Mediterranean Ceramics

Toying with 'Knowledge Representation and Reasoning' for the Ancient World

2011-12-31T14:33:00.000-05:00

This is a very (very!) rough opening entry in a discussion I hope to push forward in 2012. But first some preliminaries.

I don't know a lot about "Knowledge Representation and Reasoning" but I do know more than I did 48 hours ago. I'm in the world of "Semantic Reasoning" and "OWL 2 Ontologies". That's an interesting, and often very technical, place to be. But fun, all the same.
That's why I put "Toying" in the title of this post. I'm really just playing around here and figure I won't find out what I'm doing wrong if I don't share thoughts sooner rather than later.

I've opened a github repository at https://github.com/sfsheath/awo so I'll just dive right in using the mini-ontology that I started there. 'awo' stands for 'Ancient World Ontology' and, again, that's what I'm thinking about.

The file 'awo.owl' defines, among other things, two people: 'Augustus' and 'Lucius Cornelius Sulla'. This is an opportunity to note that the authority file I'm using for names (of people or other entities) is Wikipedia. I don't know of another publicly accessible resource with such extensive coverage combined with a simple mechanism for creating new identities. As it stands now (this github commit), awo.owl says the following about Augustus and Sulla:

<owl:Thing rdf:about="#Augustus">

<rdfs:label>Augustus</rdfs:label>

<rdf:type rdf:resource="http://schema.org/Person" />

<owl:sameAs rdf:resource="http://dbpedia.org/page/Augustus" />

<owl:sameAs rdf:resource="http://viaf.org/viaf/18013086" />

</owl:Thing>

<owl:Thing rdf:about="#Lucius_Cornelius_Sulla">

<rdfs:label>Lucius Cornelius Sulla</rdfs:label>

<rdf:type rdf:resource="http://schema.org/Person" />

<owl:sameAs rdf:resource="http://dbpedia.org/page/Lucius_Cornelius_Sulla" />

</owl:Thing>

I hope some of the 'meaning' of this markup is accessible even without 'knowing' OWL. I'm asserting that there are entities (owl:Thing's) "Augustus" and "Lucius_Cornelius_Sulla". It connects those to other defined entities such as "Roman_Emperor" and "Roman_Dictator". Again, those names are taken from Wikipedia.

I know some people won't like the use of "owl:sameAs", but I think it conforms closely to the definition of that term in the OWL 2 documentation. And what about the "is" property. Here I did become concerned that none of the OWL 2 terms for indicating equivalence between "owl:Thing"'s worked. So I made up the generic "is" property to match the very generic and informal semantics of the fairly reasonable statement "Augustus is a Roman Emperor". I could have used "was" but that seemed silly.

But what about reasoning? The repository also has a file "awo-reasoned.rdf'. That has the following (slightly re-ordered and abridged) statements about both Augustus and Sulla:

<rdf:Description rdf:about="http://example.org/awo#Lucius_Cornelius_Sulla">

<rdf:type rdf:resource="http://schema.org/Person"/>

<j.1:is rdf:resource="http://dbpedia.org/page/Roman_Dictator"/>

<j.1:is rdf:resource="http://example.org/awo#Roman_Dictator"/>

<owl:sameAs rdf:resource="http://dbpedia.org/page/Lucius_Cornelius_Sulla"/>

<owl:sameAs rdf:resource="http://example.org/awo#Lucius_Cornelius_Sulla"/>

<rdf:type rdf:resource="http://example.org/awo#Office_Holder"/>

<rdf:type rdf:resource="http://example.org/awo#Roman_Office_Holder"/>

<rdf:type rdf:resource="http://example.org/awo#Roman_Republican_Office_Holder"/>

<rdf:type rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#Thing"/>

</rdf:Description>

<rdf:Description rdf:about="http://dbpedia.org/page/Augustus">

<rdf:type rdf:resource="http://schema.org/Person"/>

<j.1:is rdf:resource="http://example.org/awo#Roman_Emperor"/>

<j.1:is rdf:resource="http://dbpedia.org/page/Roman_Emperor"/>

<j.1:is rdf:resource="http://example.org/awo#Pontifex_Maximus"/>

<j.1:is rdf:resource="http://dbpedia.org/page/Pontifex_Maximus"/>

<j.1:is rdf:resource="http://example.org/awo#Tribune"/>

<owl:sameAs rdf:resource="http://viaf.org/viaf/18013086"/>

<owl:sameAs rdf:resource="http://dbpedia.org/page/Augustus"/>

<owl:sameAs rdf:resource="http://example.org/awo#Augustus"/>

<rdf:type rdf:resource="http://example.org/awo#Office_Holder"/>

<rdf:type rdf:resource="http://example.org/awo#Roman_Office_Holder"/>

<rdf:type rdf:resource="http://example.org/awo#Roman_Religious_Office_Holder"/>

<rdf:type rdf:resource="http://example.org/awo#Roman_Imperial_Office_Holder"/>

<rdf:type rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#Thing"/>

</rdf:Description>

This file is generated by the command-line tool in the open source OWL-DL reasoner Pellet. Another win for open source as far as I'm concerned.

To the extent that the mini awo ontology hints at a useful future, it's because both Sulla and Augustus are 'known' to be "#Roman_Office_Holder"s. The ontology defines the owl:Class "Roman_Republican_Office_Holder" as all owl:Things said to be "Roman_Dictator"s. "Roman_Imperial_Office_Holder" is defined as all owl:Things said to be "Roman_Emperor"'s. Both of these classes are sub-classes of "Roman_Office_Holder".

Looking ahead, this simple (simplistic?) demonstration suggests a world in which it is possible to search a corpus of information - be it primary texts or secondary scholarship - for references to "Roman Office Holders" and be shown all documents (or other resources) that reference either Augustus or Sulla. That would be cool.

If you dig into awo-reasoned.rdf, you'll see that everything it says about "Augustus" it also says about the URI http://viaf.org/viaf/18013086. VIAF is the "Virtual International Authority File". Here I'm trying to (again, simply) explore the idea that if an author were to link to that well-known URI published by VIAF, then it would be discoverable that the document making the link referred to not only the Emperor but also to the more generic concept "Roman_Office_Holder". So imagine an Internet that can be queried for "All references to Roman office holders".

And we do want to support more complex queries: "All late Roman military sites in Syria within 30 kilometers of the findspots of LR coins or LR African Red-Slip". We're a long way from that but it's doable on the basis of existing technologies. And the content to support such queries is slowly coming online.

Some other bullet points in this world:

It's a world that I can think about because of conversations I've been having with my colleagues at ISAW, with the people running Pelagios, with people I've been writing papers and grants with. And other. There's nothing exceptionally original here. But the next step is to be part of "just doing it."
There needs to be a mechanism for bringing together existing RDF-based resources into a big pile of triples from which a reasoner can extract interesting relationships. The work can't be done by hand by a few individuals. But if we just let the machines run wild, we'll end up with silly conclusions. We need to find the right balance of automatic processing and community sourcing to create an "Ancient World Inference Engine" or "Ancient World Semantic Reasoner" that is actually useful.
And that's probably an important principle: make it useful. Here are some thoughts on that:

When a "third party" resource links to a URI such as "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus" (or its VIAF equivalent), it would be nice if there were a javascript library that showed a menu offering links based on a JSON serialization of the 'knowledge' in awo-reasoned.rdf. This is an idea that has been floating around and whose time has come.
The network of links to stable URIs should be harvested so that the reasoner can work across the entire Ancient World Internet. The internet is the interface that allows community sourcing.
Existing resources that provide stability - such as Perseus, PAS, Pleiades, DBPedia, OpenContext, Nomisma.org, and many others - should be incorporated. Keep new work to a minimum.
Another way of saying the above is that an "Ancient World Triple Store and Reasoner" should look to be a "pass through" resource reflecting the existing and developing state of the Internet rather than a destination itself.
The whole big pile of reasoned triples should be downloadable so that others can pay for the cycles to query it when they're doing something really complex. CC everything!

The above has started to wander a little bit so I'll end this post here. Let's see what happens in the next year or so...

ISAW Roman Pottery Reading Group: September 22

2011-09-14T17:41:00.001-04:00

The 2011/2012 kick-off meeting of the ISAW Roman Pottery Reading Group is next Thursday, September 22 at 3:30. The topic is roughly "African pottery in the Eastern Mediterranean in Late Antiquity". As always, the readings don't cover the full range of what we could talk about:

Abadie-Reynal, C. 1989. “Céramique et commerce dans le bassin Égéen du IVe au VIIe siècle,” in V. Kravari, J. Lefort and C. Morrisson (edd.), Hommes et richesses dans l’Empire byzantin I. IVe-VIe siècle (Paris) 143-159.
Bonifay, M. 2005. “Observations sur la diffusion des céramiques africaines en Méditerrannée orientale durant l’Antiquité tardive,” in F. Baratte et al. (edd.), Mélanges Jean-Pierre Sodini (Travaux et Mémoires 15), 565-81.
Majcherek, G. 2004. ‘‘Alexandria’s long-distance trade in Late Antiquity – the amphora evidence’’, in ed. Jonas Eiring and John Lund (edd.), Transport Amphorae and Trade in the Eastern Mediterranean. Acts of the International Colloquium at the Danish Institute at Athens, September 26–29, 2002, 229-237.
Bes, P.M. and J. Poblome. 2009. "African Red Slip Ware on the Move: the Effects of Bonifay’s Etudes for the Roman East," in: J.H. Humphrey (ed.): Studies on Roman Pottery from Africa Proconsularis and Byzacena (Tunisia). Hommage à Michel Bonifay (Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Volume 76), 73-91. [An incomplete version of this available at: https://lirias.kuleuven.be/bitstream/123456789/243673/2/Poblomeforpdf.pdf]

The Abadie-Reynal is a classic and always worth looking at. It's important to take account of Bonifay's work so the Bes and Poblome article does that. The Majcherek gives a site specific view on the question, while also addressing large-scale historical issues. Should be fun.

Blogging my Digital Humanities 2011 Talk

2011-06-22T12:46:00.000-04:00

I was all prepped to give a nice conversational version of my paper at Digital Humanties 2001 when my plane was delayed, so I had to spend an extra night in Boston, meaning my arrival in Palo Alto was bumped to after my allotted time. Oh, well. Here's a summary that presents some of what I was going to say.

The title was The Digital Materiality of Early Christian Visual Culture: Building on John 20:24-29 and the abstract is here.

My first "real" slide was a long-ish quote from the article Leonardi, P. 2010. "Digital materiality? How artifacts without matter, matter" in the online journal First Monday. It's online at http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/issue/view/315. Here's the quote:

I argue that treating materiality as the practical instantiation of theoretical ideas (like policies that allow women to vote help make material the idea that sexes are equal) or as what is significant in the explanation of a given context (like material evidence in a courtroom trial) provides a more useful framework for understanding how digital artifacts affect the process of organizing. I contend that moving away from linking materiality to notions of physical substance or matter may help scholars of technology integrate their work more centrally with studies of discourse, routine, institutions and other phenomena that lie at the core of organization theory, specifically, and social theory more broadly.

I've highlighted the bits I was going to focus on. "[M]ateriality as the practical instantiation of theoretical ideas" has useful overlap with how archaeologists think materiality. We often try to "back port" from the objects we find to what people were thinking, but Leonardi's explicit connection between ideas/thought and material is enough to prime the pump within the context of a 20 minute paper.

The "moving away" idea gave me something to play off of. It's not that I disagree with Leonardi, it's that I like to think about the continuum of interplay between thought and matter that is enabled by digital surrogates of material culture. Here are two snippets from what I said:

Just as the creation of the surviving material record should be recognized as the cumulative action of many individuals, it is likely that exploration of that record will be enabled by many projects and institutions working within their own areas of expertise and with content specific to their domain (Heath 2010, Terras 2010). It is the interactions of a series of self-digitizing and independent communities – here Early Christian textual studies and Numismatics – that can recover relationships between physical object and human thought that is a primary goal of materiality as a methodological approach .... Digital materiality is therefore an act of transmission (Liu 2004) so that its deficiencies leave it open to criticism.

I'm being selective in quoting myself so you may want to read the above in context. It has a slightly different twist there.

More briefly, my point is that transmission of digital surrogates for material culture will provide opportunities for a new/re-emphasis on the relation between object and thought - that is, "materiality" - in the ancient world and in the study of the ancient world. It will probably do so elsewhere but I'm an Ancient Med. person so that's where I focus. If we think of digitization as de-materialization, it will enable new appreciation of the material.

But what leads me to say that?

My specific example is the relationship between the text of John 20:19-29 and physical manifestations of it. That's basically the story of "Doubting Thomas", a phrase meaning someone who requires physical, unambiguous proof before believing something.

Those verses from the the Gospel of John chapter 20 are readily accessible online. Here's the KJV version. Or the New International Version. Do you read Macedonian? Go for it. Maybe you prefer Arabic?

The story culminates in Jesus saying, "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed." You can get commentary on that phrase here (scroll to the bottom).

I threw in those links to show that the accessibility of the text doesn't come from the academy, that is, from the traditional home of Digital Humanities. Sure, the New Testament is both studied within universities and is available through DH stalwarts such as Perseus. But much of the digital action around this text comes out of the self-digitizing community that is the Christian web. I think that's cool and something we should be paying attention to. I discussed that more in the blog post "Digital Epistemology as Mediated through Tessellated Self-Digitizing Communities"over at Posterous.

But these links are not materiality. They're virtual all the way.

It's easy to materialize the text of 20 John:19-24 in a modern context. Here's a low-res image of the text (minus the beginning of verse 19) from the United Bible Societies' Greek New Testament GNT.

If we look more closely at verse 21 - which in translation is "Again Jesus said, 'Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.'" - we see:

The top image is the text in the GNT and the bottom is the critical apparatus or app. crit. If you look after the // in the ap. crit., you see the Greek word παλιν followed by the Hebrew letter aleph. That's the symbol for a 4th century manuscript known as the Codex Sinaiticus. I've linked to the Wikipedia article for the codex but it's important for my talk that a digital facsimile of the manuscript is available at http://codexsinaiticus.org/. Go take a look, it's a cool site.

And just by way of introduction, the Codex Sinaiticus is a fourth century manuscript that is one of our earliest complete versions of the New Testament. Much of it is now in the British Museum but came there indirectly from Saint Catharine's monastery on the Sinai Peninsula.

Here's a screen shot of the site's version of John 20:21.

Counting down seven lines from the top of the middle column brings you to the greek "εἶπεν οὖν αὐτοῖς πάλιν" or "He said to them again...". Note that in the GNT version the text is "εἶπεν οὖν αὐτοῖς [ὁ Ἰησοῦς] πάλιν" or "Jesus said to them again..." . The brackets around "ὁ Ἰησοῦς"are an indication of some uncertainty about the reading of the "original" text. The Codex Sinaiticus delivers one component of the material basis of that uncertainty. That's digital materiality.

Here's another CS screenshot:

You can see the extent of correction as a second scribe addressed both basic mistakes and subtle issues of reading in the original product.

We can expand the digital materiality of this text by linking to a gold roundel - "small round disk" - in the collection of the American Numismatic Society: http://numismatics.org/collection/0000.999.51006 . Here's the screen shot of that page:

To the left of the central Jesus you see Thomas reaching out to touch Jesus' wounds. There's also a slightly irregular transcription of the Greek for Thomas' declaration "My Lord, My God" and of Jesus response to the effect that those who have not required such proof are blessed.

Without going into too much detail, disks of this sort are believed to have been produced in Egypt. This piece doesn't come with a findspot but it is reasonable to invoke it next to the Codex Sinaiticus.

It is another materialization of John 19-29. One that combines text and image. It is a projection into physical space and across time of the message that Christian believers who did not have the opportunity to see Christ can be blessed.

These two objects - the Codex and the ANS disk - show that materiality does not remove the reader or viewer from our understanding of how texts worked. These materializations remind us that texts are physical objects that are responded to by people, and that one response is to change the materiality, as in editing the Codex. Certainly, one response is to debate the meaning of a text. The story of the Doubting Thomas is understood by many modern scholars as a statement against those who denied the humanity of Christ, among whom were the Gnostics, active in Egypt. The ANS disk is therefore part of an ongoing debate about Christ's nature.

The point of this post is not to go into great depth about what the pairing of these objects tells us about the role of materiality in the Late Roman/Byzantine Egypt. Instead, I want to stress that the opportunity to think about that issue with such relative ease arises from acts of independent self-digitization that exist within wider contexts of topically related efforts also engaging in self-digitization. That leads to an environment in which intellectual risk taking is rewarded.

I don't want the series of inferences above to be pigeon-holed into either saying something about the past or about the present. I think we're at a stage of Digital Humanities where we can recognize that we are doing both. We do not know what questions about the past that modern Digital Materiality will allow us to ask, but I bet we're about to find out.

Brief Anecdote about Discoverability, Sigma Tables, and the Athenian Agora

2011-03-31T17:01:00.001-04:00

In the middle of today's meeting of the ISAW Roman Pottery Reading Group, the issue of "sigma tables" came up. These semi-circular marble tables are invoked by both of today's authors so it was natural to pause on the topic. At which I point I mentioned, "there's one in the Agora and I bet it's online." Quick Google search on "marble sigma table agora" and we were a click away from the Agora's database.

That's object A 3869.

My only point is that because the object was easy to find via the public Internet, we were able to include it in our conversation. It was very useful to compare a specimen to Hudson's and Vroom's analysis and to the additional visual evidence they each gather.

As a reminder, here's what we read:

Nicholas Hudson. 2010. "Changing Places: The Archaeology of the Roman Convivium." AJA 114.4: 663-695.
Joanita Vroom. 2008. ‘The archaeology of late antique dining habits in the eastern Mediterranean: A preliminary study of the evidence’, in: L. Lavan, E. Swift and T. Putzeys (eds.), Objects in Context, Objects in Use. Material Spatiality in Late Antiquity (Late Antique Archaeology 5), Leiden and Boston: 313-361.

Cool pics of a Roman Hoard

2011-03-25T10:12:00.004-04:00

I'm slow to geting round to this, but really, do visit http://ilfattostorico.com/2010/07/08/scoperte-piu-di-52000-monete-romane/. The pictures of the coins are cool. Even cooler are the pictures of the large vessel they were buried in. Those of us in numismatics frequently see the dry phrase, "Found in pot", or the more concise term, "Pot hoard". This page will help you visualize what that really means.

Here's a sample:

Roman Pottery Reading Group at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World

2011-03-21T15:45:00.009-04:00

A few of my ISAW/NYU colleagues and I have begun a "Roman Pottery Reading Group," which seems to be settling into a sort of every-other-week-ish-y schedule.

We began with three "Romanization" articles:

D. Malfitana, J. Poblome and J. Lund. 2005. "Late Hellenistic imports of eastern sigillata A in Italy. A socio-economic perspective," Babesch 80: 199-212.
Poblome, Jeroen and Michael Zelle. 2002. “The table ware boom: a socio-economic perspective from western Asia Minor” in Christof Berns, Henner von Hesberg, Lutgarde Vendeput and Marc Waelkens (eds.), Patris und Imperium, Leuven: 275-287.
Rotroff, S. 1997. "From Greek to Roman in Athenian Ceramics," in M.C. Hoff and S.I. Rotrof ( eds.), The Romanization of Athens, , Oxford: 97-116.

It was an added bonus that my colleague Billur Tekkök, in the States on a Fulbright Fellowship, could join us for that first session.

Next we read:

John Hayes. "Roman Pottery from the South Stoa at Corinth," Hesperia Vol. 42, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1973), pp. 416-470. http://www.jstor.org/stable/147465

Kathleen Warner Slane. "Two Deposits from the Early Roman Cellar Building, Corinth, " Hesperia, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1986), pp. 271-318. http://www.jstor.org/stable/148282

Kathleen Warner Slane, Guy D. R. Sanders. "Corinth: Late Roman Horizons," Hesperia Vol. 74, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 2005), pp. 243-297. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25067955

The point here was to look at representative samples of 40 years of publication from one site. Put simply: what has changed in techniques and approaches over that time? A little "inside baseball" but a fun conversation.

Next up is ceramics and dining:

Nicholas Hudson. 2010. "Changing Places: The Archaeology of the Roman Convivium." AJA 114.4: 663-695.
Joanita Vroom. 2008. ‘The archaeology of late antique dining habits in the eastern Mediterranean: A preliminary study of the evidence’, in: L. Lavan, E. Swift and T. Putzeys (eds.), Objects in Context, Objects in Use. Material Spatiality in Late Antiquity (Late Antique Archaeology 5), Leiden and Boston: 313-361.

We're meeting Thursday, March 31 at 3:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time. It's tempting to see if anybody wants to join us virtually. If really, truly, "yes", I'll see what we can do.

LRC/Phocaean Red Slip at Alexandria Troas

2011-03-04T17:51:00.002-05:00

Anybody who would enjoy seeing a nice color picture of LRC/Phocaean Red-Slip rim sherds should take a look at figure 23 on page 15 of Stefan Feuser's article "The Roman Harbour of Alexandria Troas, Turkey" in volume 40.1 (2010) of The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, doi:j.1095-9270.2010.00294.x.

From Typed Links to Annotations in Ancient Geography

2011-03-04T00:26:00.003-05:00

I've been participating in the discusions of the Pelagios Project's plans to establish semantic web/linked data conventions for linking geographic information in the ancient world. Nomisma.org is listed as a partner and it's a good group of people who are coming together to think about the issue.

As always, the individuals and projects involved don't want to re-invent the wheel. And, also as always, some new work - even if it's just establishing a domain-specific use for existing standards - is necessary. That last is what I'm thinking about right now.

I mean the title of this post to establish an axis of complexity when it comes to relating a web-based resource to a geographic entity. A "typed link" is basically plain-old HTML with a little bit of RDF-sugar to say that the end-point is a geographic entity. I've already spoken about doing this in earlier posts. Here, let me start with the RDF/Turtle:


@prefix dcterms: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/> .
@prefix        geo: <http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#> .
@prefix powder: <http://www.w3.org/2007/05/powder#> .
@prefix       rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .

[] a dcterms:Location,geo:SpatialThing;
 powder:describedby <http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/423025>;
 rdfs:label "Rome" .

This is the RDFa:

<a href="http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/423025" typeof="dcterms:Location geo:SpatialThing" rel="powder:describedby" property="rdfs:label">Rome</a>

Again, that's pretty simple html that adds a little in-place information that the link is to a geographic entity that is defined at a particular URL. There are many tools that can parse that link and do interesting things like show a map. Hence the term I'm using here, "typed link". And I include as an "interesting thing" the now prosaic ability of a user to click on that link when it's rendered by a browser. Human readable and machine actionable. Win, win.

To be clear, with this post I am suggesting to my Pelagios colleagues that we use this or a similarly "light-weight" convention for the simple case of a link to a geographic entity. And yes, I don't mind if you use dcterms:Location, geo:SpatialThing or both. Those are the most widespread RDF Classes for indicating that a resource is a geographic entity.

An "annotation" is something different. The source document is trying to say something about the geographic entity. In this case, consensus seems to be building around the Open Annotation Consortium. That's a good thing on the "use existing work" principle. This time I'll start with a sentence: "Rome was the capital of the Roman Empire". Trivial, I know, but the point is to focus on the markup.

In RDF/Turtle, I want to say something like:


@prefix dcterms: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/> .
@prefix     geo: <http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#> .
@prefix     oac: <http://www.openannotation.org/ns/> .
@prefix    rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .

_:oacEx a oac:Annotation ;
  oac:hasTarget <http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/423025>;
  oac:hasBody “was the capital of the Roman Empire” .

# choose one or both of dcterms:Location or geo:SpatialThing
<http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/423025> a dcterms:Location, geo:SpatialThing ;
  rdfs:label "Rome" .

The top level concept is oac:Annotation , a class that encapsulates the relationship between a body (the thing annotating) and a target (the thing annotated). This RDF/Turtle basically says "There's a location 'Rome' that 'was the capital of the Roman empire'. In RDFa, that's:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<html xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
      xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#"
      xmlns:oac="http://www.openannotation.org/ns/"
      xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
      base="http://example.org/doc-1.html"
       >
<head></head>
<body>
<span id="annotation1" typeof="oac:Annotation" about="#annotation1" >
<a rel="oac:hasTarget" href="http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/423025">Rome</a> <span property="oac:hasBody">was the capital of the Roman Empire.</span>
</span>
<span style="display:none" about="http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/423025" typeof="dcterms:Location geo:SpatialThing"></span>
</body>
</html>

This is a first crack at the RDFa so note the 'hidden' span that says the Pleiades URI is a dctermsLocation/geo:SpatialThing. I'm guessing I or somebody else can do better than that.

But the real point of this post is to propose that ladder of complexity. Use a combination of 'powder:describedby' along with dcterms:Location and/or geo:SpatialThing when that will suffice. Open Annotation is for more complex situations. Reactions?

Linking from Citation to Example in Numismatic (and other) Scholarship

2011-03-02T18:18:00.003-05:00

I let myself follow a tangent today. It starts with noting that the article by C. Lorber and A. Meadows that I'm preparing for publication "Review of Ptolemaic Numismatics" makes frequent reference to coin types described in J. Svoronos, Ta nomismata tou kratous ton Ptolemaion. Athens, 1904-1908. It is an obvious feature of such a publication that those references lead readers to information about those coins.

To start on the journey towards such linking, I created URIs for all coin types defined in Svoronos' typology at nomisma.org. See http://nomisma.org/id/svoronos-1904-1000. There's very little description there, and what is there is cribbed from C. Lorber's translation at http://www.coin.com/images/dr/svoronos_text.html.

Now, if you go to this paragraph in Lorber and Meadows, which makes reference to Svoronos, you'll see that the link to "Sv. 1424" is live. Look towards the end of the paragraph. And note that it's possible to refer to single <p> elements in the article. That's because each one has an @id with a unique value. That's cool and important.

Follow the link to http://nomisma.org/id/svoronos-1904-1424 and you'll see further links to the ANS collection and to coinproject.com. The former is a rock-solid stable URI but the coin hasn't been photographed (hint, hint). The latter is to an interesting project that is digitizing a type corpora for many series of coins. As the editor of ISAW Papers I don't have to worry if it's super-stable. I rely on nomisma.org to provide reasonable links and to keep them current.

The end result is a hint of a richly linked and illustrated future. Again, cool. I'd like to cross-the-bridge (as it were) and deliver images of Sv. 1424 while readers are still within the "environment" of Lorber and Meadows. But the first step is implementing such links, then we can work on the user experience.

In other news.... there is now a github for ISAW Papers at http://github.com/sfsheath/isaw-papers.

"Archival" and "Presentation" versions of (x)html-based scholarship

2011-03-01T16:52:00.005-05:00

Briefly...

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17002562/isaw-papers-preprint.xhtml is a link to the current "archival" version of "Review of Ptolemaic Numismatics, 1996-2007".
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17002562/isaw-papers-preprint-presentation.html is to a presentation-oriented version.

The presentation version changes the extension to ".html", adds some formatting to fix the page width and to justify the body paragraphs. It also adds an appendix of links to named entities at the end. That last suggests an interesting future.

The goal here is to maintain a focus on an archival version with very little formatting in it, while also exploring what the "nicer" presentation version can look like. Eventually this content will appear in a CMS-like environment. That should be attractive and functional so I'm figuring out what that means. In time, I'll add features along the lines of "pop-up" windows for geographic entities and the like. Not sure exactly what that entails but we'll find out as we go along.

And I'll move this to github in the near-ish future.

Test Bed for (X)HTML Conventions for Scholarly Publication

2011-02-23T11:17:00.008-05:00

The main reason I joined the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU was to be part of initiating a program of digital publication of peer-reviewed scholarship. We haven't announced anything formally and this blog post isn't that announcement. It is the beginning of a nuts-and-bolts conversation about the markup of digital scholarship that is intended to encourage long-term viability, flexible re-use, and easy display (among many other things).

To get right down to business, http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17002562/isaw-papers-preprint.xhtml is the very temporary URL for a preprint version of "Review of Ptolemaic Numismatics, 1996 to 2007" by Catherine Lorber and Andrew Meadows. I'm very grateful to Andy and Cathy for their willingness to be part of this experiment. Their work is largely done. Now it's up to me to make progress on the markup and I'm hoping to do that in a very public way.

But where to begin the conversation? I think the best approach is to admit I'm in the middle of things and just start laying out issues and thoughts. Keep in mind that everything is subject to change...

The format for ISAW digital publications is XHTML with RDFa. XHTML (for now 1.1 but moving to XHTML5) is a widely supported standard with excellent tooling that is directly viewable in many contexts. That makes it appropriate for long-term archival storage of born-digital scholarship.
Internal reference structures are important.For now this means each <p> element has an @id. div's of class 'section' also have @id attributes. This is in anticipation of using the semantic elements of HTML5.
Named entities will be tagged with links to stable resources describing those entities. For geography, Pleiades. For many other entities, Wikipedia. See below for RDFa patterns.
Existing ontologies/vocabularies will be used whenever possible. Geographic entities are typed as "dcterms:Location". That sort of thing.
Basic constructs for marking up bibliography and footnote-like structures are lacking for HTML-based markup languages. There are lots of semi-complete "best practices" but narrowing these down to a consistent and flexible convention will be an importnat process.

Looking ahead:

Multiple formats will be supported. We will distribute this text as "raw" valid xhtml. It will be hosted in a more interactive environment that does slick things like make maps, etc. Epub, pdf... all those are coming. Again, the ease with which a base XHTML representation can be converted to these other formats is one reason to use XHTML.
We'll use CC licenses Right now the document is CC-BY-NC-ND. We'll drop the ND eventually, perhaps the NC as well. The preprint is ND as a signal that a better version is coming from us.

A word on RDFa (a standardized way of embedding information in XHTML pages)...

The basic pattern that I'm using to markup named entities is illustrated by the sentence:

In a study of tax receipts from early Ptolemaic <a class="citation"
  href="http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/991398"
  typeof="dcterms:Location" rel="iana:describedby"
  property="rdfs:label">Thebes</a>...

That produces the RDF/Turtle

[ a dcterms:Location ;
         rdfs:label "Thebes"@en ;
         iana:describedby <http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/991398>].

You can see the turtle for the whole document at http://bit.ly/hJjgcx.

An "English" equivalent of the turtle snippet is 'There is a site in the text with label "Thebes" and a description at http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/991398.'

I like the use of the 'describedby' @rel value here. It's defined in the IANA's register of rel values (http://www.iana.org/assignments/link-relations/link-relations.xml). I take the semantics to be "I'm not saying I'm linking to Thebes itself, only to a description of it." That seems nice and "semantic webby".

There's more to come but I'm getting this out there just to get the ball rolling...

Quick poll: Worldcat, Library of Congress, or Both

2011-02-21T12:49:00.002-05:00

There are lots of ways of encoding bibliographic data on the web, but this post isn't about that problem. Instead, I'm wondering what is "the community's" preference between Worldcat and the Library of Congress when creating Semantic Web/Linked Open Data references.

As an example, the URIs http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/829279 and http://lccn.loc.gov/74155758 each lead to information about John Hayes' Late Roman Pottery published in 1972.

Which one of these is preferable as the long-term description of this volume? Worldcat or LOC. The use-case is a digital publication with bibliography that ideally includes a link to one or the other or both for all printed volumes or other appropriate entities.

Perhaps a discussion will ensue in the comments but here are some quick issues:

There are multiple URIs for that one volume in Worldcat. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/462730938 gets you to the Danish Union Catalog.
There are still concerns about the licensing of Worldcat data.
The LOC record is to a physical volume in a single national library and may not be intended as a description of the abstract concept (e.g. a FRBR Work). I don't know that Worldcat URIs solve this problem but they have the implication of a higher level of abstraction.

Votes and/or comments are appreciated.

Quick poll: Wikipedia or DBPedia?

2011-02-07T09:39:00.004-05:00

I've created a poll near the upper right of this page. In longer form: when making persistent "Linked Data/Semantic Web" references to concepts described in Wikipedia, is it "best practice" to link to Wikipedia or to DBPedia? As in, "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus" or "http://dbpedia.org/resource/Augustus"?

Access to Roman Art: Observations by Peter Stewart

2011-02-04T08:42:00.003-05:00

The last few times I've gone to speak about issues of scholarly communication/digital humanities/digital archaeology/etc, I've opened up with a quote from Peter Stewart's 2008 book The Social History of Roman Art [Worldcat]. That's a great little book, and I was particularly pleased when reading it that Stewart is explicit about the effects of access to evidence and images on his selection and narrative. And I was further pleased that he talks about his personal efforts to solve those problems. I'll illustrate this by a series of passages given in their order of appearance:

Unfortunately, my comments in the Introduction about the problems of acquiring images were born out in the book's preparation, and I had very considerable difficulties and delays in acquiring most of the images reproduced here. I therefore owe a special debt to those who helped me to obtain pictures, and to those image-providers who waived or reduced reproduction fees. (p. xv)

Then from that introduction:

To an extent, however, these are all obvious problems of evidence and interpretation which are familiar in any branch of historical study. Other problems are insidious and lie unremarked in the methodological hinterland of books like this one. I have said that the use of examples must be highly selective. But behind any book on Roman art, there are processes of selection that are largely beyond the author’s control. Most Roman art historians will never, in their lifetime, see more than a tiny percentage even of the more significant works that survive. This is not simply because of the magnitude of this great body of material. It is also because most pieces are inaccessible. Many of the finest and most interesting Roman antiquities are in private collections, and many of these are unpublished, sometimes because of scholars’ anxieties about the legality of their origins. However works preserved in museums can be at least as difficult to access. Few museums are able to exhibit more than a small minority of the objects they hold. It is not infrequent (or surprising) for some of the objects in storage to be, effectively, lost, and for other reasons it may be hard for specialists to see material, particularly if it has been excavated recently. New discoveries may take many years to become familiar within the field, and even longer to filter into general, synoptic studies of Roman art.
So, for a variety of reason, authors depend heavily on other people's publications of Roman art, where they exist, and on their illustrations. The photographs themselves are usually supplied by the museums that own the work concerned, or simetimes by commercial agencies. In many cases no photograph exists, and new photography may not be permitted. In other cases, the acquisition of photographs proves lengthy or impossible. Moreover, the photographs (especially colour images) and the permission to reproduce them in print can be extremely costly both for individual authors and for their publishers. (p. 8)

The passages need to be read in context. It's not an angry book, and these introductory are comments are followed by interesting and challenging extended essay on the topic indicated by the title. I can highly recommend it. But back to the issue of access, here's a passage from the ending Bibliographical essay:

Finally, the photo-sharing website flickr.com contains thousands of images relevant to Roman art, many of them with 'Creative Commons' copyright licenses that make them easy to use legitimately for, e.g. educational purposes. Within that site the 'Chiron' group especially is dedicated to making images available for classical teaching and research. This site carries many of my own photographs (under the screen name 'Tintern'), including colour images of the House of the Vettii and other sites mentioned in this book. (p. 174)

So mad props to Dr. Stewart for raising the issue of access and then doing something about it. A book from CUP in which the author cites his flickr.com account? That's progress.

In-house commenting systems may not be necessary

2011-01-31T09:20:00.004-05:00

Somewhat wishy-washy title, I know.

But here's my point, I look forward to a world of stable URIs for intellectual content in which responses to scholarship and primary data are distributed around the Net.

A case in point, my NYU colleague Chuck Jones blogged about the digitization of some of Blegen's diaries by the American School of Classical Studies.

If you look at the bottom of the post, you'll see that he included the Pleiades URI's for both Mycenae and Tiryns.

It is now the case that a Google search for the Tiryns URI lists Chuck's AWOL post.

Assuming that ASCSA doesn't move that resource to a different URI and that the post remains available, stable URIs for Tiryns and Mycenae have now been permanently associated with the ASCSA resource. And that with the publisher of the information doing nothing. (Though it would be nice if ASCSA ditched the "index.php" from their URIs. See here.)

And note that I'm walking a fine line in this post. The Pleiades URIs that Chuck included explicitly in his post don't appear in the text of mine. I don't see any reason to clog up the Google search with this meta-meta-commentary.

By way of slightly living up to the title, my point is that such a decentralized "commenting system" should be encouraged. If you're able to link from your content to a stable URI that more-or-less represents the same concept, do so. And use such URIs when you're talking about other's people's work. That will encourage a distributed network of publication and response that is robust, open and encompasses many forms of expression from tweets, to blogposts, to more formal work, and beyond.

Responses to "Progress on Museum URIs"

2010-11-03T09:30:00.003-04:00

Three people responded to yesterday's post on museum URIs.

Leif Isaksen left a comment to the effect that he's not too concerned about differing base URIs for museum collections. I agree that there are worse things than the string "collection." in "http://collection.britishmuseum.org/object/YCA62958". The original explanation was to reduce load on an individual server. Without meaning to get too technical, the "/object" can be an effective load reducer by passing requests to a proxy. Bottom line: in an ideal world, I'd drop the "collection.", but I'm not too worked up about it.

Eric Kansa responded on his blog. His point had an interesting overlap with an e-mail I received. I won't quote that in its entirety as the author could have made it public if s/he wanted to. Here's a snippet:

but to me it seems a very bad idea to think that only museums can claim the right to designate URIs for their objects; there should be a standard that can be used by museums as well as by scientists outside of museums...

I took this as responding largely to

2. In order to avoid that everybody invents a new URI for the same
object, there should be one authority known to the whole world that
assigns such a URI.

3. This authority is naturally the museum that keeps the object,
because it is the only institution that can verify that two
different use cases of museum object URIs actually describe the same
thing.

Taking Eric's and Anonymous' comments together, I read them as calling for a multi-vocal internet in which many agents can assert an identity for an object, with those identities together forming a distributed and diverse commentary on the human past. I totally agree. To be self-critical, I may well have mis-read M. Doerr's e-mail. If he's calling for recognition of the exclusive right of museums to identify their objects, that's a non-starter. It's neither the right thing to do nor is it possible. On first reading, I took his e-mail to represent a welcome assumption of responsibility by museums to provide a locus of stability for reference to their collections. But to be clear, objects will have multiple identifiers. Referring back to a common identifier promoted by and discoverable at the holding institution will ease the process of recognizing that two or more identifiers refer to the "same thing". That will itself promote the idea of a discoverable and multi-vocal discussion about the past.

Progress on Museum URIs

2010-11-02T09:51:00.005-04:00

I'm including the full text of an e-mail sent by Martin Doerr of the Center for Cultural Informatics on Crete. It's been forwarded to me by a couple of people and there's a call for comment towards the end so it seems to be a public document. That's good because it's an excellent step forward in promoting stable URI's for museum collections. From my perspective, it mostly speaks for itself. Section 7 did cause some concern:

...

Under this consideration, Dominic proposes for the British Museum (http://www.britishmuseum.org/), that all objects of the Museum should be identified on the Semantic Web by the following: http://collection.britishmuseum.org/object/ followed by the "PRN number".

For instance, the Rosetta Stone has the PRN number: YCA62958, hence the "official" URI of the Rosetta stone is: http://collection.britishmuseum.org/object/YCA62958 . This URI should never become direct address of a document.

Just to be clear, if a user cuts-and-pastes 'http://collection.britishmuseum.org/object/YCA62958' into an address bar, or a document links directly to that (which I've just done), that should produce a human readable page. I'd like to see that happen without redirection. If you redirect to that same URL with ".html" appended, then authors will cut-and-paste that string into their documents. If a good non-crufty URI exists, that's what should appear in address bars and that's what should stand as the 'permalink'.

More generally, URIs should promote unity and overlap, not division, between the "semantic web" and the "plain-old web" (POW).

Section 7 also endorses URIs that have a different domain name from the institution itself, e.g. the "collection." in front of "britishmuseum.org". I don't like that. The reason given is to avoid the implications of name changes in the future. Ugh. Institutions should formally endorse the URIs they mint and make them as simple and short as possible. This decision should be taken at the highest levels of the institution. In the BM's case, that may mean the 25-member Board of Trustees.

Finally, the excellent and useful Europeana is mentioned. I'll take this opportunity to note that while http://europeana.eu/portal/record/00401/034BEA5CC6F88ADC6E7DCF5D7C5FECEA8FF85528.html works, http://europeana.eu/portal/record/00401/034BEA5CC6F88ADC6E7DCF5D7C5FECEA8FF85528 doesn't. It should.


Dear colleagues,

I'd like inform you about our discussion today with Dominic Oldman,
Deputy Head of Information Systems, British Museum, his team and
representatives of the Research Space project
(http://sites.google.com/site/rspaceproject/the-team):

1. It is necessary that museum objects are uniquely identified by
suitable URIs in Semantic Web applications.

2. In order to avoid that everybody invents a new URI for the same
object, there should be one authority known to the whole world that
assigns such a URI.

3. This authority is naturally the museum that keeps the object,
because it is the only institution that can verify that two
different use cases of museum object URIs actually describe the same
thing.

4. This URI should be derived in a simple way from the inventory
numbers published in exhibition catalogues, on on-line museum
catalogue access or by asking museum staff, to avoid an error-prone
equivalence matching process.

5. This URI should have a form that enables any museum that wishes
to do so to provide a Linked Open Data service resolving to the
description of that object. Note, that this URI must not be the URL
of an existing document about the object, but it must activate a
standard mechanism prescribed by the Linked Open Data Initiative to
redirect to a document saying what the URI means.

6. This museum object URI will continue be useful for communicating
uniquely about the object, even if the museum never will install an
LoD service, or if the way of dealing with LoD resolution requests
will change.

7. The way to create this URI should be the following: The museum
decides a base URL that will be extended by the inventory number of
the object. The base URL could be within the domain name of the main
museum Website, but in order to stay clear of possible name change
of the latter, a new domain name might be advisable. Also, for
larger museums, resolving LoD access requests to object information
may cause some server load, that can more easily be balanced with a
second name.

Under this consideration, Dominic proposes for the British Museum
(http://www.britishmuseum.org/), that all objects of the Museum
should be identified on the Semantic Web by the following:
http://collection.britishmuseum.org/object/ followed by the "PRN
number".

For instance, the Rosetta Stone has the PRN number: YCA62958, hence
the "official" URI of the Rosetta stone is:
http://collection.britishmuseum.org/object/YCA62958 . This URI
should never become direct address of a document.

It would be good, if Europeana experts to comment, if they regard is
an adequate approach for Europeana, and could transfer this message
to other museums and providers to follow this practice.

I intend to present this on the CIDOC Conference in Shanghai. I
would be very glad if I and Dominic could get a response within the
next week, if you endorse the procedure, and if you will support us
to spread the practice.

If you need further clarifications, please let me know as soon as
possible.

Best wishes,

Martin
--

--------------------------------------------------------------
 Dr. Martin Doerr              |  Vox:+30(2810)391625        |
 Research Director             |  Fax:+30(2810)391638        |
                               |  Email: martin@ics.forth.gr |
                                                             |
               Center for Cultural Informatics               |
               Information Systems Laboratory                |
                Institute of Computer Science                |
   Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH)   |
                                                             |
 Vassilika Vouton,P.O.Box1385,GR71110 Heraklion,Crete,Greece |
                                                             |
         Web-site: http://www.ics.forth.gr/isl               |
--------------------------------------------------------------

Ancient Mediterranean Objects at the NMHN

2010-10-28T12:19:00.001-04:00

Using posterous.com to track URIs. Here's an Ancient Mediterranean object at the National Museum of Natural History.

http://collections.nmnh.si.edu/anth/pages/nmnh/anth/Display.php?irn=8305526

If you're reading this at http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/ , that's part of the experiment as well.

Change Happens (if it can)

2010-10-16T21:13:00.005-04:00

As the result of an e-mail exchange with Neel Smith, one of the designers of the Canonical Text Service Protocol, I've come up with the following formulation:

If a character in a URL can change, it will.

I'm not the only person to think this but I just wanted to get that thought out in simple, direct language.

But what do I mean? Take Worldcat URLs such as http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/502674170. That "www." is annoying and should not be part of the URL that Worldcat presents as its permanent identifier for the book. At some point in the future, somebody there will realize this and remove those unnecessary characters. But http://worldcat.org/oclc/502674170? Now you're talking! And look, it already works.

It's true that the "oclc" could be shortened so maybe I need to qualify the formulation, but I'm not going to for the following reason. Changing those characters would risk collision with other identifying schemes that Worldcat supports such as http://worldcat.org/isbn/0754677737 . The 'www.' is unstable because it can be removed without breaking anything.

The simple formulation stands: If a character in a URL can change, it will.

The implication is, "be aggressive about removing all unnecessary characters from your URLs." The following is a horror-show:

http://www.worldcat.org/title/digital-research-in-the-study-of-classical-antiquity/oclc/502674170

It just looks unstable. Leading me to another formulation:

If a URL looks unstable, it is.

Discussing Citation by Example

2010-09-21T16:20:00.003-04:00

I've started a set of pages at the Digital Classicist Wiki on the topic of Citation in digital scholarship. In progress, under construction, etc., etc., etc.

The goal is to move existing practice towards a broad understanding of how to make citations to such categories of evidence as primary written sources, geographic entities, cataloged objects, and secondary scholarship so that those citations are:

Clearly identified in a robust yet rich fashion
Recognizable by automatic agents
To resources that are stable over the long-term

But I don't think it will be possible to establish and drive adoption of one very detailed standard. Better to have a simple notation - I follow others in suggesting 'class="citation"' for (x)html - that can indicate the presence of more detailed markup. I'm a fan of RDFa so I further discuss that on the page "Citations with added RDFa.

The Digital Classicist community is pretty open and I'm very grateful to G. Bodard (a.k.a palaeofuturist) for saying the equivalent of "Go for it." when I raised the possibility of hosting these materials in his realm.

There's a category for all the pages and I hope that list will grow.

References that just work (but I understand it's not that simple...)

2010-09-08T11:23:00.004-04:00

Go to Google. Type in "John 20:24", then hit return. You can even click the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. Or here's a direct link.

Or try the same thing in Bing (which provides results for Yahoo), and Altavista.

As you'll see, all three searches get you to the relevant passage of the Gospel According to John. And if you poke around on the Biblegateway site, you'll see various translations (but where's the Vulgate?).

That's impressive. It indicates that human readable references can be become so stable that automated agents are able to correctly translate them into links to particular chunks of primary text.

Here are some variations on the theme (all in Google):
"jean 20:24" (at google.fr): Not spot on, but pretty close.
"1 John 2:1": That's a reference to the first epistle of John. Entered into the "address bar" in Chrome. Seems to work.
"John 3": Unqualified chapter reference. Good to go.
"ephesians 1:2": Works.
"eph. 1:2": That abbreviation is OK.
"eph 1.2": Things become fuzzier if I don't use the ':' that is conventional in references to Christian scripture.
"Ephesians 2:4-10": Spans work as well, when properly formatted.

Again, I think this is interesting. Taking the New Testament as a corpus of Ancient Mediterranean texts that were written between the mid-first and third (at the latest: the Epistle of James 1 isn't definitively quoted until Origen) centuries AD makes it relevant to the study of the Ancient World as a whole. As a corpus, it's been around for a long time. Athanasius's letter of AD 367 is one conventional date for the determination of what was in, and what was out.

Those comments aside, the point remains that it is possible to automatically reverse engineer the citation scheme of a very stable corpus. I guess one caveat is that I don't absolutely know that Google, Bing, etc. haven't special cased strings that are plausibly references to the NT. Any ideas?

My larger goal is to think about references to so-called "primary texts" that just work. Given the above, my ad hoc, working definition of "primary text" is any text with a sufficiently stable name and citation scheme that search engines can find it. Sure, that's circular and incomplete, but it will do for now.

Let's try some others:
"gilgamesh 3": Muddled.
"gilgamesh tablet 3": Better.
"Iliad 23": Not bad. No Greek.
"Iliad 23.100": Individual line references don't work.
"Homer Iliad 23.100": Not better.
"Quran 32": I see it as the third link.
"hemingway, the old man and the sea": For comparison. Wikipedia is the top page for me; that's not the text itself. And Amazon is up there, as in the work is in copyright so I'd have to pay. Not sure I want to follow the links that say I can download the text for free.

A major distinction between references to NT texts and the second group is the ability of Google to handle full chapter and verse ('n:n') references. That doesn't seem to work for the Iliad. That's worth exploring.

If I go to Perseus and use the search box at the upper right, "homer iliad 23.100" doesn't work directly. Nor does "iliad 23.100". But "Hom. Il. 23.100" does. If I try that string in Google (link), it gets me to the Chicago version of the Perseus texts (via the 2nd ranked link when I tried it.). [I'll take this opportunity to note that the Chicago Perseus is wicked, and that it's likewise wicked cool that Perseus texts are licensed so this redundancy is possible.]

That kind of variation is one of the reasons I parenthetically qualified the title of this post. References to "primary texts" - and other texts for that matter - are not simple. In this post - as is often my wont - I've let myself be drawn along by current practice. I really do like to see what people are actually doing and how data actually works on the Internet. If you want a more substantive discussion of the problems of citation, I highly recommend Neel Smith's "Citation in Classical Studies" in DHQ 2009. Here's the abstract:

Citation practice reflects a model of a scholarly domain. This paper first considers traditional citation practice in the humanities as a description of our subjects of study. It then describes work at the Center for Hellenic Studies on an architecture for digital scholarship that is explicitly based on this model, and proposes a machine-actionable but technologically independent notation for citing texts, the Canonical Text Services URN.

For now, let me say that it is correct for Google (via Biblegateway) to dereference a citation to John 7:53-8:11 (the Pericope Adulterae) or John 5:7 (the Comma Johanneum). Neither may have been in the "original" text of the Gospel of John, but references to them are semantically clear and have been used "in the wild" so need to be handled. But note that Google prioritizes discussion of the CJ over the text (or at least does when I'm trying it now). Again, see N. Smith on the implications of such variation.

Clearly it helps to have a committed body of believers and/or scholars working on very old texts. Energy and time make for stable references. But there is variability in functionality even within that group. I guess the long-term question is how do we move more texts into the category of "just working"? I am assuming we want to. And how do we support co-existence of the simple "reference following" alongside what Neel describes. Both are useful.

Numbered Paragraphs in Digital Humanities Quarterly

2010-08-30T14:51:00.002-04:00

I can recommend Patrik Svensson's article "The Landscape of Digital Humanities" in Digital Humanities Quarterly as a good read. My comments here are about the internals of handing DHQ's paragraph based citation scheme.

Quick intro to the issue: DHQ is an online journal. It doesn't have pages to provide a physical solution to the need to make references to specific points in an article. So the html version numbers each paragraph. So far so good. As a reader I can note the paragraph number and cite it in a future publication.

But I'm not sure DHQ has quite the right implementation of this good idea. I'm arbitrarily picking the paragraph numbered 118. The one that starts, "Information technology, or more broadly the digital, can be seen as affording objects of analysis for the humanities."

Note that I don't include a link directly to that paragraph. That's because I can't. Looking at the HTML source, I see:

<div class="counter">118</div><div class="ptext">Information technology, or more broadly the digital, can be seen as affording...

That's somewhat unfortunate. It would be great if the '<div class="ptext">' were changed to read '<div id="p118" class="ptext">. Then I could mint a URL of the form:

http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html#p118

It would be even cooler if the <div class="counter">118</div> also read:

<div class="counter"><a href="#p118">118</a></div>

I've wrapped the paragraph number in a link to the paragraph. That way a user can right/control-click on the link and copy-and-paste it into an e-mail or other work. Easy self-reference to an internal citation structure.

I'd also like to see the paragraph numbers represented in the XML source. Again, taking a snippet of that, the start of the paragraph numbered as 118 in the html, appears in the xml as:

<p>Information technology, or more broadly the digital, can be seen as affording objects of analysis for the humanities...

Unless I'm missing something, the published citation scheme isn't represented in the archival version. I think it should be. Even if DHQ considers the paragraph number ephemeral, I think there's a valid scholarly need for them to be persistent.

I'm a big fan of DHQ so this is constructive criticism. And I'm sort of hoping that I've mis-understood something and that those paragraph numbers are more meaningful than they seem after one looks under the hood.

Corrected Versions of Papers

2010-08-24T12:04:00.005-04:00

It's late August so my mind is on other things, like the next stretch of split-rail fence that I need to put in. But I do find it interesting that Heather Baker has used Academia.edu to distribute a corrected version of her paper "The layout of the ziggurat temple at Babylon" that first appeared in Nouvelles Assyriologiques Brèves et Utilitaires 2008.2 (Juin). Feel free to be similarly and vaguely inspired about issues of versioning, "scribal error", reference, etc.

More Papers on Academia.edu

2010-06-17T20:15:00.003-04:00

Sure, Academia.edu is far from perfect. But I continue to be psyched when I see people who have uploaded a bunch of papers or a book.

Matthew Canepa
Florin Curta
Carlos Fabião
David Gill
Luca Girella
Yannis Hamilakis
Robert Maier. Particularly Glossarium Culinarium Latinum

Just a brief "thanks" to those who have added to my collection of digital offprints.

Academia.edu

2010-06-10T23:05:00.005-04:00

When I first heard about Academia.edu, I pretty much ignored it. Basically, the last thing I needed was another social media site.

A few weeks ago, however, Chuck Jones sent me an invitation so I took another look. What caught my eye was the papers that users have uploaded. I'm always on the look out for digital content that I can't find elsewhere so the site's role as a central point for the discovery of articles, etc. is very useful.

Here's an incomplete list of some of my fellow "Academicians" whose scholarship I've downloaded:

I've tried to do my bit as well by pointing to some of my work that's available on-line. And here are links to the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World and American Numismatic Society pages. I'm intrigued by the opportunity to have a lightweight institutional repository that Academia.edu offers to an organization like the ANS.

Not everything is perfect about the site. The 'Department Viewer' - for want of a better name - relies on Flash. That's lame and doesn't work on an iPad. And I'm not sure the developers have realized that the papers are a real asset. It would be nice to be able to see all papers listed by people I'm following. Or all papers from a single department. And more liberal spreading around of "Follow this Person" buttons would be nice. If I'm looking at the page for a particular paper, I should be able to single-click to follow its author.

If you're interested, come join the fun. And remember to link to your digital scholarship. As you can tell, I think that's the real utility of the site.

Coin Hoards, Timelines and KML

2010-06-10T16:34:00.003-04:00

http://nomisma.org/kml/thasos-all.kml is a KML file that shows findspots of hoards with coins of Thasos in them. You can see that file rendered with the Google Map API at http://nomisma.org/id/thasos.

This post is about viewing the KML file in Google Earth. If you do that, you'll see a Timeline slider appear in the top left of the G Earth window. Slide the control to the right and you'll see an explosion of hoards towards the north following the mid-2nd century BC. It's really quite dramatic so give it a shot.

One part of an explanation is that Thasos started striking large numbers of new larger tetradrachms following 148 BC, with many of these traveling north. Exactly why is a matter of historical interpretation. The Roman province of Macedon was established in 146 B.C. and that had a profound effect on both the issuance and circulation of coinage.

Nomisma.org is about making this information more accessible so that more scholars can engage with the question.

Bibliographic Tools, Citations, and Digital Publications

2010-06-02T11:51:00.004-04:00

Some preliminaries... I'm posting about digital publication of ancient world scholarship as part of my work at NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. I say that only to make clear that there's a practical element to my thinking about issues of citation, structure, metadata, etc. I will be helping to shepherd content into the digital realm and that means decisions, decisions, decisions. I am enjoying the focus this context gives to my thoughts. And since I, like most bloggers, live for little nuggets of feedback, those have been appreciated as well.

It's also important to stress that this is all happening within the intellectual context of ISAW. In other words, my new colleagues have pushed on these issues in interesting ways and I can take advantage of their previous work.

As in, let's talk about Zotero and the role it can play in providing a sustainable bibliographic framework for digital scholarship. This is already happening at the ISAW-hosted Pleiades project, and that lets me take a very practical approach to writing about the issue.

The Pleiades Zotero library is at http://www.zotero.org/groups/pleiades/items. It includes the item http://www.zotero.org/groups/pleiades/items/72922905, which is the Zotero record for the article
Coastal Sites of Northeast Africa: The Case Against Bronze Age Ports. In case it isn't clear, the point of the article is pretty much that there weren't any.

In yesterday's post, I talked about citing secondary scholarship. Today, I'm interested in the mediating those citations through Zotero bibliographic records.

The same basic pattern would apply: '<a rel="dc:references" href="http://www.zotero.org/groups/pleiades/items/72922905">White and White 1996</a>' is a reference to the work described in that Zotero record. I am interested in the extent to which it is necessary to indicate that it is not a reference to the Zotero record itself but let me put that off for now. More relevant here is why use Zotero to establish unique identities for cited works at all?

The most compelling reason is that not all works will have such identifiers and Zotero allows one to create these. For example, http://www.zotero.org/groups/pleiades/items/72922931 is the Zotero record for an article that has no direct representation in Worldcat and which isn't online (I don't think). I.e., you're on your own in terms of a stable URI for this title.

And since consistency is good, it might be appropriate to create Zotero records for all cited works in a digital publication and only point to those.

This approach is also attractive because it allows linking to digital representations of titles as they become available. For example, the record for Coastal Sites could be linked to http://www.jstor.org/stable/40000602, which is the JSTOR record. A more compelling example is this link: http://hdl.handle.net/10.2972/hesp.79.1.1. That will take you to the Atypon-Link version of J. Cherry and W. Parkinson's Hesperia 2010 article on lithics from SW Greece. As the volumes of Hesperia role over into JSTOR once they are past the 3 year wall, the Atypon URI will be either matched or replaced by an equivalent JSTOR URI. A Zotero record can have links to both versions without requiring any updating of the digital publication which points to that record.

And if more than one digital publication points to a Zotero record, that equivalency should be discoverable. I like that.

The big potential downer is: do we trust Zotero to be around for the foreseeable future? Or at least, will these URI's work over the very long term? I don't know the answer to that. This is one reason to ensure that each digital publication "knows" bibliographic metadata for all the citations it makes. Centuries from now, that information may be useful in tracking down readable versions of titles.

And here'a a finishing twist. Regardless of which tool is used to generate URI-based unique identifiers for cited works, that same tool could (should? must?) be used to provide URI-based unique identifiers for the digital publication itself.

References in Digital Publications

2010-06-01T13:15:00.004-04:00

Modern scholarship relies on citation. It's efficient in that one work can incorporate the results of another without having to repeat it. It's also a requirement of our modern academic culture that if you use somebody's idea, you give that person credit. There's more to be said on both points but this post is more about mechanics than purpose. (Though see here for a recent discussion of purpose. [I fall into the camp of : if you want credit for your work, make it easy to identify and be generous in giving credit to others. If you don't need credit, that's OK but still give it.]).

Back to references. They come in many forms in print works. In pre-linked media, among the purposes of citation is to give future readers the information they need to physically acquire the referenced work. That is, you take the title of the book or journal, go to the library to find the volume, and then start reading.

It is one of the great glories of the Internet that this physical labor is no longer always necessary. The simple construct '<a href="http://sebastianheath.com/files/HeathS2010-DigitalResearch.pdf">I wrote this</a>' is rendered as 'I wrote this', so that a mere click takes you directly to the article.

That form of link is too simple to support modern scholarly practice. Citations of the form (Heath 2010) give a preliminary indication to the reader of who wrote a referenced work. Full information in footnotes further enriches the reading experience, but at the cost of possibly interrupting the flow of an argument, or depriving the reader of a collected bibliography at the end of a work. Choose your own preference, that's not my point here.

Instead, I am exploring specific patterns of markup that promote access to referenced works while also recording bibliographic metadata in a robust and sustainable fashion. Two needs, two solutions.

Here's some markup:

Late Roman pottery is very visible in Aegean landscapes  (<a rel="dcterms:references" href="http://hdl.handle.net/10.2972/hesp.76.4.743">Pettegrew 2007</a>).

If we momentarily ignore the question of whether or not Handles records are good stable URIs for bibliographic resources, the semantics of this html are clear: it represents a citation of the 2007 article by David Pettegrew, The Busy Countryside of Late Roman Corinth. (Note: it doesn't reference the html page describing that title)

The use of the term "dcterms:references" in the RDFa rel attribute follows from the Dublin Core's Guidelines for Encoding Bibliographic Citation Information in Dublin Core Metadata. In this context 'references' is a verb, not a plural noun.

That html will render as: "Late Roman pottery is very visible in Aegean landscapes (Pettegrew 2007)." Again, this is all pretty clear.

It's also worth noting that the 'a' element in html is a building-block of our search-engine enabled world. Scholarship should not fight that, but use it. As many have said, "you get this for free."

I do, however, want to pair this reference with bibliographic metadata. Here's where some more RDFa comes in.

'http://hdl.handle.net/10.2972/hesp.76.4.743' is a unique identifier for Pettegrew's article. This suggests the following snippet:

<div about="http://hdl.handle.net/10.2972/hesp.76.4.743"><span property="dcterms:bibliographicCitation">Pettegrew, D. (2007). "The Busy Countryside of Late Roman Corinth: Interpreting Ceramic Data Produced by Regional Archaeological Surveys" In <i>Hesperia</i> 76.4: 743-784.</span></div>

These two snippets can be adapted and combined with a little more RDFa scaffolding:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
 xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" >
<body about="http://example.org/example_document">
<h1>My Text</h1>
 <p>Late Roman pottery is very visible in Aegean landscapes (<a rel="dcterms:references" href="http://hdl.handle.net/10.2972/hesp.76.4.743">Pettegrew 2007</a></p>
<h1>References</h1>
<p about="http://hdl.handle.net/10.2972/hesp.76.4.743" property="dcterms:bibliographicCitation">Pettegrew, D. (2007). "The Busy Countryside of Late Roman Corinth: Interpreting Ceramic Data Produced by Regional Archaeological Surveys" In <i>Hesperia</i> 76.4: 743-784.</p>
</body>
</html>

Pointing an RDFa extractor at that html gives:


@prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
@prefix : <http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml> .
@prefix dcterms: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/> .

<http://example.org/example_document>
   dcterms:references <http://hdl.handle.net/10.2972/hesp.76.4.743> .

<http://hdl.handle.net/10.2972/hesp.76.4.743>
   dcterms:bibliographicCitation "Pettegrew, D. (2007). \"The Busy Countryside of Late Roman Corinth: Interpreting Ceramic Data Produced by Regional Archaeological Surveys\" In <i xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml\" xmlns:dcterms=\"http://purl.org/dc/terms/\">Hesperia</i> 76.4: 743-784."^^rdf:XMLLiteral .

The shorter version of which is: example.org/example_document references Pettegrew 2007 and even knows something about it. There are lots of third-party tools that can find this information when it is encoded in this way. And I could enrich the 'bibliographicCitation' to include parsable information on author, title, date, etc. That's for another time.

I want to stress that I don't think this determines a particular citation style. Use footnotes if that's preferable. As long as the RDFa produces triples similar to the above, your information is useful. And some degree of run-time transformation is also possible, depending on the granularity of the markup.

Me @ NYU/ISAW

2010-05-25T14:41:00.004-04:00

Briefly... I'm sitting in an office at NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, where I am now a Visiting Scholar. This is preliminary to a more permanent position with details to come.

My main goal is to work on issues of digital publication and on integration of diverse digital resources. I had started collaborating with ISAW-folk on these issues some time back, which is why I've been blogging about them.

I'm extremely excited to be working with my new colleagues here - a veritable dream-team of digital humanists - and am looking forward to making real progress when it comes to sharing well-structured, semantically-rich, open-licensed scholarship about the Ancient World.

And I'll still be collaborating with my long-time friends at the ANS, particularly on Nomisma.org. And field-work goes on.

Back to work...

RDFa Document Metadata: Authors in PLOS One

2010-05-19T14:46:00.003-04:00

Brief follow up to yesterday's post.

Here's the HTML that indicates authorship from an example PLOS One article.

<p xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:aml="http://topazproject.org/aml/" class="authors" xpathlocation="noSelect">
 <span rel="dc:creator"><span property="foaf:name">Harold C. Sox</span></span><sup><a href="#aff1">1</a></sup>, <span rel="dc:creator"><span property="foaf:name">Mark Helfand</span></span><sup><a href="#aff2">2</a></sup><sup><a href="#cor1" class="fnoteref">*</a></sup>, 
 <span rel="dc:creator"><span property="foaf:name">Jeremy Grimshaw</span></span><sup><a href="#aff3">3</a></sup>,
 <span rel="dc:creator"><span property="foaf:name">Kay Dickersin</span></span><sup><a href="#aff4">4</a></sup>, <span class="capture-id">the <i>PLoS Medicine</i> Editors</span>,
 <span rel="dc:creator"><span property="foaf:name">David Tovey</span></span><sup><a href="#aff5">5</a></sup>, <span rel="dc:creator"><span property="foaf:name">J. André Knottnerus</span></span><sup><a href="#aff6">6</a></sup>,
 <span rel="dc:creator"><span property="foaf:name">Peter Tugwell</span></span><sup><a href="#aff7">7</a></sup>
</p>
<p xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:aml="http://topazproject.org/aml/" class="affiliations" xpathlocation="noSelect">
 <a name="aff1" id="aff1"></a><strong>1</strong> Dartmouth Institute, Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, New Hampshire, United States of America,
 <a name="aff2" id="aff2"></a><strong>2</strong> Portland VA Medical Center and Department of Medicine, Oregon Health &amp; Science University, Portland, Oregon, United States of America,
 <a name="aff3" id="aff3"></a><strong>3</strong> Clinical Epidemiology Program, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada,
 <a name="aff4" id="aff4"></a><strong>4</strong> Department of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America,
 <a name="aff5" id="aff5"></a><strong>5</strong> The Cochrane Library, London, United Kingdom, <a name="aff6" id="aff6"></a>
 <strong>6</strong> Department of General Practice, University of Maastricht, Maastricht, The Netherlands,
 <a name="aff7" id="aff7"></a><strong>7</strong> Departments of Medicine, and Epidemiology and Community Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
</p>

The basic structure is two 'p' elements, one with a 'class="authors"', the second with 'class="affiliations"'. I am trying to avoid using @class to indicate document structure and metadata, so yesterday I adopted the 'bibo:authorList' convention. But it is useful to see another instance of the nested 'rel="dc:creator"'->'property="foaf:*"' pattern. Is that beginning to look like a trend?

The relationship between author and affiliation is a little broken. The reference from each author to his/her affiliation is actually to an 'a' element with no content. An automatic agent might return an empty string as the affiliation unless it had ad hoc code to pull the text as far as the next '<a>' or '</p>' tag. That's not particularly helpful.

It is important to be clear that this HTML is rendered from XML encoded in the National Institutes of Health's Journal Publishing Tag Set Version 2.0. That's my way of acknowledging that the markup delivered to your browser doesn't bear the full weight of being a well-structured archival version.

Towards a metadata header for XHTML5+RDFa1.1 Digital Publications

2010-05-18T15:46:00.005-04:00

XHTML5 defines elements such as 'header' and 'summary' that improve the constructs for indicating document metadata. But it is not a finished solution for embedding these concepts in a born-digital scholarly publication. In this post I take an initial crack at a decent way of doing this.

To cut to the chase, here's a sample document:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
 xmlns:bibo="http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/"
 xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
 xmlns:dctypes="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/"
 xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
 xmlns:owl="http ://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#"
 xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
 about="http://example.org/digpub"
 typeof="dctypes:Text"
>


    <head>
        <title property="dc:title">Guidelines for Using XHTML5 to encode Digital Publications</title>
        <base href="http://example.org/digpub"/>
    </head>
<body>
<header>
<div rel="bibo:authorList">
      <ul rel="rdf:Seq">
          <li rel="rdf:li">
              By <span rel="dc:creator">
                  <span rel="foaf:Person">
                      <span property="foaf:name" rel="owl:sameAs" resource="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Gallatin">Albert Gallatin</span>
                  </span>
              </span>
          </li>

          <li rel="rdf:li">
              and <span rel="dc:creator">
                  <span rel="foaf:Person">
                      <span property="foaf:name" rel="owl:sameAs" resource="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Alexander_Hammond">William Alexander Hammond</span>
                  </span>
              </span>
          </li>
      </ul>
</div>
<summary property="dc:description" xml:lang="en">An abstract in English.</summary>
<summary property="dc:description" xml:lang="fr">Un résumé en Française.</summary>
</header>
<section>
 <h1>Section 1</h1>
 <p>Your text here.</p>
 </section>
</body>
</html>

And here's the turtle representation of the embedded RDF:

@prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
@prefix : <http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml> .
@prefix bibo: <http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/> .
@prefix dc: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/> .
@prefix dctypes: <http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/> .
@prefix foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> .
@prefix owl: <http ://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#> .

<http://example.org/digpub>
    dc:description "An abstract in English."@en, "Un résumé en Française."@fr ;
    dc:title "Guidelines for Using XHTML5 to encode Digital Publications" ;
    bibo:authorList [
        rdf:Seq _:bnode1
    ] ;
    a dctypes:Text .

_:bnode1
    rdf:li [
        dc:creator [
            foaf:Person [
                owl:sameAs <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Gallatin> ;
                foaf:name "Albert Gallatin"
            ]
        ]
    ], [
        dc:creator [
            foaf:Person [
                owl:sameAs <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Alexander_Hammond> ;
                foaf:name "William Alexander Hammond"
            ]
        ]
    ] .

Even if you don't read turtle that might make some sense.

<http://example.org/digpub> after the prefixes means we're defining attributes of a document at that URI.
The last line of this indented section just says that the document is 'a dctypes:Text' resource.
dc:description "...." means the RDF extractor has found the Dublin Core description (more or less used as 'abstract'). The abstract is available in two languages as indicated by the 'xml:lang' attribute in the document.
Same for dc:title. Note that I don't put the title in the 'body' element because html-family encoding schemes want it up in the 'head'. Perhaps the title should be repeated in the 'body/header'. I'm inclined to think that can be done on delivery to a browser when a document is published via a web-server. The archival version should not have such repetition.
We then come to a 'bibo:authorList', the contents of which are specified following the line beginning '_:bnode1'. The "Bibliographic Ontology" (here 'bibo') uses this construct for multi-authored works. I'm not sure I like it. Especially since it imposes the extra nesting of rdf:Seq and rdf:li. But if 'bibo' is widely adopted (which it sort of is) then it's not my place to complain. Conform to the standard and move on. The contents of each rdf:li in a bibo:authorList are not well defined in the spec. I looked through the bibo examples, adopted its use of dc:creator and foaf:Person, and then added an owl:sameAs for good measure.

My point in doing all this is to make use of existing standards that allow a corpus of born-digital scholarship to represent metadata in a machine-recognizable fashion that also allows the "text parts" to be human readable. I'm just at the beginning of this project so I welcome suggestions of where I can look for good models.

New KML files for hoards and mints on nomisma.org

2010-05-12T16:15:00.004-04:00

Nomisma.org is the project I work on with my colleagues at the ANS and elsewhere to establish stable URIs for numismatic concepts. Development sometimes moves slowly but I've recently added new functionality for the mapping side of things. I'm facing one annoying bug but I think it's worth reporting this progress. So...

http://nomisma.org/id/eretria will bring up the html page for the mint of Eretria in Greece. You'll see a very brief label for the site, co-ordinates, and a link to the relevant Wikipedia article.
http://nomisma.org/kml/eretria.kml is a kml file that just shows the location of the mint.
http://nomisma.org/kml/eretria-all.kml is much more fun. It shows the location of the mint plus all the mappable hoards that have Eretrian coins in them. 'Mappable' is just an indication that we haven't entered findspots for all hoards. But we're moving as fast as we can.

This pattern is generalized. http://nomisma.org/kml/babylon.kml and http://nomisma.org/kml/babylon-all.kml do what you would expect.

http://nomisma.org/kml/igch0262.kml shows just the findspot of the hoard. http://nomisma.org/kml/igch0262-all.kml shows findspot and location of the mints of the coins found in the hoard.

Open these files in Google Earth for best effect.

There are links to the related kml files on each page and I've also put <link> elements in each page's head (cf. S. Gillies' blog post for discussion).

The annoying bug is that when I show those maps on the site using the Google Maps API, not all mints or findspots appear. Not sure why that is, but I'm guessing I've got something incorrectly formatted. Or there is some limit in how many Network Links the Maps API will load in a short period of time. I'll investigate and fix.

More concisely, nomisma.org will show you a mint and findspots for its coins. As noted, not all information is entered; but we can begin to talk about the site and its data as a resource for mapping economic connections within the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East.

Document and Concept: '#this' and how DBpedia does it

2010-05-11T10:53:00.005-04:00

I'm following up on yesterday's post in which I looked at the distinction between 'concept' and 'document' as well as its implications for scholarly practice. To be honest, I'm not sure I've really addressed the scholarly practice aspect of this thread but that's where I'm heading. I'll give a preview at the very end of this post.

Yesterday I asked, "Is there an unambiguous and widely-accepted convention for indicating the concept lying behind a document?". Gabriel Bodard left a comment noting the convention of appending '#this' to indicate that a URI is a reference to the real-world concept rather than the document describing that concept. This is definitely worth considering.

As an aside, Gabby (if I may) is correct that it's hard to look for documentation of the convention since 'this' is understandably ignored by search engines. There's the W3 document 'Cool URIs for the Semantic Web', which does discuss '#this'. I'm not sure if that's the original citation but that title is definitely on the suggested reading list for this topic. As is 'Linked Data Tutorial - NG: Publishing and consuming linked data with RDFa', which I was reminded to look at anew by Sean Gillies.

I have reservations about '#this'. Some of them are aesthetic but that's not a strong leg to stand on. Practically, I don't like having to inspect the internal characters of a URI to figure out its semantics. I also wonder if the convention hasn't really taken off. The 'Linked Data Tutorial' was published after 'Cool URIs' so it may be indicative that it doesn't discuss '#this'. I'm also not sure it's good to devote the '#' mechanism (aka fragment identifiers) to represent metadata rather than maintaining its original purpose of specifying internal portions of a document. But if '#this' comes to rule the world, I'll happily use it.

The 'Linked Data Tutorial' does use DBpedia in its examples so I want to look more closely at how that site handles the 'Document/Concept' distinction. In truth, I didn't find an explicit discussion of the topic on the DBpedia site itself. Maybe I just didn't come across it so I'd welcome a link. I did find the following on the the OpenLink site: "the URI prefixes http://dbpedia.org/resource/..., http/dbpedia.org/page/... and http://dbpedia.org/data/... distinguish between a resource and its HTML or RDF description documents". OpenLink is the creator of Virtuoso, the software that powers DBpedia's SPARQL-endpoint, so I'll take that statement as definitive until I find something more authoritative.

Time to get into details... http://dbpedia.org/resource/Antioch is the URI for the concept 'Antioch: the ancient city'. Clicking on that URI will cause your browser to be redirected to the document http://dbpedia.org/page/Antioch . That's great. We have a clean separation between concept and document.

Looking at the source of 'page/Antioch' (I'll use that shorthand going forward) shows that this document uses RDFa to embed semantic information in human-readable html. We could switch that around. RDFa allows human-readable text to be embedded in machine-parsable data. I'm not sure it matters, which is the main point.

DBpedia even references the RDFa 1.0 DTD: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML+RDFa 1.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/DTD/xhtml-rdfa-1.dtd">. That's very cool and very correct. When RDFa 1.1 is published, I'm counting on DBpedia to be at the forefront of adoption.

The 'resource/Antioch' URL appears three times in the 'page/Antioch' document. The following link elements are in the header:

<link rel="foaf:primarytopic" href="http://dbpedia.org/resource/Antioch"/>
<link rev="describedby" href="http://dbpedia.org/resource/Antioch"/>

The body start tag looks like this:

<body onload="init();" about="http://dbpedia.org/resource/Antioch">

Ignore the @onload, it's the @about that's interesting. It's just RDFa to say that all the parsable information in the document describes the resource http://dbpedia.org/resource/Antioch .

But far more interesting to me is the 'rev="describedby"' in the quoted link element of the document's head. Note that it's 'rev', not 'rel'. The meaning of the whole element is "The current document describes the resource at http://dbpedia.org/resource/Antioch". Yes, that's similar to the @about of the body. I really like the distinctiveness of using @rev . It's easily accessible by javascript or by an RDFa extractor. And I like that I can point to a major player in the Linked Data world as a precedent. That gives it a sense of de facto standard. And a little googling of 'describedby' found instances on the W3 site. It seems it's not quite an officially accepted standard but, again, it's nice to see a major player possibly getting behind 'describedby'.

So it's worth asking if this is a convention that others might be willing to adopt. Any takers or comments? Is @rev too obscure? Other objections?

I also want to briefly point out that the DBPedia 'page/...' documents make some effort to be clear to human readers that they are describing resources. The link at the top of 'page/Antioch' is to 'resource/Antioch'. This could be clearer but is a start.

And as for scholarly practice, I'll just briefly say that this discussion is in part inspired by the observation that Concepts should be permanent, Documents may be temporary. Looking back to the Geonames discussion of yesterday, I will not hold it against geonames.org if it stops responding to the URL http://www.geonames.org/3020251/embrun.html . Maybe html will fall out of use someday. It will be annoying if the string of characters http://sws.geonames.org/3020251/ , ceases to mean anything. Actually, I wish they'd remove the 'sws' cruft from that URL but that's their choice. Scholarship likes permanence and to the extent that the distinction between document and concept is clearly maintained, scholarly practice will be well served.

Concept and Document in the Ancient World Semantic Web

2010-05-10T09:43:00.005-04:00

This post is really just me taking some notes on semantic web usage. Apologies if it's too discursive but I'm just at the gathering info stage right now.

Along with some colleagues, I've been thinking about the relationships between concrete action and scholarly intent that are inherent in the links we make when creating digital publications.

First some background. Here's a "test" sentence, along with its html.

Themistocles was born in Athens.
Or:

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Themistocles">Themistocles</a> was born in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens">Athens</a>.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens is a document found on the Internet. As used in our sentence, it is a placeholder for Athens - nebulously defined, I admit - as a concept. Asking the question, "What is the latitude and longitude of Athens?", focuses the issue. It is not useful to respond with the location(s) of the Wikipedia servers. We clearly want to know the location of the site in "the real world", or 37° 58′ 0″ N, 23° 43′ 0″ E.

Links point to documents, we often mean the underlying concept. Often this distinction doesn't matter. Sometimes it does, as in:

My source for the longitude and latitude of Athens is the Wikipedia article for Athens.

That sentence has the same link appearing two times, one meaning the concept, the other meaning the document. Wikipedia provides no mechanism for distinguishing between these meanings.

DBpedia does implement this distinction. But first, here's the intro sentence from the DBpedia website:

DBpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia, and to link other data sets on the Web to Wikipedia data.

In DBpedia, the following URLs are both valid:

http://dbpedia.org/resource/Athens
http://dbpedia.org/page/Athens

The first refers to the concept, the second is a specific document. This allows for the following useful HTML:

My source for the longitude and latitude of <a href="http://dbpedia.org/resource/Athens">Athens</a> is the <a href="http://dbpedia.org/page/Athens">DBpedia page</a>.

Looking at the DBpedia page http://dbpedia.org/page/Athens is useful because it gives a list of resources that are each related to dbpedia:Athens via owl:sameAs. These are:

Before looking at one of these, what is owl:sameAs? The OWL Web Ontology language is described here. Among the descriptions of owl:sameAs given there is that a "...typical use of sameAs would be to equate individuals defined in different documents to one another, as part of unifying two ontologies". So the DBpedia usage, which is paralleled in many other semantic web resources, is spot on.

The geonames.org reference is interesting. In part because the site has a discussion that explicitly addresses the difference between concept and document: http://www.geonames.org/ontology/. That page also has a link to a good blog post.

DBpedia follows the Geonames guidelines in using owl:sameAs to qualify its link to http://sws.geonames.org/264371/ , which is the Geonames URI for the concept "Athens". Clicking on that redirects you to the page http://www.geonames.org/264371/athens.html. Note the change of host to 'www.geonames.org' and the addition of 'athens.html'. The serial number remains the same.

Here is a screen grab of the "balloon" that is displayed next to the icon indicating the location of Athens.

There are two interesting links shown in this image: 'perma link' and 'semantic web rdf':

perma link: http://www.geonames.org/264371/athens.html

semantic web rdf: http://sws.geonames.org/264371/about.rdf

http://www.geonames.org/264371/athens.html is just the link to the page. http://sws.geonames.org/264371/about.rdf is an RDF document. It's worth looking at the source to see the attribute 'rdf:about="http://sws.geonames.org/264371/"'. URLs of the pattern 'http:...about.rdf' are documents. http://sws.geonames.org/264371/ is a concept.

Even with this soup of web addresses, there is a lot that Geonames is doing right. The only missed opportunity I see is no explicit indication in the "264371/athens.html" page of the concept address. There is the following: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rdf+xml" title="RDF Version" href="http://sws.geonames.org/264371/about.rdf" />'. This is a link to a document not a concept. And 'alternate' is too vague for me to know that I can parse that RDF to find its @about value.

It would be nice if there were somelthing like '<link rel="concept" type="application/rdf+xml" title="Concept URI" href="http://sws.geonames.org/264371" />'. I'm not too concerned with what's in @type so I left it as is. Bit 'concept' is not in anyway standard. I just made it up.

If this post has a point, that's it. Make it really easy for me to figure out which URI is for the concept, because that's the one I really want to use. Or maybe I should end with a question. Is there an unambiguous and widely-accepted convention for indicating the concept lying behind a document? If not, we need one.

Screen shot of Troy pottery on iPad

2010-04-07T11:49:00.003-04:00

Quick post...

Here's a screen shot of Greek, Roman and Byzantine Pottery at Ilion (Troia) on an iPad. This is in the default reader iBooks.

You can click through to the Flickr page to get the full-size image. This gives a sense of the dimensions of the iPad screen.

OK, lots of work to do to make the page layout better, but I will admit to thinking this is cool.

Some annoyances: This volume is co-edited with Billur Tekkök but only "S. Heath" is showing up at the top. The underlined links don't work. That's also the case in the Stanza ePub reader on my iPhone. Desktop ePub readers do follow links (or at least some of them do). I think they all should, regardless of device.

There will be more to say so stay tuned. The brief "take away" is that eReaders will be one channel for the distribution of archaeological data. I look forward to RadioSchack and the like selling color devices for somewhere between $79.00 and $179.00

p.s. You can get the file here: bit.ly/troyepub .

Saving Archaeology in Italy

2010-04-07T08:18:00.002-04:00

The US State Department's Cultural Heritage Center circulated the following e-mail yesterday. I'll have more to say on this soon, but for those of you already inclined to write a letter in support of extending the MoU with Italy that protects its archaeological resources, the deadline is April 22 and you can send your comments in as an attachment to <culprop@state.gov>.

From: "Cultural Property" <CULPROP@state.gov>
Date: April 6, 2010 11:26:52 AM EDT
To: "Cultural Property" <CULPROP@state.gov>
Subject: Meeting of the Cultural Property Advisory Committee

The Department of State’s Cultural Heritage Center would like to draw 
your attention to an announcement that will be published in tomorrow’s 
Federal Register 
(http://www.federalregister.gov/OFRUpload/OFRData/2010-07898_PI.pdf).

[Billing Code: 4710-05]
DEPARTMENT OF STATE
[Public Notice 6945]

Notice of Meeting of the Cultural Property Advisory Committee
In accordance with the provisions of the Convention on Cultural Property
Implementation Act (19 U.S.C. § 2601 et seq.) (the Act) there will be a meeting of
the Cultural Property Advisory Committee on Thursday, May 6, 2010, from 9:00
a.m. to approximately 5:00 p.m., and on Friday, May 7, 2010, from 9:00 a.m. to
approximately 3:00 p.m., at the Department of State, Annex 5, 2200 C Street, N.W.,
Washington, D.C. During its meeting the Committee will review a proposal to
extend the “Memorandum of Understanding Between the Government of the United
States of America and the Government of the Republic of Italy Concerning the
Imposition of Import Restrictions on Categories of Archaeological Material
Representing the Pre-Classical, Classical and Imperial Roman Periods of Italy”
signed in Washington, D.C. on January 19, 2001 and amended and extended in 2006
through an exchange of diplomatic notes. The purpose of this review is for the
Committee to make findings and a recommendation regarding the proposal to extend
this Memorandum of Understanding.

The Committee’s responsibilities are carried out in accordance with
provisions of the Act. The U.S. – Italy Memorandum of Understanding, as
amended and extended, the Designated List of restricted categories, the text of the
Act and related information may be found at
http://exchanges.state.gov/heritage/culprop.

Exercising delegated authority from the President and the Secretary of State,
I have determined that portions of the meeting on May 6 and 7 will be closed
pursuant to 5 U.S.C. § 552b(c)(9)(B) and 19 U.S.C. § 2605(h), because the
disclosure of matters involved in the Committee’s proceedings would compromise
the Government’s negotiation objectives or bargaining positions on the
negotiations of this Memorandum of Understanding. However, on May 6, the
Committee will hold an open session, 9:30 a.m. to approximately 11:30 a.m., to
receive oral public comment on the proposal to extend the Memorandum of
Understanding. Persons wishing to attend this open session should notify the
Cultural Heritage Center of the Department of State at (202) 632-6301 by
Thursday, April 22, 2010, 5:00 p.m. (EDT) to arrange for admission, as seating is
extremely limited.

Those who wish to make oral presentations should request to be scheduled
and submit a written text of the oral comments by Thursday, April 22, 2010, to
allow time for distribution of these comments to Committee members for their
review prior to the meeting. Oral comments will be limited to five minutes each or
less to allow time for questions from members of the Committee and must
specifically address the determinations under section 303(a)(1) of the Act, 19
U.S.C. § 2602(a)(1), pursuant to which the Committee must make findings. This
citation for the determinations can be found at the web site noted above. The
Committee also invites written comments and asks that they be submitted no later
than April 22, 2010. All written materials, including the written texts of oral
statements, should be faxed to (202) 632-6300, if 5 pages or less. Written
comments greater than five pages in length must be duplicated (20 copies) and
mailed to Cultural Heritage Center, SA-5, Fifth Floor, Department of State,
Washington, D.C. 20522- 0505. Express mail is recommended for timely delivery.

Date: MAR 29 2010 _______________________
Judith A. McHale
Under Secretary
Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs
Department of State
[FR Doc. 2010-7898 Filed 04/06/2010 at 8:45 am; Publication Date: 04/07/2010]

Of iPads, ePub and Troy

2010-03-30T00:46:00.002-04:00

Apple's iPad will start arriving in customer's hands on April 3rd, and at least some of them will end up in the hands of Mediterranean archaeologists. That sounds like an opportunity so I've spent the last few days playing around with ePub software.

I can quickly say that all the desktop readers that I've seen are terrible. Adobe Digital Editions? Ugly. The Stanza desktop version? Ugly and doesn't show my images. Lovely Reader looks OK but does a bad job of laying out text and image.

The Stanza reader on the iPhone is decent and that's what I've been testing against.

The most useful application is far-and-away Calibre. Once I figured out to install the command-line tools, converting xhtml to epub is a single step. There are lots of options to play with, but the basic idea is simple.

So... I spent a little time simplifying the xslt stylesheets that convert the database for Greek, Roman and Byzantine Pottery at Ilion into xhtml. Then I pointed Calibre at the resulting file. You can download an early version of the results here. Don't expect too much. No TOC, bad spacing so it's hard to distinguish catalog entries, other varied problems. But all will improve over time.

To get this on an iPhone you need to load Stanza on to it. Then "Get Books" -> "Downloads" -> "Edit" -> "Download Book from URL". Typing a long URL is a pain on the iPhone so enter this: http://bit.ly/troyepub.

Again, it's super-preliminary so keep an eye out for improvements. And if anybody gets this onto an iPad, let me know how it looks. I'll try it myself soon enough but not right on April 3rd.

SPARQL Based Navigation of RDFa Encoded Named Entities

2010-03-23T14:00:00.005-04:00

This is a quick heads up on a new feature at Nomisma.org, the ANS-hosted project assigning stable URIs to numismatic concepts.

At http://nomisma.org/id/lyttus you'll find a very brief representation of the ancient site of Lyttus in Crete. It links to the relevant Wikipedia article and Barrington Atlas ID so it should be unambiguous which site we mean and it should be easy to find out further information. As a convenience, and to make it easy to put a dot on the map, the page also has latlong info.

This post is about the list of URIs prefaced by the text "The following Nomisma IDs refer to this ID:". If you click on http://nomisma.org/id/igch0151, you'll get a description of a hoard of coins as published in Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards.

Nomisma.org uses RDFa so the markup of the hoard includes the snippet: <span rel="nm:mint" resource="lyttus">Lyttus: 1 dr.</span> . You can click on "Show Markup in Page" to see this.

All the descriptions of numismatic concepts are collected in a single RDFa file at http://nomisma.org/nomisma.org.xml and as RDF-XML at http://nomisma.org/nomisma.org.rdf. That one snippet from igch0151 will produce the triple:
<http://nomisma.org/id/ich0151>
<http://nomisma.org/id/mint>
<http://nomisma.org/id/lyttus>

So... visiting http://nomisma.org/id/lyttus queries http://nomisma.org.rdf with a SPARQL statement of the form ' SELECT ?id WHERE { ?id ?refersto <http://nomisma.org/id/lyttus> }'. This just binds "?id" to a list of the ids that refer to Lyttus.

Bottom line: Simple markup achieves meaningful results using pre-existing standards. I wrote none of the tools to make this work. It will be fun when I get around to turning that list of IDs into a map, which will be simple using the Google Maps API. Then we will have a geographic front-end to "SPARQL-based Navigation of RDFa Encoded Named Entities".

Note: all of the RDFa patterns are in the process of being defined and the entries are in the process of being markedup. I.e., this is all in alpha stage.

The Relative Value of Oil and Wine in the Talmud

2010-03-16T00:37:00.003-04:00

For the last week I've been following Daf Yomi, the 7 year cycle by which Orthodox Jews read the entire Talmud. It's part of my "Echoes of Late Antiquity" hobby and so far I'm having fun. Take this translated quote from Sanhedrin 31a

If one witness attests [the loan of] a barrel of wine, and the other, of a barrel of oil: — such a case happened, and it was brought before R. Ammi, who ordered him [the defendant] to repay a barrel of
wine out of [the value of] the barrel of oil.

So a "barrel" of oil is worth more than the same of wine. That's nice to know. Of course, I'm relying on the translation from halakhah.com and that's always a worry.

FWIW, the legal principle here is that you need two witnesses. Since the value of the oil is higher, there are only two witnesses to the loan of the value of the barrel of wine.

Coming to terms with HTML 5

2010-02-26T17:31:00.005-05:00

I haven't heard much talk among digital humanists about HTML 5. If I've missed something please let me know.

I will admit that for a long time I sort of ignored it. I was interested in xhtml 2 but that's dead. And when the html 5 discussions began, xhtml seemed like a barely tolerated intruder. That's clearly less so currently. Then there was the dismissive attitude of the "5" folk towards RDFa. Everybody seems to be talking now and that's good.

So it looks like there will be an XHTML5 that directly supports RDFa. I'm assuming that means in the DOM as it's made available to Javascript. (Somebody tell if I'm wrong about that).

With this in mind, I spent the day catching up with developments in the html 5 community. Sometimes focusing on integration with RDFa but also just catching up.

This series of articles by "boblet" was well-written and useful. On the RDFa front, I read Mark Birbeck's discussion about tokenizing RDFa. Likewise interesting. And see the RDFa section of the Microformats.org HTML5 page.

I like that html 5 supports structures along the lines of:

<html>
 <head>
  <title></title>
 </head>
 <body>
 <section>
  <summary></summary>
  </section>
   
 <section>
  <h1>Introduction</h1>
  <p></p>
  ...
 </section>
 <section>
   <h1>Next section</h1>
   <p></p>
   ...
  </section>
 </body>
</html>

Add in more xhtml 1.0 bits and you can really think about doing a nice job of publishing prose works digitally with the html5 vocabulary. And don't forget the '<article>' element. That looks interesting as well.

Not all is perfect. I've always been bummed that the title element goes in the head of an (x)html document. That means that if you want it to show up in the document part of a browser window, you have to repeat it. There's some silliness there. Why can't a title element go anywhere? And would it it really be a problem if a document had more than one title in it? I can think of use-cases where that works: more than one article in a single html file, or a list of objects that have titles.

And there's still no preferred way of doing footnotes. The section in the spec 4.6.26 is sort of a punt. The boblet articles suggest <aside> for footnotes but that isn't encouraged in the spec. I see that there's a "note" value for the rel attribute on the WHATWG RelExtensions page. That list is an official part of the html 5 spec (see "Other Link Types"). But the spec is totally vague on how a proposed rel moves to actual approval.

And anybody using xhtml is still going to have lots of decisions about what goes in class attributes and how to specify lots of basic things like 'author'. That smacks of being proprietary. How much can Dublin Core help with this?

So... it was a day of mostly reading. I added a little bit of xhtml 5 to the git repository under an xhtml5 branch but only just a hint of what I should do to really "commit" to such a big change.

OpenCyc + Wiki/DB-Pedia and Ancient World References

2010-02-23T17:07:00.004-05:00

This is another post in the Ancient World RDFa series.

I'm writing now because I have two questions in mind, one fairly general and one very specific:

Is there a pre-existing ontology that I can use to identify concepts found in Ancient World scholarship?
How can I indicate the office of "strategos" that was held by the sophist Polemon.

The topic comes up because I'm faced with the sentence fragment:

Polemon also appears as strategos on coins of Hadrian...

Again, how to mark the text "strategos" so that it is identified as the ancient office. Here's what I have so far:

<span
 id="id8296"
 about="#id8296"
 typeof="skos:Concept opencyc:PublicOffice"
 rel="owl:sameAs"
 resource="[dbpedia:Strategos]"
 property="rdfs:label"
 >strategos</span>

That give the following RDF/Turtle

<http://example.org/ajn2006-smyrna.html#id8296>
    a opencyc:PublicOffice, skos:Concept ;
    owl:sameAs dbpedia:Strategos ;
    rdfs:label "strategos"@en .

In short, this says that there's an instance of a public office and that office is "strategos".

The "opencyc" namespace maps to "http://sw.opencyc.org/". You can read about OpenCyc at http://www.opencyc.org, where you'll be told that OpenCyc is an "ontology containing hundreds of thousands of terms, along with millions of assertions relating the terms to each other, forming an ontology whose domain is all of human consensus reality." Even accounting for "commericial-speak", this could be useful. And yes, it's based on a commercial product, but CC-Licensed versions of the whole thing can be downloaded from http://www.opencyc.org/downloads.

The landing place for PublicOffice is http://sw.opencyc.org/2009/04/07/concept/en/PublicOffice. "Mayor" and "Ambassador" are example instances of PublicOffice so I'm comfortable using it as the type for Strategos. But "Strategos" iteself is not in OpenCyc. I think this will be a common situation: knowledge bases intended for the modern world will have many useful analogs for concepts that appear in Ancient World scholarhip, but the specific vocabulary will be missing.

OpenCyc has entries for

GeographicalPlace

GeopoliticalEntity

You can replace many narrowly scoped namespaces with these and other concepts that appear in OpenCyc.

But again, no "Strategos". This is where Wikpedia (via DBPedia) comes in. Here's the Wikipedia article. I map that into the Semantic Web via DBPedia.

So here's a basic principle: OpenCyc is the default ontology, DBPedia is the default vocabulary. I think that plays to the strengths of each resource.

Neither is complete for the Ancient World. That's probably more of a problem for the use of OpenCyc. DBPedia doesn't have a page for the ceramic type "Eastern Sigillata A". If I write one for Wikipedia, that will eventually migrate to DBPedia. OpenCyc doesn't have an easy route for community-based editing. Will the concepts "Excavation Unit" or "Survey Collection Unit" be necessary? Probably. That means coming up with or finding an ontology for those.

Ancient World Digital Publishing Test Suite

2010-02-04T17:00:00.003-05:00

This post is just a brief notice that I have begun a test suite of xhtml+rdfa and related documents to facilitate my work on digital publication for ancient world scholarship. It's very much "pre-release" at this point so I'm putting the suite out there for the sake of sharing, not because it's useful in its current state.

Right now, there are a few files in a git repository at http://github.com/sfsheath/awdp-test/. To download, try http://github.com/sfsheath/awdp-test/archives/master.

As the files become more useful, I'll talk more about what I'm trying to achieve with this project.

RDFa Patterns for Ancient World References

2010-01-26T14:35:00.003-05:00

I am continuing to experiment with semantic links within digital publications relevant to the Ancient World. Here's a snippet from the same article I drew from in the last post.

In 124, Polemon had spoken before Hadrian and persuaded him to make a gift of money and grant a series of honors to Smyrna, not least of which was a second temple to the imperial cult (IvS 697; Burrell 2004: 42-48).

The "things" I want to identify are:

The year 124 as an event.
The sophist Polemon
The emperor Hadrian
The imperial cult
And the two citations

And I want to do this in a standards-based way that is automatically recognizable by third-parties (or at least their software agents).

As before, I'm using RDFa. In a future post, I'll explain this choice and talk about what RDFa and RDF are, but for now I'm diving right in.

The relevant namespaces that I'm using are:

xmlns:dbpedia="http://dbpedia.org/resource/"
xmlns:cito="http://purl.org/net/cito/"
xmlns:ev="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/event/"
xmlns:ex="http://example.org/"
xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
xmlns:frbr="http://purl.org/vocab/frbr/core#"
xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#"
xmlns:owl="http ://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#"
xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
xmlns:skos="http://www.w3.org/2008/05/skos#"
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"

All the markup that follows is experimental and comments are welcome, of course.

Polemon
The reference to Polemon now looks like:


<span id="id2209"
 about="#id2209"
 typeof="skos:Concept foaf:Person"
 resource="[dbpedia:Polemon_of_Laodicea]"
 rel="owl:sameAs cite"
 property="rdfs:label">Polemon</span>

With the '<head>' of the document including '<base href="http://example.org/ajn2006-smyrna.html"/>', that RDFa gives the following RDF/turtle:


<http://example.org/ajn2006-smyrna.html#id2209>
    owl:sameAs dbpedia:Polemon_of_Laodicea ;
    a skos:Concept, foaf:Person ;
    <http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#cite> dbpedia:Polemon_of_Laodicea ;
    rdfs:label "Polemon"@en .

Some observations:
The pairing of 'id' and 'about' attributes means that I can identify a span of text and then say things about it.

I then give that span a type. Here I say that it's a skos:Concept and a foaf:Person. Which concept and which person? http://dbpedia.org/resource/Polemon_of_Laodicea. 'skos:Concept' will be used on all named-entities, and their nature will be further qualified when it's useful.

Why "owl:sameAs'. Here I follow the usage of dbpedia.org. If you look at the Polemon page, you'll see the same construct used to make the link to freebase. 'owl:sameAs' also underlies sameas.org (see the n3 for Hadrian).

The metaphor here is that I am instantiating Poleman as a concept and person present in the text. That should be recognizable and actionable. There is some redundancy in how I go about doing it, but that is in the spirit of convenience for future processors of this data.

"In 124"
This looks like:

<span id="id3724"
 about="#id3724"
 typeof="frbr:Event"
 rel="owl:sameAs"
 resource="dbpedia:124"
 property="ev:startdate"
 datatype="xsd:year"
 content="124">In 124</span>

Same basic process. I isolate some text as individually addressable. I say what is, in this case a FRBR Event. Here I also embed a machine-readable property, the start date, into the document , but retain the inline text as the label.

But I am probably on less-firm ground here. I use FRBR because it's an LOC approved standard. I annotate the event with an RSS Event property and that's a little weak. And it might seem odd to equate the event with the dbpedia representation of the year 124. If you follow through to the wikipedia version, that does refer to Hadrian's trip east, which is the setting for Polemon's speech. In the case of a better known event, I think I'd prefer to link to a representation of that, for example http://dbpedia.org/page/Sack_of_Rome_(455). The 'owl:sameAs' on that page will eventually redirect you to the right Wiki page.

Here's the RDF/Turtle produced by the above RDFa:

<http://example.org/ajn2006-smyrna.html#id3724>
    owl:sameAs <dbpedia:124> ;
    ev:startdate "124"^^xsd:year ;
    a frbr:Event, skos:Concept .

As above, the goal is for this to be usable in a number of contexts.

References
There are two inline references at the end of the sentence. The first is to a primary source, an inscription at Smyrna as published in Petzl, G. (1982). Die Inschriften von Smyrna. Bonn: Habelt. The second is to Barbara Burrell's Burrell, B. (2004). Neokoroi: Greek cities and Roman emperors. Cincinnati classical studies, new ser., v. 9. Leiden: Brill.

Here's the RDFa for the second:

<span id="id4616"
 about="#id4616"
 typeof="ex:Citation"
 rel="cito:citesAsAuthority cite"
 resource="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/53013513"
 property="rdfs:label">Burrell 2004: 42-48</span>

This is similar markup as previously, except I'm not instantiating it as a 'skos:Concept'. I am using the CITO ontology to indicate the relationship between the works, but note that I'm currently making up the type 'ex:Citation'. Perhaps I could use 'cito:Document' but that doesn't seem quite right. I really want to mark this span of text as being a citation but haven't found just the right RDF vocabulary. I looked at BIBO but, like CITO, it doesn't have the exact class I want. BIBO is linked with Zotero so I'd like to use it. For now, CITO has a more detailed set of relationships between citing and cited documents so I'm going with that. Worldcat also isn't great because there's confusion about the 'terms of use' but it will do for this experimental phase.

Here's the RDF/Turtle:

<http://example.org/ajn2006-smyrna.html#id4616>
    cito:citesAsAuthority <http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/53013513> ;
    a ex:Citation ;
    <http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#cite> <http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/53013513> ;
    rdfs:label "Burrell 2004: 42-48"@en .

The RDFa for the epigraphic reference looks like:

<span id="id9773"
 about="#id9773"
 typeof="ex:Citation"
 rel="cito:citesAsAuthority ex:citesAsPrimarySource"
 resource="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/8935414"
 property="rdfs:label"><i>IvS</i> 697</span>

The main difference here is that I'm also making up the 'ex:citesAsPrimarySource' value for the rel attribute. The concept of "Primary Source" and references thereto is important for the Humanities and we need a way of indicating its usage.

It's also important that I'm referring to the publication of the inscription, not the inscription itself. When a digital surrogate becomes available, I can point to that. In the meantime, a way of standardizing references to parts of a work would be useful. But I don't think you can just tag on a fragment identifier, as in http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/8935414#no.%20697, since the implication there is that such an ID actually exists. And it might be rude to put the same after a '?'. Something to ponder...

Instead of continuing on with each named entitiy, here's the whole sentence with RDFa visible:

<span id="id3724" about="#id3724" typeof="skos:Concept frbr:Event" rel="owl:sameAs" resource="dbpedia:124" property="ev:startdate" datatype="xsd:year" content="124">In 124</span>, <span id="id2209" about="#id2209" typeof="skos:Concept foaf:Person" resource="[dbpedia:Polemon_of_Laodicea]" rel="owl:sameAs cite" property="rdfs:label">Polemon</span> had spoken before <span id="id5130" about="#id5130" typeof="skos:Concept foaf:Person" rel="owl:sameAs cite" resource="[dbpedia:Hadrian]" property="rdfs:label">Hadrian</span> and persuaded him to make a gift of money and grant a series of honors to <span id="id39156" about="#id39156" typeof="skos:Concept geo:SpatialThing" rel="owl:sameAs cite" resource="http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/550771" property="rdfs:label">Smyrna</span>, not least of which was a second temple to the <span id="id4168" about="#4168" typeof="skos:Concept dbpedia:Religion" rel="owl:sameAs cite" resource="dbpedia:Imperial_cult_(ancient_Rome)]" property="rdfs:label">imperial cult</span> (<span id="id9773" about="#id9773" typeof="ex:Citation" rel="cito:citesAsAuthority ex:citesAsPrimarySource" resource="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/8935414" property="rdfs:label"><i>IvS</i> 697</span>; <span id="id4616" about="#id4616" typeof="ex:Citation" rel="cito:citesAsAuthority cite" resource="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/53013513" property="rdfs:label">Burrell 2004: 42-48</span>).

And here's the RDF/Turtle:


<http://example.org/ajn2006-smyrna.html#id3724>
    owl:sameAs <dbpedia:124> ;
    ev:startdate "124"^^xsd:year ;
    a frbr:Event, skos:Concept .

<http://example.org/ajn2006-smyrna.html#id2209>
    owl:sameAs dbpedia:Polemon_of_Laodicea ;
    a skos:Concept, foaf:Person ;
    <http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#cite> dbpedia:Polemon_of_Laodicea ;
    rdfs:label "Polemon"@en .

<http://example.org/ajn2006-smyrna.html#id5130>
    owl:sameAs dbpedia:Hadrian ;
    a skos:Concept, foaf:Person ;
    <http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#cite> dbpedia:Hadrian ;
    rdfs:label "Hadrian"@en .

<http://example.org/ajn2006-smyrna.html#id39156>
    owl:sameAs <http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/550771> ;
    a geo:SpatialThing, skos:Concept ;
    <http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#cite> <http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/550771> ;
    rdfs:label "Smyrna"@en .

<http://example.org/ajn2006-smyrna.html#4168>
    owl:sameAs <dbpedia:Imperial_cult_(ancient_Rome)]> ;
    a dbpedia:Religion, skos:Concept ;
    <http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#cite> <dbpedia:Imperial_cult_(ancient_Rome)]> ;
    rdfs:label "imperial cult"@en .

<http://example.org/ajn2006-smyrna.html#id9773>
    ex:citesAsPrimarySource <http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/8935414> ;
    cito:citesAsAuthority <http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/8935414> ;
    a ex:Citation ;
    rdfs:label "<i>IvS</i> 697"^^rdf:XMLLiteral .

<http://example.org/ajn2006-smyrna.html#id4616>
    cito:citesAsAuthority <http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/53013513> ;
    a ex:Citation ;
    <http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#cite> <http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/53013513> ;
    rdfs:label "Burrell 2004: 42-48"@en .

Some of these constructs deserve more comment but this post is getting long. The only thing to add is that fairly soon I will publish a javascript toolset that starts making use of these patterns.

Referring to People and Places

2010-01-22T11:04:00.004-05:00

Another title for this post could be "How can I achieve something by doing nothing?"

Back in 2006 I published the article 'A Box Mirror Made from Two Antinous Medallions of Smyrna.' American Journal of Numismatics Second Series 18 (2006), 63-74. It contains the following sentences:

The reverse type on this piece is one of four images — showing either the female panther on this piece, a bull, a sheep, or a ship’s prow — that appear on a series of medallions struck at Smyrna in honor of Antinous and naming Polemon as issuer. These two individuals are both historical figures and their biographical information provides the framework for dating the issue. Antinous was the companion of the emperor Hadrian who drowned in the Nile in late AD 130.

I am currently thinking about how to represent links from the "named entities" embedded within texts such as this to well-known identifiers for those concepts. That's what I want to achieve. The "doing nothing" part of my alternate title is an off-hand way of indicating that I want to make as few choices as possible. To again rephrase, the bottom line is that I'm hoping to use pre-existing standards.

BTW, pictures of the mirror are at http://numismatics.org/collection/2005.19.1.

In terms of well-known identifiers, here's the "low hanging fruit" that I see in the sample text:

Smyrna: http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/550771. This is a Pleiades identifier for the ancient site.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nile
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polemon_of_Laodicea
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinous
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadrian

We could get into dates and abstract concepts such as "emperor" but I'll save that for later.

You'll note that I'm using the English Wikipedia for most of my identifiers and Pleiades for Smyrna. There is a Wikipedia article for that ancient site, but I do want to situate myself within the discipline of ancient geography. I think using the Pleiades reference meets that goal. On a slightly different topic, I was tempted to use dbpedia references – as in http://dbpedia.org/resource/Polemon_of_Laodicea – but think it's probably better practice to give the Wiki URI and let harvestors, etc. derive the dbpedia URI if they want to. Is it a disadvantage to tie the URI to a particular language?

Moving along... how to embed these references in the text? That does require an initial choice: RDFa embedded in xhtml. Here's a possible snippet that links an implicit identity with the relevant unambiguous identifier:

<span id="id7474" about="#id7474" typeof="foaf:Person" rel="owl:sameAs" resource="http://dbpedia.org/page/Polemon_of_Laodicea">Polemon</span>

With this markup I am trying to say, "the characters 'Polemon' refer to a person and that person is the same as the person represented by the URI 'http://dbpedia.org/page/Polemon_of_Laodicea'."

Why do I think I've achieved that? If I point an RDF parser – I use rapper – at this text, I get the following triples:

<http:/example.org/AJN2006-Heath.html#id7474>
  <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#type>
  <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person> .

<http:/example.org/AJN2006-Heath.html#id7474>
  <http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#cite>
  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polemon_of_Laodicea> .

<http:/example.org/AJN2006-Heath.html#id7474>
  <http ://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#sameAs>
  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polemon_of_Laodicea> .

I think this represents progress towards using a well-known standard that allows a third-party tool to extract the semantic meaning in my text. Expanding the markup I'm using, here's the whole sample text with embedded RDF:

The reverse type on this piece is one of four images — showing either the female panther on this piece, a bull, a sheep, or a ship’s prow — that appear on a series of medallions struck at <span id="id128979" about="#id128979" typeof="geonames:Feature nm:mint" rel="skos:sameAs cite" resource="http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/550771">Smyrna</span> in honor of <span id="id49178" about="#id49178" typeof="foaf:Person" rel="skos:sameAs cite" resource="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinous">Antinous</span> and naming <span id="id7474" about="#id7474" typeof="foaf:Person" rel="cite skos:sameAs" resource="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polemon_of_Laodicea">Polemon</span> as issuer. These two individuals are both historical figures and their biographical information provides the framework for dating the issue. Antinous was the companion of the emperor <span id="id876873" about="#id876873" typeof="foaf:Person" rel="skos:sameAs cite" resource="http://en.wikipedia.org/en/Hadrian">Hadrian</span> who drowned in the <span id="id5726" about="#id5726" typeof="geoname:Feature" rel="skos:sameAs cite" resource="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nile">Nile</span> in late AD 130.

Which produces the following RDF:

<http:/example.org/AJN2006-Heath.html#id128979>
    a nm:mint, geonames:Feature ;
    <http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#cite> <http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/550771> ;
    skos:sameAs <http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/550771> .

<http:/example.org/AJN2006-Heath.html#id49178>
    a foaf:Person ;
    <http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#cite> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinous> ;
    skos:sameAs <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinous> .

<http:/example.org/AJN2006-Heath.html#id7474>
    a foaf:Person ;
    <http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#cite> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polemon_of_Laodicea> ;
    skos:sameAs <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polemon_of_Laodicea> .

<http:/example.org/AJN2006-Heath.html#id876873>
    a foaf:Person ;
    <http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#cite> <http://en.wikipedia.org/en/Hadrian> ;
    skos:sameAs <http://en.wikipedia.org/en/Hadrian> .

<http:/example.org/AJN2006-Heath.html#id5726>
    <http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#cite> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nile> ;
    skos:sameAs <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nile> .

By way of a few observations, note that I type "Smyrna" – here id128979 - as a mint using the URI http://nomisma.org/id/mint, which is a reference to an incipient numismatic vocabulary. I don't type Hadrian as a Roman emperor. 'Smyrna' can be used in many ways so I want to be clear that I'm referring to it as a mint (in the broad numismatic sense). Hadrian's role as emperor is explicitly stated in the Wiki article and in its dbpedia equivalent. I don't think I need to repeat that here.

I'm also adding 'cite' to the rel attributes. 'cite' is one of the W3 sponsored relationships and I like how generic it is but also want to use the more specific 'skos:sameAs'.

This post is not a finished product and I don't mean to suggest that the above is the best way to achieve my goal. I welcome comments along the lines of "You should be using pre-existing standard http://...." or "What you suggest is sort of (barely?) OK but here's an improvement...". Is there a better RDFa pattern?

New URL Pattern at American Numismatic Society

2009-12-17T14:08:00.002-05:00

At the ANS, we are currently assigning hierarchical categories to all the objects in the database. You might think this had already been done, but in the pre-web world, when most of our 550,000 records were entered, it wasn't really necessary. If you wanted to find Byzantine Seals or Contorniates, you just went to the right tray and there they were.

In a webbie world, we want users to be able to navigate by well-known numismatic categories in order to access individual records, examination of which can suggest searches that will help one find what one is looking for. Keeping that goal in mind, our categories need to be sensible and recognizable, but do not need to carry an undue interpretive burden. It's OK that a user might question how we've arranged things, so long as we've helped her find what she's looking for.

Some examples:

Notes:
'--' separates the components of a category.

The URL prefix is http://numismatics.org/search/category/ . We're trying to make these search-engine friendly. We do intend for these to be stable, but aren't quite making the guarantee that we do about URLs of the form http://numismatics.org/collection/1944.100.81154. Those should work for as long as the DNS/URL paradigm is around.

Appending "/images" to a URL will show only records with images.

In the future, I expect that extensions such as ".atom", ".json", ".kml" will also have the desired result.

Again, the reason we're doing this is to ease the user experience. See the description of the ANS Roman collection for a preliminary deployment of these links in the real world. We hope it's a convenience that our Italic coins, for example, will be one click away.

Museums Explain Their Databases

2009-12-08T13:32:00.003-05:00

It's a good thing that museums are increasingly putting their curatorial databases online for public browsing and searching. A minor aspect of this trend is the language institutions use to explain the state of their data. This post collects some examples of the genre.

The Brooklyn Museum has the following on its opening search page:

The material presented here represents only a fraction of that rich collection. The Museum is committed to making its collections accessible to the widest possible audience, and this site is an important part of that process. It is, however, a work in progress. We intend to continue to expand the number of works of art included on the site and to update information currently posted. We are making every effort to ensure that the information provided about our collection is accurate and up-to-date, but the nature of scholarship is that there are sometimes changes in information and new discoveries. If you believe you have information we should have about any of the works you find here, we would be happy to hear from you.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston shows this to start:

Note that some of the electronic records indicate that they have not been reviewed recently by curatorial staff and might need revision; also, please note that a small percentage of the MFA’s collection is not presently searchable online.

The indicated MFA records have this:

This electronic record was created from historic documentation that does not necessarily reflect the MFA's complete or current knowledge about the object. Review and updating of such records is ongoing.

That text is essentially identical to what appears on the Yale Art Gallery site

Note: This electronic record was created from historic documentation that does not necessarily reflect the Yale University Art Gallery's complete or current knowledge about the object. Review and updating of such records is ongoing.

In turn, that's not so far off from the Harvard Art Museum text:

This record was created from historic documentation and may not have been reviewed by a curator; it may be inaccurate or incomplete. Our records are frequently revised and enhanced. Please contact the curatorial department listed above for more information.

[[Note that I don't give a link into the Harvard website. The (almost unbelievable) explanation is that if you click on http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/collection/detail.dot?objectid=289448 you get a blank page. I clicked on the link from a search results page and saw information about a sherd of Roman pottery. Is it really possible that Harvard is checking a session id or the referrer and only displaying the info as part of an existing visit to the site? If so, that's highly (highly!) lame.]]

The Metropolitan Museum in New York has the following:

Due to the extremely large number of objects in the Museum's permanent collection, not all artworks are currently available in the Collection Database. Furthermore, information contained in the database records is, in some cases, incomplete, and all information is subject to change according to ongoing research and new acquisitions.

The British Museum just puts "Noticed a mistake? Have some extra information about this object? Please contact us." on its individual object pages. That's in the same spirit as the more extended explanations from other institutions.

Overall, these texts represent a mode of sharing data that is welcome. Better to make slightly incorrect or outdated data available than to hold on tight to it. That's especially the case when there are images of the objects as well.

Mediterranean Ceramics Reference Stability Report, Number 8

2009-12-03T23:22:00.003-05:00

The MCRSR first appeared in October, 2007. This is the first new installment since April 2008.

As I noted then, the JSTOR link to number 2 takes me to a login page. I still find it odd that no indication of the title of the work is given. When I am logged into JSTOR via UPenn, the link works.

Number 10, which was the Perseus Project Vase Catalog, is now part of the Persues Project Art and Archaeology Artifact Browser. The old URI does not work on the main Perseus site.

No new references have been added.

I have seen that some of these resources have improved URIs, meaning they are shorter and with fewer '?','&' and '=' characters. That's a welcome development and I will update the addresses next time round.

1. Walters' Catalogue of the Roman Pottery in the Departments of Antiquities, British Museum from Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id=M2UEAAAAYAAJ

2. Robinson's Agora V from JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/i285178, previously http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1558-8610%281959%295%3C%3E1.0.CO%3B2-3 [noted April 2008].

3. Lattara 6: http://www.lattara.net/LATTARAPUB/PUBLAT/LATTARA6/lattara6.html

4. K. Greene's AJA article on Early Roman lead glazed pottery: http://www.ajaonline.org/pdfs/111.4/AJA1114_Greene.pdf

5. Heath and Tekkök, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Pottery at Ilion (Troia): http://classics.uc.edu/troy/grbpottery/

6. Vessel from Çatalhoyuk (via Flickr): http://www.flickr.com/photos/catalhoyuk/971964416/

7. A Late Minoan III Pyxis from the Metropolitan Museum of Art: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/03/eus/hod_1999.423.htm

8. An undocumented ARS Hayes 70 bowl from the dealer Classical Numismatics Group: http://cngcoins.com/Coin.aspx?CoinID=86618

9. Fifteenth Century Mosque Lamp from Jerusalem now in the British Museum: http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/me/m/mosque_lamp.aspx

10. The Perseus Project Vase Catalog: now part of http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/artifactBrowser, previously http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0043 [noted December 2009].

11. Wikimedia Commons Image of a Greek Geometric Skyphos in the Louvre: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Skyphos_birds_Louvre_CA3822.jpg

12. Sagalassos from Pleiades: http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/639087

13. Inscribed pot from Aphrodisias (HTML): http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/iaph2007/iAph150353.html

14. Inscribed pot from Aphrodisias (XML): http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/iaph2007/xml/iAph150353.xml

15. Hellenistic lamp from Assos, Turkey at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: http://mfa.org/collections/search_art.asp?recview=true&id=199476&coll_keywords=&coll_accession=84%2E110&coll_name=&coll_artist=&coll_place=&coll_medium=&coll_culture=&coll_classification=&coll_credit=&coll_provenance=&coll_location=&coll_has_images=&coll_on_view=&coll_sort=2&coll_sort_order=0&coll_view=0&coll_package=0&coll_start=1

16. Open Context record for Halaf period jar from Domuztepe, Turkey: http://www.opencontext.org/database/space.php?item=14926_DT_Spatial

17. Abbasid Ceramics from the Museum With No Frontiers: http://www.discoverislamicart.org/exhibitions/ISL/the_abbasids/exhibition.php?theme=5

18. Roman Amphorae: a digital resource: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/resources.html?amphora2005

Aegean Amphora at Dura Europos

2009-12-03T00:41:00.004-05:00

As a follow up to the last post, here's a 3rd to 5th century AD Middle Roman Amphora 7 from Dura, now at Yale. It's essentially uncataloged but there's no doubt about what it is.

Dura Europos Pottery at Yale

2009-11-24T22:59:00.006-05:00

This is just a brief post to say that I've been enjoying looking at images of the pottery from Dura Europos that is now at the Yale University Art Gallery. At the time of writing, you can get to it by following this link. If that doesn't work try "Syrian, Dura-Europos" in the culture field and "Containers - Ceramic" in the classification field.

The Gallery's database is pretty nice. I'll give its URLs for addressing individual records a B+. Here's an example: http://ecatalogue.art.yale.edu/detail.htm?objectId=3432 . It would be better if that were something like http://art.yale.edu/objectid/3432 , but I'm a quibbler for good looking identifiers.

Sometimes the information is limited. For example, 1938.5011 is definitely Eastern Sigillata A, and 1938.4969 looks to be African Red Slip. I do hesitate to identify from images, but again 1938.4980 sure looks like ARS.

The above is not a complaint. Similarly to many online museum databases, Yale displays the following text with each record:

Note: This electronic record was created from historic documentation that does not necessarily reflect the Yale University Art Gallery's complete or current knowledge about the object. Review and updating of such records is ongoing.

It's great that museums aren't hiding their data just because it's incomplete or incorrect. It's more useful just to put it out there so interested folk like me can have fun browsing.

Protecting Archaeology in Italy, Now by Email

2009-10-30T13:09:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I wrote about the upcoming Nov. 13th meeting of the Cultural Property Advisory Committee. I am now getting reports that people have sent in their letters by fax. This is great. I have also heard that messages sent by regular mail will take weeks to arrive. That makes e-mail a good alternative. The address is culprop@state.gov. Attaching a word document to that address is a good idea. Or the fax number is (202) 632–6300 .

Some relevant links.

In 2001 the US and Italy signed a Memorandum of Understanding. You can read that here as a PDF:
http://exchanges.state.gov/heritage/culprop/itfact/pdfs/it2001mou.pdf

Article II of the MoU was amended in 2006. Here's a link:
http://culturalheritage.state.gov/it06agr.html

And as a pdf:
http://exchanges.state.gov/heritage/culprop/itfact/pdfs/it2006mouext.pdf

Here's the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affair's (ECA) page for the agreement with Italy:
http://exchanges.state.gov/heritage/culprop/itfact.html

And, finally, the page for the Cultural Property Advisory Committee:
http://exchanges.state.gov/heritage/culprop/committee.html

If you're interested in the topic, it is worthwhile to poke around the ECA site. There is lots of good information there.

But to emphasize my main point, please write a letter. The deadline is Monday, November 2nd so that the culprop@state.gov may be the best way to communicate. If you have letterhead and no fax machine, make a scan at 8-bit 100 dpi and attach that. Here's the e-mail again: culprop@state.gov .

Protecting Archaeology in Italy, Nov. 2nd Deadline

2009-10-29T08:34:00.002-04:00

The primary US mechanism for regulating the trade in illegally excavated antiquities is a series of agreements with other countries that specify what can be imported and how the two countries are going to co-operate to promote the preservation of cultural patrimony.

On Nov. 13th, the Cultural Property Advisory Committee, which helps draft and review such agreements, is meeting in Washington, D.C. to consider the Memorandum of Understanding with Italy.

The full-text of the agreement can be found here
http://culturalheritage.state.gov/it06agr.html.

The call for the meeting is here:
http://culturalheritage.state.gov/whatsnew.html. Follow the link at
the top right for more specifics.

The announcement of the meeting includes the following:

"With respect to comments on the interim review of the Memorandum of Understanding Between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Republic of Italy Concerning the Imposition of Import Restrictions on Archaeological Material Representing the Pre-Classical, Classical and Imperial Roman Periods of Italy, concluded on
January 19, 2001, and extended in 2006, oral comments must be limited to Article II of this MOU."

Article II concerns actions that both the US and Italy are supposed to take to implement the MoU. I am writing now to encourage readers either to write a letter to CPAC commenting on Italy's actions under Article II.

Letters that address specific actions by Italy that fall under Article II and which benefit or affect the writer are the most useful. But the bar is low, so to speak. If you excavate in Italy, have conducted research there, have seen Italian material on loan to American museums, or have used such material in your teaching, that counts.

Discussion of loans is particularly important. Museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Getty Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Princteton University Art Museum, the Morgan Library in NYC, the Meadow Museum at Southern Methodist University and others have Italian material on loan. If you have seen these objects and enjoyed them, please write.

Letters do not need to be long. Without meaning to provide too much unnecessary advice: the opening sentence should say you're writing about the Memorandum of Understanding between the US and the Republic of Italy. Give a brief introduction (I am a teacher/professor/student/archaeologist/member of the public), and then a few examples of personal impact. End with a call for continued co-operation between the two countries.

DEADLINES: letters need to be received on Nov. 2. They can be faxed to (202) 632–6300 or sent to

Cultural Heritage Center,
SA–5, Fifth Floor,
Department of State, Washington,
DC 20522–0505.

Every letter counts so please write if you can.

Anglican Options in the UK

2009-10-21T20:20:00.002-04:00

The continuing echo of late antiquity in the modern world is of interest to me. This comes to mind in light of the announcement from the Vatican that it will allow Anglicans to convert while "preserving aspects of their Anglican spiritual and liturgical heritage". I note that there is an alternative that looks back further than the reformation.

The document British Orthodox Heritage Resurgance starts with the paragraph:

For a thousand years, from AD37-45 to AD1054-66, the people living in the British Isles believed and worshipped God as an integral part of the undivided Orthodox Church. That Church was governed world wide by five Patriarchs, those of Constantinople (the Ecumenical Patriarch), Rome, Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria. The Church in the British Isles was a local expression of the common Christian Faith held throughout the world. The great saints of the British Isles such as Saint Aidan, Saint David, Saint Patrick, Saint Alban, Saint Chad, Saint Cuthbert, Saint Boniface, Saint Dunstan etc., were all members of that Orthodox Catholic Church in the British Isles which continued for a thousand years.

AD 1054 is, of course, the year of the so-called Great Schism, one of a series of events that lead to the remarkable variety of christian liturgy and doctrine that exists today. While I don't mean to comment on the historicity of the document, I do like the living offering of the pentarchy as a model for modern church government and self-description. Can't we just go back to the Middle Ages?

Brief Thoughts on EPUB Books at Google

2009-10-21T09:40:00.002-04:00

I've been playing with downloading epub books from Google. EPUB is a format for digital publication targeted to portable readers. That's not what I care about right now. It is cool that it uses plain old xhtml and standard image formats to represent the contents of a book. That means if you can unpack an EPUB file, which is very easy, you have access to text and images in readily consumable form.

I'm not the first to point this out. See Greg Crane What do you do with a Million Books for early thinking on the large scale implications of Google's work.

In terms of playing, here's what's fun. If you go to the G Books page for H. Chase's Catalogue of Arretine pottery from the MFA, you'll see a link to download the "EPUB" version.

Once you've downloaded that file, it's easy to unpack. I'm a Mac/Linux user. If you are too, and you like the command line, 'unzip Catalogue_of_Arretine_pottery.epub' will do the trick. Otherwise, change the extension to ".zip" and double-click on the file. I'm sure something similar will work in Windows.

Once unpacked, you have two directories, 'OEBPS' and 'META-INF'. The first is the one with all the goodies in it. Open 'OEBPS/images' and you'll see the plates from the book. Those files aren't hi-res, but better than nothing.

The text is the in 'Content-###.xml' files. These can be opened in a browser directly.

As people like Greg have noted, cool things will happen when communities, such as scholars/enthusiasts of the ancient Mediterranean world, take these files and add value to them. In the meantime, I like being able to get at the images, and to have the text on my hard-drive so its available for searching. On the Mac, Spotlight does a good job of indexing the Content files. It also indexes the compressed archives when their extensions are ".zip". It seems to ignore the ".epub" files but I bet that will change soon enough.

Another Video of Upenn Roman Pottery

2009-10-19T17:38:00.003-04:00

I'm still enjoying using my phone to shoot video in museums. And I've upgraded my copy of iLife so I can put the clips together with iMovie. That's seems to be good enough for my skill level. The latest product is overviews of a display at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

As I note in the opening frame, these are totally unofficial and personal works. Yes, I'm a Consulting Scholar in the Mediterranean Section and that's why I find myself in the galleries. But I'm just messing around here so don't think worse of the institution because of my low production values.

I'm also still playing around with how to do captions, etc. This time I tried adding "freeze frames". When I get comfortable with what I can do, I'll start adding more informative copy.

I have clips of Upenn Dressel 1's and a Dressel 20 handle/body sherd. And I went to the Brooklyn Museum last weekend. In the past they've had a little bit of Roman pottery on display. But the Egyptian displays keep growing at the expense of later material. I shot some of that and some Bronze Age Cypriot and Minoan vessels. I'll compile and upload those eventually.

The Chronology of Phocaean Red Slip (LRC) Hayes 1 and 2

2009-10-17T12:00:00.011-04:00

The chronology of Phocaean Red-Slip (LRC) Hayes forms 1 and 2 is turning out to be very important for the work Billur Tekkök and I are doing at Troy/Ilion, in particular when it comes to dating late 4th century building activity at the site. No real surprise there. In the grand scheme of things, Phocaea is near Troy so we should expect to have a fairly complete range of vessels, especially through the early to mid 6th century when the city is still in pretty good shape. An earthquake hits in c. 525 +/- and things seem to get rapidly worse after that. A few PRS Hayes form 10's and a little bit of African Red-Slip, including a Hayes 91d, show that there was ongoing activity at the site but it seems clear that things slow down over the course of the 6th century AD.

In terms of forms, we have lots of Hayes 1s, plenty of Hayes 2's, and many Hayes 3's. We also have a few 5's, vessels near form 6, 8's, a single 9, and a few 10's.

This post isn't about quantities so I'm intentionally using very vague terms. It is about chronology, or rather about the current thinking on the early chronology of the ware. It's just an opening shot so I hereby invoke all the informality that comes with a blog post.

Hayes defined the most widely used typology in 1972 in his Late Roman Pottery (worldcat). He described 10 forms with various subtypes and made frequent reference to his work at the Athenian Agora. Picking from his combination of explicit dating and narrative discussion gives the following date ranges for early PRS (p. 325-329):

Hayes 1a	"late fourth-early fifth century."
Hayes 1b	"early-third quarter fifth century."
Hayes 1c	"uncertain, perhaps first half of fifth century"
Hayes 1d	"early-third quarter fifth century"
Hayes 2a	late fourth (370) to 450
Hayes 2b	No explicit dates are given for the start of this variant, end falls under the general rubric that form 2 ends by 450.
Hayes 2c	Early variant, "with mid-late fourth century material".

And while we're at it, here are some profile drawings:
Hayes 1a/b from Troy (I17.0647:5)

Hayes 2a from Troy (I17.0647:1)

For more examples go to http://classics.uc.edu/troy/grbpottery/.

Since 1972, the start of form 2 has at times been moved later. This has been done partly on the basis of excavations at San Giacomo degli Schiavoni in Molise (Italy), which documented PRS from a rich early fifth-century cistern fill. The full reference is U.Albarella , V.Ceglia & P.Roberts, S.Giacomo degli Schiavoni ( Molise ): an early fifth century AD deposit of pottery and animal bones from central Adriatic Italy. Papers of the British School at Rome, LXI, 157-230. I'm writing this from home but I do have a photocopy of that article. (Note: why isn't PBSR online? Really, it should be. Or is it and I just don't know about it.)

Jumping ahead a little bit, J. Hayes in his 2009 Agora volume on the imported fine-wares (about which more below), writes of this deposit that it is "coin-dated" (p. 85). Roberts in the article itself writes, "No coins were found, but abundant dating evidence was provided by imported finewares..." (p. 163). Earlier, Albarella writes, "Continuity of occupation through the Imperial period is well documented by and coins...". Question: is there a subsequent publication of a coin from (or clearly dating) the cistern fill? Hayes only references the PBSR article so may overstate the case by calling it "coin dated". Regardless, it's a large deposit (435 vessels identified), with various imports including 33 African Red-Slip (7.5%) and 13 PRS (3%). It certainly shows ARS and PRS circulating together in the early fifth century but I'm not sure it needs to be read as indicating a later start for Hayes 2.

I could offer more references, both to Albarella et al. and to other deposits but I'll instead return to Hayes 2009 (worldcat). Pages 83-88 discuss PRS and offer a substantial update on the chronology presented in LRP. To go along with the narrative, catalog entries 1229 to 1419 are all PRS and there are many profile drawings and a selection of photographs. It's a "don't miss" selection of information about the ware.

Looking to turn Hayes' prose into some relevant dates - some represented as numbers -, I come up with the following:

First appearance of PRS in Agora	"...later fourth century, but regular importation seems to coincide with the marked slump seen here in African imports around 390-400... (p. 85)
Form 2 and 3	Citing Italian and other sites, "it seems reasonable to conclude that the stamped forms 2 and 3 both originated close to the turn of the century as replacements for two popular African products..." (p. 85)
Form 3f and 3g	In Beirut earthquake horizon of 551.(p. 86)
beginning of Form 10	"...the evidence from Lejjun (Jordan) hints at ca. 550..." (p. 86)
	"...the continued presence of PRS ware until the mid-7th century seems assured..." (p. 86)

Those are just a few quotes from Hayes' prose introduction to the ware. Turning to the catalog, here are synopses of/snippets from some of the entries that stand out as useful for our work at Troy:

1230	A "forerunner" to Hayes 1 dated to the late 3rd/early 4th. This piece is useful for documenting transition from Çandarli/ESC to PRS.
1326 + 1327	Form 1 variant. From "Grynnion" workshop? No join between sherds so perhaps not same vessel. "4th Century or later".
1231	Form 1 from "Context of second half of 4th century.
1229	Hayes 1. "Early(?) variant, in probable Çandarli fabric./Late 4th century. Context of Same date."
1232-1236	Main series of Hayes 1's, from first half of fifth or residual in later context.
1237	Hayes 2a from "Context of ca. A.D. 400.
1238	Hayes 2a dated "Ca. A.D. 400-425."
1239	Hayes 2a/b from "Context of ca. A.D. 400+."
1240	Hayes 2b "Date later than 1239? Context of ca. A.D. 460-475"
1242	Hayes 2c dated "Ca. A.D. 400 to mid-5th century."
1243	Hayes 2c from "Context of mid- to late 4th century."
1244+1245	Small Hayes 2's both from "Context of late 4th century."
1246+1247	Small Hayes 2's both dated to "Ca. A.D. 400 or later."

I've assembled the above tables because when I read the prose introduction, I became concerned that the phrase "the stamped forms 2 and 3 both originated close to the turn of the century" could be become hardened into something like "forms 2 and 3 appear after 400." While this is true for Hayes form 3, I think the appearance of Hayes 2 needs to be kept a little earlier.

As noted, saying so goes against one stream of discussion of form 2. For example, when reviewing C. Abadie-Reynal's volume on the Roman pottery from Argos (worldcat) for BMCR, K. Slane wrote, "Recent work in Corinth confirms that LRC forms 1 and 2 are prevalent in the first half, perhaps even second quarter of the fifth century, rather than in the fourth." I quote the review first because it's readily available online. More in depth discussion can be found in two Hesperia articles: K. Slane and G. Sanders, Corinth: Late Roman Horizons Hesperia 74 (2005), 243-297 (online). To quote:

Assemblage 1 marks the earliest appearance of LRC at Corinth: Hayes forms 1 and 1A, 2B and C, 3.32, and 4 (or 3/4) appear in small quantities with coins of the second quarter and middle of the fifth century and with fifth-century AfRS. Although the amount of AfRS is sharply reduced from what it had been in the fourth century, it is still two or three times as common as LRC. (p. 283)

At the end of the same paragraph, assemblage 1 is dated to 450 or 460. By extension, LRC 1, 1a, 2b, 2c first appear at Corinth in 450 to 460.

In the catalog of this article no. 1.10 on page 251 and fig. 3 is a Hayes 2c similar in profile to Agora XXXII no. 1243, which is said to be from a "Context of mid- to late 4th century." So it looks like the first appearance of 2c at Corinth may post-date its appearance at Athens by 50 years. That's a big gap.

Slane has also published The End of the Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore on Acrocorinth Hesperia 77 (2008), 465-496 (online). The most relevant paragraph is the following:

No additional Late Roman C was identified in the reexamination of the context pottery. The single piece found in the sanctuary remains an intact saucer of form 1D (120, Fig. 2) from the debris overlying the floor of the Roman Propylon (lot 2240).Although progress has been made in establishing that LRC was manufactured at several sites south of Pergamon, including Phocaea,the published dates of LRC still depend heavily on the Athenian deposits.In the West, LRC is rare until ca. 470 and most common in the first half of the 6th century. Earlier forms appear ca. 430 in southern Italy (San Giovanni di Ruoti, San Giacomo degli Schiavoni), and the same forms appear at Benghazi. At Corinth, in the area north
of Buildings 1–7 east of the Theater, LRC forms 1 and 2 occur in approximately equal numbers with form 3B–C, suggesting that importation occurred through most of the 5th century; assemblage 1 from the same area contained form 2 and an early example of form 3.40 The most likely date for 120 therefore remains 425–460. Unfortunately, it is not from what we term “destruction debris.” Because it is intact, I had suggested that it was from one of the late graves, but none were identified so far west on the Middle Terrace. Perhaps it can be associated with the dismantling of the Roman Propylon, which would thus be dated ca. 430–460.

That's a long quote, I admit. But it makes for a good read and it is worth following the footnotes if you have access to the article online or in print. For my immediate purpose, it makes no definitive statements about the start of production of PRS Hayes 2, only about its appearance at Corinth.

As noted above, Slane's BMCR review is of the Roman pottery volume from Argos. What's is going on there. In her introduction to PRS, Abadie-Reynal writes:

La chronologie établie par J. W. Hayes parait généralement confirmée par les trouvailles ultérieure. La date d'apparition de cette production a été fixée dans la seconde moitié du IVe siècle, autour des années 370. Cette production continue jusqu'au VIIe siècle. (p. 176)

Catalog nos. 288, 289, and 290 (17.1.2-4) reference sherds of Hayes 2a, b and c from early fifth century deposits. Cat. no. 292 (17.2.2) is identified as the foot of a Hayes 2. Here's the discussion:

Un exemplaire provient d'un context daté de la fin du IVe siècle. Il est importante car c'est le seul fragment de la forme Hayes 2 qui ait été trouvé à Argos dans un contexte de cette époque. Il confirme donc bien que cette forme a commencé à être utilisée à la fin du IVe siècle, même si la majorité des fragments proviennent d'ensembles du Ve.

This offers a correction to Slane's statement in the BMCR review that "Abadie-Reynal is explicit that all examples of LRC form 2 are found in contexts of the fifth century or later, but a few examples of form 1 seem to be transitional from Çandarli." A foot is not as good evidence as a rim, however.

[Quickly checking the catalog of A. Ivantchik Un puits d'époque paléochrétienne sur l'agora d'Argos BCH 126 (2002), 331-404 (online), gives 2 Hayes 3's and a 4 of the mid-fifth.]

OK. What does all this have to do with Troy/Ilion? We have a Hayes 2 sealed in the construction of a columned portico that was added to an earlier building in the late fourth or early fifth century AD. It's the example illustrated above. The same deposit produced 2 Hayes 1a/b rims, a Hayes 1a base, an ARS H50, and an ARS H53b. I'm repeating two drawings from above, but here they all are together.

Hayes 1a from Troy (I17.0647:4)

Hayes 1a/b from Troy (I17.0647:5)

Hayes 1a base (I17.0648:6)

Hayes 2a from Troy (I17.0647:1)

Hayes African Red-Slip 50a (I17.0647:2)

Hayes African Red-Slip 53b (I17.0647:3)

It's a nice group and its date matters. Building the portico is part of a larger resurgence of activity after a lull in the fourth century. If things don't get going again until after 400, that affects our understanding of how quickly Ilion responded to large-scale phenomena such as the increasing population of Constantinople. Consider this and other issues local, regional and Mediterranean-wide and the date of PRS Hayes 2 matters. Especially if it's after 400 and is the latest dateable sherd in that deposit.

Right now, partly on the basis of I17.0647 and on the basis of the Argos catalog, I think Hayes 2 begins before 400. On a related matter, I think the transition from Çandarli to ESC is a smooth one and that Ilion, even if the fourth century isn't a high-point, continues to receive finewares from the south throughout this transition. But I'm adopting a somewhat informal tone in offering this initial conclusion because I've gathered the evidence as notes on secondary literature and as consideration of the material at Troy. I haven't pursued the dialectic between those sources to a firm end. I'm comfortable I've read pretty much everything but I need to do more photocopying/photographing so that I can get everything in front of me at the same time. More importantly, I think the work will be strengthened if I ask for comments now, so that's mostly what I'm doing.

Attitudes toward Pottery

2009-10-16T09:33:00.003-04:00

Partially as a note to myself, here are a few passages from early Christian literature that reveal attitudes towards ceramic vessels:

[Romans 9:21] hath not the potter authority over the clay, out of the same lump to make the one vessel to honour, and the one to dishonour?

[Timothy 2:20] And in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth, and some to honour, and some to dishonour

I'm using Young's Literal Translation because it's out of copyright and because its approach is useful.

More complete in terms of its range of material culture is the following from the so-called Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus:

See not only with thine eyes, but with thine
intellect also, of what substance or of what form they
chance to be whom ye call and regard as gods.
 2:2  Is not one of them stone, like that which we
tread under foot, and another bronze, no better than
the vessels which are forged for our use, and another
wood, which has already become rotten, and another
silver, which needs a man to guard it lest it be
stolen, and another iron, which is corroded with rust,
and another earthenware, not a whit more comely than
that which is supplied for the most dishonourable
service?
 2:3  Are not all these of perishable matter? Are they
not forged by iron and fire? Did not the sculptor make
one, and the brass-founder another, and the
silversmith another, and the potter another? Before
they were moulded into this shape by the crafts of
these several artificers, was it not possible for each
one of them to have been changed in form and made to
resemble these several utensils? Might not the vessels
which are now made out of the same material, if they
met with the same artificers, be made like unto such
as these?

That's the somewhat archaic sounding translation of J. B. Lightfoot as found on the excellent Early Christian Writings website. The Greek text is available from The Christian Classics Ethereal Library, which is also a terrific resource.

Many more such passages could be cited so take the above as just a small taste from an abundant feast.

"Mediterranean Ceramics" YouTube Playlist

2009-10-08T11:39:00.002-04:00

I've created a "Mediterranean Ceramics" YouTube playlist. Follow that link or use this embedded player:

As always, this is in a spirit of experimentation.

One comment: you'll note that there are no voice overs. The one time guards looked at me funny when I was shooting one of these is when I was making comments about the objects in a case. So I don't do that anymore. Perhaps I'll get round to doing audio tracks in the future.

And let me know if there are any videos that should be added to this list.

FYI: Workshop at Center for Hellenic Studies

2009-10-08T10:40:00.001-04:00

This should be interesting:

WORKSHOP: Host your texts on Google in one day

The Center For Hellenic Studies will conduct a one-day workshop at the Center's Washington, D.C., campus, on Monday, Jan. 11, 2010, with the subject: "Host your texts on Google in one day". Bring one or more XML texts to the workshop in the morning, and leave in the afternoon with a running Google installation of Canonical Text Services serving your texts to the internet.

For more information, including how to apply, please see http://chs75.harvard.edu/CTSWorkshop.html.

Feel free to forward this announcement to anyone who might be interested.

Roman Pottery Study Case at the Metropolitan Museum

2009-10-07T16:32:00.004-04:00

I'm all for criticizing museums when they buy unprovenanced antiquities, pointing out when they seem to be unduly effected by poorly conceived laws, and praising them when they do a good job of presenting material to the public.

The last applies to the Metropolitan Museum's Greek and Roman study collection. It's true there aren't labels, but there is access for those who can travel to New York. In lieu of that, here's a YouTube video of one case of Roman pottery.

I shot it with my iPhone a little over a week ago. Very unprofessional but perhaps better than nothing.

There are three levels in the case and I move from top to bottom. I've added two annotations. Move to 1:50 to see a box indicating that a bowl is African Red-Slip. I would do more if it were possible to link to non-YouTube web pages. I suppose that's too dangerous in terms phishing, etc. But it would be nice.

Google finds Roman Amphorae

2009-10-05T18:11:00.003-04:00

Way back in April 2008 I noted that the excellent resource Roman Amphorae: a digital resource seemed to be hiding itself from Google. See the third paragraph of that post.

Since then, I've written and submitted the chapter "Diversity and Reuse of Digital Resources for Ancient Mediterranean Material Culture" that is forthcoming (2010) in G. Bodard and S. Mahony, eds., Digital Research in the Study of Classical Antiquity from Ashgate. In that I make the same observation about Roman Amphorae. The text was submitted earlier this year, and I noted towards its end that many of the observations I make about digital resources may change since the Internet is a moving target.

Accordingly, I'm very happy to report that Google searches now include Roman Amphorae pages. Try http://www.google.com/search?q=keay+62. For me, the seventh link goes to the drawings page for that Late Roman form from N. Africa.

An administrator from the Archaeological Data Service was an anonymous reviewer of my paper. Perhaps it made a difference. Or maybe not. That doesn't matter. I'm just happy that the problem has been corrected.

Video of UPenn Amphora

2009-09-23T23:24:00.002-04:00

A while back I wrote about a North African Amphora at UPenn. I took the photos in that post with an iPhone. Here's video from a 3GS via youtube.

Panathenaic Amphoras

2009-08-02T01:31:00.002-04:00

I'm in Troy. One agenda item is adding content to GRBPIlion. Last week Kathleen Lynch of the University of Cincinnati was here. She kindly sent me her catalog entries for a few of the Panathenaic amphoras that she is in the process of publishing.

The main goal is continuing work on the Roman pottery from the Lower City here. A side effect is improvements to the GRBPIlion catalogs, such as the one for Phocaean Red Slip.

Mapping coin hoards at Nomisma.org

2009-05-21T13:17:00.004-04:00

As a small supplement to yesterday's post, here's an additional brief notice of some collaborative work at nomisma.org.

http://nomisma.org/id/igch0546 is a stable URI for hoard 546 as found in An Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards. If you scroll down you'll see there is a map. The text was contributed by the ANS. The lat-long info by colleagues in France.

http://numismatics.org/cgi-bin/nm-search?kw=gml%3Apos will get you a list of all the hoards for which we have geographic coordinates. That URL will change but works for now.

This is all still highly preliminary, but the data is available and already somewhat useful.

In other ANS matters, our main website is coming along, and there is a new website for the ANS Magazine.

A few items

2009-05-20T17:07:00.004-04:00

Non-blog activities continue to keep me busy. Including:

Little by little, the digital publication Coins from Ilion (Troia) is coming along. This is very much a joint effort by all the people listed there. My goal is to be well-prepared for the upcoming study season, when I can look at the coins directly.
I'm in the proofs stage with "Forum Note: Legal threats to Cultural Exchange of Archaeological materials", co-authored with Glenn Schwartz, that will appear in the July American Journal of Archaeology. Should be done with it tomorrow.
Things seem to be moving along well with 'Diversity and Reuse of Digital Resources for Ancient Mediterranean Material Culture', which is coming out in G. Bodard and S. Mahony, eds., Digital Research in the Study of Classical Antiquity from Ashgate. There will be more editorial stages, I'm sure, but the writing is done.
Also working on "Ceramic Data from In-Field Use to Digital Publication" with Billur Tekkök and John Wallrodt. Needs to be done next week.
And don't forget the CAA2009 paper... Perhaps more on that later.

OK, not all of this will be immediately available for free and in digital form, but that doesn't mean it's totally without merit.

The Surface of African Red Slip

2009-03-27T14:00:00.002-04:00

Today I added explicit references to page nos. in Hayes' Late Roman Pottery [worldcat] to the GRBPIlion page for African Red Slip.

That's hardly worth a post. But I did re-look at the photographs so here are a few excerpts that show variability of surface treatment.

The exterior of an H32/58 of the late 3rd/early 4th AD. Shows thick unbrushed slip on surface. The photo is a little washed out, overall color of the vessel is "normal" ARS orange.

The interior of a similarly dated H53a. Thick, somewhat smoothed surface with feather rouletting.

It would be really nice if I had a good photo of a very smooth H50. I'll look for one.

Interior of an early 6th century H87b. Less detail than the previous two. Thick smoothed slip.

Exterior of the same piece. Obviously thinner slip is "streakily" applied.

MFA Boston and Perseus

2009-03-17T23:07:00.003-04:00

The URL http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/artifact?name=Boston%201982.283&object=Coin brings up information about a mirror formed from two coins of a type issued for Antinous.

The object is in the MFA's collection and you can see further information at http://mfa.org/collections/search_art.asp?recview=true&id=155289. That URL isn't published by the MFA and some time ago I pointed out that this situation is unfortunate. It's now becoming unfortunate that the MFA website hasn't been updated to display nice, simple URLs for the records in its curatorial database. Something along the lines of JSTOR's stable urls (e.g., http://www.jstor.org/stable/876505).

When it does, Perseus will be able to include markup along the lines of <link rel="alternate owl:sameAs" href="http://mfa.org/collections/search_art.asp?recview=true&id=155289"> in the header of its page. That will be progress.

Time Team Publishes

2009-03-10T10:58:00.003-04:00

Briefly noting that Wessex Archaeology and the television series Time Team now have the show's resulting archaeological reports available for browsing and download. One model for funding field work and publication.

ARS in Wikipedia

2009-03-09T17:21:00.002-04:00

In a fit of procrastination some time back, I started a Wikipedia article for African Red Slip. I've just added a bit today. Improvements can be made on the page itself (hint, hint).

A note on capitalization: wiki-style prefers lower-case. See the editing history for the change from "African Red Slip" to "African red slip". Many archaeologists may think of ARS as something of a proper noun. Either way is OK by me.

And, boy, do I hate typing wikicode in those text-entry boxes. But it's all for a good cause.

NextEngine 3D

2009-03-03T16:15:00.002-05:00

It's been too long since I've posted. Busy, busy, busy...

But now I have a specific question of the community: Has anybody used a NextEngine 3D to good effect? I know Scott Moore took one to Cyrpus. Scott, any further reactions?

I'm speaking with colleagues about getting funding for one but don't want to waste money/time if the machine is no good, too cumbersome, otherwise not useful.

Thanks in advance.

AIA Paper Preview: ESC to PRS

2009-01-02T14:32:00.003-05:00

Here's a sequence of images that shows the transition from ESC/Çandarli to Phocaean Red-Slip (PRS). They will appear in my part of the upcoming paper Late Hellenistic and Roman Pottery at Ilion (Troia).

This is the interior of an ESC Hayes form 4 from a late third century AD pit.

Then a sequence of rim sherds. The top three are again ESC Hayes form 4, the lower PRS Hayes form 1. Surface treatment moves from a quite high-gloss finish to a dull matte slip. The ESC is from a 4th century deposit with considerable residual material. The PRS is from a late 4th/early 5th century group. Note the color variation that begins to appear on ESC. This has the feeling of error or at least sloppiness. On PRS, a stacking line becomes one of the signatures of the ware. While such lines do not need to be called "decoration", they shouldn't be thought of as errors.

Now the exterior of a fifth century PRS Hayes form 3 with thin slip.

That the transition from ESC H4 to PRS H1 was smooth has long been known. Nonetheless, these sherds come from distinct production centers. Or rather, the PRS likely comes from workshops in/near ancient Phocaea, whereas production of ESC may have been more regionally distributed between Pitane/Çandarli and Pergamon.

We don't have great early 4th century deposits at Ilion but our evidence indicates that Hayes was right to raise the possibility of overlapping production of these two forms. Nonetheless, ceramic catalogs often enforce a distinct separation between ESC and PRS, with the former falling into discussion of Roman period ceramics and being separated from PRS by the presentation of other wares. Ancient consumers may not have perceived much of a difference as their sources of supply slowly changed over the decades of the fourth century.

For Profit Archaeology

2008-12-24T00:44:00.002-05:00

The Miliken Institute's Financial Innovations Labs have issued a report entitled Financial Innovations for Developing Archaeological Discovery and Conservation. It seems to be a call for archaeologists to participate in the profit-oriented market for antiquities, though the report certainly doesn't use that language. Even when mediated through the securitization of debt obligations backed by cash-flow from long-term loans, this is problematic. Archaeologists work to bring information about the past to the public, not to meet commercial demand for artifacts.

CIDOC-CRM

2008-12-12T08:57:00.002-05:00

Sean Gillies has written an important memo Concordia, Vocabularies, and CIDOC CRM on Concordia's current approach to using the Comité International pour la Documentation des Musées - Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC-CRM). It should be widely read by people interested in the digital publication of resources for the ancient Mediterranean and beyond. In it he gives a preliminary indication that RDFa - a standard for embedding the Resource Description Framework in html pages - provides a better route forward for the time being. But don't take my word for this, read his whole text.

RDFa has appeared on this blog: PRAP, xhtml 2.0 and Archaeological Databases was early thinking, RDFa at Ilion is more recent, nomisma.org also makes use of RDFa. So Sean's memo is welcome here because his reasoning is similar to mine.

But what of CIDOC-CRM? The main CIDOC-CRM website opens with:

The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) provides definitions and a formal structure for describing the implicit and explicit concepts and relationships used in cultural heritage documentation.

It also notes that the CRM is an ISO standard (ISO 21127:2006). That's a good thing.

In general, the main CIDOC-CRM website doesn't do a good job of introducing itself. If you want a quick feel for how the CRM organizes concepts, try the relevant section of Princeton's QED site. You'll see that the CRM provides a well-thought out vocabulary of concepts for describing cultural heritage. Apart from the odd use of gendered language, it's useful that the CRM defines the concept E24 Physical Man-Made Thing. It will be cool when I can search the Internet for E24's within the Aegean that date to the Late Roman period. I'm guessing the CRM will play a role in enabling such functionality.

In terms of resources linked from the main CIDOC-CRM website, I've paid the most attention to the "mappings" page. I take heart in the work being done in this domain because of the implication that my use of the CRM can be indirect. This is encouraging because current self-representation by CIDOC seems to obscure notions of "best practice" in an over-abundance of detail. See this paper for an example. It is to the CRM's credit that it can represent all the concepts used there, but in many cases one does not have, nor need, this level of detail. I will be happy to use VRA, Dublin core and any other vocabularies and ontologies that gain traction in the Semantic Web world and trust that these will be mapped to the CRM.

From my perspective, that there is not a large amount of CRM-encoded original archaeological data easily available on the internet is an indication that the standard has not seen a high-degree of real world uptake. I understand that there is acceptance of the CRM and many initiatives discussing how it can be used (here) but I would very much like to see actual use with large datasets. I'm also interested in seeing projects that adopt the CRM as the original format for "born digital" data. Will that really happen?

This post represents thinking that I hope will change as we see real world adoption of standards in Cultural Heritage. I'm agnostic as to what the future holds. For the present, I'm all for exploring vocabularies and ontologies that are moving towards RDFa representations.

Briefly: two books and a new resource

2008-12-10T10:52:00.002-05:00

I am in the Thomas J. Watson Library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's a very pleasant place to work and recommended for archaeologists visiting NYC. They have very strong holdings in Roman pottery.

I've paged and am using A. Camilli. 1999. Ampullae : balsamari ceramici di età ellenistica e romana [worldcat]. That's Italian for "Unguentaria", the common small ceramic bottles/flasks found in many contexts on Mediterranean sites. I stress this because the book is not about Early Christian/Late Roman ampullae associated with pilgrimage. If you're working with unguentaria, you want this book.

Next up is M. Berndt. 2003. Funde aus dem Survey auf der Halbinsel von Milet : (1992 - 1999) : kaiserzeitliche und frühbyzantinische Keramik [worldcat]. This is a very useful catalog for the period it covers. A noteworthy feature is that the 172 plates are on a CD in the back. Putting a CD in the back of a book is an inane long-term solution so I want to go on record here as saying "Don't do it!". And if you do, "Dont use PDF!". But it wouldn't be entirely straightforward of me not to admit that I have the plates on my hard-drive. In the short term, yes, this information is useful. But who is going to have CD readers 20 years from now? Not many of us. And the text isn't available in digital form so here I am checking a few things.

Finally, the American Numismatic Society has initiated a project to establish stable URIs for numismatic concepts and entities. It's at nomisma.org. Take a look but be gentle since it's all in early stages.

Semantic Web Vocabularies for the Ancient World

2008-12-07T09:03:00.005-05:00

As previously indicated, I'm working on an xhtml+rdfa representation of GRBPIlion.

At some point I will give a more general statement of why this is a good idea. Right now, I'm still very much in the planning/modeling phase. In particular, I'm interested in which pre-existing vocabularies I should be using. What follows is a lightly annotated list of potential candidates, some more obvious and stable than others.

General statements of properties and relationships:
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:skos="http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#"
xmlns:ov="http://open.vocab.org/terms/"

The Dublin Core is a well understood and widely used standard. Where it matches, it's a no-brainer to use it as a default. Currently, each record in the db has "dc:title" as a human readable title. E.g., "African Red Slip Hayes form 68".

The Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a W3 standard that has some uptake in the real world. dbpedia.org uses the skos:subject property to indicate membership in categories such as those found on Wikipedia. My use is semantically similar.

The newly-started Open Vocab was brought to my attention by Sean Gillies. More precisely, he mentioned it on twitter and since I follow him, I checked it out. OV is a nice staging ground for creating URIs for terms that aren't found in other vocabularies and for terms you just want to think about before choosing an existing standard.

Visual Documentation:
xmlns:vra="http://www.vraweb.org/vracore4.htm#"

Right now I use "vra:imageIs" to indicate that an external file is an image (whether svg or bit-mapped) of an object.

Geography:
xmlns:gml="xmlns:gml=http://www.opengis.net/gml"
xmlns:georss="http://www.georss.org/georss">
xmlns:pleiades="http://pleiades.stoa.org/"
xmlns:batlas="http://atlantides.org/batlas/"

As suggested by S. Gillies, I've qualified some of the geographic markup with "ov:origin".

Authorial/Responsibility Metadata:
xmlns:tei="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0"

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) provides a richer set of tools than DC for indicating authorship and related concepts. Its version P5 also provides a complete and elegant standard for encoding digital documents. For now, I'm representing GRBPIlion in xhtml and rdf, because the combination has explicit W3 backing and is suitably lightweight for my purposes.

Data modeling:
xmlns:owl="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#"
xmlns:rdf="xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#""
xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"

No surprises here. I do think there will always be a place for asserting relationships that are not strongly typed by reference to a particular discipline. That and using RDF and Owl for mapping relationships that will be more richly defined at a later date.

What about CIDOC-CRM? I did not find an up-to-date and official looking document that integrates RDF and CIDOC-CRM. I'm also concerned about using a standard whose official release appears only in Microsoft Word and PDF.

I should also explore ArchaeoML as implemented by Open Context but the site seems to be down right now. When I click through to individual databases, no records are being returned. I may be doing something wrong, but if not, I'm sure the site will come back soon.

Again, this is all highly preliminary. Constructive criticism would be very much appreciated.

RDFa at Ilion

2008-12-04T18:14:00.002-05:00

The following will seem cryptic and I promise to give more detail later...

If anybody is interested in a draft RDFa representation of the GRBPIlion database, then point your parser at http://classics.uc.edu/troy/grbpottery/database.html.

It even uses ov:origin! (sort of)

It's all in pursuit of the four goals given by Tim Berners-Lee in his Linked Data paper.

Use URIs as names for things
Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names.
When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information.
Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover
more things.

Not there yet, but trying.

Late Hellenistic and Roman Pottery at Ilion (Troia)

2008-11-28T18:31:00.003-05:00

Here is the abstract of my co-authored AIA paper. It's part of the Sunday morning session 7A: Pottery Production and Trade. My colleague Billur Tekkök and I are splitting the main text; she'll work on Hellenistic and I'll do Roman. Ernst Pernicka, director of the Troia Project, will contribute the results of NAA of sherds we selected.

Late Hellenistic and Roman Pottery at Ilion (Troia)

Billur Tekkök, Başkent University,
Sebastian Heath, American Numismatic Society,
and Ernst Pernicka, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen

This paper presents results from the study of stratified deposits dating from the late second century B.C. to the early sixth century A.D. Beyond establishing chronological horizons, our purpose is to explore the role of ceramic evidence in identifying economic and cultural trends at the site. Throughout this period, Ilion participated in both regional and long-distance exchange networks, and the ce-ramic assemblage includes a wide selection of Aegean utilitarian and tablewares. For the late Hellenistic period, Neutron Activation Analysis shows that regional workshops continued to produce Aegean forms, while also incorporating wider Mediterranean trends. Tablewares from first-century A.D. well-fills, pits, and foundation trenches indicate regular access to trade networks that brought ce-ramic material from outside the Aegean to the households of the region. Eastern Sigillata A, Italian Sigillata, as well as Eastern Sigillata B, are regular features of the ceramic assemblage, though none are common. Eastern Sigillata C, also called Çandarli-ware, becomes increasingly available at this time. By the late second cen-tury A.D., ESC makes up the bulk of the tableware assemblage. Pontic products remain rare in the Roman period. NAA indicates that ESC vessels, which display differences in inclusions and manufacture, were all supplied by regional work-shops. Late Roman tablewares show a transition to the use of Phocaean Red-Slip, as well as the presence of African Red-Slip and pale-slipped tablewares. Equal attention has been given to utilitarian wares and amphoras, and these vessels are presented as well. Finally, we present ongoing efforts toward digital publication of ceramic data.

To encourage me to get the text done in a timely fashion, I'll post sections here as I work on them. That will help me select the right photographs and drawings.

Last year I posted a list of papers whose titles indicated they had something to do with pottery. Look for a similar list to appear soon. And anybody who wants to post a relevant abstract here, just send it by e-mail or paste it into a comment.

Profile Drawing from the Illustrator's Perspective

2008-11-27T07:41:00.002-05:00

Jane Heinrichs posts on the relative merits of drawing amphora vs. African Red-Slip sherds.

I spent two seasons at Leptiminus (Lamta) when I was a graduate student. Great site, nice kilns. My only comment on the post is to wonder why the project is using JPEG rather than a vectorized format.

Roman Pottery List at Worldcat

2008-11-26T16:38:00.003-05:00

On AWBG, David Gill mentioned his History of Egyptology Worldcat list. That has inspired me to start such a list for Roman Pottery. You'll see that the focus is the Mediterranean.

It's incomplete, of course, but will grow over time. Suggestions, preferably with Worldcat links included, are welcome.

More on Sharing

2008-11-26T13:30:00.002-05:00

Readers may recall a blog-based discussion of sharing archaeological data. See this post on AWBG for a summary with links to most of the discussion. The originator of the thread, Charles Watkinson, offered further observations in a contribution to the CSA Newsletter. I don't mean to re-open the whole issue, but I did recently come across a quote that seemed relevant.

The short volume, Francovich and Hodges. 2003. Villa to village: the transformation of the Roman countryside in Italy, c. 400-1000. London. [worldcat], is a good introductory text on an important early Medieval topic. When surveying the contributions of archaeology, the authors write:

...ceramic remains from for[sic] the post-classical period were needed to identify medieval sites. The opportunity arose in the spring of 1960 during the survey of the Ager Veientanus, some 17km north of Rome. Deep ploughing turned up what what on inspection proved to be the bases of a church colonnade, together with other major architectural elements and medieval pottery. Ward-Perkins soon identified the conspicuous surface remains as those of the monasterium sancti Cornelii in Capracorio, a monastery found between 1026 and 1035 on the site of a papal estate established by Pope Hadrian I in c. 776 (Christie 1991). Ward-Perkins realised that the site had almost certainly been occupied by a Roman villa as well, and with some zeal set out to explore the possibility of establishing direct continuity between a Roman villa and a domusculta - a ninth-century papal farm. Over five seasons, under the direction of Barri-Jones and then Charles Daniels, the British School at Rome uncovered this rare example of an early medieval rural settlement, permitting the pottery types of the age to be identified and used for locating other sites in survey. Unforunately, as Chris Wickham has recently written, "Santa Cornelia did not have the impact of the Castelprio or Torcello sites, or the German excavations of Invillino later in the decade, because it was not published for 30 years; by the time Neil Christie piloted it to publication in 1990, medieval archaeology had moved on." (Wickham 2001:38)

The key phrase here is "did not have the impact...because it was not published for 30 years". It is not important who you are - and I leave it to others to slot Ward-Perkins into a scholarly taxonomy - if you don't share ("publish"), then your data doesn't matter. I could certainly be more expansive and subtle but that would dilute the point.

Lamp fillers or baby feeders?

2008-11-24T22:04:00.003-05:00

First, a quick word of thanks to Sebastian for allowing me the chance to post here on Mediterranean Ceramics, particularly as the post's in some respect a selfish one. Y'see, I'm the student with whom he's working on the lamps from Beit She'an: and after discussing the several examples with him from a particular tomb, as well as associated ceramic and glass vessels, I'm left with a question I hope someone on the interwebs can answer.

Among the other ceramic vessels found within the tomb in question was a small, one-handled vessel with a bulbous body and a high neck--it'd be a stretch to call it piriform, but not entirely inaccurate--with a slender spout emerging from the body above its thickest point. More to the point, it's the sort of vessel which usually gets characterized as either a lamp filler or a baby feeder. Both are sensible enough guesses, I suppose, but they strike me nevertheless as almost comically divergent (similar shapes notwithstanding). Has anyone seen a treatment of these sorts of vessels anywhere--another example from Beit Sh'ean is at right--especially as regards their use in Late Roman or Byzantine Palestine? I'd be curious to know whether I ought to assume the thing's a lamp filler, given the presence of several associated lamps, or if I'm looking at a baby bottle. Thanks for the help!

Three Books: Argos, Britain and Loot

2008-11-19T09:00:00.006-05:00

Somewhat randomly:

Catherine Abadie-Reynal's La céramique romaine d'Argos: Fin du IIe siècle avant J-C - fin du IVe siècle après J-C. [worldcat] is an excellent contribution to the study of Aegean ceramics in the Roman period. In conception, it is a well-executed catalog-based typological study. The introductions for each ware are up-to-date and the regionally organized bibliography is a resource all on its own.
Lloyd Laing's Pottery in Britain: 4000 BC to AD 1900 [worldcat] is useful for its color illustrations. If you take the book on its own terms, it makes a good addition to your personal or institutional library.
I recieved a review copy of Sharon Waxman's Loot: the battle over the stolen treasures of the ancient world [worldcat]. Preliminary reading has added it to my "get to soon" list. For reactions and links see Looting Matters.

Quick Lamp Follow-Up

2008-11-18T17:26:00.003-05:00

Looking at lamps from Beit She'an was enjoyable. The wider topic was material from a single tomb but lamps were the most numerous category of ceramic object. This was done in the context of an independent study so all the credit for setting things up goes to the student who pulled the pieces. The main reference we used was:

Hadad, S. (2002). The oil lamps from the Hebrew University excavations at Bet Shean. Qedem reports, 4. Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem. [worldcat]

Generally a very useful book, particularly when you're lucky enough to be looking at objects from the same site that happen to be in the very museum you're working in!

Quick Poll: LRC, Phocaean or Phokaian

2008-11-17T17:50:00.002-05:00

Towards the top right of this page you'll see a poll asking for your preferred term for the late Roman red-slipped ware from Phocaea (or Phokaia?). This is the kind of thing that I don't much mind what your answer is. The modernist in me likes Phokaian, though Phocaean seems more common in English-language publications. Everybody knows what LRC means, but it is out of date and a geographic term is probably preferable.

Three Websites for Ancient Lamps

2008-11-17T15:33:00.003-05:00

Tomorrow I am taking a look at lamps excavated by the University of Pennsylvania Museum from tombs at Beit She'an/Scythopolis [wikipedia].

There are a few good websites for ancient oil-lamps. Three that come immediately to mind are:

Ancient Lamps. RomQ Reference Collection
Holyland Oil Lamps from the Ancient Coin Club of Los Angeles.
Oil Lamps from the Holy land from the Adler Collection

It will be clear that I've listed sites that are well illustrated and have reasonably good descriptions, not sites that are replete with objects from properly excavated and documented contexts. One would wish that there were more of the latter.

Feel free to add to this short list in the comments.

Online Syriac Studies

2008-11-14T13:27:00.003-05:00

I've been poking around the online resources for Syriac studies. First issue of note is the seeming disappearance of the site Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Computing Institute. Does anybody know what's going on there? I've seen notice of a Syriac Unicode font but can't get at it.

I have enjoyed the online journal Hugoye. Unfortunately, the copyright statement includes the following:

Hugoye articles are copyrighted and must be treated like any other published articles. They cannot be copied, duplicated, or reproduced by any means without prior written authorization from the General Editor.

Such restrictions only serve to marginalize this important field. The articles are already online and freely available. How about using a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Work license?

Living Late Antiquity

2008-11-12T11:44:00.002-05:00

I think many students of the Ancient World can see the repercussions of their own period of expertise still present in current events. This was brought home to me by the article A Short Overview of the Common History of the Syrian Church with Islam through the Centuries by HH Patriarch Mor Ignatios Zakka I Iwas.

Without meaning to preview it too much, I think anybody interested in the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages will find it offers an interesting perspective.

And while I'm sure one can find controversy in this document, that's not my interest at all.

Roman Cheese Presses

2008-10-18T22:50:00.002-04:00

An October 18th post to the London Archaeological Archive and Research Centre (LAARC) VIP blog mentions a Roman period cheese press (illustrated below) excavated in 1973 and recently repackaged. I claim no great familiarity with such objects. But if you're intrigued, you can read about another one in a BBC News report from 2006. And the Google search "roman cheese press site:jstor.org" suggests they are an occassional part of the Roman-period assemblage in Britian.

Clicking through on the image drops you into the LAARC photostream on Flickr, which is also recommended.

Sword and Kylix

2008-10-07T12:25:00.002-04:00

Aegeanet and a few blogs are discussing the find of an imported Italian sword in a Mycenaean grave. But note the nice kylix as well. Bronze age elites liked their drink as much as their arms.

An African Amphora in Sicily

2008-10-04T08:35:00.002-04:00

The University of British Columbia has a good writeup on Roger Wilson's excavation near Punta Secca in Sicily. The evidence for periodic feasting around burials is interesting. As is this nearly complete amphora:

The piece is clearly an African Amphora. I can't make the rim be of the common Keay 62 type. It looks like the rim is banded so perhaps it's a Keay 8? Regardless, that's a nice find.

While we're on the topic of feasting for the dead, I can also recommend: Kathleen Warner Slane with Mary E. H. Walbank. 2006. "Anointing and
Commemorating the Dead: Funerary Rituals of Roman Corinthians," in D. Malfitana, J. Poblome and J. Lund (eds.), Old Pottery in a New Century. Acts of an International Conference held in Catania, Sicily 22-24 April, 2004, pp. 377-387. [worldcat]

And while were in the Corinthia: Joe Rife, M. Morison, A. Barbet, R. K. Dunn, D. H. Ubelaker, and F. Monier. "Life and death at a port in Roman Greece: The Kenchreai Cemetery Project 2002-2006" Hesperia 76 (2007): 143-181. [handle]

Also Ridiculous

2008-09-19T15:16:00.002-04:00

D. and N. Soren's 1999 A Roman Villa and a Late Roman Infant Cemetery: Excavation at Poggio Gramignano Lugnano in Teverina [worldcat], which is a useful publication, costs $608.00 at Amazon.com.

If you happen to have access to a library that spent the money to acquire the volume, you can find a useful discussion of the pottery in part 2, with good photographic documentation of amphoras reused as child burials on plates 236 to 250. Black-and-white, but you can still get a sense of North African and other fabrics.

Still Totally Ridiculous...

2008-09-11T11:11:00.002-04:00

I recently received the David Brown Book Company's Byzantium and Late Antiquity list via regular mail; the one that is valid through October 31st, 2008. On the inside of the last page, J. Bardill's Brickstamps of Constantinople is offered for $199.98. That's much better than the original list price of $750.00 still given at Amazon.com, and again less than the independent reseller prices also listed there. At the time of writing, these ranged from $692.12 to $297.99.

Even with these reductions, it does nonetheless seem clear that expensive, print-only distribution was a bad way of bringing this information to the world. I say this without meaning to take anything away from the author's scholarly accomplishment.

Pottery Database from the British Institute at Ankara

2008-09-10T11:19:00.002-04:00

Tom Elliot noticed that the British Institute at Ankara has put up a website for its collection of artifacts from various sites around Turkey. Pot sherds seem to make up the greatest part of this material.

The map at the top right is nice for exploring what's available. Here's a link to the site of Kavak on the Gallipoli peninsula. Click here for an enlarged photo of some sherds from the site. Note the nice Phocaean Red-Slip Hayes form 3, it's one-up from the lower left corner. It looks like there are some PRS bases in there as well, and the largest ridged amphora sherd should be LRA2. But it's always risky to identify small fragments from photos so take that for what it's worth.

Another nice digital resource, even if the descriptions aren't yet very complete.

Hadashot Arkheologiyot from the IAA

2008-09-07T00:38:00.002-04:00

The Hadashot Arkheologiyot website offers useful preliminary discussions of archaeological work in Israel. There is a nice search form with a link to a clickable map.

Many of the articles discuss ceramic and numismatic finds and are accompanied by well-chosen illustrations. Here's a notice of an agricultural "watchman's hut" where African Red-Slip was found. That's certainly an interesting site classification. And see here for salvage work that recorded Cypriot Red-Slip.

There's much to be learned from browsing and searching so I recommend taking the time to try it out.

Huntington Coins, part 2

2008-09-02T12:46:00.002-04:00

The Art Newspaper has now covered the possibility that the Hispanic Society of America will sell the coins it is withdrawing from the American Numismatic Society. Here's my previous post on the topic.

Amazonian "Cities"

2008-08-29T12:02:00.003-04:00

Nothing to do with the Mediterranean, but the BBC story on newly-reported "cities" in the Amazon is very cool. Defensive walls, roads with shared orientation, farming, pottery... All relevant to debates on the origins of agriculture and other big topics in archaeology.

You'll note that I link to the BBC version and not the Science Magazine original. You have to pay for that, an annoyance that will cost them hits and influence.

Profile Photo of ARS Hayes 87b

2008-08-19T08:01:00.004-04:00

Gebhard Bieg took terrific photographs of the late 5th/early 6th century AD African Red Slip plate found at Troia last year. I've added his profile shot and preview it here:

An African Red Slip Hayes Form 87b

2008-08-18T07:51:00.003-04:00

Last year the Troia Project excavated and published via GRBPIlion an African Red-Slip Hayes form 87b of the late fifth to early sixth centuries AD. The vessel was conserved this summer and I've now added photos. Here's a description with links to high-res images:

P.H. .063. Est. diam. rim .44. Th. .074.
P18.0093:1. Almost completely preserved plate, twenty-six joining sherds leave two gaps and missing sections at rim and base. There is some chipping of the interior surface, though in general the slip is very well preserved; patches of plaster adhere to the interior of one group of joining sherds, to exterior of another. Vessel has been conserved.
Broad sloping walls with thickened rim and short triangular foot. Slightly granular fabric, fired red throughout (btw. 2.5YR 6/8-5/8) with occasional lime inclusions and some reddish bits. Smooth slip on interior surface is slightly darker red (10R 5/8), drip marks over rim, exterior largely plain.
From deposits associated with the aftermath of the early sixth century AD earthquake.

I'll work on getting in situ images of the piece up on the site .

Ceramic Analysis from U. of Leicester

2008-08-16T01:29:00.004-04:00

Here's a nice page on Roman and Medieval ceramics from a UK-oriented archaeological perspective.

2008 Preliminary Report from Tel Kabri, Israel

2008-08-09T10:22:00.003-04:00

Excavations at Tel Kabri took place from July 6th to July 31st. The preliminary report just now published is admirable for both its timeliness and detail.

Munsell 1954 and 2000

2008-08-08T06:59:00.002-04:00

Picking a Munsell color for the fabric and surfaces of one's sherds is a staple of ceramic studies. Here's a quick comparison shot of a 1954 edition, at left and courtesy of one of my colleagues here at Troy, next to a 2000 edition. It's of the 5YR page. The top row (hue 8/) has shifted, but many chips on the older edition have held their color well. Note also the layout changes, e.g. 5YR 4/8 is missing at the right. That's the major concern between editions: they are different in the details and that can influence perception. But if the goal is to communicate the general appearance of a sherd, either one would do just fine.