The New York Times has a front page story today under the title, “As Interest Fades in the Humanities, Colleges Worry.” I hated most everything about this story: the assumption that students choose either science or the humanities, the over-hyped crisis rhetoric, the manufactured horse race . . . BUT buried in there is a note about classics students at Stanford using a text annotation program called RapGenius, which is interesting.

Susan Stephens at Stanford has a class called “Teaching Classics in the Digital Age” that deals with many aspects of pedagogy and research in classics. Jeremy Dean of RapGenius was visiting the class one day this month, and the NYT reporter attended as well, hence the inclusion of this in the story.

The attractive thing about RapGenius is its large community of users, and also its flexibility for annotation. You can annotate by sentence, phrase, word, whatever, and easily add images, audio, and other media to the pop up annotations. Though originally designed for obsessive rap fans to analyze lyrics, the potential of the tool for other branches of the humanities is obvious, and recognized clearly by the company. They hired Dean to be their humanities specialist, and they are developing an alternate brand for the same tool, Poetry Genius.

Oh, and it collects statistics on lyrics and creates effortless visualizations, a la Google Ngrams. Here is the graph for the occurrence of the words “love,” “hate,” and “rhyme.”

As for the humanities crisis, don’t ask a Latinist about that. We’ve taken some hits in the last century or so. On the other hand, my friends in math and science fields certainly don’t seem to feel that everything is ducky in their disciplines. It is a struggle to get students to substantively engage in science and math, just as it is a struggle for us in the humanities. Students are often utilitarian in their thinking, and this should be no cause for surprise or lament. We should use every tool at our disposal to promote learning and intelligent living in all disciplines, and to create connections between, say, computer science and humanities. This is an attractive enterprise to some computer scientists of my acquaintance as well.

Prof. Stephens’ course is a model of this kind of forward, engaged thinking. The description of the course goals lays it out nicely:

This Workshop is predicated on four assumptions: (1) on-line teaching is here to stay; (2) within the career trajectory of those of you who are now graduate students it will replace or force essential modification of traditional classroom and book-centered learning; (3) the field is growing exponentially in tools and sophistication of applications; and (4) we do not all come to these emerging technologies with equal expertise. For those of us with low technical skills, the challenges may often seem to outweigh the rewards.

Therefore the Workshop has as its primary goal to allow us to gain familiarity with a broad range of digital materials currently available for teaching classical subjects (1) initially by engaging with experienced users or designers of various digital media, then (2) by experimenting ourselves with a selection of sites in order to evaluate what works in various teaching environments. You should learn how and in what ways a medium can enhance (or distract from) learning, gain familiarity with various ways of assessing the success of various media in teaching, and understand issues of intellectual property, copyright, and plagiarism. A secondary goal is to facilitate thinking collaboratively about pedagogical issues and to encourage departmental sharing of individual digital classroom materials.

The course is a mix of presentations about all kinds of online resources and digital tools, along with a practicum component in which students create lessons using them. All along there is searching discussion of how to marry tools to learning goals in an intelligent way. RapGenius may not be your cup of tea, but the kind of dialogue going on at Stanford among humanists and those in other fields about digital tools and humanistic methods is exciting, forward thinking, and unfortunately missed by the big media outlets. But then again, I guess that’s why we have blogs.

DCC board member Wille Major of Louisiana State University  sends along this handy guide to typing polytonic Greek in a Windows environment—no special keyboard required.

TYPING ANCIENT (POLYTONIC) GREEK
in a Windows environment

This is a practical guide to setting up Windows to type ancient (polytonic) Greek. It does not require you to purchase or install any software, just to activate a feature in Windows.

Step 1:  Activate polytonic Greek in Windows

Setup instructions for Windows Vista or Windows 7
1. Go to the Control Panel.
2. Select Clock, Language and Region (or Regional and Language Options).
3. Select Change keyboards and other input methods.
4. A window will appear. Select Change Keyboards button.
5. A window will appear with three tabs. The “general” tab is open by default. Click the Add button.
6. You will see a list of keyboards based on languages. Scroll down and click on Greek, and then select Greek Polytonic keyboard.
7. Click OK on this tab and then all the previous tabs until you are back in the Control Panel. Close the Control Panel.

Setup instructions for Windows XP
1. Go to the Control Panel.
2. Double-click Regional and Language Options.
3. Click the Languages tab,
4. Click Details under “Text Services and Input Languages”
5. Click Add under “Installed Services”
6. You will see a list of keyboards based on languages. Click on Greek Polytonic from the list.
7. Click OK on this tab and then all the previous tabs until you are back in the Control Panel. Close the Control Panel

After you activate Polytonic Greek, you should have a language button or taskbar similar to one of the images below.
• The English keyboard is represented by the letters EN.
• The Greek keyboard is represented by EL.
By clicking on this symbol, you can toggle between the English and Greek keyboard at any time! You can move and manipulate the appearance of the bar if you wish.

If you want, you can pull up keyboard images and type directly on them.
• Go to START:
• select ALL PROGRAMS
• select ACCESSORIES
• select ACCESSBILITY (or EASE of ACCESS)
• select “On-screen Keyboard”

IMPORTANT: No matter how you input polytonic Greek, you must use a Unicode font. If the basic alphabet and vowels with acute accents appear correctly, but other accents and breathings do not appear correctly, it is because the font you are using is not consistent with Unicode. There are many Unicode fonts available, but a good one that comes with Windows is “Palatino Linotype.”

Step 2. The keyboard layout of the Greek alphabet and punctuation

These layouts show the placement of the letters. This arrangement is the same for Ancient and Modern Greek keyboards. The keys in yellow will be used for placing polytonic diacritical marks:

Punctuation

• The period and comma are the same as on the standard English keyboard.
• Half-stop: hold the <shift> key & right-hand <alt> key, then type the ] key: type <shift>&<right alt> ]
  → ·

• Question mark: type q <space>
  → ;

remember: “q for question”!
Make sure to type the space after the q. Otherwise, if you type a vowel next, it will put an accent on the vowel. (See below.)

• For the acute accent, type the semi-colon (;) key, then the vowel: for example: type ; a
  → ά

The Dickinson College Department of Classical Studies will sponsor a full day Saturday Workshop of interest to teachers and students of the classical world and of archaeology.

Ancient Corinth and Roman City Planning

Saturday, November 16, 2013, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Tome Hall Room 115.

Speakers:

Dr. David Gilman Romano, Karabots Professor of Greek Archaeology at the School of Anthropology, University of Arizona, and Director of the Corinth Computer Project and the Archaeological Mapping Lab

Dr. Nicholas Stapp, Director of Geospatial Research at the Archaeological Mapping Lab at the University of Arizona

There will be four hour-long sessions, with time for questions and discussion. Lunch will be provided. The workshop is free of charge, but to order materials and food we need to have an accurate count of attendees. To register please contact Terri Blumenthal at blumentt@dickinson.edu by November 10, 2013.

Description:

When the former Greek city of Corinth was settled as a Roman colony by Julius Caesar in 44 BC Roman land surveyors were called upon to lay out the urban as well as the rural aspects of the new colony. In the 70s AD when a second Roman colony was founded there, again the agrimensores were involved in new organization of the city and landscape. The agrimensores were Roman land surveyors responsible for the planning and measurement of cities and landscapes all over the Roman world. They were a professional group, usually a part of the Roman army, and we know a good deal about their work from a compilation of ancient texts known as the Corpus Agrimensorum Romanorum. The Corpus was originally compiled in the fourth or fifth century AD, but includes texts as early as the first century AD. These texts give us substantial information about the training of the agrimensores and their day-to-day activities as well as some of the practical issues that they faced in the field.

Since 1988 a research team from the Mediterranean Section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania has been involved in making a computerized architectural and topographical survey of the Roman colony of Corinth. The leader of this team, Prof. David Gilman Romano (Karabots Professor of Greek Archaeology at the School of Anthropology, University of Arizona), will present a workshop on the results of the Corinth Computer Project, http://corinthcomputerproject.org/ as they relate to the ancient written evidence for Roman city planning. He will be joined by Dr. Nicholas Stapp who has worked with Dr. Romano on the Corinth Computer Project since 1995. He is an archaeologist and an expert in the use of new emerging technologies in higher education and research.

In the workshop participants will learn some of the Latin terms that refer to Roman surveying and city and land planning and, in addition, they will learn about high tech methods utilized in the research: electronic total station survey, digital cartography and remote sensing, utilizing air photos, balloon photos and satellite images, all in the study of an ancient city. The planning of the urban and rural aspects of two Roman Colonies at Corinth are outlined in detail, including some of the social, economic and political implications of these foundations.

Anyone with an interest in Roman culture and archaeology; digital cartography, GIS, and spatial analysis; ancient and modern surveying techniques; or city-planning and urban design will find this a rewarding workshop.

Funding for this workshop is provided by the Roberts Fund for Classical Studies at Dickinson College.

With apologies to the good folks a Classical Outlook (the journal of the American Classical League), I wanted to make more widely available Sharon Kazmierki’s favorable review of Paul Hudson’s SPQR app for iPad in the latest issue (print only). We need more reviews of apps and other digital resources by experienced teachers and scholars like Sharon. Paul lives in Bath, England, and is not a subscriber to CO, so this is partly for his benefit, but also for anyone interested. Paul has plans to include some DCC content in SPQR in future. He is a great example of an app developer who is an active part of the community he is trying digitally to serve, so I wanted to support his good work. Sorry about the coaster in the shot . . .

CONVENTICULUM DICKINSONIENSE     July 7-13, 2014               

The Conventiculum Dickinsoniense is an immersion seminar in active Latin. It is specifically designed for all cultivators of Latin who wish to gain some ability to express themselves ex-tempore in correct Latin. A wide range of people can benefit from the seminar: professors in universities, teachers in secondary schools, graduate students, undergraduates, and other lovers of Latin, provided that anyone who considers applying has a solid understanding of the grammatical essentials of the Latin language. A minimum requirement for participation is knowledge of Latin grammar and the ability to read a Latin text of average complexity, even if using a dictionary often.  But no previous experience in speaking Latin is necessary. Sessions will be aimed at helping participants to increase their ability to use Latin effectively in spoken discourse and to understand others speaking in Latin. After the first evening reception (in which any language may be spoken),  Latin will be the language used throughout the seminar. Participants will be involved in intensive activity each day from morning until early evening (with breaks for lunch and mid-afternoon pauses). They will experience Latin conversations on topics ranging from themes in literature and art all the way to the routines and activities of daily life, and will enjoy the benefits of reading and discussing texts in the target language. Activities will involve both written and spoken discourse, both of which engage the active faculties of expression, and each of which is complementary to the other. The seminar will not merely illustrate how active Latin can be a useful tool for teachers, it will show how developing an active facility in Latin can directly and personally benefit any cultivator of Latin who wishes to acquire a more instinctive command of the language and a more intimate relationship with Latin writings.

Moderators:

Prof. Milena Minkova, University of Kentucky

Prof. Terence Tunberg, University of Kentucky

We can accept a maximum number of 40 participants. Deadline for applications is May 1, 2014. The participation fee for each participant will $300. The fee includes lodging in a single room in campus housing (and please note that lodging will be in a student residence near the site of the sessions), two meals (breakfast and lunch) per day, as well as the opening dinner, and a special cookout at the Dickinson farm for one night. That also covers the facilities fee, which allows access to the gym, fitness center, and the library, as well as internet access. The $300 fee does not include the cost of dinners (except for the opening dinner and the cookout at the Dickinson farm), and does not include the cost of travel to and from the seminar. Dinners can easily be had at restaurants within walking distance from campus.  Please keep in mind that the participation fee of $300, once it has been received by the seminar’s organizers, is not refundable.  This is an administrative necessity. 

For more information and application instructions write to:

Professor Terence Tunberg /

email: terence.tunberg@gmail.com

photo: Mary Lou Burke via flickr

Dickinson Summer Latin Workshop

July 13-19, 2014

The Dickinson Summer Latin Workshop is intended for teachers of Latin, as a way to refresh the mind through study of an extended Latin text, and to share experiences and ideas with Latinists and teachers. Sometimes those who are not currently engaged in teaching have participated as well, including retired teachers and those working towards teacher certification.

In 2014 we will read selections from Lucretius’ De rerum natura.

In a sometimes lyrical, sometimes argumentative style, Lucretius argues that all matter is composed of atoms, and describes their movements (Books 1 and 2). He says that the soul itself is made of atoms, and is therefore mortal, and thus that we should not fear death (Book 3). He discusses the theory of sense perception and emotion (Book 4), of cosmology and the origin of culture, and argues that the world is not divinely made and governed and that the gods are not to be feared (Books 5 and 6). Throughout, Lucretius’ goals are both scientific and therapeutic.

Moderators:

Christopher Francese (Dickinson College)

Wells Hansen (Assistant Editor, Amphora, formerly of Milton Academy)

Participants must have a firm grasp of the basics of Latin grammar and a solid working vocabulary. But we aim at a mixture of levels and experience.

Deadline for applications is May 1, 2014. The participation fee for each participant will $300. The fee covers lodging, three meals per day, the facilities fee, which allows access to the gym, fitness center, and the library, as well as wireless and wired internet access while on campus. The $300 fee does not cover the costs of books or travel. The recommended book is W.E. Leonard and S.B. Smith, The Latin Text of Lucretius (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1942). Please keep in mind that the participation fee of $300, once it has been received by the seminar’s organizers, is not refundable. This is an administrative necessity.

Lodging: accommodations will be in a student residence hall near the site of the sessions. The building features suite-style configurations of two double rooms sharing a private bathroom, or one double and one single room sharing a private bathroom.

The first event will be an introductory dinner at 6:00 p.m., Sunday, July 13. The final session ends at noon on Saturday, July 19, with lunch to follow. Sessions will meet from 8:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. each day, with the afternoons left free for preparation.

TO APPLY: please contact Mrs. Terri Blumenthal, blumentt@dickinson.edu by the application deadline May 1, 2014. The fee for 2014 is $300, due in a check made out to Dickinson College, by the fee deadline June 1, 2014.

For more information please contact Prof. Chris Francese (francese@dickinson.edu).

Neil Coffee of the University at Buffalo sends along these comments on a recent post where I suggested that the APA might take the lead in organizing peer review of digital projects in classical studies. Neil is the director of the superb Tesserae Project, a freely available tool for detecting allusions in Greek and Latin literature, and one of the organizers of the Digital Classics Association conference that happened this past April.

Thanks to Chris for raising these issues, and Sam’s efforts as information architect are to be commended. There’s a lot to be said here, but I’ll limit myself to some remarks on peer review and mention of some further venues for dialogue.

Digital_Humanities, a recent survey available free online, is helpful in providing the most specific standards for digital peer review I’ve seen. The section “How to Evaluate Digital Scholarship” (pages 128-129), includes the following:

Digital projects should be peer-reviewed by scholars in fields who are able to assess the project’s contribution to knowledge and situate it within the relevant intellectual landscape. Peer review can happen formally through letters of solicitation but can also be assessed through online forums, citations, and discussions in scholarly venues, by grants received from foundations and other sources of funding, and through public presentations of the project at conferences and symposia. (129)

The first Digital Classics Association conference in April 2013 did discuss peer review in a concluding session. One proposal was to explore whether the editors of BMCR would be interested in reviving a standalone Bryn Mawr Electronic Resources Review, or, if not, whether something similar could be established under other auspices. As it turns out, the editors of BMCR and the late Ross Scaife reflected in 2005 on the difficulty of finding qualified and interested reviewers. I don’t know how much the circumstances have changed, but it might be worth giving the idea fresh consideration.

Starting in January 2014, DCA will host a series of sessions at the APA / AIA that will report on ongoing research, but are also aimed at building a broader understanding of digital classics and associated issues. Proposed topics for future sessions are “Making Meaning from Data,” “Digital Resources for Teaching and Outreach,” and “Digital Classics and the Changing Profession.” The 2014 session, “Getting Started with Digital Classics,” is designed to introduce members to the current state of digital scholarship in classics. We are also planning a reception at the 2014 meetings to give a space for informal discussions. I invite readers of Chris’s blog to come to one or both of these events in Chicago and make their voices heard.

Academic professional associations are playing key roles in making sense of the changes being wrought upon intellectual life and academia by the advent of digital publishing and media. As gatekeepers and upholders of standards they inject important notes of critique and caution into the too often hype-filled world of digital humanities. And by pronouncing on such things as citation practices and evaluation techniques they can help everyone navigate in the quite uncharted waters in which we find ourselves. So every year I read with great interest the statements by the candidates for leadership positions in the American Philological Association. Here’s my short annual round-up of where things seem to be going, based on the candidates’ statements. For further background and context, see last year’s post.

At the moment, the APA has nothing like the Modern Language Association’s Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media. The American Historical Association has been proactively sponsoring discussions about digital methods in the research and teaching of history at its annual conference. This is not really happening at the APA either, so far. The focus for the APA  has been the building of some kind of online gateway or portal to knowledge about the classical world. A substantial amount of money was raised to make this happen. But the vision is still very much under negotiation.

Marilyn Skinner, a Latinist and candidate for APA President, puts it as follows:

With the Gateway Campaign concluded, designing and implementing the digital portal that was its primary objective is now the APA’s most immediate internal challenge. The recent establishment of a “Cabinet” to weigh strategic planning initiatives will be crucial for setting organizational policies. Studying, in collaboration with other academic societies, the feasibility of a Digital Latin Library Project giving access to all Latin texts presently available on the Internet is a welcome first practical step, because on-line availability of scholarly editions of ancient Greek and Roman primary sources is an essential need. The APA President and the Board of Directors must play major roles in furthering discussion of how this digital gateway is to be structured and what features will most greatly benefit all its users.

John Marincola, a Greek historian and the other candidate for President, sounds a note of caution regarding large digital initiatives:

As many have noted, the success of the capital campaign offers new opportunities for the APA; but it’s important to remember that the APA has only a small (if very dedicated) staff, and relies greatly on the work of its officers, committees, and members. So even with this new endowment, we need to proceed carefully with projects that make sense for an organization of our size. The current state of technological change mandates a flexible approach, since today’s innovations can be outdated two years hence. That means that we must be committed but nimble.

The key unresolved question is that of audience. Is the gateway to serve scholars, who want reliable textual editions (as Skinner says), or is it  for students, who want reliable but concise scholarly information about topics they are interested in? Marincola is undoubtedly right that in the long run the APA is just not staffed in a way that would allow it to make a better Perseus, or a better version of the classical articles in Wikipedia. 

What can the APA contribute? Probably not vast new reference works or digital tools. That’s Gregory Crane’s job, and he’s got some very exciting and well-funded new initiatives on the way. What the APA can contribute is something that digital humanities desperately needs: peer review. Solid, rigorous peer review is the something that digital projects need, that print publications have as a matter of course, and that consumers of digital projects would rely on to tell the wheat from the chaff. Only peer review will ensure  the long-term rise in quality of digital projects, and motivate scholars to spend time on open-access digital projects.

Yelena Baraz, a candidate for the Publications and Research Committee, seems to understand this:

On the one hand, it would be useful to produce a set of guidelines for members (to be updated regularly) about the status of various existing publishing venues. On the other hand, the committee may well wish to be proactive by drawing up a plan for the kinds of ventures, both digital and traditional, that it thinks should be promoted and by seeking out partnerships to help do so.

This seems to see digital publishing as analogous to print journal publishing, with “venues” that need to be monitored. But she’s got the right idea: quality control, guidance. Laurel Fulkerson, the other candidate for the Publications and Research Committee, while she acknowledges that “the world of publishing is changing, drastically,” is more inclined to try to find ways to safeguard the status of the traditional monograph.

At the same time, most authority figures in academia (e.g., tenure committees) remain attached to physical manifestations of research, and many of us like writing books, so it is imperative not to overanticipate the pace of change. To me, the discontinuation of the monograph series is regrettable, and, if it does not make sense to bring it back, I would be very interested in replacing it with a series whose scope is very clearly defined, and well-promoted.

Fulkerson is of course right that many of us like writing books. Me too! There’s no either/or proposition here. But the overwhelming preference for books among academics has a lot to do with the lack of regular channels of peer review for non-books, and the associated quality control, editing support, and prestige that go with that. When it come to the APA’s own journal, TAPA, she talks rather vaguely of “blending more traditional [journal articles] with more innovative ways of making scholarship available.” But to focus on the delivery method (paid print vs. open electronic) is to mistake the central role of the professional association: not to anticipate and manage publishing trends, but to foster networks of peer review for scholarship, no matter how it appears.

So what would I like to see? MLA-style guidelines, for sure. More talk at the national meetings, as with the AHA, definitely. But I think the best thing the APA could do is to create a digital brand, kind of like what Anvil Academic is trying to do more broadly in different humanities fields. No massive funding scheme needed, just a merry band of hard-nosed scholars willing to be honest about which digital projects are worthy to be issued under the APA name (whatever that name ends up being–a name change is also on the ballot).