Digital Classics Association

Contact: Neil Coffee, University at Buffalo, SUNY, ncoffee@buffalo.edu

Organizer: Neil Coffee, University at Buffalo, SUNY

The increasing importance of digital scholarship raises substantial questions about how we evaluate both it and traditional scholarship. The SCS now fulfills a critical function by providing reviews of digital projects on its blog. Should there be more such venues? What about reviews of smaller contributions? For personnel processes, the SCS has issued a statement in support of the value of digital work in professional evaluation. How should similar statements at other institutions be formulated, and how can they be put into practice? How should we distinguish in evaluation processes among different forms of digital publications, from tools, to online primary texts, to articles in open journals? In projects that are often collaborative, how should credit be given to project participants? How do we give proper weight to micro-publications, contributions to code, student contributions, superseded contributions, and other non-traditional contributions to scholarship? For granting agencies, on what basis do they review proposals for digital projects?

More broadly, does the capacity for online publication have consequences for the traditional peer-review model of publication and professional credentialing? What is the role of trust in traditional modes of evaluation (e.g., trust in print book publishers and journals)? Do we need to establish similar levels of trust in online and digital work and evaluations of them? If so, how?

Abstracts are invited addressing these and other questions dealing with the evaluation of digital work, with traditional standards for evaluation in the new digital context, or both. Presentations might come from scholars or students who have produced digital work that has been or should be evaluated. They might come from administrators at colleges and universities who have faced the question of evaluating digital or traditional scholarship. They might come from representatives of grant funding agencies. Or from others as well.

Anonymous abstracts of no more than 400 words should be sent to digitalclassicsassociation@gmail.com, with identifying information in the email. Abstracts will be refereed anonymously in accordance with SCS regulations. Submitters should confirm in their emails that they are SCS members in good standing. Abstracts should follow the formatting guidelines of the instructions for individual abstracts on the SCS website. The deadline for the submission of abstracts is Friday, March 1, 2019.

Announcement on SCS website: https://classicalstudies.org/annual-meeting/2020/151/dca-evaluating-scholarship-digital-and-traditional

AIA / SCS 2019 Call for Papers: “Reconnecting the Classics”

Digital Classics Association
AIA / SCS 2018 Call for Papers

“Digital Textual Editions and Corpora”

Contact: Neil Coffee, University at Buffalo, SUNY, ncoffee@buffalo.edu

Organizer: Neil Coffee, University at Buffalo, SUNY

The discovery, editing, and publication of classical texts has been a foundational activity in the study of antiquity. The creation of born-digital editions of classical texts and of digital textual corpora has led to a resurgence of interest in the curation and editing of texts, so that they can be made more broadly accessible online and enhanced with features only possible through digital representation. The aim of this panel is to inform the SCS membership and engage them in a discussion regarding the current state of the art in the curation and publication of digital editions and corpora, as well as likely future directions. Abstracts are invited in two complementary areas. Scholars with experience working with contemporary digital editions and corpora are invited to discuss their experience. This might involve creating a digital edition or corpus, or it might involve a research project that intensively engaged with one. Scholars who have set up digital corpora and/or editing environments, or who work on conventions or other software that underlie such corpora are invited to relate their experience as well. Papers can address completed work, but can also be devoted partly or entirely to ongoing work, problems, or challenges.

Anonymous abstracts of no more than 400 words should be sent to digitalclassicsassociation@gmail.com, with identifying information in the email. Abstracts will be refereed anonymously in accordance with SCS regulations. Submitters should confirm in their emails that they are AIA / SCS members in good standing. Abstracts should follow the formatting guidelines of the instructions for individual abstracts on the SCS website. The deadline for the submission of abstracts is March 1, 2017.

– See more at: https://classicalstudies.org/annual-meeting/2018/149/call-papers-%E2%80%9Cdigital-textual-editions-and-corpora%E2%80%9D#sthash.HW6jumzX.dpuf

The DCA will be hosting a panel entitled “Digital Classics and the Changing Profession” at this year’s meetings of the Society for Classical Studies (SCS) and Archaeological Institute of America at the Sheraton Centre Hotel in Toronto. It will be held as Session 24 on Friday, January 6 from 1:45 – 4:45 p.m., with the following agenda (titles link to abstracts):

• Gregory Crane (Leipzig University/Tufts University) “Greco-Roman Studies and Digital Classics“
• Bruce Robertson (Mount Allison University) “Working in Digital Humanities and Classics at the Small Undergraduate University“
• Marie-Claire Beaulieu (Tufts University) “Digital Work, Student Research, and the Tenure Track“
• Christopher Blackwell (Furman University) “Philology, Technology, Collaboration: 16 Years of the Homer Multitext“
• Christopher Johanson (UCLA) “DH 101 (Classics)“
• Neil Coffee (SUNY – Buffalo) Response
• General Discussion

Perseids will be offering a free treebanking workshop just prior to the SCS conference, led by Marie-Claire Beaulieu and Bob and Vanessa Gorman. The workshop will be held January 4-5th, 2017, 9a.m. – 5p.m. at the The Westin Harbour Castle, 1 Harbour Square in Toronto.

It will include hands-on seminars on how to use the tools available via Perseids, in particular the Alpheios Translation Alignment editor and the Arethusa Treebank editor. Treebanking (morpho-syntactic diagramming) allows a user to identify all the dependency relationships in a sentence as well as the morphology of each word. Translation alignments allow a user to identify corresponding words between an original text and its translation. With both methods, the resulting data is automatically compiled in an xml file which can be further queried for research.

Register here and find preparatory training videos here.

There will be an all-day workshop entitled “Ancient MakerSpaces: Digital Tools for Classical Scholarship” at the SCS Meeting, Saturday, January 7 from 8:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. The presenters will be as follows:

• (8:30-9:00) Thomas Beasley (Bucknell University) “Visualizing Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean”
• (9:10-9:50) Rodney Ast (University of Heidelberg) “Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri”
• (9:55-10:45) Rebecca Benefiel (Washington and Lee University) “Ancient Graffiti Project”
• (10:50-11:35) Sebastian Heath (New York University) “Make Your Own 3D Models”
• (11:40-12:25) Ryan Horne (University of North Carolina) “Make Your Own Map”
• (12:30-1:00) Pramit Chaudhuri (Dartmouth College) and Joseph Dexter (Harvard University) “Phylogenetic Profiling and the Reception of Classical Drama”
• (1:10-1:55) James Gawley (University of Buffalo) “Intertext Mining with Tesserae”
• (2:00-2:45) Bridget Almas (Tufts University) “Perseids: Infrastructure for Research and Collaboration”
• (3:00-4:00) Patrick J. Burns (New York University) Panel Discussion

The growth of the digital humanities is increasingly affecting the professional life of classicists. Job ads have begun to ask for digital humanities experience. Job seekers who have digital skills face an expanded employment landscape, including not only to academic teaching positions, but also post-docs on funded research projects, work at NGOs, and jobs at private technology firms. Graduate students and graduate programs must decide what sort of digital training is necessary for a career. Tenure and promotion evaluators face the challenge of accounting for digital scholarship. Abstracts are invited for presentations addressing how digital methods are changing the shape of the profession in these and other ways, and how students and faculty can respond.

Anonymous abstracts of no more than 400 words should be sent to digitalclassicsassociation@gmail.com, with identifying information in the email.

 Abstracts will be refereed anonymously in accordance with SCS regulations. Submitters should confirm in their emails that they are SCS members in good standing. Abstracts should follow the formatting guidelines of the instructions for individual abstracts on the SCS website. The deadline for the submission of abstracts is March 9, 2016.

Note: All past DCA sessions have been joint colloquia of the Society for Classical Studies and the Archaeological Institute of America. This panel has been initially approved by SCS, with the application for a joint AIA colloquium pending. AIA members are encouraged to submit, though there is no guarantee at this point that the panel will be approved by AIA.

The DCA panel “Digital Resources for Education and Outreach” will take place at the AIA / SCS meetings in San Francisco at the Union Square Hilton on Friday, January 8, from 8-11:30 a.m. The presentations are:

1. Lain Wilson and Jonathan Shea, Dumbarton Oaks
   Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Seals Online Catalogue (20 mins.)

2. Kristina Chew, Rutgers University Online
   Using Online Tools to Teach Classics in a Small or Non-Existent Classics Program (20 mins.)

3. J. Bert Lott, Vassar College
   Collaborative Annotation and Latin Pedagogy (20 mins.)

4. Gwynaeth McIntyre, University of Otago, Melissa Funke, University of British Columbia, and Chelsea Gardner, University of British Columbia
   From Stone to Screen to Classroom

5. Robert Gorman, University of Nebraska–Lincoln
   Dependency Syntax Trees in the Latin 1 Classroom

Neil Coffee, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Response (10 mins.)

General Discussion (40 mins.)

See more at: https://classicalstudies.org/annual-meeting/2016/147/details-paper-sessions#sthash.tpCx8gwD.dpuf

Archaeological Institute of America and the Society for Classical Studies (AIA / SCS) Meetings, January 6-9, San Francisco, CA.

 Digital resources are increasingly opening up new opportunities for classics education and outreach. Some, like MOOCs, have been intensively discussed. The goal of this session is to highlight new and less familiar approaches and encourage reflection on how we can best achieve our educational mission in this changing environment. We now have access to free online language textbooks with exercises. Students can play online games in which they guide animated characters through Roman history. They can also contribute to research by publishing translations and annotations in major online repositories. Papers are invited that introduce these and other sorts of tools and techniques and / or reflect on the present and future use of digital methods for pedagogy and outreach.

 Anonymous abstracts of no more than 400 words should be sent to digitalclassicsassociation@gmail.com, with identifying information in the email. Abstracts will be refereed anonymously by three readers in accordance with SCS regulations. The session will be proposed as a joint AIA / SCS colloquium, so abstracts from members of both societies are welcome. In your email, please confirm that you are an AIA or SCS member in good standing. Abstracts should follow the formatting guidelines of the instructions for individual abstracts on the SCS website. The deadline for the submission of abstracts is 5 p.m. Eastern Time, Monday, March 16, 2015.

Please direct any questions to ncoffee@buffalo.edu.

See this call on the SCS website.

The DCA hosted a successful session on January11 at the 2015 AIA / SCS meetings in New Orleans, entitled “Making Meaning from Data.” The program was as follows (links to presenter materials will be added as they become available):

1. What Do You Do with a Million Links?
   Elton Barker, The Open University; Pau de Soto The University of Southampton; Leif Isaksen, The University of Southampton; Rainer Simon, The Austrian Institute of Technology
   [200+ MB Powerpoint with audio in Google drive folder. Click on “Pelagios” file and download, then play as ppt.]

2. Beyond Rhetoric: The Correlation of Data, Syntax, and Sense in Literary Analysis
   Marie-Claire Beaulieu, J. Matthew Harrington, Bridget Almas, Tufts University

3. Trees into Nets: Network-Based Approaches to Ancient Greek Treebanks
   Francesco Mambrini, Deutsches Archaeologisches Institut Berlin; Marco Passarotti, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan

4. Inside-out and Outside-In: Improving and Extending Digital Models for Archaeological Interpretation
   Rachel Opitz, University of Arkansas; James Newhard, College of Charleston; Marcello Mogetta, University of Michigan; Tyler Johnson, University of Arkansas; Samantha Lash, Brown University; and Matt Naglak, University of Michigan [Two-part presentation. Part 1, on Gabii, slides and publication demo, by Opitz, Mogetta, Johnson, Lash, and Naglak]

5. Enhancing and Extending the Digital Study of Intertextuality
   Joseph P. Dexter, Harvard University; Matteo Romanello, Deutsches Archaeologisches Institut Berlin; Pramit Chaudhuri, Dartmouth College; Tathagata Dasgupta, Harvard University; and Nilesh Tripuraneni, University of Cambridge
   [Two-part presentation. Part 2, on intertextuality in classical secondary literature, by Matteo Romanello]

6. Response
   Neil Coffee, University at Buffalo, SUNY