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Beta version of the Early Irish Glossaries Project available

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The Early Irish Glossaries Project is currently editing a series of medieval texts, compiled c. 700-1000 and written in Old/Middle Irish, with a mixture of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and other languages. There are five inter-related texts (c. 50,000 words in total) and 18 manuscript witnesses (incl. fragments).

A traditional print edition will be supplemented with a digital resource, providing manuscript transcriptions, links to manuscript images and other resources, and search and concordance tools. We are currently testing a beta version at the address below:

http://www.asnc.cam.ac.uk/irishglossariesdev/

We aim to make our XML source freely available and (hopefully) well-documented. To these ends, you can find XML/TEI files, our schema and documentation on transcription practices on our downloads page:

http://www.asnc.cam.ac.uk/irishglossariesdev/downloads.php

We would really appreciate any feedback regarding our TEI implementation, our documentation, or indeed the resource in general.

Dr Pádraic Moran
Classics, National University of Ireland, Galway

http://www.asnc.cam.ac.uk/irishglossaries/
http://www.pmoran.ie/

Semantic Interoperability of Linked Data

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DC-2009: Last days for early bird rate

August 31 is the last day to enjoy the “Early bird” rates for the 2009 International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications (DC2009) to be held from 12 through 16 October 2009 in Seoul, Korea. Participants are invited to register online at the conference Web site and book accommodation for their stay in Seoul.

This year’s conference focuses on the Semantic Interoperability of Linked Data.

The main conference is taking place from Tuesday through Thursday, 13 to 15 October. Keynotes, plenary presentations and public working-group meetings will be held in parallel on topics ranging from

  • Metadata principles, guidelines, and best practices
  • Metadata quality, normalization, and mapping
  • Conceptual models and frameworks (e.g., RDF, DCAM, OAIS)
  • Application profiles
  • Metadata interoperability across domains, languages, and time
  • Cross-domain metadata uses (e.g., recordkeeping, preservation, institutional repositories)
  • Domain metadata (e.g., for corporations, cultural memory institutions, education, government, and scientific fields)
  • Bibliographic standards (e.g., RDA, FRBR, subject headings) as Semantic Web vocabularies
  • Accessibility metadata
  • Metadata for scientific data
  • Metadata in e-Science and grid applications
  • Social tagging
  • Knowledge Organization Systems (e.g., ontologies, taxonomies, authority files, folksonomies, and thesauri) and Simple Knowledge Organization Systems (SKOS)
  • Ontology design and development
  • Integration of metadata and ontologies

Conference Web Site: http://www.dc2009.kr/

Conference Program: http://www.dc2009.kr/sub/cfs_uprog_01.php

Registration: http://www.dc2009.kr/sub/cfs_uregi_01.php

Revealing the Invisible Heritage of Panjab

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For the first time ever a searchable collection of millions of rare pages on the Sikhs and the region of Panjab has been made available. Panjab Digital Library (PDL) will include texts of manuscripts, books, magazines, newspapers and photographs and will be available to anyone with Internet access at http://www.PanjabDigiLib.org. This launch was made possible in part by The Nanakshahi Trust and the Sikh Research Institute (SikhRI).

PDL has been in development since 2003, charged with a mission to select, collect, preserve, digitize and make accessible the accumulated wisdom of Panjab. Texts were included without distinction as to script, language, religion, nationality, or other human condition.

“Since long, preservation of heritage, research and education have been a victim of apathy in Panjab; more so, in the last century. With the launch of the online digital library, we have tried to fill some of that gap. PDL is a humble offering to the community what it lost 25 years ago,” said Harinder Singh, co-founder and executive director of SikhRI who also serves on PDL board. “Scholars will be able to access a wide variety of information concealed in the manuscripts and other literature of the region with the click of a mouse sitting in the comfort of their homes. This is essential to the growth of Sikh and Panjab studies and its meaningful representation in the fast-changing modern world.”

Digitization technology brings with it untold benefits for heritage preservation and access. Once a document has been properly digitized it becomes immortal and can remain accessible long after the original has ceased to exist. The option of digital access further aids in preservation of originals through reduced need for physical handling. The central digital archive which the PDL has developed over the last six years allows for wide electronic access to the public and will help the researcher to search, browse and sift through vast amounts of data in seconds.

According to Davinder Pal Singh, PDL’s co-founder and executive director, “PDL will break many barriers which currently restrict a conventional library. Information is decentralized, through its shared storage and access model, thus enabling utilization of a single resource concurrently by multiple users all over the world. On a local note, assuming that every household will possibly have a computer within the next ten years, PDL holds great promises for the people of Panjab especially.”

“To date, PDL has been instrumental in digitally preserving over 2.5 million folios from 3,400 manuscripts, 2,200 books, 1,990 issues of periodicals, 5,578 issues of newspapers, 3,152 photographs, 248,000 legal documents and some 168 hours of video recordings,” commented Gurvinder Singh, PDL’s US Coordinator. The current collection of data amounts to about 15,000 GB of available information.

Among others, major institutional collections digitized to date include SGPC, DSGMC, Government Museum and Art Gallery Chandigarh, Chief Khalsa Diwan, Panjab Languages Department, and Kurukshetra University . Critical works of significant importance from the personal collections of Prof. Pritam Singh, Dr. Man Singh Nirankari, Dr. Kirpal Singh, Dr. Madanjit Kaur and Prof. Gurtej Singh are also available at PDL.

“PDL is the only non-profit, non-governmental organization to have initiated a digitization project for the preservation and upkeep of Panjab archives, and perhaps the only one in India ” said Gurnihal Singh Pirzada Director, PDL’s board member. “PDL has undertaken rigorous research and laid solid ground work in order to be in the best possible position for this launch. Projects around the globe were closely studied as models for establishing a successful digitization project. Internationally recognized benchmarks were referred to and complied with,” he further said.

PDL is an ongoing project in its early stages and the collection will grow substantially in coming years. New titles are being digitized everyday and the Web site will be updated with new features and titles on monthly basis. PDL staff will be adding at least 50,000 pages per week to the Web site’s collection.

Contact Person: Davinder Pal Singh davinder.singh@panjabdigilib.org | +91-98141 13047

Geospatial computing for the arts, humanities and cultural heritage

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Workshop at 5th IEEE International Conference on e-Science Oxford, UK, 9-11 December 2009

Geospatial computing for the arts, humanities and cultural heritage

References to time and location pervade the human record, both past and present: an oft-quoted statistic is that some 80% of all online information is in some way georeferenced. It is unsurprising therefore that as researchers in the arts, umanities and cultural heritage become more fully engaged with e-infrastructures, their disciplines’ engagement with, and use of, spatial and temporal data gives rise to new and interesting research questions in this area.

How, for example, can heterogeneous academic data resources which fall into the 80% of georeferenced information – including, for example, historical texts, archaeological databases or museum collections – be linked and cross-queried without dictating the research process or methods used? How can geo-temporal data be visualized, both geographically and non-geographically? What is the role of ‘virtual globes’ such as Google Earth as platforms for the expression of such data? What can digital tools and methods in geospatial computing contribute to the use and understanding of space and time in the practice-led arts, creative industries and galleries (e.g. for documenting performances or visitor pathways)? How can issues of scale that are common to both time and space be usefully explored in the arts, humanities and cultural heritage sectors?

Further details: http://www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/ieee/workshops/geospatial/

This workshop seeks contributions from which might further these, and similar, questions. Contributors might (not exhaustively) include:

* Academics in the arts, humanities or cultural heritage who are making use of spatial and/or temporal data in their research
* Researchers with relevant interests in HCI or related disciplines
* Researchers, curators, practitioners etc. from outside the academic sector (e.g. museums and galleries)
* Developers or information scientists working on geospatial or temporal tools or applications

Short contributions (up to four pages, including images, references and notes), in IEEE format (see http://www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/ieee/call-for-papers/formatting-guidelines) are invited.

Deadlines are:

September 25th: Submission of first drafts

October 2nd: Notification of acceptance and reviewers’ comments

October 14th: Final submission of camera-ready papers

Papers should be submitted via the EasyChair system:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=geospatialworkshopieee09

Stuart Dunn (King’s College London)
Fredrik Palm (University of Umeå)

Workshop co-chairs