Small Demons is a new beta site dedicated to opening up the worlds inside of books by connecting all their details (people, places, and things). Small Demons is a Los Angeles based company that believes powerful and interesting things can happen when you connect all the details of books.
This site is the first step in showing what happens when you do just that.

Not just another search engine for what’s inside your favorite novel, Small Demons collects and catalogs the millions of references to real-world and fictional music, movies, people, and objects that are found in literature. Your new favorite restaurant could be on the next page of the book you’re reading, and Small Demons hopes to provide a place where you can draw meaningful connections between stories and everyday life.

See comments on Cool Hunting.

From Stylianos Chronopoulos:

We are very pleased to post the invitation to participate in the conference “Commenting Fragments: the Case of Ancient Comedy”, that will be held at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau – July 2-7, 2012.

The project “Kommentierung der Fragmente der altgriechischen Komödie” (“A Commentary on the Fragments of Ancient Greek Comedy”) invites applications to participate in a one-week conference/workshop, “Commenting Fragments: The Case of Ancient Comedy”, to be held July 2–7, 2012 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. The workshop is part of a multi-year research project supported by the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften and directed by Bernhard Zimmermann. The goal of the project, which has been underway at the Albert Ludwigs University since January 1, 2011, is to produce commentaries on all surviving fragments of Greek comedy.

Applications are open to all, but younger scholars (including graduate students) and other individuals interested in producing commentaries on individual comic poets are particularly encouraged to apply. Further information on the project (which builds on the textual work of R. Kassel and C. Austin, Poetae Comici Graeci), and on its publications to date, is available at the homepage of the Seminar for Classical Philology: http://www.altphil.uni-freiburg.de/komfrag

The workshop will have two separate but related agenda.

Mornings (9-12 AM) will be occupied with a series of round-table style discussions of some of the challenges of commenting on fragmentary comedies. The first two sessions will be devoted to sample commentaries produced collectively by the participants, and will consider methodological and practical problems such as the use of parallels, argumentative structure, textual matters, handling of sources, citation practices, reconstruction of scenes and plays, and the like. More information will be provided with the application, but every participant in the conference will be expected to produce a sample commentary on 5–6 lines of Greek text. These samples will be due June 1, and will be combined and precirculated to all workshop participants. The final three morning sessions will be devoted to close discussion of substantial samples of draft commentaries produced by individual workshop participants. The precise number and arrangement of these sessions will depend on the number of samples submitted. These samples (25–30 doublespaced pages) will be due April 30, and will be similarly precirculated to all workshop participants. A final round-up session will be held on Saturday, 7 July.

Afternoons (3-7 PM) will be devoted to talks by recognized experts in the field on the general theme: “The Periodization and Dramatic Form of Greek Comedy”.
The provisional schedule of afternoon talks is as follows:

Monday July 2:
Bernhard Zimmermann (University of Freiburg) – “The Periodisation of Greek Comedy as Necessary – and Problematic.” (the talk will be in German)
Eric Csapo (University of Sydney) – “The Earliest Phase of Ancient Greek Comedy.”

Tuesday July 3:
Andreas Willi (University of Oxford, Worcester College) – “Epicharmos and Attic Comedy.”
Jeffrey Henderson (Boston University) – “Pherecrates and Athenian Comedy between 450 and 420 BC.”

Wednesday July 4:
Guiseppe Mastromarco (University of Bari) – “Euripidaristophanizein (Cratinus, fr. 342 K.-A.): Aristophanes and Euripidean Paratragedy.” (the talk will be in Italian)
Heinz-Günther Nesselrath (University of Göttingen) – “Periodisation of Ancient Greek Comedy in Hellenistic Philology.” (the talk will be in German)

Thursday July 5:
Ioannis Konstantakos (University of Athens) – “Tendencies and Variety in Middle Comedy.”
Benjamin Millis (University of Oxford) – “Comedy in- and outside of Athens in the 4th Century BC.”
S. Douglas Olson (University of Minnesota / University of Freiburg) – “And on to Rome. Aristophanes and Athenaeus.” (Key-note lecture)

Friday July 6:
Antonis Petridis (Open University of Cyprus) – “Before and after Menander.”
Michael Scott Fontaine (Cornell University) – “From Athens to Rome: From Greek to Latin Comedy.”

Talks will last 45-50 min. and will be followed by a one-hour discussion period. Those interested in participating should submit proposals by March 30, 2012. Proposals must include
(1) a short CV (no more than one A4-page)
(2) a statement of purpose (no more than 600 words) describing why you want to participate; if you have any previous experience working with fragmentary texts, ancient Greek Comedy or writing a commentary; and how you intend to use participation to advance your research.

Applicants who also wish to have their own work discussed in one of the morning sessions are invited to send a 20-pages sample of their work by April 30. No participation fee for the workshop is required. A presentation of the project “Kommentierung der Fragmente der griechischen Komödie” and a grand conference banquet will be held after the talks on the first day. Various free-time activities (e.g. city tours of old Freiburg, hiking in the Black Forest, a guided visit to the Freiburg Cathedral, collective readings of aristophanic comedies) will be offered as part of the unofficial program.
The working languages for the conference and workshop will be English, German and Italian.

Due-dates:
Applications for participation March 30, 2012
Sample commentary (on 5-6 lines of Greek text), that each participant has to submit as basis for the discussion in the first two morning sessions June 1, 2012
Samples of draft commentaries (work in progress) to be discussed in the final three morning sessions April 30, 2012

Invitation for Participation (pdf)

For more information or to submit applications, please contact stylianos.chronopoulos@altphil.uni-freiburg.de

EpiDoc and TEI-XML training workshop
Dipartimento di Scienze Storiche, Giuridiche, Economiche e Sociali dell’Università Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria – BILG Project
June 4-7, 2012

The Department of Scienze Storiche, Giuridiche, Economiche e Sociali of University Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria and the Department Diritto dell’Organizzazione Pubblica, Economia e Società of University Magna Graecia of Catanzaro, within BILG (Inscriptiones Graecae et Latinae Bruttiorum) project, is organising an intensive training workshop of EpiDoc, with Monica Berti (Tufts University – Università di Roma Tor Vergata), Lou Burnard (TEI Editor) and Marion Lamè (Università di Bologna). This workshop is an introduction to the use of TEI and of EpiDoc, XML schema for the encoding and publication of literary texts and inscriptions, papyri and other documentary classical texts respectively. Participants will study the use of EpiDoc markup to record the distinctions expressed by the Leiden Conventions and traditional critical editions, and some of the issues in translating between EpiDoc and the major epigraphic and papyrological databases.

The course is targeted at scholars of historical and ancient texts, epigraphic and papyrologic ones (from advanced graduate students to professors), that are interested and want to learn some of the hands-on technical aspects in the markup, encoding, and exploitation of digital editions. The course will give a practical introduction to the Text Encoding Initiative, an introduction to EpiDoc markup and editing tools, and the text transformations with XSLT.

For more details about EpiDoc and TEI /XML, see at http://epidoc.sf.net and http://www.tei-c.org. Knowledge of Greek and/or Latin, the Leiden Conventions, the distinctions expressed by them and the kinds of data that need to be recorded by epigraphic scholars and ancient historians are of course essential. The course will be held in English with Italian tutors. No particular computer skills and technical expertise are required, even if the possession of an interest for computer know-how is preferable.

The workshop is free of charge and open to all, but spaces are limited (not more than 20 people) and registration as soon as possible is essential. To enrol in the training, please contact daria.spampinato@cnr.it or stefania.romeo@unirc.it with a brief statement of qualifications and interests.

Tufts University invites applications to “Working with Text in a Digital Age“, a three-week NEH Institute for Advanced Technology in the Digital Humanities (July 23-August 10, 2012) that combines traditional topics such as TEI Markup with training in methods from Information Retrieval, Visualization, and Corpus and Computational Linguistics.

Faculty, graduate students, and library professionals are encouraged to apply. Applicants should submit proposals by February 15, 2012. Participant proposals must include CVs and statements of purpose (no more than 1,000 words) describing how they will be able to use participation in the Institute to advance their subsequent careers. Participants must be committed to collaborative work and to publication of results from this Institute under a Creative Commons license. Participants should identify source materials with which they propose to work during the Institute and which must be in the public domain or available under a suitable license. In an ideal case, source materials would include both texts for intensive analysis and annotation and one or more larger corpora to be mined and analyzed more broadly. Statements of purpose must describe initial goals for the Institute. For more information or to submit applications, please contact lisa.cerrato@tufts.edu.

We particularly encourage participants who are committed to developing research agendas that integrate contributions and research by undergraduates, that expand the global presence of the Humanities, and that, in general, broaden access to and participation in the Humanities. Preference will be given to participants who are best prepared not only to apply new technologies but to do so as a means to transform their teaching and research and the relationship of their work to society beyond academia.

For further details see Working with Text in a Digital Age – NEH Institute at Tufts University

 Be it science or the everyday life – our language contains numerous trails of our cultural legacy in the form of winged words and quotations. Scientists now created new software tools for making this cultural legacy available in digital libraries. With the help of those programs the origin and dissemination of text passages, quotes and common phrases can be reconstructed in a quick and easy manner.

The main focus of “eTRACES” (which is the name of the project) lies on temporal traces and interconnecting relations of text passages in German language novels from between 1500 and 1900, as well as social science texts created since 1909. Project partners are the chair for Natural Language Processing at the University of Leipzig (ASV), the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities (GCDH), as well as the GESIS – Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences in Bonn.

Funding of about 1.2 Mio € is granted by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), covering a period of three years. “The cooperation of computer science experts with the specialists from the humanities and the social sciences bears great potential for the advancement of all three disciplines” explains State Secretary Cornelia Quennet-Thielen from the BMBF. Further, she emphasized, how eTRACES did exemplarily implement the “Recommendations on Research Infrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences” that were recently issued by the science council.

Harnessing the latest methods in text mining, new methods should be developed and tested to determine the demarcation of the intentional re-use of a text passage and and its utilization as a commonly used text block or boilerplate. Further attention lies on analyzing and visualizing the geographical, temporal and semantic cross-linking of citations.

In the application in the literary studies (partner Göttingen) the central question is, which practices of text passage re-use did coin the history of german novels. The initial subject of the research interests is the Luther Bible. The pivotal question posed by the partner GESIS is the examination of a textual differentiation of qualitative and quantitative social research. The application of informatics (ASV Leipzig) is to utilize the information on text re-use to build a search engine that also considers the citation frequency of a text or text fragment to determine its relevancy.

Here is a new Google Group called “Historical Text Re-use“. This group is about historical text re-use like quotations, paraphrases, and allusion over several centuries.
The main goal of this group is to organize and identify the community. Furthermore, to inform about recent activities in different projects or research papers.

Join the group and participate in the discussion!

Announcing Working with text in a digital age, a NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities. Co-directors: Monica Berti and Gregory Crane, Tufts University; Anke Lüdeling, Humboldt University.

July 23-August 10, 2012 Tufts University, Medford MA

This institute will provide participants with three weeks in which (1) to develop hands on experience with TEI-XML, (2) to apply methods from information retrieval, text visualization, and corpus and computational linguistics to the analysis of textual and linguistic sources in the humanities, (3) to rethink not only their own research agendas but also new relationships between their work and non-specialists.

A call for applications will follow shortly.

We post here a link to an interesting article by Kurt Schick (The Chronicle – October 30) on modern “citation obsession”, a problem that nowadays concerns not only scholars, but also librarians, tutors, and students. 

The author of the article mentions The Citation Project, which is  is a multi-institution research project responding to educators’ concerns about plagiarism and the teaching of writing.

The points addressed in the article and the aim of the Citation Project are very interesting and stimulating for discussing in general topics and problems raised when citing and quoting something, from ancient to modern sources.

________________________________________________

Citation Obsession? Get over it! (The Chronicle – October 30, 2011)

My university recently convened an emergency “summit” for librarians, tutors, and concerned faculty members to solve a citation crisis. Our library help desks reportedly cannot complete their core mission of assisting students with information literacy (finding, choosing, and using sources) because students keep pestering them with questions about how to format obscure citations: “I’m analyzing poetry for my ‘Punk Literature’ seminar. Using MLA style, how do I cite a limerick scribbled in the third-floor toilet?”

Meanwhile, the writing center stinks of fear as students struggle to decipher APA, MLA, AP, and Chicago (or is it Turabian?) documentation styles, which seem as alien and absurd to them as using a typewriter. Academic departments and even whole colleges consistently beg the library and writing center for workshops to rehabilitate their worst citation transgressors. Bibliographic citation has apparently eclipsed perfect grammar and the five-paragraph theme as the preoccupation of persnickety professors.

What a colossal waste. Citation style remains the most arbitrary, formulaic, and prescriptive element of academic writing taught in American high schools and colleges. Now a sacred academic shibboleth, citation persists despite the incredibly high cost-benefit ratio of trying to teach students something they (and we should also) recognize as relatively useless to them as developing writers.

Professors’ obsession with citation formatting is relatively new. Many of us over the age of 40 probably cannot remember learning much about citation styles until graduate school—not because our memories have faded, but because our teachers knew better than to demand that we fret about such specialized, scholarly formalities. It’s not that they were teaching us to be sloppy scholars, either. On the contrary, they emphasized how to effectively and responsibly locate, evaluate, and integrate other writers’ words and ideas into our own writing better, perhaps, than we teach students to do today. Surely, the uneven quality of information available online makes it more important for writers to know how to evaluate the worth of their sources than how to parse pedantic rules and display their expertise in footnoting.

What I advocate here is not to dispense with teaching students how to use sources but rather to abandon our fixation on the form rather than the function of source attribution. Here’s why: We cannot control how much time and effort students invest in a particular writing assignment; we can only influence how they distribute their energies. Professors’ overattention to flawless citation (or grammar) creates predictable results: Students expend a disproportionate amount of precious time and attention trying to avoid making mistakes. Soon, they also begin to associate “good” writing with mechanically following rules rather than developing good ideas.

In contrast, experienced writers (like us) edit meticulously only after they have allocated substantial effort to more complex and consequential writing tasks, such as refining their topics, selecting and processing their sources, organizing their ideas, and drafting and revising their manuscripts to improve focus and coherence. Nitpicky professors hinder student writers’ development by effectively forcing them to invest more time and thinking in less important elements of writing.

Recent research by the Citation Project corroborates how severely teachers’ citation psychosis has diminished students’ information-literacy skills, in particular. Rebecca Moore Howard and Sandra Jamieson blame “plagiarism hysteria,” which compels teachers to punish improper citation more than reward students’ effective use of sources’ words and ideas. Thus, clever students master quotation “mining” and sloppy paraphrasing, and they rarely summarize (or, presumably, deeply read or understand) their sources. Why should they, when success equals completing a checklist (“minimum of six sources including two books, two peer-reviewed articles … proper MLA format, including a period before the parenthetical citation for block quotations”) rather than composing writing that engages readers with sophisticated content or, heaven forbid, eloquent prose? Should we not judge writing on its content and character rather than its surface features?

The intricacies and formalities of citation become useful to scholars only when they publish their work. Until then, they need a bookkeeping system to keep track of where they found things (a system that others might later use to retrace their steps), and some means of attributing their sources and thus establishing the credibility of information for their audiences. More than anything, source attribution enables students—who, by virtue of being students, don’t yet know much about a subject—to borrow knowledge and ethos from those who do. It’s just about that simple.

What might be more surprising is how simple formal citation mechanics really are. Citation contents are virtually the same across styles and disciplines: author’s name(s), title(s), publication information. As anyone who’s translated a manuscript from MLA to APA and then to Chicago format knows, the only differences are sequence, punctuation, and format. Why, then, could we not simply ask students to include a list of references with the essential information? Why couldn’t we wait to infect them with citation fever until they are ready to publish (and then hand them the appropriate style guide, which is typically no more difficult to follow than instructions for programming your DVR)?

We could then reinvest time wasted on formatting to teach more-important skills like selecting credible sources, recognizing bias or faulty arguments, paraphrasing and summarizing effectively, and attributing sourced information persuasively and responsibly.

If anything, we should abandon trivial roadblocks so that students can write more often in more classes. Recent research demonstrates how effectively and efficiently writing can improve comprehension of content in any discipline. Writing also enables students to practice analysis, synthesis, and other skills that constitute critical, creative, and even civic thinking. If writing provides one of our best means to enhance learning outcomes across the curriculum, then more writing equals more learning. Why would we design writing assignments with obstacles that discourage students from learning?

Kurt Schick teaches writing at James Madison University.

SAWS (Sharing Ancient Wisdoms) Workshop
16-17 February, 2011 – University of Vienna – Department of Oriental Studies

Team:

London: Charlotte Roueché, Stuart Dunn and Mark Hedges, Charlotte Tupman

Uppsala: Denis Searby and Måns Billund

Vienna: Elvira Wakelnig, Ines Dallaji-Hichr, Lorenz Nigs

Attending:

Aliento: Marie-Sol Ortola, Marie-Christine Varol

CASG (Corpus der arabischen und syrischen Gnomologien): Ute Pietruschka

D.A.R.E. Digital Averroes: Raphaela Veit

eAqua: Marco Büchler, Charlotte Schubert

Fragmentary Texts: Monica Berti

HiFoS (Historische Formelhafte Sprache und Traditionen des Formulierens): Natalia Filatkina

HyperHamlet: Regula Hohl-Trillini

Interedition: Tara Andrews (tbc)

TextGrid: Wolfgang Pempe

Apologies:

BiblIndex: Laurence Mellerin

Scriptorium: Raphael Lyne

DMM, The Dynamics of the Medieval Manuscript: Bart Besamusca

Agenda

Wednesday 16 February

I. Meeting one another: a brief (5-10 minutes) factual introduction of each project

What are you working on
What is the (i) chronological and (ii) geographic scope of your material?

How do you work?
What existing use of digital resources (of any kind) do you currently make?
Describe the workflow you use when editing a text  with a list of tools,/software that you use

Coffee

II. Shared Questions

The following questions may apply to many or all projects. Please think about what you would like to present under each heading.
As a by-product, it could be useful to devote a small amount of time to discussing definitions/preferred terms for various aspects of the texts?  Are there any problematic definitions?  Please bring a list of your local terminology, and we will do the same.

1  Identifying

What do you think your unit of research is? A citation? A proverb? Something else?
How do you identify it? And how do you mark it up?
How many different kinds of units of research are we dealing with?

Lunch

2. Goals

(i) What textual, historic or social research questions do you approach?
(ii) Have you carried out any use-case research? What research questions are other scholars likely to use your work to pursue?

3. Searching

How do you find your units? How important are search mechanisms for you?

4. Publication

What form will your publication(s) take?
(1) Collections
(2) Complete texts
Printed editions are simple, and need not concern us:  Will you be contributing to one or more online libraries? Will this involve non-textual resources such as images or maps?

Thursday 17 February

5. Relationships

What kinds of relationship do you think about between your units? What definitions of relationship have you come up with? Are the relationships quantitative, qualitative, direct, inferred, explicit, implicit, semantic, textual, literal, linguistic? Are they internal to your text, or external, or both?
How do you describe these relationships? Can we compile a shared list of relationships?

6. What next?

What other questions do we need to engage with, in further workshops?
What tools do we need?

International Workshop (☞)
11.-12.02.2011 – University of Trier (Germany)
Claudine Moulin & Natalia Filatkina

Program (download)

Friday, 11.02.2011
Guest Room of the University, Campus I

09:00-10:00
Welcoming, get acquainted, introduction

10:00-10:45
Aliento. Analyse Linguistique, Interculturelle d’énoncés sapientiels et Transmission Orient/occident Occident/orient
Marie Sol Ortola, Nancy/Marie Christine – Varol, Paris
http://www.aliento.eu

10:45-11:15
Coffee break

11:15-12:00
HiFoS. Historical formulaic language and traditions of communication
Monika Hanauska, Carina Hoff, Johannes Gottwald – Trier
http://www.hifos.uni-trier.de

12:00-12:45
SAWS. Sharing Ancient Wisdoms
Stuart Dunn – London
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/depts/bmgs/research-section/saw/

12:45-13:30
DoLPh. Dynamics of Luxembourgish Phraseology
Ane Kleine – Luxembourg
http://www.europhras.org

13:30-14:30
Lunch break (Buffet)

14:30-15:15
CASG. Gnomology Database for Arabic and Syriac
Marco Büchler – Leipzig
http://casg.orientphil.unihalle.de/?page_id=8

15:15-16:00
Representing Fragmentary Texts
Monica Berti – Rome
http://www.fragmentarytexts.org

16:00-16:45
Collocation in Historical English Science Writing
Sabine Bartsch – Darmstadt
http://www.linglit.tu-darmstadt.de/index.php?id=bartsch

16:45-17:00
Coffee break

17:00-18:00
Discussion

18:30-19:45
Guided Tour through the Historical City of Trier (Meeting Point: Porta Nigra)

ca. 20:00
Dinner in the Cumvino restaurant
Weberbach 75 54290 Trier,
tel.: +49 651 979409-40

Saturday, 12.02.2011
Guest Room of the University, Campus I

9:00-9:45
Textgrid. Virtual Research Environment for the Humanities
Andrea Rapp – Darmstadt
http://www.textgrid.de

9:45-10:30
FuD. Research Network and Database System
Marina Müller – Trier
http://fud.uni-trier.de

10:30-11:15
Automatic Text Analysis for eHumanities
Silvana Hartmann – Darmstadt
http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/people/silvana-hartmann/

11:15-11:45
Coffee break

11:45-13:45
Discussion, conclusions, further planning

14:00
Lunch break

15:30-16:30
Guided tour through the Dom of Trier (Meeting point: Am Domstein)