Ecole Normale Supérieure, 45 Rue d’Ulm, Paris

As the number of publishing, mapping, and data management platforms proliferate, many technical and methodological incompatibilities may also appear, endangering the ideal of open communication. Scholars need practi- cal methods to connect them so that information can efficiently flow across them to generate new scholarship. Removing potential walls between narra- tives, primary data, and maps holds particular importance for the spatial hu- manities. As the publishing world shifts from static, paper-based to interac- tive, online platforms need to make sure that established practices for evaluating and disseminating humanities endeavors are continued, even as new publication methods are encouraged. One strategy for meeting this strategy is loose coupling. By it researchers can loosely integrate data syn- thesis, curation, and dissemination between already well-established data- bases, content management, and publishing systems. In loosely coupled sys- tems, components share only a limited set of (usually simple) assumptions. The projects discussed in the panel use a more evolved type of “loose cou- pling” which relies on open APIs and data feeds (RSS and JSON) to send information back and forth. Feeds are streams of data units, containing de- scriptions of the content found on a site that is broadcast by a site widely and can be picked up and reused by any other site as it were its own data. In pro- posing “loose coupling” for integrating digital humanities projects we advo- cate for an evolutionary design philosophy, since components that have very few dependencies on one another can evolve independently.

Keywords: Publishing, Data, Storage, Maps, Loose Copuling, API, Platform

Panelists

Catherine Dossin, Purdue University

Originally from France, Catherine Dossin received a Master’s degree with Very High Honor from the Sorbonne with a thesis devoted to André Derain and The Return to Classicism, 1880-1940, and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation entitled The Stories of the Western Artworld, 1936-1986, uncovered gaps between the US, French, German, and Italian accounts of post-War art, and tried to interpret these differences and explain how one particular view came to prevail as the story of Western contemporary art.

Beatrice Joyeux Prunel, ENS

Associate Professor for Contemporary Art and Associate Professor of History. Specializes in history and historical sociology of avant-garde artis- tic internationalization, general history of art, arts and cultural transfers, quantitative art history, and geography of art. Current research: the inter- national market of Surrealism (1924-1940).

Lea Saint-Raymond, ENS, Doctoral Candidate

Marcel Oliver, ENS, Post-Doctoral Fellow

EAGLE2014, September 30, 2014

Ecole Normale Supérieure, 45 Rue d’Ulm, Paris

The Linked Open Data (LOD) approach, which entails the use URIs and Semantic Web technologies to publish datasets in machine-readable formats under open licences, has become increasingly popular to digital humanists as a way of breaking away from the specter of the infamous ‘data silo’. The success of the Pelagios project has demonstrated how classical geographic information can be used to bring together a wide variety of projects while the newly founded SNAP:DRGN initiative aims to provide a similar service for prosopographical and onomastic data. At the same time the use of CIDOC CRM/FRBR-OO has grown in cultural heritage and archaeological domains resulting in significant collections of linked-data ready material just waiting to be connected. The ancient world offers a real opportunity to enhance understanding on both the technological and humanistic sides of the digital humanities. This panel brings together a group of international pioneers and experts from a range of academic disciplines and professional backgrounds to discuss the role of LOD in the scholarship of the ancient world as well as current general best practices with a specific focus on the themes of:

– Place

– People and people-like entities

– Texts as evidence

– Interoperability and the exploitation of structured data.

The panel will also address the problem of data creation by and the communication and dissemination of ideas to both non-technical and non- specialist audiences.

Keywords: LOD, Places, People, vocabularies, semantic technologies.

Panelists

Gabriel Bodard, King’s College London

Researcher in Digital Epigraphy in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. He has worked with EpiDoc for over a decade, developing conversion tools, documentation and training; technical observer at Pleiades; contributor to Pelagios; founder of Digital Classicist. Principal Investigator of Standards for Networking Ancient Prosopographies: Data and Relations in Greco-roman Names (SNAP:DRGN) project. http://wiki.digitalclassicist.org/User:GabrielBodard

Hugh Cayless, Duke University

Research developer at the Duke Collaboratory for Classics  Computing (DC3). Hugh is the primary architect of Papyri.info’s linked data system, and the maintainer of the LAWD (Linked Ancient World Data) ontology. He has worked with EpiDoc since its beginning. He is a contributor to the SNAP project and was a faculty member at the NEH- funded Linked Ancient World Data Institutes

Faith Lawrence, King’s College London

Research Associate at the Digital Humanities department, KCL. Faith has worked on a variety of projects involving LOD including Sharing Ancient Wisdoms (http://www.ancientwisdoms.ac.uk/) which used linked data to expose and explore the links between a collection of gnomologia and the ongoing SNAP (http://snapdrgn.net/) project which endeavours to bridge the prosopographies of the classical world. She also has a special interest in the description of fictional and mythic narratives with linked data.

Terhi Nurmikko, University of Southampton

PhD candidate whose current academic research focuses on the Linked Data publication paradigm and its potential to benefit Assyriological scholarship.

Daniel Pett, The British Museum

Archaeologist who has worked as the British Museum’s ICT advisor for 10 years and has written, built and maintains the Portable Antiquities Scheme database (over 940,000 objects) available at http://finds.org.uk. He is co-Investigator on the AHRC funded MicroPasts project (http://micropasts.org), and the Leverhulme funded “Mapping the Palaeolithic” and on the “Museums to HER” project with the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford University. He is also on the advisory board for a variety of projects including Nomisma.

This panel intends to discuss the advantages of computer-assisted study of writings as well as the exigency for collaboration between digital and traditional epigraphists. The advances in computing in the past few decades have resulted in the development of several digital tools meant to assist scholars decipher and analyze inscribed symbols. Some of the techniques involve 2D or 3D digitization of the inscriptions and various post-processing methods that help scholars recognize the inscribed characters or symbols, analyze their structure, and study writing techniques. This interdisciplinary panel that consists of computer scientists, computational linguists, heterogeneous writings experts (archaic Latin, cursive Latin, Egyptian writings), and epigraphists will address the following issues: the use of traditional and digital methodologies for deciphering and analyzing inscriptions, the accuracy and efficacy of a computer algorithm that tries to solve the same problem, text representation problems when iconicity is involved, optimal ways to train digital tools, and to what extent 2D, 3D representations, and text encodings follow, imitate, and enhance traditional methodologies.

Keywords: Writings in contexts, Deciphering, Digital Autoptic Process, Archaic and iconographic writings, Encoding epigraphic writings, 3D reconstruction and analysis.

Note: In order to offer a background on the proposed topic, panelists posted their individual contributions on Épigraphie En Réseau. Attendees of this panel are invited to read the aforementioned texts and post their comments/questions online.

Panelists

1) Panelists: Digital Epigraphy Project Dr. Angelos Barmpoutis & Dr. Eleni Bozia

Angelos Barmpoutis is Assistant Professor in the Digital Worlds Institute at the University of Florida, and research faculty at the Institut für Informatik, Universität Leipzig. He is the director of the Digital Epigraphy and Archaeology project – digitalepigraphy.org. His research interests include 3D computer vision with applications ranging from Medical Imaging to Digital Humanities.

Eleni Bozia is a faculty member at the Department of Classics at the University of Florida, and research faculty at the Institut für Informatik, Universität Leipzig. She is the associate director of the Digital Epigraphy and Archaeology project – digitalepigraphy.org and a founding member of the Digital Classics Association. She is the author of the book Lucian and his Roman Voices and her research interests are Digital Humanities and Imperial Greek and Latin literature.

2)  Panelists Visualization of writings and textual process: Dr. Marion Lamé, Dr. Federico Boschetti & Dr. Matteo Dellepiane

Marion Lamé is post-doc researcher in Digital Epigraphy at the Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “A. Zampolli” – CNR of Pisa. She has worked and works on several digital epigraphic projects (IGLouvre, TSS, Memorata Poetis…) and collaborates to collective dissemination of digital practices (EpiDoc). Her researches are dedicated to Digital Epigraphy applied especially to complex epigraphical situation and device (multilingualism,  multialphabetism…).

Federico Boschetti is a Researcher at the Institute of Computational Linguistics “A. Zampolli” – CNR of Pisa. His area of interest is Computational and Collaborative Philology. He works on Optical Character Recognition applied to Greek and Latin critical editions and he collaborates to the creation of linguistic resources for ancient languages.

Matteo Dellepiane is a Researcher at CNR-ISTI. He received an advanced degree in Telecommunication Engineering (Laurea) from the University of Genova in 2002, and a PhD in Information Engineering from the University of Pisa in 2009. His research interests include 3D scanning, digital archeology, color acquisition and visualization on 3D models and perceptual rendering. He’s also one of the developers of MeshLab. Website.

3) Panelists: Latin epigraphy and archaic writings: Prof. Giulia Sarullo

Giulia Sarullo is Assistant Professor in General and Historical Linguistic at the University of Enna. She is part of a team directed by Prof. Giovanna Rocca (IULM University) working at the Iscrizioni Latine Arcaiche: a Digital Corpus of the Archaic Latin Inscriptions Research Project, which aims at encoding in EpiDoc all the archaic Latin Inscriptions (VII-V century BC).

4) Panelists:  digital Ancient Egyptian writings: Prof. Serge Rosmorduc & Dr. Stéphane Polis

Serge Rosmorduc is Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Paris. He has also lectured in Late Egyptian at the ÉPHÉ. His research work focus on the creation of rich annotated databases for Ancient Egyptian, and he has conceived and realized the computing side of the Ramses Project of the University of Liège, and the JSesh hieroglyphic editor.

Stéphane Polis is Research Associate at the National Fund for Scientific Research (Belgium). His fields of research are Ancient Egyptian linguistics, and Late Egyptian philology and grammar. His work focuses on language variation and language change in Ancient Egyptian. He supervises the development of the Ramses Project – an annotated corpus of Late Egyptian texts, crucially including the hieroglyphic spellings – at the University of Liège with Jean Winand. He further works in Egypt as a field epigraphist in the framework of the ‘Mission Archéologique de la Nécropole Thébaine’ (ULB – ULg, Belgium).

EAGLE2014, October 1, 2014

Collège de France, 11 Place Marcellin Berthelot, Paris

In the last few years, there has been a growing attention to applications based on mobile devices. Recent consumer mobile devices (such as smartphones and tablets) support a good interactivity and the possibility to transmit and receive multimedia content. High definition cameras, high computing power (parallel CPUs) and high definition displays have also made possible to augment the reality with context dependent multimedia in- formation and 3D objects. In parallel with that, the use of Information Tech- nologies in Cultural Heritage, though not yet as widespread as it is in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) is becoming more and more common in many different application fields, like for example social sciences, linguistics, philology, history, music, archaeol- ogy, etc.

It is therefore natural that the interest for mobile applications in Cultural Heritage has grown rapidly in recent years. In fact, Cultural Heritage offers many environments where mobile applications can provide a really added value to the user experience, such as touristic routes, cities, parks, archaeo- logical sites, ancient buildings, and museums. Mobile applications are very often context and location aware applications, and the added value therefore may come in the form of providing context dependent information. For loca- tion awareness, mobile applications can offer image recognition capabilities, by identifying an image sent by the mobile device within a pre-defined data base of images, and providing the associated information; this capability can be in addition or in substitution of GPS information, which is nowadays al- most always provided by mobile devices. Another aspect of mobile applica- tions is that the user can be not only the information consumer but can be also an information producer, by collecting context tagged data and providing them to a central repository, for later use of for the benefit of other mo- bile users. At the same time, the possibility of providing information interac- tively, in a context and location aware environment, with information tai- lored to the preferences and profile of a specific user, can open the way to a new set of issues regarding privacy and trust.

The objective of this panel is to bring together experts and researchers from both information science and humanities, so that they can share their experience with the audience and hopefully stimulate some debate and dis- cussion engaging the audience in the comparison of different opinions and solutions.

Keywords: Mobile applications, Cultural Heritage, Image recognition, Epigraphy, Location aware applications

Panelists

Giuseppe Amato is Researcher at CNR-ISTI since 1994. He graduated in Computer Science at the University of Pisa, Italy, in 1992 and was awarded a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Dortmund, Germany, in 2002. His main research interests are content-based retrieval of multimedia documents, access methods for similarity search of multimedia documents, multimedia digital libraries, wireless sensor networks. He has participated in several EC and national funded research actions in the areas content-based retrieval of multimedia data and wireless sensor networks. The most recent include: the DELOS Network of Excellence, funded by the EC in the IST program, the project Multimatch, funded by the EC in the FP6 program, where he was Technical Director, the project VISITO Tuscany, funded by the Regione Toscana within the Europeean Regional Development Funds program, where he is the Project Coordinator, the project ASSETS, funded by the EC in the ICT-PSP program, where he is responsible of the indexing and retrieval workpackage, the project RUBICON, Funded by the EC in the FP7 program, where he is scientific coordinator for CNR.

Fabrizio Falchi is researcher at ISTI CNR. He has a PhD in Information En- gineer from Università di Pisa and a PhD in Informatics from Masaryk Uni- versity in Brno. He also has a MBA in “Innovation Management and Service Engineer” from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna di Pisa. He has participated in many European and National projects (SAPIR, VISITO Tuscany, ASSETS, NeP4B, etc.) with roles of task leader, technical leader and scientific advisor

Sorin Hermon has a background in electronics and physics. He graduated in 1996 at the Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 2002 he received his PhD from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel. Between 2000 and 2008 Sorin Hermon worked as a sen- ior researcher at VAST-Lab, PIN, University of Florence, Israel. Since 2008 he has been research coordinator at the Cyprus Institute, coordinating a group of researchers, post-doctorates and young researchers. His research interests include: theory and applied research on the use of visualization methods (mainly VR and 3D modelling) for the research and (museum) communication of CH, CH knowledge representation, definition and use of standards, application of fuzzy logic concepts in humanities research, and the use of remote sensing techniques for archaeological investigation. He coordinates activities in several EU funded initiatives, such as 3DCOFORM, V-MUST, CARARE, ATHENA and Europeana Local.

Graduated from Ecole Nationale des Arts et Métiers, Philippe Martineau has 20 years experience in the software industry, with a very broad spectrum of positions: R&D, international project management, innovation director. More recently he managed the European portfolio of Microsoft’s strategic projects, before being director of Microsoft France consulting and support services. He then was board director of French software firm Prologue, prior to be the founder of SME Eureva, dedicated to software innovation.

Andrea Zanni attended a Master in Digital Library Learning in the Universi- ties of Oslo, Tallinn and Parma. From 2010, and is presently working at AlmaDL, the digital library of the University of Bologna (http://almadl.unibo.it/). The main responsibility is to sustain and manage open access resources for the public, like academic journals and digitized collections of ancient books. Andrea has also been involved in Wikisource, a wiki project where he has been working as a volounteer from 2005. The BS thesis was focused on the potentiality of wikis in digital libraries, especially mathematical ones. His main interests are in digital libraries, open access, wiki, collaborative systems, information management, no-profit, cultural heritage digitization, information management, knowledge management, digital preservation,

Due to the double nature of inscriptions as both archeological objects and texts, the study of epigraphy must be rooted in the material context of inscriptions. How can digital tools and methods enhance epigraphical scholarship so as to produce editions and studies that treat inscriptions as whole objects, both textual and material? How can we train the next generation of epigraphists to put these orientations into practice? The project “Visible Words∫†Research and Training in Digital Contextual Epigraphy”, recently funded by the Partner University Fund, addresses these questions from different angles. Our panel will focus on the main aims and

goals of this project, as well as on pressing issues in digital epigraphy of more general concern.

Three short presentations from the panel chairs will address:

-­ the issue of metadata categories, definitions and taxonomies

-­ steps toward a Linked Open Data implementation of a core epigraphic taxonomy, an ultimate goal being to make an adaptable template available to the wider digital community

-­ the technical framework, image mapping capabilities and future plans for the Perseids Platform as they apply to epigraphy.

Each presentation will be followed by a brief question period, and the session will include ample time for a roundtable discussion. In particular, we are eager to identify other practitioners of « digital archaeological epigraphy » and to map out possible collaborations. Secondly, we are interested in defining common needs and resources of the EAGLE consortium. One crucial topic is the question of bibliography. How are we to handle bibliographical information across the various projects and platforms participating in EAGLE? Can we and should we establish a shared bibliographical repository?

Keywords: Metadata, Taxonomy, EpiDoc, Visualization, Linked Open Data, Shared, Bibliography, Digital Pedagogy.

Panelists

John Bodel (Brown University)-­-­Visible Words, US Epigraphy Project

Bridget Almas (Perseus Digital Library)-­-­Perseids Platform

Monica Berti (Universität Leipzig)-­-­Open CIL in Perseids

Scott DiGiulio (Brown University)-­-­Visible Words, US Epigraphy Project

Laurent Coulon (CNRS-­HiSoMA)-­-­Visible Words, Karnak Cachette

Tom Elliott (New York University)-­-­Visible Words, ISAW

Arlo Griffiths (EFEO)-­-­Visible Words, Inscriptions†khmères

Emmanuelle Morlock (CNRS-­HiSoMA)-­-­Visible Words, IG Louvre Project

Elli Mylonas (Brown University)-­-­Visible Words, US Epigraphy ProjectJohn  Bodel  (Brown  University) ­Visible  Words,  US  Epigraphy  Project

Michèle Brunet (Université Lyon II-­IUF)-­-­Visible Words, IG Louvre Project

Marie-­Claire Beaulieu (Tufts University)-­-­Perseids Platform