Today is held one of the many intersting sessions at the Digital Classicist Work-in-Progress seminars:

20 June (STB3) Dot Porter (University of Kentucky), The Son of Suda On Line: a next generation collaborative editing toolI am looking forward to seen the outcomes of this session.

I hope I may soon be able to read the outcome of this session.

I am just back from a nice trip to Baltimore that ended with a visit to the temporary exhibition on maps in the Walters Art Museum. The Museum displayed examples of maps coming from all over the world created through every ages and for very different reasons: itineraries from Japan, maps from China engraved on stones and reproduced for centuries, pieces of the Forma Urbis Romae , drawings from or for imaginary utopias such as Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, Da Vinci’s attempts to represent relief with colours and not to forget Ptolemy’s representation of the world.

I would like to highlight here two elements. One is an at first sight rather enigmatic Inuit map. It represents the contours and slopes of a coastal landscape.
Part of Greenland Coast
Greenland National Museum and Archives

This object raises some important questions as it is an interesting mixture of a hodological description with the curves on the wood rendering the coastal line as a traveler would see it and a representation from a bird’s eye view. But it does not share some of the inconveniences of other materials. It is not a flat surface as a piece of paper would be and does not need special conventions in order to render the relief.
My second thought is about distortion. In one of the section the exhibition emphasizes that maps sometimes represent something else than geographical features, for instance in modern times they may represent social realities. In these cases the distortion are wanted in order to illustrate a special point the creator of the map what to make. This attitude is not restricted to modern usage of maps and distortion was not always a consequence of a not-yet-accurate representation of a landscape on a flat surface. It could also be seen as resulting from assumptions, beliefs or certainties adopted by a distant civilisation and the creating techniques used for a maps often disclose these assumptions.

The example I would like to present here comes from an entirely different field of research (Humanists from the Renaissance period). I however found the way they used the images in the presentation of a space very interesting. In opposition to what would be involved while dealing with Demetrios who focuses on outdoor spaces, the present example illustrates an indoor space. Indeed beyond the mere illustrative usage, this example seems also relevant to a study on Demetrios of Scepsis and his attempt to locate the Homeric topography because it raises the question of the similarities or – probably more numerous– differences between indoor spaces (e.g. rooms) and their descriptions and outdoor spaces (e.g. landscapes). The present example combines two important concepts involved in these issues. First it uses both the cartographic point of view (from above) and the hodologic one (from within the place) and with regard to descriptions of a space the analysis of the interaction of both of these points of view is often of great significance. Second, the example also illustrates a rather intuitive difference between outdoor spaces and indoor spaces, which should be verified as Antiquity is concerned. At first sight indoor spaces tend to be limited by clear boundaries whereas outdoor spaces seem to be experienced as more open and as going beyond the frame, let’s say, of a picture or rather beyond the piece of material it would be drawn on or which would be used to reproduce it.

Melanchthonhaus

Thinking of a way to illustrate the work of Demetrios of Skepsis, either by maps or photographs – or rather with maps and photographs –, the possibility flickr.com offers should be explored. I present here quickly two examples which both could give some ideas for the project I have in mind about Demetrios of Skepsis.

First there is the thematic use of flickr.com illustrated by the file from
Image . The illustrations are linked by the theme of the Trojan tale and are ordered in an album. For each image there is a comment also providing information about the provenance of the picture. Then flickr.com also provides the possibility of creating groups for a same file, as for instance in The Monastery .

As the project of the edition of Demetrios of Skepsis is concerned, I still have to make my mind up about the criterion of arrangement of the albums and to consider the gathering of a group.

Last week I was reading two interesting contributions.

The first was written on be-virtual 7.2.08 . It is about the usage of internet in Asia and is displayed as a summary of part of the LIFT08 conference. According to this review, young people in Asia use internet to be in touch with their peers and to present themselves, their activities, their interests quasi permanently and instantaneously. It is then, it seems, much about self-presentation through a personally created profile, whit its shape left entirely to the authors (with all the risk of excess).

The second is an ongoing discussion on the Ancient World Bloggers Group (i.e. PD(Q) from Comments to a Post: What are we blogging for? , but there are several other related comments). The points I would like to single out here are the notes on two issues: the question of citations in, and of, a blog and then the issues of how and wherefore differentiate blogs from scholarly writings. Among the interesting points about blogging, as different from scholarly writing, are mentioned, among others, the opportunity of instantaneous conversation and the thematic coherence of some of them.
Both of those issues seem to me to be surprisingly close to what has been described in the first blog. As there seems not yet to be well-established guidelines and rules about blogs (even if it is no longer as naïve as I am simplifying here and there are a great number of ways allowing to guide a reader through the mass of information available, as proves the mentioned discussion) it is still basically an empty space one can shape and use in accordance with one’s thoughts, or habits. It appears therefore again to be a way of self-presentation, of sharing thoughts and news or reading about, or following, a topic of interest in a shape and at a speed oneself chooses. On the other hand, while reading the discussion and writing this comment, I found myself thinking about scholarly writings as a standard in itself one tries to achieve for one’s researches.

I have just been told by the publisher of my PhD thesis that it has been published today. I am happy about the idea to have soon the BOOK in my own hands!

Schwabe Verlag

A few weeks ago, I received the advertisement of a new book by L. Canfora about the so-called Artemidorus papyrus:

I am looking forward to discovering this book and the Italian scholar’s argumentation about this exceptional text.

For more details about Canfora’s point of view, one may follow the discussion on the blog: What’s New in Papyrology? . In particular the following post gives the current discussion Artemidorus papyrus

There are now quite a few electronic journals for Classics. Some of them are listed by the Digitalclassicist.

Here is another example, which is slightly different in scope. It is devoted to didactics and methodology in the field of Greek and Latin and the contributions demonstrate this in a convincing way (Pegasus).

There are two article, which could be highlighted in relation to the present project:

• First there is the contribution by Lars Fengler on the recent movie on Troy. This modern reading and reshaping of an old story has, of course, its predecessors and can be added to the now long list of such revisions or re-makings of the Homeric story. Besides providing an useful tool for classrooms, Fengler’s contribution makes two interesting points: the table shows clearly how much of the Trojan story is not told in the Iliad. According to Fengler, we have to wait for 50 min before the film shows a scene referring to the first lines of the Homeric text. This statement leads us the the second contribution of Pegasus we shall discuss. The second interesting point in Fengler’s table, is the emphasis on the settings in his second column. For a project focusing on the topographical elements of the Homeric text and how there were read in Antiquity like the present one, a new list of settings from the Troad or from the Homeric text is very interesting. The choice of the mentioned places made by Petersen raises several questions. First of all, it is interesting to see that for a movie (not a book neither for an oral performance) the settings seem to be the most important elements to create the outline of the story. Second, making a choice always involves leaving out some items. This is true for Antiquity and for modern times. Having now this subjective choice made by a modern movie-maker, we could compare it to the choices ancient authors or commentators made and ask the question why some settings are thought to be more relevant to modern movie-watchers and other more appropriate for ancient audiences. One important difference is, of course, the presence of the Homeric poems in everyday life. This leads us again to the second article from Pegasus. (see Fengler, Pegasus-Onlinezeitschrift 2+3, 2005, 80-87).

• The second contribution is written by Gerson Schade on the classrooms in Antiquity. He discusses the new insights given by papyrological findings. In our discussion here, his article, as well as many others, emphasizes once again the importance Homer had in ancient education and how much the Trojan story was well-known in Antiquity. This is a major difference one has to bear in mind when creating or commenting on new version of the Tojan war (see Schade, Pegasus-Onlinezeitschrift IV/2 (2004), 55).

JSTOR has conducted a study on needs, challenges and missions of University presses in a digital age and has published its report. The study is based on interviews of several institutions involved in university publishing, coming however mainly from the US.

The authors of the study believe that University presses could play a more substantial role in the new publishing schemes than in the traditional ones. According to them Universities’ missions, as non-profit organizations, should also involve publishing scholarly results, besides producing them and transmitting them through eduction. They also emphasize that the new means promote sharing of information and results among scholars and create further discussion for specialists, which could again be of great interest for Universities. Another important aspect of these activities is a closer link to librarians and their needs for storage and creating new repositories for the electronic publications. And finally the authors believe that these changes could be a great opportunity for smaller institutions to be more attractive.

The study shows also that one should not create a too clear-cut distinction between printed books and new electronic publications. The documented change does not mean the end of the book, which still -and always may have- some advantages over electronic publications. It is therefore not the scholarly monographs, which will be the main target of electronic publications. There are other forms of scholarly writings, which are more suitable for electronic publications and the authors of the article mention for instance electronic journals as a good starting point (maybe relying on their own point of view). They also draw attention to the fact that there is also a wide range of methods to give access to these electronic publications, reaching from suscription-based publications to open access documents, each of these methods having advantages and inconvenients for scholars, readers and publishers.

One striking though could however be added:

- according to the graphs following the article, the part taken by publications from the fields of Humanities (books or journals) is amazingly high in the institutions selected for the study.

Scholarly research based in Humanities could then take an important part in shaping the development of the new medias for their own needs. But often, as their own domains of research do involve less technological aspects, the fields of Humanities are the most reluctant to move to electronic publications. There are no doubts good reasons for this situation. For the Humanities, the book has always be central, as source for information, object of study and goal to achieve. And the question remains of how much value a printed book may always have as objet of study and evidence of scholarly activity in the field of Humanities. There lays then another important challenge for electronic publications.

L. Brown, R. Griffiths, M. Rascoff, K. Guthrie, “University Publishing in a Digital Age”, JEP 10, 2007

The project “Travelling with Demetrios of Skepsis” is a new edition of the fragments of this author. There will be an additional translation and extensive comments on each of the remaining fragments. But as the work of Demetrios of Skepsis deals mainly with description of places Demetrios has seen, the project of the new edition of his fragments will also give an important part to other description of the same places. These witnesses could come from Antiquity and the comments will give emphasis to this part. But it is also important to have comments and pictures from the present day stage of the places. So this blog should allow people from all round the world to give their comments and pictures of the places mentioned and described since Antiquity. Their contribution will help making people living in Antiquity and their thoughts closer to the occupations and activities of present day people.