Tuesday, October 29, 2019

Release Notes: Alpheios Reading Tools Desktop Browser Extensions (Chrome, Firefox and Safari)

Release Notes: Alpheios Reading Tools Desktop Browser Extensions (Chrome, Firefox and Safari)
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Version 3.0.1.82/83

This is the first release of Alpheios 3.0 that includes support for Safari. All 3.0 features are now available in the Safari Browser Extension as well as Chrome and Firefox. (See below for full details of the Alpheios 3.0 new features and enhancements.)
This is an incremental release for Chrome and Firefox and includes the following bug fixes:
  • Improved handling of user session timeouts.
  • Eliminated sticky word selection after deactivation and reactivation of the extension.
  • Eliminated lexicon loading message when no lexicons were selected.
  • Fixed inconsistent language selection behavior when changing languages using the toolbar lookup.
  • Fixed locative ending errors in the Latin Noun Inflection Table.
  • Back-To-TOC button in the Smyth Grammar is now functional.

Version 3.0

This is a major release. The user interface has been completely refreshed with a new design for compliance with web accessiblity standards.

New Features

  • Alpheios Toolbar: the new floating toolbar provides quick access to word lookup and all Alpheios resources.
  • Usage Examples (Latin only): search for usage examples of a word in the canonical Latin corpus from the Packard Humanities Institute.
  • User Word Lists: all words you look up get added to your wordlist. Create and login to an Alpheios user account to save your wordlist.
  • Persistent Options Configuration: Create and login to an Alpheios user account to save your application preferences.

Enhancements

  • After dragging the popup to a new location on the page, the location is retained between lookups (and sessions/workstations if you login to a user account)
  • User configuration options can be reset to default values.
  • A custom alpheios-word-node data attribute can be used on a page to identify words which contain HTML markup (such as in texts which use the Leiden markup conventions). See the FAQ for more information on how to take advantage of this feature.
  • We have reduced output to the browser console, except when log level is set to verbose.

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World-Historical Gazetteer: Beta Release v. 0.2

World-Historical Gazetteer: Beta Release v. 0.2
At long last we are ready to offer a v0.2 beta release of the World Historical Gazetteer (WHG) at http://dev.whgazetteer.org. We hope that spatial historians and spatio-temporal infrastructure developers will be interested in taking a look at what we are building, experimenting with their data or provided samples. It is a “sandbox,” so nothing will be saved for the time being (that will change soon). There are 5-6 months remaining in the term of our initial NEH grant, time enough to complete most of what we planned for this phase, and to incorporate more suggestions from users and potential contributors as we move toward future planning and development.
The site includes a brief guide titled “WHG Beta Release: A Tour,” which outlines what is there, what you can do and how, remaining challenges, and what is in the works. What follows is a higher level introduction.
Places and Traces
The World Historical Gazetteer is a Linked Open Data platform for publishing, linking, discovering, and visualizing contributed records of attested historical places and traces. Our initial focus has been on places, but we are working experimentally to demonstrate their integration within the platform with what we now call traces–defined as web resources about historical entities for which location in time and space is of scholarly and general interest. We are considering three classes of traces for the time being: agents (people and groups), works (e.g. artifacts, texts, datasets), and events (e.g. journeys, conflict). Our objective has been to create the first large-scale spatial infrastructure for world history: oriented toward documenting the human past at the global scale, and particularly the geography of global and transregional connections.
Our accessioning process is intended to eventually be largely self-directed; getting it to that stage means working directly and hands-on with our early contributors.
LOD Publication
Registered users of WHG can publish their place records as Linked Open Data simply by uploading them in Linked Places format (or the LP-TSV version intended for relatively simpler records). We see LOD publication as a key feature for researchers who are not in a position to stand up their own web interfaces with per-place pages. Once uploaded, each record will have a permanent URI and be accessible in our graphical interface and API; on their way to being LOD in good standing. The dataset can be browsed immediately by its owner in a searchable table and map, but turning the uploaded dataset into a contribution for accessioning requires some further steps. The data needs to have as many asserted links to name authorities as possible, and augmentations of geometry where that is missing and findable. We provide reconciliation services for that purpose.
Reconciliation
Simply put, reconciliation is the process of identifying matches between records of named entities. In this case the records are for places, and the matches are between a researcher’s records and those in existing place name authorities. So far, we provide reconciliation services for the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN) and Wikidata; DBpedia and GeoNames are planned.
The reconciliation process has two steps: 1) sending records to the authority, and 2) reviewing the prospective matches returned and accepting or declining them as appropriate. The results of this somewhat laborious process are 1) links, and 2) more geometry. Once augmented in this way, a dataset is ready for accessioning.
Accessioning
The last step is another reconciliation effort — this time to the WHG index. Each record is compared to the growing WHG index to determine if we have a contributed attestation for the place yet or not. If we do, the incoming record becomes a “child” or “leaf” in the set of attestations for the place. If the place is not yet accounted for, the new record becomes a “parent” — the seed for a new set of attestations. At this stage, an automatic linking can be made if two records share an authority match, but the rest will have to be reviewed as described above.
Graphical Interface
The opening screen of WHG offers users search of places and traces. We try to offer enough context on the opening screen to identify the likeliest match. Once you identify a place of interest, clicking its name take you to a “place portal” screen–where everything we have about the place, or linked to it in some way, will appear: attestations from contributors, associated traces, nearby places, physical geographic context (rivers, watersheds, ecoregions). The place portal is very much a work-in-progress at this stage. Several other features are also on our near-term to do list, including advanced search; more and better maps; user data collections; project team ‘workspace’; batching of reconciliation tasks; and more.
A Word About Architecture
There are two data stores within the WHG platform: a relational database (PostgreSQL) and a high-speed index (Elasticsearch). All uploaded data gets imported to a set of relational tables whose names correspond to the elements of Linked Places format: places, place_name, place_type, place_geom, place_link, place_when, place_related, place_description, and place_depiction. Contributed data is most readily managed in that form. Upon accessioning, records are added to the index in the manner described under Reconciliation above.
An API
This part of the WHG platform is one of the most important, and the least developed right now. Stay tuned for further developments. Our intention is to provide access to both contributors’ individual records and datasets from the database (when designated by their owner as public), and to the aggregating index records; both with numerous and useful filtering capabilities.
Content
Our index has been instantiated with records from modern gazetteer resources: 1) about 1,000 of the world’s most populous cites from GeoNames, 2) ~1.8 million place records from Getty TGN, 3) about 1,500 societies from the D-Place anthropological repository; and 4) major rivers, lakes, and mountain ranges from Natural Earth and Wildlife Research Institute.
To this modern “core” we have begun adding historical data: 1) 10,600 entities harvested from the index of the Atlas of World History (Dorling Kindersley, 1995), offering broad but shallow global coverage; and 2) our first specialist gazetteer, HGIS de las Indias, which consists of approximately 15,000 settlements and territories in colonial Latin America. There are several additional large datasets in the queue, which we will be adding in partnership with contributors. Some are previewed as heat maps on our Maps page.
Broad coverage of modern names with increasing historical depth and connections supplied by trace data.
Our Pelagios Connections
The WHG platform borrows extensively from the Peripleo application developed by Rainer Simon of the Pelagios project, extending it significantly in a few ways. Our backend architecture closely mimics that underlying both Peripleo and the Recogito annotation tool, and we are actively collaborating with Rainer and the entire Pelagios Network team on several aspects of this work. In particular, we are co-developing the data format standards for contributions to both systems: Linked Places format, and a nascent Linked Traces annotation format.
Feedback
We welcome suggestions, critiques, even praise :^) – and there is an email form on the site which makes it easy to offer it. Please bear with us in this active development stage and check back as we realize the system’s potential more fully over the next several months. Look for further blog posts and follow us on Twitter; we tweet progress and related information as @WHGazetteer and @kgeographer.
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Monday, October 28, 2019

Open Access Journal: Journal of Open Archaeology Data (JOAD)

[First posted in AWOL 20 April 2012. Updated 28 October 2019]

Journal of Open Archaeology Data (JOAD)
ISSN: 2049-1565
https://openarchaeologydata.metajnl.com/static/images/header.png
The Journal of Open Archaeology Data (JOAD) features peer reviewed data papers describing archaeology datasets with high reuse potential. We are working with a number of specialist and institutional data repositories to ensure that the associated data are professionally archived, preserved, and openly available. Equally importantly, the data and the papers are citable, and reuse will be tracked. While still in beta phase, the journal is now accepting papers. We will also be adding new functionality over the next few weeks, and refining the look and feel.

Issue Archive

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Aramaic Texts from Egypt (also including Phoenician and Hebrew)

[First posted in AWOL 28 October 2015, updated 28 October 2019]

Aramaic Texts from Egypt (also including Phoenician and Hebrew)
(currently 1306 records).

An online metadata database project by A. Schütze
(Institut für Ägyptologie, Universität München)
 
in cooperation with the project Multilingualism and multiculturalism in Graeco-Roman Egypt (M. Depauw)
Data processing: A. Schütze
General coordination: M. Depauw
Database structure (Filemaker 7): B. Van Beek, S. Gülden
Online version (PHP & MySQL): J. Clarysse, B. Van Beek
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Online Exhibition : Mythes et images au Cabinet des Médailles

Mythes et images au Cabinet des Médailles
Mythes et images au Cabinet des Médailles propose la découverte d'une sélection d'œuvres conservées dans les collections d’antiques d’époque classique, un des fonds les plus abondants et riches du département des Monnaies, médailles et antiques de la BnF ou "Cabinet des médailles". Cette exposition virtuelle met en scène ces œuvres grecques, étrusques et romaines dans l'historique du musée et des parcours thématiques, et offre grâce à la 3D une visite du Cabinet des médailles du roi ou « salon Louis XV » et la visualisation complète de plusieurs objets antiques. D’autres parcours thématiques seront proposés ultérieurement.
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SESPOA: Sceaux et empreinst de sceax du Proch-Orient ancien

SESPOA: Sceaux et empreinst de sceax du Proch-Orient ancien
(Page en construction)
 Petits objets caractéristiques des civilisations de l’ancien Proche-Orient, les sceaux-cylindres étaient déroulés sur l’argile fraîche afin d’y laisser une empreinte. Moyens d’identification et de communication, ils ont notamment servi, pendant plus de 3000 ans, à sceller portes, jarres, bulles et tablettes d’argile inscrites, leur histoire étant étroitement liée à celle de l’écriture cunéiforme. Les techniques les plus récentes d’imagerie numérique permettent aujourd’hui de renouveler les modes de présentation et d’étude de ces objets souvent gravés de riches illustrations.
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Open Access Journal: Koiné archeologica, sapiente antichità

 [First posted in AWOL 25 August 2011. Updated 28 October 2019]

KASA – Koiné archeologica, sapiente antichità
K.A.S.A. è l’acronimo di Koiné archeologica, sapiente antichità. E’ uno dei progetti finanziati dal III Programma interregionale  IIIA Italia-Malta, anno 2004-2006, promulgato dalla Regione Sicilia con contributi della Comunità Europea. Esso prevede la partecipazione di tre partners, la Facoltà di Lettere, L’Università di Malta e la Officina di Studi Medievali di Palermo, per la realizzazione di itinerari turistici integrati che leghino in percorsi unitari le province di Siracusa e Ragusa e l’arcipelago maltese.

Il progetto ha come obiettivo l’utilizzo delle potenzialità insite nel patrimonio culturale di tipo archeologico-monumentale di queste aree per pervenire ad un triplice obiettivo: approfondire la conoscenza del patrimonio comune contribuendo a rinsaldare l’identità delle comunità locali; riqualificare in senso culturale i flussi turistici già esistenti tra l’area iblea e Malta, incrementando quello proveniente da altre aree italiane ed europee, inserire siti minori finora poco conosciuti all’interno dei circuiti.

Il denominatore comune alle proposte che verranno fatte sarà quello di tipologie monumentali e fenomeni culturali analoghi tra le due isole; verranno inclusi cioè siti e monumenti che mostrino contatti diretti ovvero convergenze tipologiche.
L’area coinvolta dal progetto è caratterizzata da una domanda notevole di conoscenza delle proprie radici e da un forte senso di identità, dimostrato anche dalla presenza di ben due corsi di laurea destinati ai Beni Culturali a Siracusa.

See AWOL's full List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies

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