The New Alexandria Foundation – Rebuilding the ancient world anew, digitally.

“The objective of New Alexandria is to develop and nurture an open environment for learning, teaching, and research about premodern civilizations that is inclusive, collaborative, and restlessly innovative. Instead of flattening the differences between ancient and current ways of representing the world, we seek to see more clearly the lively unfamiliarity of the ancient way. Instead of selectively extracting elements of ancient life from their historical contexts, we seek a holistic approach that is interdisciplinary and that integrates anthropological and other socially-informed methodologies. The basic rationale is that cultural and human differences are “good to think with,” vital for humanism and even for humanity….

 

 

Our aim is to take the best that we know and think about premodern civilizations and to make it available to anyone with access to the internet by way of a phone, a tablet, or a computer, at home, in a library, in a park, or on a bus. As our data will be free and open for all to use and engage with, so also must our interpretations of it be free and open, and so also the software that we create for accessing it and analyzing it must be free and open….”

The Perseus Digital Library and the future of libraries | SpringerLink

Abstract:  This paper describes the Perseus Digital Library as, in part, a response to limitations of what is now a print culture that is rapidly receding from contemporary consciousness and, at the same time, as an attempt to fashion an infrastructure for the study of the past that can support a shared cultural heritage that extends beyond Europe and is global in scope. But if Greco-Roman culture cannot by itself represent the background of an international twenty-first century culture, this field, at the same time, offers challenges in its scale and complexity that allow us to explore the possibility of digital libraries. Greco-Roman studies is in a position to begin creating a completely transparent intellectual ecosystem, with a critical mass of its primary data available under an open license and with new forms of reading support that make sources in ancient and modern languages accessible to a global audience. In this model, traditional libraries play the role of archives: physically constrained spaces to which a handful of specialists can have access. If non-specialists draw problematic conclusions because the underlying sources are not publicly available and as well-documented as possible, the responsibility lies with the specialists who have not yet created the open, digital libraries upon which the intellectual life of humanity must depend. Greco-Roman Studies can play a major role in modeling such libraries. Perseus seeks to contribute to that transformation.

 

AWOL – The Ancient World Online: Active Open Access Journals

“This is a developing list of open access journals currently reviewing papers for publication. It is intended to offer opportunities for scholars interested in publishing openly. It is compiled in advance of my presentation at the ASOR Annual Meeting 2019: Best Practices for Digital Scholarship: “Sharing Your Work: Library Ethics, Privacy, and Commercial Repositories”. Journals included here cover a wide range of disciplines within the study of antiquity. It is not yet comprehensive. If you wish to add a title simply let me know (comments – below)….”

Everything old is new again | University of Michigan Library

“A century ago, amid the political upheaval and humanitarian crises that followed World War I, U-M professor of Latin language and literature Frances Willey Kelsey traveled to Constantinople (now Istanbul). In a shop in the Old City, he purchased the first item of what would become the largest collection of Greek manuscripts in America, which now encompasses more than 100 bound manuscripts and fragments spanning the 4th to the 19th centuries. 

Each of the collection’s items is unique — all written by hand, some illuminated, and some incorporating elaborate bindings. Taken together, they’re a rich source of information about the transmission of Christian texts, manuscript illumination, and historical bookmaking,  especially in the late Byzantine Empire.

Pablo Alvarez, curator in the library’s Special Collections Research Center, has been responsible for the Greek manuscripts since arriving at the library in 2010, and he describes it as one of the highlights of his work. 

Now, a new exhibit created by Alvarez — live in the Hatcher Library through June 28, and also available online — celebrates the collection’s centenary by shedding light on its history and provenance, and by displaying some of its most beautiful and interesting items. …”

AWOL – The Ancient World Online: List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies

“This is a List of all Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies known  to me. It includes digitized paper-based journals from their 18th century origins to the present day. It also includes born-digital open access journals. I am in the process of compiling a list of currently active (i.e. seeking contributions) open access journals as a guide for scholars seeking opportunities to publish openly.”

DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: A Prosopography as Linked Open Data: Some Implications from DPRR

Abstract:  The Digital Prosopography of the Roman Republic (DPRR) project has created a freely available structured prosopography of people from the Roman Republic. As a part of this work the materials that were produced by the project have been made available as Linked Open Data (LOD): translated into RDF, and served through an RDF Server. This article explains what it means to present the material as Linked Open Data by means of working, interactive examples. DPRR didn’t do some of the work which has been conventionally associated with Linked Open Data. However, by considering the two conceptions of the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data as proposed by Tim Berners-Lee one can see how DPRR’s RDF Server fits best into the LOD picture, including how it might serve to facilitate new ways to explore its material. The article gives several examples of ways of exploiting DPRR’s RDF dataset, and other similarly structured materials, to enable new research approaches.

 

AWOL – The Ancient World Online: Loebolus: Open Access to all the public domain Loeb Classical Library volumes

Loebolus is based on Edwin Donnelly’s “Downloebables” , aiming to make all the public domain Loebs more easily downloadable by re-hosting the PDF’s directly, without the need to enter CAPTCHA’s.

You can also download a .zip containing all 277 PDF’s (3.2GB). Or view the code used for generating this site on GitHub….”

AWOL – The Ancient World Online: Loebolus: Open Access to all the public domain Loeb Classical Library volumes

Loebolus is based on Edwin Donnelly’s “Downloebables” , aiming to make all the public domain Loebs more easily downloadable by re-hosting the PDF’s directly, without the need to enter CAPTCHA’s.

You can also download a .zip containing all 277 PDF’s (3.2GB). Or view the code used for generating this site on GitHub….”

Free access to the Loeb Classical Library

“Access to the digital Loeb Classical Library will be free to schools and universities impacted by COVID-19 until June 30th.

Librarians: email loebclassics_sales@harvard.edu for access…”

[We don’t normally tag tweets for OATP, but this announcement has apparently not yet been posted to the HUP or Loeb web sites.]

Open and Shut?: The Open Access Interviews: Edith Hall

“Why is open access so contentious? In large part, I think, because although OA began as a bottom-up revolution it was never widely embraced by researchers. However, OA advocates managed to persuade governments, funders and institutions that their colleagues should be compelled to embrace open access. This has seen a series of ever more stringent OA mandates being imposed on researchers, increasing the bureaucratic burden on them (amongst other things).

Monographs are a particularly contested area because of their length, their narrative form, and the licensing issues that this raises.

 

It has not helped that OA advocates promised open access would reduce the costs of scholarly communication. In reality, costs have risen.

 

This last point is particularly troublesome in the UK context as OA policies have been introduced without providing the necessary funding to support them. As a result, researchers can discover that they have been mandated to make their work open access but cannot afford to pay the article-processing charge (APC) needed if they want to satisfy the government’s preference for gold OA.

 

This has been a challenge even for researchers at wealthy and prestigious institutions. Last year, for instance, Oxford University library had to inform faculty that its OA fund had been exhausted and so they should delay submitting to journals until it had been replenished. 

 

At the same time, the bureaucracy surrounding OA compliance has become so complex that universities have had to recruit legions of support staff to interpret and manage the escalating number of policies (some of which have proved contradictory). Indeed, such is the complexity now that even specialist support staff can struggle to decode the rules.

 

In short, the UK OA policy environment is far too complex, and it is seriously underfunded. For researchers, this is frustrating and depressing….”

Ancient history – modern lessons: Can a new wave of Classics scholars save the world? (Paid Content by University of Warwick from The Chronicle of Higher Education) – The Chronicle of Higher Education

[Note that this piece is not a news piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education, but “Paid for and created by University of Warwick.”]

“This is an incredibly exciting time to study the ancient world Scott argues. Because now new technologies are enabling the advance of research and teaching techniques in classics and ancient history and the subject is shooting off into exciting new areas of study and ways of understanding the people of the ancient world. He explains: “The digital revolution allows us to explore these worlds in more depth or in ways we hadn’t imagined before. Virtual reality brings places and situations to life for us, if we can’t get there in person. 3D printing allows us to recreate artefacts and from there we can recreate scenes from ancient history.” …”

Ancient history – modern lessons: Can a new wave of Classics scholars save the world? (Paid Content by University of Warwick from The Chronicle of Higher Education) – The Chronicle of Higher Education

[Note that this piece is not a news piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education, but “Paid for and created by University of Warwick.”]

“This is an incredibly exciting time to study the ancient world Scott argues. Because now new technologies are enabling the advance of research and teaching techniques in classics and ancient history and the subject is shooting off into exciting new areas of study and ways of understanding the people of the ancient world. He explains: “The digital revolution allows us to explore these worlds in more depth or in ways we hadn’t imagined before. Virtual reality brings places and situations to life for us, if we can’t get there in person. 3D printing allows us to recreate artefacts and from there we can recreate scenes from ancient history.” …”

IGNTP releases Open Data

“The International Greek New Testament Project (IGNTP), established in 1948, is working towards major new editions of the Gospel according to John and the Pauline Epistles using the latest digital tools. The focus of work for these projects is at ITSEE in the University of Birmingham. In a move towards making its data openly available, the IGNTP has now released 350 of its transcriptions of Greek New Testament manuscripts under the Creative Commons Attribution licence, meaning that these files are freely available for re-use.”

IsoArcH – An open-access and collaborative isotope database for bioarcheological samples from the Graeco-Roman world

“IsoArcH is an open access spatial database of bioarcheological isotopic data of the Graeco-Roman world. It consists of georeferenced isotopic, archaeological, and anthropological information related to the study of dietary and mobility patterns of human and animal populations. IsoArcH focuses on the Mediterranean region between the 12th c. BC and the 8th c. AD, although some northern European sites are also included….”