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).

Digital Classicist & Institute of Classical Studies Seminar 2011

Friday June 3rd at 16:30
Room 37, Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU

Kathryn Piquette & Charles Crowther (Oxford)
Developing a Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) System for Inscription Documentation in Museum Collections and the Field: Case studies on ancient Egyptian and Classical material
ALL WELCOME

Ancient documentary scholars face a range of challenges in obtaining accurate physical documentation to support both decipherment and study of the processes of writing. In this seminar we present results from a joint Southampton-Oxford AHRC-funded project designed to address these issues through the application of Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) technologies. Through case studies of Egyptian and Classical material captured using a custom lighting-dome system and highlight-based RTI, we demonstrate how RTI is able to overcome challenges of image lighting as well as providing a more reflexive environment for observation and processes of ‘looking at’ inscribed surfaces.
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).

The programme for the summer 2011 Institute of Classical Studies digital seminars has been released. http://www.stoa.org/archives/1430

Institute of Classical Studies Digital Classicist Seminar, Summer 2011 Fridays at 16:30 in Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU

June 3
Kathryn Piquette and Charles Crowther (Oxford),
Developing a Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) System for Inscription Documentation in Museum Collections and the Field: Case studies on ancient Egyptian and Classical material

June 10
David Scott and Mike Jackson (Edinburgh University),
Supporting Productive Queries for Research (SPQR): Aggregating Classical Datasets with Linked Data

June 17
Charlotte Roueché and Charlotte Tupman (King’s College London), Sharing Ancient Wisdoms: developing structures for charting textual transfer

June 24
Alessandro Vatri (Oxford University),
HdtDep: a treebank and search engine for Greek word order study
July 1
Agiatis Benardou (Digital Curation Unit, R.C. “Athena”),
Classical Studies facing digital research infrastructures: From practice to requirements

July 8
Timothy Hill (New York University),
Semantics and Semantic Constructs in Cultural Comparison: The Case of Late Antiquity
July 15
Elton Barker (Open University) & Leif Isaksen (Southampton), Mine the GAP: Finding ancient places in the Google Books corpus

July 22
Sandra Blakely (Emory),
Modeling the mysteries: GIS technology, network models, and the cult of the Great Gods of Samothrace
July 29
Marco Büchler (Leipzig),
Bringing Modern Spell Checking Approaches to Ancient Texts: Automatized Suggestions for Incomplete Words

August 5
Daniel Pett (British Museum),
The Portable Antiquities Scheme: a tool for studying the Ancient landscape of England and Wales
August 12
Valentina Asciutti & Stuart Dunn (King’s College London),
Digital diasporas: remaking cultural heritage in cyberspace

ALL WELCOME

The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.

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

Posted by: Simon Mahony (s.mahony@ucl.ac.uk).