"Digital Classics in Arabic" gets funding from the British Academy

Digital Classics in Arabic (DCA)

Makdisi, George,1980. The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West. Edinburgh University Press.

        After a delay of one year(!), my project "Digital Classics in Arabic", funded by the British Academy and hosted by the Institute of Classical Studies (ICS) of the University of London, has officially started. It has been a long journey from my office in Cairo until I arrived here safe and sound in London on Sunday the 7th of July 2019. I can not express how happy I am to start working in the ICS and I'm sure that, with the help and expertise of Gabriel Bodard, Charlotte Roueché and Valeria vitale, this project will achieve its goals and provide both our national and international classical and papyrological community with important tools and gadgets. For the moment I am just announcing the quick-off of this long-delayed project. So, dear classical and papyrological friends and colleagues (in and outside Egypt) stay tuned DCA is coming!

      As for the reasons behind this long delay, I will be giving a detailed account of this trip in a blogpost that will appear soon in "Everday Orientalism". For those who unfamiliar with this blog; this is the blog I, Katherine Blouin, and Rachel Mairs, are running for almost three years now. It's main focus is the discourse of Orientalism, Colonialism, Nationalism, politicized past in and around Antiquities-related disciplines. In addition to regular posts about these topics in English, French and Arabic, we are running an Egypt-based yearly workshop that brings together scholars from the Middle East, Europe, and North America, in order to reflect on the many ways in which Orientalism has shaped the field of “Classics” and its relationship to Egypt’s territory, history, and heritage. To know more about this initiative and our other activities, please visit the blog here https://everydayorientalism.wordpress.com/ .

Gregory Crane: Greek, Latin and Digital Philology in a Global Age

Greek, Latin and Digital Philology in a Global Age

Greek, Latin and Digital Philology in a Global Age
ST Lee Professorial Fellow Lectures
Spring 2016

Gregory Crane
Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Digital Humanities
University of Leipzig

Professor of Classics
Winnick Family Chair of Technology and Entrepreneurship
Tufts University

A programme of lectures and events around the UK sponsored by the School of Advanced Study, University of London.

Tuesday, May 17, 17:30-19:30, School of Advanced Study, University of London, Senate House 349: “Global Philology, Greco-Roman Studies, and Classics in the 21st Century,” round table with Imre Galambos, Eleanor Robson, Sarah Savant and Michael Willis.

Friday, May 20, 16:00-17:30, University of Glasgow: “Europe, Europeana and the Greco-Roman World.”

Monday, May 23, 13:00-14:00: Oxford University Faculty of Classics, first floor seminar room, Epigraphy Workshop: “What are the possibilities for epigraphic (and papyrological) sources in a digital age?”

Tuesday, May 24, 14:00-16:00, Oxford University: Seminar, Main lecture theatre, Faculty of Classics: “What would a smart edition look like and why should we care?”

Friday, May 27, 12:00-13:30, University of Manchester: Seminar, Samuel Alexander Building A104, “Greek into Arabic, Arabic into Latin, and reinterpretation of what constitutes Western Civilization.”

Tuesday, May 31, 5.30-6.30, Durham University,seminar room, Dept. of Classics and Ancient History “Digital Philology and Greco-Roman Culture as the grand challenge of Reception Studies.”

Friday, June 3, 16:30-18:00, School of Advanced Study, University of London, Senate House 234: “Philological Education and Citizenship in the 21st Century.”

Queries to valerie.james@sas.ac.uk

Altertumswissenschaften in a Digital Age: Leipzig, 4.-6. November 2015

For the conference's program and abstracts see here:http://www.dh.uni-leipzig.de/wo/dhegypt15/. Below is the poster.

DH LEIPZIG WORKSHOP WEEK 2015

A very busy week in Leipzig !

The Leipzig Workshop Week is comprised of a series of three related workshops in the week beginning 14th of December. In addition, the Sunoikisis DC Planning Seminar will run on the 16th and 17th.

For more information see the website here: http://www.dh.uni-leipzig.de/wo/events/workshop-week-2015/ and see the full programme below.

Add caption

Call for papers to Digital Approaches and the Ancient World

Posted in Digital classicist's email-list by Gabriel Bodard.

Digital Approaches and the Ancient World
A themed issue of the _Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies_

Editors:
Gabriel Bodard (University of London) gabriel.bodard@sas.ac.uk
Yanne Broux (KU Leuven) yanne.broux@arts.kuleuven.be
Ségolène Tarte (University of Oxford) segolene.tarte@oerc.ox.ac.uk

Call for papers:
We invite colleagues all around the world and at all stages of their careers to submit papers on the topic of “Digital Approaches and the Ancient World” to a themed issue of the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies. The topic is to be construed as widely as possible, to include not only the history, archaeology, language, literature and thought of the ancient and late antique Mediterranean world, but also of antiquity more widely, potentially including, for example, South and East Asian, Sub-Saharan African or Pre-Columbian American history. Digital approaches may also vary widely, to include methodologies from the digital humanities and information studies, quantitative methods from the hard sciences, or other innovative and transdisciplinary themes.

Papers will be fully peer reviewed and selected for inclusion based not only on their research quality and significance, but especially on their ability to engage profoundly both with classics/history academic readers, and scholars from digital or informatic disciplines. We are keen to see papers that clearly lay out their disciplinary and interdisciplinary methodological approaches, and present and interpret the full range of scholarly and practical outcomes of their research.

We encourage the use of and direct reference to open online datasets in your papers. BICS is not currently an open access publication, but self-archiving of pre-press papers is permitted, and the editors believe in the transparency and accountability that comes with basing scientific work on open data.

To submit an article to this themed issue, please send your full paper of 4,000–8,000 words in Microsoft Word doc, docx or rtf format, to <gabriel.bodard@sas.ac.uk>, along with a 150 word abstract, by January 31, 2016. You do not need to follow BICS style for the initial submission, but please note that the final version of accepted articles will need to be formatted to adhere to our style guide (http://www.icls.sas.ac.uk/sites/default/files/files/STYLE-V15.pdf).

If you have any questions about this issue, please feel free to contact any of the editors informally.


--
Dr Gabriel BODARD
Reader in Digital Classics

Institute of Classical Studies
University of London
Senate House
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HU

E: Gabriel.bodard@sas.ac.uk
T: +44 (0)20 78628752

http://digitalclassicist.org/

al-Raqmiyyātالرقميات : Digital Islamic History of Maxim Romanov

Digital Islamic History, see here http://maximromanov.github.io/  is the website of Maxim Romanov, an expert in digital Arabic, who will be joining the Leipzig team of Digital Humanities this September. 

Maxim Romanov says about himself that he  is a "Postdoctoral Associate (PhD, U of Michigan) at the Department of Classics and the Perseus Project, Tufts University, who studies Islamic historical texts with computational methods, currently focusing on the analysis of multivolume biographical and bibliographical collections".

Seven reasons why we need an independent Digital Humanities, by Gregory Crane

A very interesting piece of writing by Gregory. Warning: more than 40 pages ! so enjoy !

Seven reasons why we need an independent Digital Humanities

Gregory Crane

gcrane2008@gmail.com

[DRAFT as of April 27, 2015]

Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Digital Humanities

Department of Computer Science

Leipzig University

Professor of Classics

Winnick Family Chair of Technology and Entrepreneurship

Tufts University

Summary

This paper describes two issues, the need for an independent Digital Humanities and the opportunity to rethink within a digital space the ways in which Humanists can contribute to society and redefine the social contract upon which they depend.

The paper opens by articulating seven cognitive challenges that the Humanities can, in some cases only, and in other cases much more effectively, combat insofar as we have an independent Digital Humanities: (1) we assume that new research will look like research that we would like to do ourselves; (2) we assume that we should be able to exploit the results of new methods without having to learn much and without rethinking the skills that at least some senior members of our field must have; (3) we focus on the perceived quality of Digital Humanities work rather than the larger forces and processes now in play (which would only demand more and better Digital Humanities work if we do not like what we see); (4) we assume that we have already adapted new digital methods to existing departmental and disciplinary structures and assume that the rate of change over the next thirty years will be similar to, or even slower than, that we experienced in the past thirty years, rather than recognizing that the next step will be for us to adapt ourselves to exploit the digital space of which we are a part; (5) we may support interdisciplinarity but the Digital Humanities provides a dynamic and critically needed space of encounter between not only established humanistic fields but between the humanities and a new range of fields including, but not limited to, the computer and information sciences (and thus I use the Digital Humanities as a plural noun, rather than a collective singular); (6) we lack the cultures of collaboration and of openness that are increasingly essential for the work of the humanities and that the Digital Humanities have proven much better at fostering; (7) we assert all too often that a handful of specialists alone define what is and is not important rather than understanding that our fields depends upon support from society as a whole and that academic communities operate in a Darwinian space.

For the full text, see the Google Doc