I’m doing a little study into high quality, but non-academic, and non-institutional web resources. The type of “virtual museums” or online communities created by enthusiasts, producing varied and exhaustive documentation of ephemera. How and why are these created? How do they link to existing institutional resources? and does anyone use – or will admit to using – resources created by amateur enthusiasts in academic research?

There is a wide community that glance at this blog, so if you fancy pausing for a minute do drop me a line with your opinions (m.terras AT ucl.ac.uk), or post your comments below. Any comments made will be anonymised if/when I write this up properly (it depends on what I find out – this is very much preliminary research at the moment).

I really is a fascinating area – more and more virtual communities are emerging that are using platforms such as flickr to host their “virtual archives”, producing exhaustive documentation about topics hitherto ignored by many memory institutions. But I could rant on for ages… here are some questions to think about, if you have a minute. Thanks!

Part A. About you and your research
1. Can you describe your area of academic interest?
2. At what stage of your academic career are you? (student, postgraduate student, research assistant, lecturer, professor, etc)
3. Do you commonly use digital resources (of any nature) in your research? If so, can you provide a few examples of commonly consulted resources?
4. Do you use social networking and Web 2.0 resources, such as Flickr or Wikipedia, outside of your academic work?

Part B. Non-Institutional Digital Resources

5. Have you ever used amateur or non-institutional digital resources to aid you in your research? (This may include wikis, blogs, online collections, virtual museums, Flickr groups, etc).
6. Can you think of any examples where consulting such material has provided information you could not find elsewhere? Or been more efficient than looking for the research in a traditional “memory institution”?
7. Would you trust digital resources that do not come with the imprimatur of an established institution? What are your reactions to such resources?

Part C. Any Further Comments?

8. Is there anything else you would like to add regarding your attitude, views, impressions, concerns, use, interest (or disinterest) in digital resources created by amateurs and enthusiasts?

An afternoon & evening of silent film screenings with piano accompaniment and related talks for silent films with settings in Biblical or Near Eastern Antiquity. As with the first screening of films set in ancient Greece & Rome which we held in January, almost all of the films to be screened in June are not available for purchase in video or DVD format, and are rarely shown in cinemas. They survive as viewing copies in film archives. The event is open to the public and admission is free. ALL ARE WELCOME.

Monday 22 June 2009,
at UCL Bloomsbury Theatre, 15 Gordon Street, London, WC1H 0AH

More info here: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/GrandLat/newsandevents/events/silentcinema

(Unfortunately I’ll be in the states. bah.)

“We can try a little experiment. Let us resort to the fiction of programming an information transducer, a machine to read [ancient] texts. While so far only human beings have learned it, it is equally possible, and may one day be tried, to teach this skill to a machine …”
Erica Reiner (1973) “How We Read Cuneiform Texts.” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 25: 3 -58, p.6.

(and see our project: http://esad.classics.ox.ac.uk/)

Great video about digital preservation, in a Ren and Stimpy stylie:

I have a real soft spot for chancing across things written about technological change prior to, say, the 1960s or 1970s. I dont mean things like “we’ll all be living on the moon, wearing reflective suits!” but asides made in academic texts about the state of affairs then, that take on a whole new meaning when you realise the Internet was just around the corner. Take this for example, from Clarke, M. L. (1959), “Classical Education in Britain 1500-1900”, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 175-6.

We have moved still further from the Ancient World. In literature and the arts we have seen a startling break with tradition, and above all the technological revolution which we are witnessing is transforming our lives and insensibly affecting our outlook, encouraging us to live in the present, judging everything by the standard of technical efficiency and assuming that the latest is always the best. Descartes compared the study of antiquity to foreign travel; it was useful, he said, to know something of the manners of different nations, but when too much time was spent in travelling, men became strangers to their own country ‘and the overcurious in the customs of the past are generally ignorant of those of the present’. Today, there is very little danger of living in the past…

Lovely.

Great story about breaking recaptcha to manipulate online polls. [link] (Thanks, Duncs!)

I experienced my own interesting Digital Fail this week – which probably shows more about my own search habits than faults in Digital Library structure.

I’m just finishing up that chapter for Gabby and Simon, which is about interdisciplinarity and the Digital Classicist. So, as well as talking about disciplines, and learning, and interdisciplinarity, at some stage you have to look at the history of classics as a University discipline.

But could I find much about it on my usual online searches, and searches of online catalogues? Turns out that “classics” is “history” in a lot of catalogues. The searches turned up thousands, if not millions of hits. Noise Noise Noise. Impossible to find the gem I needed in the midst of it*

As I said – probably says more about my own scattergun searching techniques, and I’m pushed for time at the moment. So off I go to the actual library, and ask an actual librarian, and she directs me to an actual room, and I comb the actual shelves, and I find an actual book!

How very retro. And I wonder what else I’ve been missing the last few years that I’ve relied more and more heavily on catalogues and online searches…

* The book I was looking for was “Classical Education in Britain 1500-1900, by M. L. Clarke. (CUP) But I didnt know it was called that when searching for it. Has an interesting 2 page chapter on the “new universities”: such as University College London and Kings College London. And how their teaching will never be up to scratch…

Juliet: Fakn death. C U Latr.

Romeo: gud plan.

Interesting comment in the NY Times on the affect modern day communication technology is having in plot and suspense in literature and film. [link]

…. Gabby and Simon, I’m working on that book chapter for you.

Promise.

The (very generous) maternity leave laws in the UK stipulate that you can have ten “keeping in touch” days with your work whilst on leave (which then get tacked on as extra holiday to your period of leave… and the holiday you accrue whilst on leave… did I mention the word generous?) Anyway, I’ve now got to make a note of what I did in my ten “keeping in touch” days for my back to work meeting with my boss next week.

So I thought I’d point you to some of the things of interest:

1. I chased the book, Digital Images for the Information Professional, through from submission (just before I went off on leave) to publication. Heck, I even designed the cover myself. And no, its not fun to go over the proofs with a fine tooth comb in less than a week when you have an 8 week old baby to look after full time, in case anyone would think it was a good idea.
2. I edited, alongside Greg Crane of the Perseus Project, a fantastic special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly called “Changing the Center of Gravity: Transforming Classical Studies Through Cyberinfrastructure” in memory of Ross Scaife. I should have mentioned it before here: a really provocative and strong collection of essays about where digital classicists are going, and what classics will be like in ten years time.
3. I saw a paper, written with Paul Gooding, through revisions and through to publication: “‘Grand Theft Archive’: a quantitative analysis of the current state of computer game preservation” in The International Journal of Digital Curation.
4. I took part in the Day in the Life of Digital Humanities blogging experiment.
5. I got the ball rolling, with Brent Nelson, for a couple of volumes on Digitizing Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture. Hopefully, the contributors should be sending in essays soon – and we are looking for a quick turnaround (ie publication within the next year).
6. I went to Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts Conference, for the afternoon, to see a paper about the VERA project.
7. I answered a tonne of email. As usual.

There were other things not really of relevance outwith my immediate community – Digital Humanities Town Meeting, Computing Science Away Day, visit to the eSAD project at Oxford. Involved in a few grant applications. Wrote a book chapter. Got a couple of papers accepted for conferences. You know, the usual.

The eagle eyed amongst you will probably spot that this probably took up more than ten days of my time. Well, I didnt mind. For a start, it kept my mind ticking over (and I was completely housebound for over 4 months, you have to do something lest you go crazy). And I’m not at all phased about being back at work… my mind has never really been away…