Digital Classicist Seminar Series and Book Launch

Fridays at 16:30
Senate House - Room 243

June 3 Gregory Crane (Leipzig and Tufts)
Philological Education and Citizenship in the 21st Century

June 10 Matteo Romanello (Lausanne and DAI)
Of People, Places and References: Extracting information from Classics publications

18:00 Launch event for Digital Classics Outside the Echo-Chamber
2nd floor foyer.

June 17 Eleanor Robson (University College London)
From the ground to the cloud: digital edition of freshly excavated cuneiform tablets on Oracc

June 24 Stuart Dunn (King’s College London)
Reading text with GIS: Different digital lenses for Ancient World Geography

July 1 Valeria Vitale (King’s College London)
The use and abuse of 3D visualisation in the study of the Ancient World

July 8 Chiara Palladino (Leipzig and Bari)
Annotating geospatial patterns in ancient texts: problems and strategies

July 15 No seminar

July 22 Stelios Chronopoulos (Freiburg)
New Life into Old Courses? Using Digital Tools in Reading and Prose Composition Classes

July 29 Silke Vanbeselaere (KU Leuven)
Exploring ancient sources with data visualisation

Abstracts available here.

Seminars will be screencast on YouTube. You can also follow and discuss the seminars on Twitter using the hashtag #DigiClass.

Guest Post: Small Change Big Games

Greetings from sunny (yes, I said sunny and no it isn’t a typo) Glasgow. We’ve hijacked the ICS blog for one day only to bring you news about an exciting project we are working on up north. You may have seen our poster up in the library, some of you may even have followed us on twitter (thank you) or had a look at our website, but for those of you who have no idea who we are or what we are doing, never fear, we will give you a quick summary now. 

Here in Glasgow we are pretty excited about the upcoming Commonwealth Games, and we were especially excited to discover that the Royal Mint have commissioned a special 50p to mark the occasion. The 50p features some sporting imagery, as you might expect, but as well as the cyclist and runner, it also has a saltire, a symbol of Scottish national identity, and the writing is done in the style of famous Glaswegian artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh. 


Image courtesy of the Royal Mint:

http://www.royalmint.com/shop/The_Glasgow_2014_Commonwealth_Games_UK_50p_Brilliant_Uncirculated_Coin

This coin, with its sporting imagery and symbols of civic and national identity got us thinking about Roman coins, and how much they have in common with the Glasgow 2014 50p. Luckily for us The Hunterian has one of the best ancient coin collections in the UK*, so we applied to the Hunterian Associates Programme, and Small Change Big Games was born. 

Coin from The Hunterian, Glasgow (catalogue number 21182).

Our project will take the form of an online exhibition on our webpage. Using the Glasgow 50p as a springboard for thinking about coins minted to commemorate games, we have chosen a selection of Roman coins to feature in this exhibition. We have divided the coins into four broad themes: history, politics, religion and sport. Each topic has an introductory video featuring either us or a special guest, as well as some information and images of the coins. We are also planning a number of events which will take place during the commonwealth games, and which we hope will be of interest to a wide audience. 

The Small Change Big Games team are also known as Jenny and Sarah, two PhD students at Glasgow, you can contact them at smallchangebiggames@gmail.com, @smallchange2014 or www.smallchange2014.tumblr.com. 

* For the five volume collection 'Roman imperial coins in the Hunter Coin Cabinet, University of Glasgow' go to X136H.2 in the library!

If anyone else is interested in submitting a guest post for our blog then contact us at iclass.enquiries@london.ac.uk. It doesn't have to be formal or directly related to the library. As long as it involves Classics in general we're happy to give our readers a chance to advertise, explain and vent!

New Scanner (it's actually here!)

 
At the risk of becoming technologically advanced the Joint Library is delighted to announce that our new Zeta scanner has been installed and will be ready for use on Monday.

The scanner gives the option either for black and white printing (10 pence per page) or saving to USB (5 pence per page). Re-usable cards can be purchased for a pound and topped up with credit at the desk. 

It's living in the photocopy room and if you need any assistance feel free to ask a member of staff- we cannot guarantee they'll be entirely competent to begin with...

Computer Booking

                 

 Just to let our readers know that we are currently planning on getting rid of at least one of the computers in the computer room. It is therefore essential that you book on every time you use one so that we have a full outline of usage when deciding how many to remove. Even if it’s just for ten minutes- there’s a phone in the room so you can call and book in. If the phone's broken (as it often is) you can always tell us you which computer you were using when you leave if you really can't face the walk to the desk...

Free Apps and eBooks!

Available for the next week from Romans Go Home. Of particular interest to Latin learners/ teachers.

Open Access Conferences

Two great conferences have been placed online (free!) in their entirety:

UCL's Greek Literary Epigram: From the Hellenistic to the Early Byzantine Era

and The Warburg Institute and the Institute of Classical Studies' The Afterlife of Ovid

It's a fantastic feature of the Open Access movement that scholars across the world can now experience conferences they are unable to attend in person. It also allows students and other interested parties to remain at the forefront of research without having to spend large amounts of money on events which may well not be as relevant as hoped. Many thanks to the above contributors and feel free to link to more in the comments!

Mapping the Catalogue of Ships

It’s happened; someone has mapped the Catalogue of Ships from Book Two of The Iliad. Some might suggest that tiny moveable boats would help....

http://de.digitalclassicist.org/berlin/2012/12/11/StraussClay-Jasnow-Evans

Tools of the Trade: Bibliographies for Roman Studies

Tools of the Trade: Bibliographies for Roman Studies. 

An incredibly useful resource available:

http://cnx.org/content/m37230/latest/?collection=col11220/latest

Open Acces Journals from Pauly-Wissowa

10,000 articles now available on online open access. Not that the library feels threatened or anything... 

http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/10000-articles-now-in-open-access-pauly.html

 

p.s. they won’t smell the same as real books!

Minerva is now open access

The journal Minerva is now open-access, with volumes going back to 1990 available here.

Open access publications from the American School of Classical Studies at Athens

Check out this great list of free resources from the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.

Ancient and Modern Olympics Blog

Image via Flickr user Sebastia Giralt

For those interested in the ancient Olympics, in light of the upcoming London games, Dr Jason König from the University of St. Andrews has started a blog about the games: http://ancientandmodernolympics.wordpress.com/

L'Année Philologique in danger

The German office of the Année Philologique is due to have its funding withdrawn at the end of the year, seriously jeopardising the validity of the publication as a comprehensive bibliographic source.

From their website:

The Année Philologique, a critical and analytical bibliography of Greco-Latin Antiquity, has existed since the 1920s : over the years, its generalist orientation has made it a working tool that is useful for all, whatever one's specialty may be. Since its creation and its dissemination on paper, it has been a bibliographical tool that is universally recognized, utilized, and appreciated by students of Antiquity throughout the world. Since 2002, its dissemination online has facilitated the access of an ever-broader public to the bibliographical data it offers.
However, this irreplaceable tool is threatened, in the very near future, with disappearing in its current form, and perhaps with simply ceasing publication.
The cause of this threat is simple : the German office of the Année Philologique, the Zweigstelle Heidelberg, must close its doors at the end of the fiscal year 2012, unless a durable source of funding is found. The Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, which has funded it until now, has let it be known that it will cut off all subsidies at that date. In so doing, it is applying the government's decision to no longer fund continuing projects and positions, but to henceforth grant funds only to short-term scientific operations, answering to invitations to tender. If it were to take effect at the planned date, this programmed closure would have disastrous consequences for the entire project : with it, the totality of German-language research, whose importance for the classical humanities is known to all, would cease to be covered by our publication. Quantitatively, this would mean a decrease of approximately 30% of the bibliographical items made available to the public.
Unless a solution is found, the consequences will boil down to a sinister alternative : the transformation of a project of high scientific value into a bargain-basement search engine, or the outright disappearance of the publication.

For more information, and to sign a petition in support: http://anphil.org/en/forms/petition

Bodleian and Vatican libraries to digitise ancient texts

Image via Flickr user adrienpoly

The Bodleian Libraries and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana have received a £2 million grant from the Polonsky Foundation to launch a collaborative digitisation project, with the aim of making over 1.5 million pages from their collections freely available to the wider public. Over the next four years, the project will digitize Greek manuscripts, incunabula, early printed books and Hebrew manuscripts from both collections, allowing them to transcend the limits of time and space!

L'Osservatore Romano provides some information on the texts to be digitised from the Vatican collections.

Electronic Resources Room Closed on Monday

Image via Flickr user cafenut

On Monday, March 19th, the electronic resources room will be closed for training. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

Electronic Resources at the Library

Want to peruse Google Maps 4th century AD-style? Find out what's been published on a particular subject? Search dozens of classical texts at the touch of a button? 

The notice board in our computer room has had a revamp! The new board gives information about the wealth of electronic resources available both from the library and online.

If you would like more information about the resources available and how they can help you, check out our website or speak to a member of library staff.

You can now join the Roman Society online!

Image via Flickr user mharrsch under Creative Commons

Did you know that you can now join or renew your membership of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies online? You can also order back copies of JRS and Britannia, as well as purchase online access to back copies on JSTOR.

http://www.romansociety.org/membership/online-payments.html