Saturday, August 22, 2015

Open Access Journal: Rocznik Orientalistyczny

Rocznik Orientalistyczny 
ISSN: 0080-3545
Rocznik Orientalistyczny (Lwów-Kraków-Warszawa od 1915) to najstarsze polskie i jedno z najstarszych w Europie czasopismo orientalistyczne założone we Lwowie przez grupę uczonych lwowskich, krakowskich i warszawskich. W latach 1923-1952 był organem Polskiego Towarzystwa Orientalistycznego, później PAN (początkowo wydawany przez Zakład Orientalistyki, a po jego likwidacji przez Komitet Nauk Orientalistycznych). 

Obecnie funkcję redaktora naczelnego sprawuje arabista prof. M. Dziekan. Do 2012 r. ukazało się 65 tomów czasopisma, od wielu lat w formie dwóch zeszytów rocznie. Obecny nakład wynosi 200 egzemplarzy.

 Rocznik Orientalistyczny znajduje się w zasobach wszystkich najważniejszych bibliotek światowych w ośrodkach prowadzących badania na krajami Azji Afryki. Rocznik Orientalistyczny publikuje studia polskich i zagranicznych orientalistów z różnych dziedzin: literaturoznawstwa, językoznawstwa, historii, antropologii kulturowej itp. Publikacje ukazują się w językach obcych (angielski, niemiecki, francuski, rosyjski) ze streszczeniami w języku angielskim. Niektóre tomy Rocznika Orientalistycznego mają charakter monodyscyplinarny lub monotematyczny i poświęcone są np. wybitnym polskim orientalistom, przez co zawierają szczególnie wartościowe z punktu widzenia tej nauki materiały. 

Zespół redakcyjny Rocznika Orientalistycznego składa się z grupy wybitnych polskich i zagranicznych badaczy z rozmaitych dziedzin (arabistyka, japonistyka, sinologia, tybetologia, afrykanistyka, indologia). Czasopismo dysponuje obecnie strona internetową, której zawartość jest stale uzupełniana.
Posted by at 0 comments
Labels:

Friday, August 21, 2015

Architecture and Asceticism: Cultural Interaction between Syria and Georgia in Late Antiquity

Architecture and Asceticism
http://architectureandasceticism.exeter.ac.uk/themes/seasons_modified/images/banner.jpg
Architecture and Asceticism: Cultural Interaction between Syria and Georgia in Late Antiquity is a five-year research project funded by the European Research Council.

The aim of the project is to explore the Georgian belief that monasticism was brought to the country by the "Thirteen (As)Syrian Fathers" in the sixth century. As there is no textual evidence still extant from this early period, the project is evaluating the surviving material culture in both countries in order to identify any common movements in architecture and art, as well as to study the ecclesiastical history of both countries in order to pinpoint similarities in liturgy, pilgrimage or any other area of historical ritual practice. It is hoped that data from further afield will be contributed in the future, but the parameters of the current project (which will run until November 2017) encompass the modern countries of Georgia, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

The outbreak of the Syrian Civil War in 2011 has meant that no new field work can be undertaken for this project in that country, but this has been largely overcome by making use of a large archive of site images taken by the principal investigator in Syria from 1997 until 2010. Therefore this resource also incorporates material from earlier research, including data from two archaeological excavations. We are aware that the ongoing looting and destruction of Syrian archaeological sites places a moral duty on academics to make available their unpublished material to the wider research community in order to create a common resource for those seeking to safeguard Syrian Cultural Heritage. This web resource is intended as a contribution to this process.

Much of this information is being made available to the public for the first time. We have endeavoured to publish as many papers written by team members as possible, but where prevented by copyright restrictions from including articles and monographs we have added links to the websites where there are abstracts and purchase details of these items.

Please look at the Contact Us section if you have any comments or suggestions for the improvement of this resource. This site is still evolving and we hope that it will ultimately become a valuable repository for the Late Antique and Early Medieval material culture of the Levant, Asia Minor and Caucasus regions.

Posted by at 0 comments
Labels: , , ,

Thursday, August 20, 2015

Crowdsourcing Excavation Records from Ur

[First posted on AWOL 14 October 2012, updated 20 August 2015]

UrCrowdsource
http://urcrowdsource.org/omeka/files/theme_uploads/b892365629d6891b68cda0d209654e16.jpg
UrCrowdsource is asking for public assistance in transcribing thousands of documents related to the excavations of the ancient city of Ur in Mesopotamia. These excavations were conducted under the auspices of the Iraqi Department of Antiquities from 1922-1934 by the joint expedition of the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum.

By participating in this project, you will be helping to gather data that will eventually be featured on an open-source, public, and free website with all known data from the ancient site of Ur. Anyone will be able to search the data, enjoy, and learn from it. We are particularly interested in having educators and students of all ages involved. Anyone can use the data for educational purposes under Creative Commons share alike license. This means that any data you acquire here must be made available to others free of charge with attribution to the Ur Project as the source of the data. If a commercial concern wishes to use data or images on this site, it will need permission from the museums, who are the official copyright holders.

Naturally, creating a comprehensive site of this magnitude takes time and money. We have completed our first year wherein we have assessed the amount of material to be made digital, and we have secured a two-year continuation with lead funding from the Leon Levy Foundation. A test site featuring data from archives and artifacts should appear in 2014 with a more refined version in 2015. Meanwhile, documents will continue to appear here for transcription and inclusion until all have been converted.

A variety of documents can be found on this site. They include typewritten reports, accounts, and letters from the field or between the museums, as well as handwritten notes taken at the site as artifacts were coming out of the ground and the remains of architecture were being assessed for the first time in thousands of years.

Optical Character Recognition can be used on the typewritten documents but not the handwritten ones and around half of the documents we have are handwritten. Furthermore, the typewritten ones are often on wrinkled paper with faded typeface, and are often annotated by hand. People are much better transcribers of all of this material and gain the added benefit of observing history in a unique way.

The field notes are particularly difficult to read because of the handwriting, the scan quality, the original quality of the notes, and the graph background on most of the cards themselves. We will eventally rescan at higher resolution, but it will take time. The scans we have now are readable, however, and no matter how good the scan, transcribers must accustom themselves to Woolley's handwriting and his use of abbreviations. Help with this process appears in the pages under "Terminology" on this crowdsrouce site.

Thanks to everyone taking part and we hope this explains some of the issues. Any questions or concerns can be addressed to the project manager, Dr. William B. Hafford: whafford(at)sas.upenn.edu

UrCrowdsource is a part of the larger project entitled Ur of the Chaldees: A Virtual Vision of Woolley's Excavations, funded by the Leon Levy Foundation and conducted by the original excavating museums in Philadelphia and London.
      Posted by at 0 comments
      Labels: , ,

      Tuesday, August 18, 2015

      Theban tomb tracings made by Norman and Nina de Garis Davies

      Theban tomb tracings made by Norman and Nina de Garis Davies
      Concept and direction: Jaromir Malek
      Catalogue: Helen Murray, Elizabeth Fleming and Alison Hobby
      Editing: Hana Navrátilová, Elizabeth Fleming and Jaromir Malek
      Scanning: Jenni Navratil, assisted by Hana Navrátilová
      Photo-editing: Jenni Navratil
      Coordination: Elizabeth Fleming
      Detail of a scene in TT 65. Reconstruction by Hana Navrátilová Tombs

      Posted by at 0 comments
      Labels: , , ,

      Archiving the AWOL Index

      Archiving the AWOL Index
      Ryan Bauman
      The AWOL Index is a new experimental project to extract structured data from AWOL - The Ancient World Online, which has published links to material about the ancient world since 2009.

      As a practical experiment, I thought it might be interesting to check which URLs in the index are already in web archives, and try to archive those which are not. To do this, I downloaded the AWOL index JSON, unzipped it, and extracted unique linked URLs with:

      find . -name '*.json' -exec grep '"url":' {} \; | \
sed -e 's/^.*"url": "//' -e 's/".*$//' | \
sort -u > urls-clean-uniq.txt
       
      This gave me 52,020 unique URLs.

      Initially, I thought it would be best to check if the URLs were in any web archive, rather than just one. To do this, I used the mementoweb.org Time Travel API to hit the “Find” service to check URL availability in a wide range of archives. Unfortunately, this proved to be a relatively slow process.

      In order to speed things up, I decided to try checking and using just one web archive: the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Using some hand-picked URLs that showed as “missing” from the truncated mementoweb.org process, I checked the Wayback Machine Availability API to see what sort of results I got.

      Interestingly, this lead to the realization that certain URLs which show no availability in the JSON API do show availability in the CDX API. So, I decided to check URL availability using the relatively fast CDX API for the most accurate results:

      while read url; do \
  if [ -n "$(curl -s "http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=${url}")" ]; \
    then echo "$url" >> cdx-success.txt; \
    else echo "$url" >> cdx-failure.txt; \
  fi; \
done < urls-clean-uniq.txt
       
      After this process finished running, I had 34,832 URLs showing as already successfully archived (or about 67%). For the remainder, I wanted to submit them to the Wayback Machine for archiving, which I did with:

      while read url; do \
  echo "$url"; \
  curl -L -o/dev/null -s "http://web.archive.org/save/$url"; \
done < cdx-failure.txt
       
      So, any live, savable URLs which weren’t already in the archive at the time this process was run should be added to it.

      After this process finished, I did an initial pass at checking the submitted URLs for presence in the CDX index, and found 10,823 hits for the 17,188 URLs submitted (a 63% success rate). I also noticed that the CDX server can occasionally give false negatives as well (i.e. returns no results for something that’s in the index), so I did another pass against the 6,365 “missing” URLs to try to see if they were actually available, which added only 5 URLs as false negatives from the initial run.

      So, after running these processes it seemed the Wayback Machine now had at least one snapshot for 45,660 of our 52,020 URLs (about 88%). Spot-checking the remaining 6,360 URLs showed that some returned no snapshots via either the JSON or CDX APIs but show snapshots in the web interface. This particular example shows in the mementoweb.org API, so I decided to try checking the Wayback Memento API by hitting http://web.archive.org/web/{URI-R}:

      while read url; do echo $url; \
  if curl -s --fail -I "http://web.archive.org/web/$url"; \
    then echo $url >> memento-success.txt; \
  fi; \
done < cdx-missing-combined.txt
       
      This revealed that 4,606 of our 6,360 “missing” URLs were, in fact, successfully archived (so 50,266 of our 52,020 original URLs, or about 97%, now have at least one snapshot in the Wayback Machine). Looking at the remaining 1,754 missing URLs, we can triage these further and see what currently returns a “live” response code with:

      while read url; do \
  if curl -s --fail -L -I "$url" ; \
    then echo "$url" >> cdx-missing-live-success.txt; \
    else echo "$url" >> cdx-missing-live-failure.txt; \
  fi; \
done < cdx-memento-missing.txt
       
      Giving us 431 URLs with no snapshots that currently return an HTTP error (so less than 1% of our total URL count).

      I plan on doing one more archive run for the remaining 1,323 missing URLs, just in case some temporary server issues cropped up during the initial run.

      Going forward, it might be helpful to automate this process to check and archive new URLs in the AWOL Index on a periodic basis. There are probably much more interesting things that can be done with mining and analyzing the AWOL Index, but the foundation of some of these activities will rely on the simple availability of the linked content.

      Posted by at 0 comments
      Labels: ,

      Monday, August 17, 2015

      Open Access Journal: Revista Eletrônica Antiguidade Clássica

      Revista Eletrônica Antiguidade Clássica
      ISBN: 1983-7615
      A revista eletrônica Antiguidade Clássica é fruto de um projeto de dois amigos, que tinham em comum o ideal de criar uma revista virtual que promovesse os estudos clássicos, oferecendo em um único espaço, informações acadêmico-culturais, artigos.

      2012


      VOLUME 9

      VOLUME 8

      2011


      VOLUME 7

      VOLUME 6

      2010


      VOLUME 5

      2009


      VOLUME 4

      VOLUME 3

      2008


      VOLUME 2

      VOLUME 1

      Posted by at 0 comments
      Labels: , ,
      Location: Brazil

      Sunday, August 16, 2015

      Open Access Digital Library: PANDEKTIS - A Digital Thesaurus of Primary Sources for Greek History and Culture

      [First posted in AWOL 30 July 2009. Updated 16 August 2015]

      PANDEKTIS - A Digital Thesaurus of Primary Sources for Greek History and Culture
      National Hellenic Research Foundation
      http://pandektis.ekt.gr/pandektis/icons/headers/logo-pandekths-engl.jpg
      What is PANDEKTIS?
      It is a project of the National Hellenic Research Foundation which contains major digital collections of Greek history and civilization. The collections have been produced by the Institute of Neohellenic Research, the Institute of Byzantine Research and the Institute of Greek and Roman Antiquity. The National Documentation Centre supports the collections' digital form.

       Why PANDEKTIS?
      'PANDEKTIS - A Digital Thesaurus of Primary Sources for Greek History and Culture' aims to provide free access to eleven integrated and scientifically elaborated collections produced by the three humanistic Institutes of the National Hellenic Foundation for Research - Institute of Greek and Roman Antiquity, Institute of Byzantine Research, Institute of Neohellenic Research.

       Who benefits?
      The scientific community and the society gain online free access to the research results through the PANDEKTIS online digital collections.

       What about the PANDEKTIS collections?
      The collections, which will be widely disseminated through the internet, originate from primary documents of Greek history and civilization. Certain applications have been developed to ensure the digital homogeneity of the documents, a single interface for the provision and search of the databases through Internet services, by using tools and products developed by EKT.

      Posted by at 1 comments
      Labels: , ,
      Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)