Dittenberger-Vahlen Collection of Classical Texts Online

 [First posted in AWOL 26 November 2012, updated 2 December 2017]

Dittenberger-Vahlen Collection of Classical Texts
Illinois Harvest / Large-scale Digitization Initiative, University of Illinois

In 2000, the Classics Library at UIUC received a $85,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to microfilm its Dittenberger-Vahlen Collection of rare, priceless and perishable 19th century European dissertations and other short scholarly works on Latin and Greek literature, history and civilization. The grant was part of a $885,000 NEH grant to the Committee on Institutional Cooperation's (CIC) Center for Library Initiatives. The UIUC Library acquired the private collections of Wilhelm Dittenberger (1840-1906) and Johannes Vahlen (1830-1911) in 1907 and 1913, respectively. Dittenberger's collection consists of 5,600 books and 2,000 pamphlets; Vahlen's consists of 10,000 books and 15,000 pamphlets. Hundreds of the titles in this collection have now been digitized. The collection is a subset of the University of Illinois Digitized Books Collection.

Until recently this large collection of Universitätsschriften and other short scholarly works on Latin and Greek literature has been accessible only on not widely distributed microfilm. 2,886 items are now accessible in multiple formats with first rate bibliographic metadata.

Dittenberger-Vahlen Collection in Worldcat

The Classics Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is continuing to digitize books from it's collection, many but not all of which are also from its Dittenberger-Vahlen Collection. These digital scans were created by the library's Digital Content Creation department.  They will eventually appear in the Dittenberger-Vahlen Collection of Classical Texts, but in the meantime they are accessible at the Internet Archive.  To promote this project, they have created a Tumblr account that features the latest items to have been digitized and added to the Internet Archive:

U of Illinois Classics Library 
 

With thanks to Mark Wardecker, Acting Classics Librarian, University of Illinois at Urbana, and to Bruce Swann, former Classics Librarian, University of Illinois at Urbana, for making this collection available.

And see also Illinois Classical Studies

Coming Soon: Classics Library Collection: CICERO

Classics Library Collection: CICERO

CICERO (Curated Illinois Classics E-Resources Online) is a digital library featuring items from the Classics Library Collection. Ultimately, all volumes in the collection that were published before 1923 will be digitized and made available through CICERO. The expected launch date for this resource is January 2018.

Please direct all comments or requests for information to the Classics Librarian, David Morris (217-300-5060) • dmorri9@illinois.edu

Best Commentaries: Reviews and ratings of Biblical, theological, and practical Christian works

Best Commentaries: Reviews and ratings of Biblical, theological, and practical Christian works

As Qoheleth put it so long ago:

The writing of many books is endless, and excessive devotion to books is wearying to the body. (Ecc. 12:12)

And this has led to most common question I heard in seminary:

What's the best commentary on Mark (or Genesis or 1 John...)?

Some professors give student their own lists and some have even published their list (notably D. A. Carson, Tremper Longman, III, John Glynn, and Jim Rosscup), but these are not available in one place.
BestCommentaries.com has collected these scholarly reviews and averaged them along with reviews from other ministries like John Piper's Desiring God Ministries, R. C. Sproul's Ligonier Ministries, and the Denver Seminary Journal as well as users of the site. The individual reviews are still extremely valuable, but together they can help ible students at all levels to make good, informed decisions about which commentaries they should purchase.
Of course, scores and ratings alone cannot determine the best choices for an individual pastor or student, but we hope the combined resources available through this site points them in the right direction.

Scoring Method

A numerical rating can never fully capture the value of a work. It is only included here as a guide to help students of the Scriptures know where to start.
The scoring algorithm is currently under development. Here are some of the criteria:

• Average rating - ratings from users and journals are the starting point.
• Total number of reviews - the more reviews a book receives and the more reviews submitted by a reviewer, the weight of those reviews will increase.
• Internal modifier - for some reviewers, a behind-the-scenes modifier may be added that will give their reviews more or less weight. The reason for this is to be able to give more weight to credible academic sources that may not have many reviews.
• Libraries - libraries are curated lists of books and being included in a library increases a book's overall rating

Right now the algorithm looks something like this:

score = (weighted average) + (# of times in a library / 10) + (# of overall reviews / 10).

The highest rated commentary in the entire database is currently Carson, Donald A. The Gospel According to John. PNTC. Eerdmans, 1990. with a computed score of 14.91. This score is converted to a 100 and then all other commentaries are averaged down from this work on a scale of 60-100.

• Best
• OT Books
• NT Books
• Theology
• Life
• Series
• Authors
• Libraries
• Reviewers

E(i)ditorial — Philomela’s Tapestry

E(i)ditorial — Philomela’s Tapestry

The library of ideas, thoughts, and arguments written about the ancient Mediterranean is so large that any individual can fathom only a tiny fraction of it. But in its shadow is a second library — at once infinite and infinitesimal— of essays, articles, and books that will never be written because the people who would have written them were pushed out of the field by harassment and abuse...

Please read all of this:

We’re starting a new project here at Eidolon that we’re calling ‘Philomela’s Tapestry’ to assess and fight a problem in the Classics discipline in the treatment of junior faculty and graduate students by more senior scholars. The problem is sexual harassment, but also non-sexual abusive behavior that is often conspicuously gendered, and also sex that is non-harassing. (Consider: when a senior scholar and a graduate student in a department enter into a sexual relationship, even an entirely consensual one, that relationship will have ripple effects. It will affect the other graduate students and faculty. It will inevitably lead to inappropriate situations in the future — what if one of them is asked to referee the other’s work? — and those situations will be whispered about, but nobody will ever speak openly about how they ought to be handled.)

The problem is that we pretend that our colleagues will always be supportive advocates (or, failing that, benevolently negligent presences) to their students, and we treat instances of inappropriate behavior as anomalies that should be whispered about and smoothed over.

The problem is our field’s culture. If you are part of the field, you are almost certainly part of that culture. You have been an enabler, or a whisperer. You have looked the other way, or you have seen but done nothing. You have received the professional support of someone you knew had behaved inappropriately toward others and put your discomfort with that support aside. And you probably had an excellent reason to do so, because the culture would have punished you for doing otherwise. You would have been labeled a troublemaker, a buzzkill. People would have avoided working with you. Life in your own department would have become strained.

The only way to fight that culture is to collectively agree that we will listen, and honestly confront our own behavior, and try to do better.

The Eidolon team has been inspired, in part, by the #MeToo movement, and the powerful outpouring of survivor stories occasioned by the downfall of several powerful, high-profile men. But our goal is not to point fingers or bring down any individuals, because doing so will never really get to the heart of such a pervasive problem. (Those interested in pursuing more investigative avenues may want to contact the Chronicle of Higher Education, which is increasing its sexual harassment reporting.) What we want, instead, is to pick apart and better understand the systemic issues that have made all of us complicit.

In the coming weeks and months, we will be publishing a series of articles about these problems. Some of these will share stories of abuse; others will be analytical approaches to the problem, or suggestions for how to do better. Our main goal is to take the conversation out of the realm of whispers and coded language and into a forum where people share and their discuss their ideas and experiences.

As always, you can contact us with stories you’d like to share or article ideas you’d like to pitch at pitches@eidolon.pub. However, we understand that sharing stories about your experiences comes at a risk. So we’re introducing a new email address. If you contact us at confidential@eidolon.pub, only one member of our team — myself or Sarah Scullin — will read your message. We won’t disclose its contents to anybody. If you want to hide your identity, you can even email that account from an aliased or anonymous email address — although we will eventually have to verify who you are if you’re willing to have your story become part of an article.

That lost library can never be recovered, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t do more to protect young scholars from abuse and help them realize their potential. We can start an honest and open conversation about the sexual politics of our discipline. We can work to understand the insidiousness and ubiquity of the culture that silences victims. And, hopefully, we can move forward.

Cuneiform Commentaries Project News

Cuneiform Commentaries Project News

We would like to notify you of nine new texts that have recently been added to the online editions of the Cuneiform Commentaries Project (http://ccp.yale.edu), a list of which is provided below.

 

Thanks are expressed to Uri Gabbay and Klaus Wagensonner for their notes on several texts.

 

We would be delighted to publish any editions of commentary tablets you may have made on the CCP website, for which you will, of course, receive full credit.

 

All the best,

 

Mary Frazer

Senior Editor of the Cuneiform Commentaries Project

 

⁂

 

CCP 3.1.21 (Enūma Anu Enlil 21): A fragment from the lower edge of a tablet written in Neo-Assyrian script. The preserved lines explain Enūma Anu Enlil § II, 3-5 by means of phonetic glosses and synonyms. On the obverse, line 9’ is written in smaller script, giving the impression that it was a later addition, squeezed between o 8′ and 10′ in order to explain 8′. (Read more)

 

CCP 3.1.55.G (Enūma Anu Enlil 55 G): Although cited in secondary literature already in 1925,1 this is the first published text edition of this commentary. The tablet, which is from Hellenistic Uruk, contains, in varying states of preservation, the first thirty-eight lines of a commentary on one of the higher-numbered chapters of Enūma Anu Enlil. The number by which the chapter was known at Uruk is uncertain,2 but at Assur it was Chapter 48 (according to the Assur catalogue of EAE) and at Nineveh it was Chapter 55 (?). (Read more)

 

CCP 4.2.J (Therapeutic (ears) J): The present tablet contains remains of a commentary on a therapeutic text concerned with ear treatments. A few of the lines from the base text can be identified in certain medical texts (see ll. 8′–9′ below) but, as is often the case in commentaries on therapeutic texts, the specific text commented upon is unknown. (Read more)

 

CCP 6.1.9 (Aa II/1 (pirsu 9)): This small and badly broken fragment contains meager remains of a commentary on the beginning of the second tablet of the lexical series Ea. The two preserved entries deal with the possible readings of the sign DÙ; some of the equations are well attested elsewhere (see e.g. the commentary on obv 7′). (Read more)

 

CCP 6.1.13.C (Aa II/5 (pirsu 13) C): The present commentary is constituted by two joining fragments: BM 48261 (81-11-3,971) and BM 48380 (81-11-3,1090).1 It preserves remains of a previously unidentified commentary on Aa II/1 (?) and II/5. (Read more)

 

CCP 7.2.u9 (Uncertain): This small fragment from Nippur was provisionally identified as an Izbu or Ālu commentary by M. Civil, but as a medical commentary by E. Reiner.1 Not enough is preserved to support either identification. It is unclear whether or not the second column offers explanations to the first column. (Read more)

 

CCP 7.2.u132 (Medical (?)): The most interesting feature of this small fragment is that it quotes a full line from Udugḫul (XIII-XV 214′) in its bilingual form (l. 6′). Due to the broken context it is unclear why this particular line is cited, but it seems reasonable to assume that its goal was to provide a context for a very rare word that occurs in that line, KU.KU (Sumerian) = subandu (Akkadian). (Read more)

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History pairs essays and works of art with chronologies, telling the story of art and global culture through the Museum’s collection.

The Timeline presents a thematic, chronological, and geographical exploration of global art history through The Met collection. It is a reference, research, and teaching tool conceived for students and scholars of art history. It is authored by The Met’s experts, and currently comprises more than 1,000 essays, close to 7,600 works of art, 300 chronologies, and 3,700 keywords. It is regularly updated and enriched to provide new scholarship and insights on the collection.

The Timeline is structured with four components. Essays focus on specific themes in art history, including artistic movements and periods, archaeological sites, empires and civilizations, recurrent themes and concepts, media, and artists. Works of Art celebrate human creativity from around the world and from all eras, and are contextualized chronologically, geographically, and thematically. Chronologies provide a linear outline of art history by geographical region. Each chronology includes up to ten representative works of art, a timeline, an overview, and key events. Keywords—categorized by art movement and style, artists and makers, geography (present-day nation states and historical regions), time period, material and technique, object, and subject matter—further connect chronologies, essays, and works of art.

• Essays
• Works of Art
• Chronology

A Standard for the Scholarly Citation of Archaeological Data as an Incentive to Data Sharing

A Standard for the Scholarly Citation of Archaeological Data as an Incentive to Data Sharing

• Ben Marwick
• Suzanne Birch

Submitted on: September 16, 2017 | Last edited: November 30, 2017

How do archaeologists share their research data, if at all? We review what data are, according to current influential definitions, and previous work on the benefits, costs and norms of data sharing in the sciences broadly. To understand data sharing in archaeology, we present the results of three pilot studies: requests for data by email; review of data availability in published articles, and analysis of archaeological datasets deposited in repositories. We find that archaeologists are often willing to share, but discipline-wide sharing is patchy and ad hoc. Legislation and mandates are effective at increasing data-sharing, but editorial policies at journals lack adequate enforcement. Although most of data available at repositories are licensed to enable flexible reuse, only a small proportion of the data are stored in structured formats for easy reuse. We present some suggestions for improving the state of date sharing in archaeology, among these is a standard for citing data sets to ensure that researchers making their data publicly available receive appropriate credit.

Paper DOI

10.17605/OSF.IO/PY4HZ

License

CC-By Attribution 4.0 International