Streaming Greek and Latin in an Age of Open Data

For those interested in watching our paper presentations at the Greek and Latin in an Age of Open Data conference, see the live stream and links to youtube videos here. We have one more talk scheduled for 11 am Eastern Time, "Digital Access and the Practicality of Citizen Scholarship." You can also see our first talk, "A Redefinition of Classical Scholarship", on Day 2 of the conference.

CHS Seminar 2014

For the fourth summer in a row, the Homer Multitext project is running a two week seminar on digitally editing the Venetus A manuscript. Twenty-two undergraduates, graduates, and professors have been hard at work, creating a digital edition of Iliad 12 in the Venetus A. Many have likened work on this project to building a ship while sailing it and these researchers have shown great flexibility learning both the 10th century Byzantine hand and at the same time learning how to conduct their editing using virtual machines, a new technology added to the project this summer.

Front row (left to right): Olga Levaniouk, Mary Ebbott, Melody Wauke, Malia Piper, Sam Hill, Stephanie Lindeborg
Middle row (left to right): Corinne Pache, Ineke Sluiter, Shannon Young, Suzanne Verkade, Solomon Umana, Amie Goblirsch
Back row (left to right): Ian James, Casey Dué, Neel Smith, Kirsten Haijes, Charlie Schufreider, Eric Dugdale, Michiel Cock, Jacob Luber, James Skoog, Ian Tewksbury

We look forward to great things from this team of researchers as they tackle questions that have puzzled scholars on Iliad 12 and have plagued readers of the scholia, and look to update Allen’s landmark article, "On the Composition of Some Greek Manuscripts," with live references to the digital material now available through HMT.

Left to right: Suzanne Verkade, Corinne Pache, Malia Piper, Shannon Young, Sam Hill, Jacob Luber, and Michiel Cock

Left to right: Shannon Young, Melody Wauke, and Michiel Cock

Look forward to more updates soon as they tackle the scholia of Iliad 12!

Year In Review: The Latest Goings On of HMT

During the Fall 2013-Spring 2014 Academic year progress on the creation of digital editions of the Iliad manuscripts continued. Teams of undergraduates have been hard at work not only across the country but internationally. Several of our teams took a moment at the end of their academic years to report on what they have accomplished.

At College of the Holy Cross, teams were hard at work on Book 10 in the Venetus A, which was begun at the CHS Summer Seminar in 2013. When they weren't spending their Friday afternoons in the Isidore of Seville Lab, they were on the road giving presentations at Tufts and BU this spring, culminating in a final presentation at the Holy Cross Spring Academic Conference this April.

Holy Cross HMT at Tufts University
Pictured left to right: Neel Smith, Rebecca Musgrave, Alexander Simrell, and Neil Curran

At Brandeis University, work has continued on the Venetus B. The Fall was spent working steadily on Book 3. In the Spring, three new members joined their editing team and began to get familiar with the basics of the project, reading and editing the Venetus B hand. They are looking forward to acquiring a dedicated office space next year, where they can work with two other Classical Studies research projects at Brandeis.

At University of Washington in Seattle, their HMT team worked on Book 23 of the Venetus A, focusing their work primarily on the scholia, which included reading a number of them. Highlights include a fascinating (if convoluted) theory on how the third declension might derive from the first declension.

This summer promises to continue the productive streak. For the fifth summer in a row, undergraduates are hard at work at Holy Cross. This summer their work focuses on Book 11 in the Venetus A and Upsilon 1.1, allowing the teams to draw comparisons as they work on the manuscripts in parallel. The teams are also finishing Book 10 in the Venetus A and bringing previously edited books of the Venetus A up to the current editorial standards via automated testing.

Another two week seminar at the Center for Hellenic Studies is starting today, where students from five different colleges and universities will edit Book 12 of the Venetus A. More on the results of their work will be forthcoming.

The HMT Manuscript Browser · News and Updates

Summary: The old version of the Manuscript Browser at chs75.harvard.edu is going away. Its replacement will appear at amphoreus.hpcc.uh.edu. In the interim, a beta application is available at http://beta.hpcc.uh.edu/tomcat/hmtapps/. 

An archive of every digital image in the HMT library is always available for manual and automatic downloading.

Background

In 2007, shortly after we completed photography of manuscripts Marciana 822, Marciana 821, and Marciana 841, we wrote and posted online an application for browsing the high-resolution images. This application used the Google Maps API to allow users to manipulate the images; it allowed searching by the enumeration of manuscript folios and by poetic book and line.
Technological and scholarly considerations alike dictate that we take this original application offline. Using the Google Maps API is not ideal for our purposes. Google Maps assumes that it is displaying images of the surface of the earth, for one thing, and using it for serious work on manuscripts requires many workarounds, compromises, and hacks. More serious, though, is the problem of scholarly citation. In the five years since we wrote the original facsimile browser, our understanding of scholarly citation in a digital world has matured. By standardizing on citation with URNs, we can deliver effective applications today, using scholarly material that can remain valid in the future. The old application does not support citation using URNs; its replacements do.

What Will Happen

The application at chs75.harvard.edu will cease working at any moment. New “Facsimile Browser” applications are being developed on two hosts: beta.hpcc.uh.edu and amphoreus.hpcc.uh.edu. beta hosts experimental versions of HMT applications; when we consider versions of an application ready for regular public use, we will also host them on amphoreus.
In the meantime, users can use two resources for accessing digital images of the Homeric manuscripts:

• Our beta version of a Facsimile Browser is online at http://beta.hpcc.uh.edu/tomcat/hmtapps/.
• As always, users can download complete sets of images of any of our manuscripts from http://amphoreus.hpcc.uh.edu.

About the Beta Facsimile Browser

The application that lives at http://beta.hpcc.uh.edu/tomcat/hmtapps/ allows users to look up digital images of manuscripts, and associated data, by requesting citations of folios or by poetic book and line.
We wrote this application to explore a URN-driven graph of HMT data. Its state as of December 26, 2012 reflects its origin as a test-bed for this way of integrating our data.
The application will evolve over the next few weeks as we redesign the user interface with a wider audience in mind. Once that redesign is complete, we will put the application on the amphoreus.hpcc.uh.edu server and announce its public availability.

A Final Word

The Homer Multitext consists of data–images, texts, collections of regularly structured data. It is a reality of the twenty-first century that technology changes rapidly, and thus how we interact with data will change rapidly. From the outset, the editors of the HMT assumed that any particular end-user application would have a lifespan of only a few years. Our goal has been to ensure that the data remain accessible regardless of technological changes, and that the discoveries and insights generated through widespread and free access to that data is never trapped in forms dependent on any particular technology.

Ongoing Research, Summer 2010

Christopher Blackwell here:

I have begun a series of blog posts aimed at describing and narrating one corner of the constellation of research that surrounds the Homer Multitext. These posts will appear on my blog: http://nobleswineherd.blogspot.com .


They will focus on the work of this summer, 2010, both the projects in Europe, and what my undergraduate collaborators are doing in Greenville, SC.

I am hoping to use these as tools for recruiting good students to study Classics at Furman University, so they wil tend to have a local focus.

However, I also want to give an overarching view of how the Homer Multitext is progressing, what we have done, and what we hope to do in the near term. I will post those pieces here, and link to them from my “Eumaeus, the Noble Swineherd” blog.

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