Even if I did not write a lot of new posts on my blog things still go on. You may hear it now at the digital classicist under:

www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2009.html

this is a very interesting seminar which I attended last year and was allowed to present this year. Many thanks to the organisators.

A few days ago I received the link to a database made by a good friend of mine. So I am really happy to mention it here, even if it is not closely linked to the present project.

However it shows the possibilities online presentations of ancients texts, with remarks on the text itself and comments on the content and, in this special case, of the general context of each papyrus.

Greek Law in Roman Times

After quite a long time of silence, I come back to my blog to add another interesting project. It is not developing a literary topic as the present blog does, but it is more oriented towards archaeology.  Further, it is again a French site:

http://sites.univ-provence.fr/ccj

It is also on this site that I learned about the “Manifeste of Berlin”. It aims at eliminating as much as possible the restrictions in internet and to internet. The links for more details can be found on the mentioned web-page.

A few days ago the announcement of the availability of the database Pinakes has been sent out. It is a tool from the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (CNRS UPR 841, Paris) and contains information about manuscripts from all over the world dated from before 1600.
I was playing around with the tool and found out that, according to this database, 235 manuscripts where in Hamburg, the place were I am working right now. Among these texts, figures one from Hesiod’s Works and Days. With another mouse click, I found out that I could consult another 305 manuscripts containing the same text or parts of it.
I guess that the tool is worth other much deeper researches and I won’t go on fooling around with it ! I hope however I may use it more properly in the future.

It is also worth mentioning that, as the project from the CHS mentioned in the previous post, this French tool allows collaboration from outside in the future.

The Center for Hellenic Studies has just announced an ambitious project:

First Thousand Years of Greek

Making first an inventory of all Greek texts transmitted by manuscripts, which is already a Herculean task, but still more they also plan to create a full corpus of these texts and to make them available, at least in one version attested by manuscripts.
It is not worth saying how interesting such a project may be, but it is also remarkable that their corpus will be open for collaboration first, for usage second.

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.

In the last few weeks I composed a short note that I would like to submit to the PDQ (vol 1.2). It it not yet in the shape I wanted it to be and it should be seen as a kind of exercise for the author rather than a very innovative contribution. I still hope it is in accordance with the editors’ goal.

I just came across these nice pictures from Stefan Radt’s new edition of Strabo. They have been taken by Michiel Thomas last November:

For further details, see:
Galerie de Michiel Thomas

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.

As my project on Demetrios is concerned I mainly thought about pictures as illustrations within the commentary written for each fragment. The previous posts are written from this point of view. There are however at least two extremely convincing examples using pictures at another stage of a scholarly work, more precisely at the very first stage of an edition.

CHS: Manuscripts from the Marciana Library

Corpus Medicorum Graecorum