... 180

“General” Humanities Infrastructures, Domain-Specific Needs, and the Research Needs of Humanists . 181

VREs in the Humanities: A Way of Addressing Domain Specific Needs?............................................... 185

New Models of Scholarly Collaboration.................................................................................................... 188

Sustainable Preservation and Curation Infrastructures for Digital Humanities.......................................... 189

Levels of Interoperability and Infrastructure.............................................................................................. 195

The Future of Digital Humanities and Digital Scholarship........................................................................ 200

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Overview of Large Cyberinfrastructure Projects............................................................................................ 201

Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) ............................................................................ 201

arts-humanities.net..................................................................................................................................... 202

centerNET ................................................................................................................................................. 202

CLARIN .................................................................................................................................................... 203

DARIAH Project ....................................................................................................................................... 204

Digital Humanities Observatory................................................................................................................. 206

DRIVER.................................................................................................................................................... 207

NoC-Network of Expert Centres ................................................................................................................ 207

Project Bamboo ......................................................................................................................................... 207

SEASR....................................................................................................................................................... 208

TextGrid .................................................................................................................................................... 209

TextVRE.................................................................................................................................................... 211

References.......................................................................................................................................................... 211

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