Sociedad de Estudios Latinos - SELat

Article in The Chronicle of Higher Education

Scholars in the sciences have been light-years ahead of their peers in the humanities in exploring the possibilities of open-access publishing. But a new venture with prominent academic backers, the Open Humanities Press, wants to help humanists close the gap.

…

“Scholars in all disciplines tend to confuse online publication with the bypassing of peer review,” [Peter] Suber observed. “That’s simply mistaken.” In the humanities in particular, he said, “we’re fighting the prestige of print.”

CHE, Today’s News, May 7, 2008:

http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=WqvC6RkTkxgjB9pb92RywcgrsJVtXz9K

The Digitizing Early Material Culture conference, for which we posted a CFP back in February, has a new deadline and slightly changed line-up of speakers (Meg Twycross replaces Melissa terras). See the new programme here (PDF).

By way of Open Access News, we learn of this announcement, recently posted at openaccess.gr:

Taking into consideration the latest developments in scientific publishing, the Institute for Byzantine Research of the National Hellenic Research Foundation has reevaluated the aims of ?????????, a journal it has published since 1966. Under the new name BYZANTINA SYMMEIKTA, it has become a peer-reviewed open access journal with well-defined processes and scope and it is freely accessible at: http://www.byzsym.org/. Its printed version will be published at the end of each year.

Fridays at 16:30 in NG16, Senate House, Malet St, London, WC1E 7HU
(June 20th, July 4th-18th seminars in room B3, Stewart House)
(June 27th seminar room 218, Chadwick Bdg, UCL, Gower Street)

**ALL WELCOME**

6 June (NG16): Elaine Matthews and Sebastian Rahtz (Oxford), The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names and classical web services

13 June (NG16) Brent Seales (University of Kentucky), EDUCE: Non-invasive scanning for classical materials

20 June (STB3) Dot Porter (University of Kentucky), The Son of Suda On Line: a next generation collaborative editing tool

27 June (UCL Chadwick 218) Bruce Fraser (Cambridge), The value and price of information: reflections on e-publishing in the humanities

4 July (STB3) Andrew Bevan (UCL), Computational Approaches to Human and Animal Movement in the Archaeological Record

11 July (STB3) Frances Foster (KCL), A digital presentation of the text of Servius

18 July (STB3) Ryan Bauman (University of Kentucky), Towards the Digital Squeeze: 3-D imaging of inscriptions and curse tablets

25 July (NG16) Charlotte Tupman (KCL), Markup of the epigraphy and archaeology of Roman Libya

1 Aug (NG16) Juan Garcés (British Library), Digitizing the oldest complete Greek Bible: The Codex Sinaiticus project

8 Aug (NG16) Charlotte Roueché (KCL), From Stone to Byte

15 Aug (NG16) Ioannis Doukas (KCL), Towards a digital publication for the Homeric Catalogue of Ships

22 Aug (NG16) Peter Heslin (Durham), Diogenes: Past development and future plans

**ALL WELCOME**

We are inviting both students and established researchers involved in the application of the digital humanities to the study of the ancient world to come and introduce their work. The focus of this seminar series is the interdisciplinary and collaborative work that results at the interface of expertise in Classics or Archaeology and Computer Science.

The seminar will be followed by wine and refreshments.

Audio recordings and slideshows will be uploaded after each event.

(Sponsored by the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London.)

For more information please contact gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk or simon.mahony@kcl.ac.uk, or visit the seminar website at http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2008.html

Attendees (who should be familiar with Greek/Latin and the Leiden Conventions) will need to bring a laptop on which has been installed the Oxygen XML editor (available at a reduced academic price, or for a free 30-day demo).

The EpiDoc Summer School is free to participants; we can try to help you find cheap (student) accommodation in London. If any students participating would like to stay on afterwards and acquire some hands-on experience marking up some texts for the Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica project, they would be most welcome!

All interested please contact both charlotte.roueche@kcl.ac.uk and gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk as soon as possible. Please pass on this message to anyone who you think might benefit.

From the Chairman’s Letter:

The main objective of Art2008 is to bring together experts in non-destructive evaluation and material analysis with professionals from the fields of preservation of cultural heritage, archeology, art history and architectural researchers of ancient structures.

Non-destructive methods of analysis have become a routine in many areas of technology, engineering and medicine. With a growing number of application areas, non-destructive analysis found its way into the world of art and archeology. Its advantage over sampling is obvious in the cases of unique objects of cultural heritage. Continuous improvement of sensitivity and reliability has caused non-destructive investigations to become a preferred approach even in cases where microanalysis sampling is permitted.

Many non-destructive techniques and evaluation methods applied in the natural sciences offer advantages to cultural heritage preservation. The synergy between experts will lead to the continuous development and adjustments of new scientific methods and their application in the fields of preservation, reconstruction and diagnostics of museum and archaeological objects.

Conference website: http://www.isas.co.il/art2008/

Is anyone here attending this?

As primary source materials move online, in both licensed and freely available form, what will be the impact on scholarship? On teaching and learning practice? On the collecting practices of research libraries? These are questions we are hoping to explore in the third day of our annual meeting (June 4th). This symposium, which we’re calling “Digitization and the Humanities: Impact on Libraries and Special Collections,” will feature perspectives from scholars on how digital collections are impacting both their research and teaching practice. We’ll also have perspectives from university librarians (Paul Courant, University of Michigan and Robin Adams, Trinity College Dublin) on the potential impact on library collecting practices.

The symposium will be held at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and on Tuesday evening (June 3rd), the Philadelphia Museum of Art will host a reception for attendees. It should be a great event and a thought provoking conversation, and we hope you will join us. RLG Partners may register online.

Charles Watkinson has just posted a long, interesting and important consideration of the emerging European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH). He reflects upon, in particular, the stated aims and methods of this effort and its potential adoption as a bibliometric mechanism informing hiring, tenure, promotion and library subscription decisions, as well as the emerging opposition.

The official report on the NEH Workshop “Supporting Digital Scholarly Editions”, held on January 14, has been released and is available in PDF form:

http://www.virginiafoundation.org/NEH%20Workshop%20Report%20FINAL-3.pdf

Attendees included representatives from funding agencies and university presses, historians, just one or two literary scholars, one medievalist, and no classicists. It appears that much of the discussion focused on creating a service provider for scholarly editions, something to work between scholars and university presses to turn scholarship into digital publications.

I’m of two minds about this. On one hand, I know a lot of “traditional scholars” who find the idea of digital publication a little scary, just the idea of having to learn the technology. So it could be a good way to bring digital publication into the mainstream. But on the other hand, this kind of model could be stifling for creativity. One of the exciting things about digital projects is that, at this time, although there are standards there is no single model to follow for publication. There’s a lot of room for experimentation. It’s certainly not either/or - those of us doing more cutting-edge work will continue to do it whether there are mainstream service providers at university presses or not. But it’s interesting that this is being discussed.

One of the authors at Thoughts on Antiquity has posted a provocative reflection on a long-standing effort to digitize an out-of-copyright translation of Cyril of Alexandria’s Commentary on Luke. In light of technological change, the big book-scanning projects and the continued operation of APh, the author expresses uncertainty about how or whether to proceed.

What is the role of the humanist scholar (and his home institution, and her professional society) in the era of big digitization? Readers of this blog know about the on-going Million Books discussions. I’ve opined elsewhere that the creation of stable, sustainable, massively interlinked scholarly reference works is a critical contribution. The issue also surfaces regularly in attempts to define “digital scholarship in the humanities” and to organize funding for it. Yet, clearly the questions are arising spontaneously in many quarters and there is not yet a field-wide dialog on the subject.

We may agree with Steven Wheatley that:

The day will come, not that far off, when modifying humanities with ‘digital’ will make no more sense than modifying humanities with ‘print.’ (in A. Guess, “Rise of the Digital NEH,” Inside Higher Ed, 3 April 2008).

Ask your colleagues: what is your role in getting there and how will you work when we’ve arrived? Comments welcome.

A date has been set for the next meeting of the International Association of Egyptologists Computer Group (Informatique et Egyptologie, I&E), which last met in Oxford in 2006.

Thanks to the kindness of Dr Wilfried Seipel, the meeting will take place in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria, on 8-11 July 2008, with the sessions on 9-10 July.

Further information can be found here

Back in November, Gabriel Bodard posted about the importance of attaching explicit licenses (or public domain declarations) to on-line works so as to clarify for users how they can, and can’t, use these works. A new post by Cathy Davidson (”Permission Denied” in Cat in the Stack, 31 March 2008), highlights the case of an academic author who has been unable to include in his book various images of artworks created by the subject of that book because the artists’ heirs have refused permission.

Which all makes me wonder: is explicit release, in one’s own lifetime, of a work into the public domain or under license terms that permit redistribution and remixing, sufficient to prevent post-mortem claw-back by one’s institutional or personal heirs?

The Marriage of Mercury and Philology: Problems and outcomes in digital philology

e-Science Institute, Edinburgh, March 25-27 2008.

(Event website; programme wiki; original call)

I was asked to summarize the third session of papers in the round table discussion this afternoon. My notes (which I hope do not misrepresent anybody’s presentation too brutally) are transcribed below.

Session 3: Methodologies

1. Federico Meschini (De Montfort University) ‘Mercury ain’t what he used to be, but was he ever? Or, do electronic scholarly editions have a mercurial attitude?’ (Tuesday, 1400)

Meschini gave a very useful summary of the issues facing editors or designers of digital critical editions. The issues he raised included:

• the need for good metadata standards to address the problems of (inevitable and to some extent desirable) incompatibility between different digital editions;
• the need for a modularized approach that can include many very specialist tools (the “lego bricks” model);
• the desirability of planning a flexible structure in advance so that the model can grow organically, along with the recognition that no markup language is complete, so all models need to be extensible.

After a brief discussion of the reference models available to the digital library world, he explained that digital critical editions are different from digital libraries, and therefore need different models. A digital edition is not merely a delivery of information, it is an environment with which a “reader” or “user” interacts. We need, therefore, to engage with the question: what are the functional requirements for text editions?

A final summary of some exciting recent movements, technologies, and discussions in online editions served as a useful reminder that far from taking for granted that we know what a digital critical edition should look like, we need to think very carefully about the issues Mechini raises and other discussions of this question.

2. Edward Vanhoutte (Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature, Belgium) ‘Electronic editions of two cultures –with apologies to C.P. Snow’ (Tuesday, 1500)

Vanhoutte began with the rhetorical observation that our approach to textual editions is in adequate because the editions are not as intuitive to users, flexible in what they can contain, and extensible in use and function as a household amenity such as the refrigerator. If the edition is an act of communication, an object that mediates between a text and an audience, then it fails if we do not address the “problem of two audiences” (citing Lavagnino). We serve the audience of our peers fairly well–although we should be aware that even this is a more hetereogenous and varied a group than we sometimes recognise–but the “common audience”, the readership who are not text editors themselves, are poorly served by current practice.

After some comments on different types of editions (a maximal edition containing all possible information would be too rich and complex for any one reader, so minimal editions of different kinds can be abstracted from this master, for example), and a summary of Robinson’s “fluid, cooperative, and distributed editions”, Vanhoutte made his own recommendation. We need, in summary, to teach our audience, preferably by example, how to use our editions and tools; how to replicate our work, the textual scholarship and the processes performed on it; how to interact with our editions; and how to contribute to them.

Lively discussion after this paper revolved around the question of what it means to educate your audience: writing a “how to” manual is not the best way to encourage engagement with ones work, but providing multiple interfaces, entry-points, and cross-references that illustrate the richness of the content might be more accessible.

3. Peter Robinson (ITSEE, Birmingham) ‘What we have been doing wrong in making digital editions, and how we could do better?’ (Tuesday, 1630)

Robinson began his provocative and speculative paper by considering a few projects that typify things we do and do not do well: we do not always distribute project output successfully; we do not always achieve the right level of scholarly research value. Most importantly, it is still near-impossible for a good critical scholar to create an online critical edition without technical support, funding for the costs of digitization, and a dedicated centre for the maintenance of a website. All of this means that grant funding is still needed for all digital critical work.

Robinson has a series of recommendations that, he hopes, will help to empower the individual scholar to work without the collaboration of a humanities computing centre to act as advisor, creator, librarian, and publisher:

1. Make available high-quality images of all our manuscripts (this may need to be funded by a combination of goverment money, grant funding, and individual users paying for access to the results).
2. Funding bodies should require the base data for all projects they fund to be released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
3. Libraries and not specialist centres should hold the data of published projects.
4. Commercial projects should be involved in the production of digital editions, bringing their experience of marketing and money-making to help make projects sustainable and self-funding.
5. Most importantly, he proposes the adoption of common infrastructure, a set of agreed descriptors and protocols for labelling, pointing to, and sharing digital texts. An existing protocol such as the Canonical Text Services might do the job nicely.

4. Manfred Thaller (Cologne) ‘Is it more blessed to give than to receive? On the relationship between Digital Philology, Information Technology and Computer Science’ (Wednesday, 0950)

Thaller gave the last paper, on the morning of the third day of this event, in which he asked (and answered) the over-arching question: Do computer science professionals already provide everything that we need? And underlying this: Do humanists still need to engage with computer science at all? He pointed out two classes of answer to this question:

• The intellectual response: there are things that we as humanists need and that computer science is not providing. Therefore we need to engage with the specialists to help develop these tools for ourselves.
• The political response: maybe we are getting what we need already, but we will experience profitable side effects from collaborating with computer scientists, so we should do it anyway.

Thaller demonstrated via several examples that we do not in fact get everything we need from computer scientists. He pointed out that two big questions were identified in his own work twelve years ago: the need for software for dynamic editions, and the need for mass digitization. Since 1996 mass digitization has come a long way in Germany, and many projects are now underway to image millions of pages of manuscripts and incunabula in that country. Dynamic editions, on the other hand, while there has been some valuable work on tools and publications, seem very little closer than they were twelve years ago.

Most importantly, we as humanists need to recognize that any collaboration with computer scientists is a reciprocal arrangement, that we offer skills as well as receive services. One of the most difficult challenges facing computer scientists today, we hear, is to engage with, organise, and add semantic value to the mass of imprecise, ambiguous, incomplete, unstructured, and out-of-control data that is the Web. Humanists have spent the last two hundred years studying imprecise, ambiguous, incomplete, unstructured, and out-of-control materials. If we do not lend our experience and expertise to help the computer scientists solve this problem, than we can not expect free help from them to solve our problems.

Not specifically classics, but this news from the National Endowment for the Humanities should be of interest, at least to those of us in the US: The Digital Humanities Initiative (DHI) has been made permanent, and is now the Office of Digital Humanities (ODH)
From the ODH Webpage:

The Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) is an office within the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Our primary mission is to help coordinate the NEH’s efforts in the area of digital scholarship. As in the sciences, digital technology has changed the way scholars perform their work. It allows new questions to be raised and has radically changed the ways in which materials can be searched, mined, displayed, taught, and analyzed. Technology has also had an enormous impact on how scholarly materials are preserved and accessed, which brings with it many challenging issues related to sustainability, copyright, and authenticity. The ODH works not only with NEH staff and members of the scholarly community, but also facilitates conversations with other funding bodies both in the United States and abroad so that we can work towards meeting these challenges.

To bring you all up to date with what is going on with the Digital Classicist seminar series:

Some papers from the DC seminar series held at the Institute of Classical Studies in London in the summer of 2006 have been published as a special issue of the Digital Medievalist (4:2008).

 See: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/index.html

Gabriel and I are putting together a collection of papers from the DC summer series of 2007 and working on the programme for the coming summer (2008). With the continued support of the Institute of Classical Studies (London) and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London it is anticipated that this seminar series will continue to be an annual event.  

There will be two memorial services held in honor of Ross Scaife. The first will be held at Belmont (the home and studio of Fredericksburg artist Gari Melchers) in Fredericksburg, Virginia on Wednesday, April 2, at 2 pm (http://www.umw.edu/gari_melchers/). The second service will be held in Memorial Hall on the University of Kentucky Campus in Lexington, Kentucky on Saturday, April 12, at 1pm (http://ukcc.uky.edu/cgi-bin/dynamo?maps.391+campus+0049). Feel free to contact me if you’d like more information (Dot Porter, dporter@uky.edu).

The authors and editors of the Stoa blog have been hesitant to post a new item to this blog that would take the obituary and memorial to Ross Scaife off the top of the page. However, we are determined that the blogging should go on, and that this site should continue to serve the functions for which Ross founded it.

This blog exists to report, highlight, and comment upon issues of interest to Classicists and Digital Humanists (since 2005 it has also been the official blog of the Digital Classicist community). Its core themes include digital research and publication, events, publications and jobs. We place particular focus on standards, Open Access, Open Source, and other issues that are vital to the future of our fields.

We are in communication with the Stoa Advisory Board, whose members are communicating with the various Stoa project leaders concerning steps for the maintenance and preservation of Stoa content. As their plans formalize, we will report on them here.

Allen Ross Scaife, 47, Professor of Classics at the University of Kentucky and founding editor of the Stoa Consortium for Electronic Publication in the Humanities, died of cancer on March 15, at his home in Lexington, Kentucky.

Ross was born in Fredericksburg, VA on March 31, 1960. He graduated from the Tilton School in Tilton, New Hampshire in 1978 and from the College of William and Mary in 1982 with a major in Classics and Philosophy. He earned a PhD in 1990 in Classical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1988 he participated in the summer program at the American Academy in Rome, and in 1985 was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for a year of study at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece.

From 1991 to the time of his death, Ross was on the faculty at the University of Kentucky in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literature, and Cultures where he taught courses on women in the ancient world, Greek art, Aristophanes, and the Greek historians, as well as Greek and Latin language courses.

A pioneer in using computer technology to advance scholarship in the humanities, Ross is perhaps best known as the founding editor of the Stoa Consortium for Electronic Publication in the Humanities. The Stoa, established in 1997, set the standard for Open Access publication of digital humanities work in the classics, serving as an umbrella project for many diverse projects that provide functionality, and have requirements, not supported by traditional (print) publishers. In addition to providing Open Access publication for the work of other scholars, Ross strived to make his own work (and the raw materials behind that work) available freely to others. He was the co-creator of Diotima: Materials for the Study of Women and Gender in the Ancient World and of the Neo-Latin Colloquia collection, both of which are published on The Stoa.

According to his principled belief in Open Access, Ross was always a stern critic of models of scholarship that were needlessly exclusionary in their presentation or implementation. He firmly believed in the potential afforded by technology to bring the highest levels of scholarship to the widest possible audience, and in the obligation of learned societies to make their work freely available to all interested readers.

Ross’s influence is most noticeable in his long-standing belief in the power of collaborative work. With humor, generosity, and a keen editor’s discretion, he worked throughout his career to build working relationships among an international circle of collaborators, for his own projects, as well as for others. As a founding editor of the Suda On Line, a web accessible database for work on Byzantine Greek lexicography, Ross helped to build a framework that allowed a large number of people to work together on a single edition. SOL was founded in 1998 at a time when such large-scale collaborative editing was rare, if not unheard of. The influence of the SOL is still being felt as the next generation of collaborative editing tools are being developed. Ross had long-term associations with Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies, the Perseus Project, and more recently with the Digital Classicist. Those who knew him will remember him for his generosity and willingness to offer advice, and for his ability to see connections and build bridges between projects and people.

Most recently, Ross was instrumental in forging the collaboration that resulted in the high resolution digital imaging of the Venetus A, a 10th century manuscript of the Iliad located at the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, and was a co-Principal Investigator of project EDUCE, which aims to use non-invasive, volumetric scanning technologies for virtually “unwrapping” and visualizing ancient papyrus scrolls. Since July, 2005 Ross has been the director of the Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities, a research unit at the University of Kentucky which provides technical assistance to faculty who wish to undertake humanities computing projects, and to encourage and support interdisciplinary partnerships between faculty at UKY and researchers around the world.

His many interests included sailing in the Northern Neck of Virginia, hunting, cooking, woodworking, and photography.

Ross was the proud father of three sons, Lincoln (16), Adrian (13), and Russell (9). In addition, Ross is survived by his wife, Cathy Edwards Scaife, his parents, William and Sylvia Scaife, and three siblings, Bill Scaife, Susan Duerksen, and John Scaife, as well as their spouses and children.

Two memorial services are planned. The first will be held at Belmont (home and studio of Fredericksburg artist Gari Melchers) in Fredericksburg, Virginia on Wednesday, April 2, at 2 pm. The second service will be held in Memorial Hall on the University of Kentucky Campus in Lexington, Kentucky on Saturday, April 12, at 1pm.

Memorial donations may be made to the Swift/Longacre Scholarship Fund which provides support for students of classical studies at the University of Kentucky. Please make checks payable to the University of Kentucky and send in care of Dr. Jane Phillips, Department of MCLLC, 1055 Patterson Office Tower, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506-0027.

Million Books Workshop, Friday, March 14, 2008, Imperial College London.

The second of two round tables in the afternoon of the Million Books Workshop, chaired by Brian Fuchs (Imperial College London), asked a panel of experts what services and infrastructure they would like to see in order to make a Million Book corpus useful.

1. Stuart Dunn (Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre): the kinds of questions that will be asked of the Million Books mean that the structure of this collection needs to be more sophisticated that just a library catalogue
2. Alistair Dunning (Archaeological Data Service & JISC): powerful services are urgently needed to enable humanists both to find and to use the resources in this new collection
3. Michael Popham (OULS but formerly director of e-Science Centre): large scale digitization is a way to break down the accidental constraints of time and place that limit access to resources in traditional libraries
4. David Shotton (Image Bioinformatics Research Group): emphasis is on accessibility and the semantic web. It is clear than manual building of ontologies does not scale to millions of items, therefore data mining and topic modelling are required, possible assisted by crowdsourcing. It is essential to be able to integrate heterogeneous sources in a single, semantic infrastructure
   1. Dunning: citability and replicability of research becomes a concern with open publication on this scale
   2. Dunn: the archaeology world has similar concerns, cf. the recent LEAP project
5. Paul Walk (UK Office for Library and Information Networking): concerned with what happens to the all-important role of domain expertise in this world of repurposable services: where is the librarian?
   1. Charlotte Roueché (KCL): learned societies need to play a role in assuring quality and trust in open publications
   2. Dunning: institutional repositories also need to play a role in long-term archiving. Licensing is an essential component of preservation—open licenses are required for maximum distribution of archival copies
   3. Thomas Breuel (DFKI): versioning tools and infrastructure for decentralised repositories exist (e.g. Mercurial)
   4. Fuchs: we also need mechanisms for finding, searching, identifying, and enabling data in these massive collections
   5. Walk: we need to be able to inform scholars when new data in their field of interest appears via feeds of some kind

(Disclaimer: this is only one blogger’s partial summary. The workshop organisers will publish an official report on this event.)

Million Books Workshop, Friday, March 14, 2008, Imperial College London.

In the afternoon, the first of two round table discussions concerned the uses to which massive text digitisation could be put by the curators of various collections.

The panellists were:

• Dirk Obbink, Oxyrhynchus Papyri project, Oxford
• Peter Robinson, Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing, Birmingham
• Michael Popham, Oxford University Library Services
• Charlotte Roueché, EpiDoc and Prosopography of the Byzantine World, King’s College London
• Keith May, English Heritage

Chaired by Gregory Crane (Perseus Digital Library), who kicked off by asking the question:

If you had all of the texts relevant to your field—scanned as page images and OCRed, but nothing more—what would you want to do with them?

1. Roueché: analyse the texts in order to compile references toward a history of citation (and therefore a history of education) in later Greek and Latin sources.
2. Obbink: generate a queriable corpus
3. Robinson: compare editions and manuscripts for errors, variants, etc.
   1. Crane: machine annotation might achieve results not possible with human annotation (especially at this scale), particularly if learning from a human-edited example
   2. Obbink: identification of text from lost manuscripts and witnesses toward generation of stemmata. Important question: do we also need to preserve apparatus criticus?
4. May: perform detailed place and time investigations into a site preparatory to performing any new excavations
   1. Crane: data mining and topic modelling could lead to the machine-generation of an automatically annotated gazeteer, prosopography, dictionary, etc.
5. Popham: metadata on digital texts scanned by Google not always accurate or complete; not to academic standards: the scanning project is for accessibility, not preservation
   1. Roueché: Are we talking about purely academic exploitation, or our duty as public servants to make our research accessible to the wider public?
   2. May: this is where topic analysis can make texts more accessible to the non-specialist audience
   3. Brian Fuchs (ICL): insurance and price comparison sites, Amazon, etc., have sophisticated algorithms for targeting web materials at particular audiences
   4. Obbink: we will also therefore need translations of all of these texts if we are reaching out to non-specialists; will machine translation be able to help with this?
   5. Roueché: and not just translations into English, we need to make these resources available to the whole world.

(Disclaimer: this summary is partial and partisan, reflecting those elements of the discussion that seemed most interesting and relevant to this blogger. The workshop organisers will publish an official report on this event presently.)