Digital Classicist & Institute of Classical Studies Seminar 2011

Friday July 8th at 16:30
Court Room, Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU

Timothy Hill (New York University)
Semantics and Semantic Constructs in Cultural Comparison: The Case of Late Antiquity

As increasing numbers of historical datasets are made available online, the question of how best to mediate among them becomes more pressing. But the standard computational approach to such mediation, the creation of a unifying framework ‘over’ the datasets, is problematic in the context of historiography: often, for historians, the question of overarching ‘frame’ is itself the point at issue. This paper explores, with particular reference to Late Antique urban culture, the potential for electronic tools to free the historian from this reflexive bind, and facilitate an ‘experimental’ research approach to history, as advocated by e.g. Marcel Detienne and other classicist anthropologists.

The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.

ALL WELCOME

For more information please contact Gabriel.Bodard@kcl.ac.uk, Stuart.Dunn@kcl.ac.uk, S.Mahony@ucl.ac.uk, or see the seminar website at http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2011.html

Posted by: Simon Mahony (simon.mahony@kcl.ac.uk).

Digital Classicist & Institute of Classical Studies Seminar 2011

Friday July 1st at 16:30
Court Room, Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU

Agiatis Benardou (Digital Curation Unit, R.C. “Athena”)
Classical Studies facing digital research infrastructures:
From practice to requirements

ALL WELCOME

In the context of Preparing DARIAH, the DCU engaged in a research programme consisting partly of an empirical study of scholarly research activity. The study involved 24 interviews, and the largest groups of interviewees included archaeologists, historians and classicists. What emerged was the diversity in the evidence and sources associated with Classical Studies nowadays. Classicists indicated that in addition to text-based research they also use objects, sites, and other historical-cultural material. This challenges earlier perceptions that Classicists only employ strictly linguistic/textual methods of research. Moreover, it indicates the evolving nature of Classics as an increasingly hybridized, thematic, and multi-methodological interdiscipline.

The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.

For more information please contact Gabriel.Bodard@kcl.ac.uk, Stuart.Dunn@kcl.ac.uk, S.Mahony@ucl.ac.uk, or see the seminar website at http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2011.html

Posted by: Gabriel Bodard (gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk).

Friday June 24th at 16:30
Court Room, Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU

Alessandro Vatri (Oxford)
HdtDep: a treebank and search engine for Greek word order study

ALL WELCOME

HdtDep is a treebank and search engine based on the first book of Herodotus’ Histories. The structure of the sentences has been parsed applying a modified version of Mel’čuk’s dependency syntax, and has been encoded in an XML database. The search engine allows searching for precise dependency patterns involving specific grammatical categories or lexemes in exact sequences, and can easily be programmed through a user friendly graphic interface. This tool is especially designed for classicists and linguists investigating Greek word order—hence the choice of Herodotus’ prose as linguistic material—but can also be useful for teachers and language learners.
The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.

For more information please contact Gabriel.Bodard@kcl.ac.uk, Stuart.Dunn@kcl.ac.uk, S.Mahony@ucl.ac.uk, or see the seminar website at http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2011.html

Posted by: Simon Mahony (simon.mahony@kcl.ac.uk).

Friday June 17th at 16:30
Room 37, Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU

Charlotte Roueché & Charlotte Tupman (KCL)
Sharing Ancient Wisdoms: developing structures for charting textual transfer

ALL WELCOME

SAWS uses digital technologies to analyse wisdom literatures in Greek and Arabic. Throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages collections of wise sayings (gnomologia) were circulated as a response to the cost and inaccessibility of full texts. These moral and philosophical anthologies formed a crucial route by which ideas of reasonable behaviour were disseminated over the course of centuries. We are publishing gnomologia using TEI XML and developing a series of explanatory links in RDF between sections of collections, their source texts, and texts which drew upon them. This paper discusses challenges in publishing and linking these texts.
The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.

For more information please contact Gabriel.Bodard@kcl.ac.uk, Stuart.Dunn@kcl.ac.uk, S.Mahony@ucl.ac.uk, or see the seminar website at

Posted by: Simon Mahony (simon.mahony@kcl.ac.uk).

Friday June 10th at 16:30
Room 37, Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU

David Scott & Mike Jackson (Edinburgh)
‘Aggregating Classical Datasets with Linked Data’

ALL WELCOME

The SPQR project (http://spqr.cerch.kcl.ac.uk) is investigating the integration of heterogeneous datasets relating to Classical antiquity via Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies to produce an intuitive way for researchers to explore the data. EpiDoc XML (including the Inscriptions of Aphrodisias and Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania) has been converted into Linked Data. In addition to relationships arising from shared properties of the objects, such as the materials from which they are made, there are links to external resources such as the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places. A user evaluation by classicists at KCL of the tools and techniques used is under way.
The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.

For more information please contact Gabriel.Bodard@kcl.ac.uk, Stuart.Dunn@kcl.ac.uk, S.Mahony@ucl.ac.uk, or see the seminar website at http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2011.html

Posted by: Simon Mahony (simon.mahony@kcl.ac.uk).