The Linked Fragment: TEI and the encoding of text reuses of lost authors

This paper presents a joint project of the Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig, the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University, and the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies to produce a new open series of Greek and Latin fragmentary authors. Such authors are lost and their works are preserved only thanks to quotations and text reuses in later texts. The project is undertaking two tasks: (1) the digitization of paper editions of fragmentary works with links to the source texts from which the fragments have been extracted; (2) the production of born-digital editions of fragmentary works. The ultimate goals are the creation of open, linked, machine-actionable texts for the study and advancement of the field of Classical textual fragmentary heritage and the development of a collaborative environment for crowdsourced annotations. These goals are being achieved by implementing the Perseids Platform and by encoding the Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, one of the most important and comprehensive collections of fragmentary authors

Ancient Greek Historians in the Digital Age

Ein Beitrag zur Digital History 2023: Digitale Methoden in der geschichtswissenschaftlichen Praxis: Fachliche Transformationen und ihre epistemologischen Konsequenzen, Berlin, 23.-26.5.2023. Abstract: This paper presents results of ongoing digital projects on ancient Greek historians. The research question is the analysis of the language used by ancient sources to refer to historians and cite their works with a particular reference to lost historians (the so-called fragmentary authors). If a lot of scholarship has been devoted to collect fragments of many different genres and try to reconstruct the texts from which they were taken, less effort has been spent on collecting data pertaining to the language used by ancient authors to refer to them and their works. The paper discusses the use of Computational Linguistics techniques and Named Entity Recognition to extract and annotate information about ancient Greek historians and their works from the sources where they are preserved. Morevoer, the paper describes a new catalog of ancient Greek authors and works based on the extraction and annotation of references to them in ancient sources

Blogs as a Means of Preservation Selection for the World Wide Web

Currently, there is not a strong system of selection in place when looking at preserving content on the Web. This study is an examination of the blogging community for the possibility of utilizing the decentralized and distributed nature of link selection that takes place within the community as a means of preservation selection. The purpose of this study is to compare the blog aggregators, Daypop, Blogdex, and BlogPulse, for their ability to collect content which is of archival quality. This study analyzes the content selected by these aggregators to determine if any content which is linked to most frequently for a given day is of archival quality. Archival quality is determined by comparing the content from the aggregator lists to criteria assembled for the study from a variety of archival policies and principles

Open Philology at the University of Leipzig

The Open Philology Project at the University of Leipzig aspires to re-assert the value of philology in its broadest sense. Philology signifies the widest possible use of the linguistic record to enable a deep understanding of the complete lived experience of humanity. Pragmatically, we focus on Greek and Latin because (1) substantial collections and services are already available within these languages, (2) substantial user communities exist (c. 35,000 unique users a month at the Perseus Digital Library), and (3) a European-based project is better positioned to process extensive cultural heritage materials in these languages rather than in Chinese or Sanskrit. The Open Philology Project has been designed with the hope that it can contribute to any historical language that survives within the human record. It includes three tasks: (1) the creation of an open, extensible, repurposable collection of machine-readable linguistic sources; (2) the development of dynamic textbooks that use annotated corpora to customize the vocabulary and grammar of texts that learners want to read, and at the same time engage students in collaboratively producing new annotated data; (3) the establishment of new workflows for, and forms of, publication, from individual annotations with argumentation to traditional publications with integrated machine-actionable data

From loose to boxed fragments and back again : seriality and archive in Chris Ware’s building stories

This article focuses on the dynamics of seriality, archiving and collection in Chris Ware’s graphic novel Building Stories, situating it within the larger context of graphic novel serialisations. It argues that the dispersed serialisation of Building Stories is key to understanding its box-of-comics format as well as its fragmented narrative structure. In a self-reflexive homage to the material history of comics, Ware’s graphic novel indeed appears as an archive of its own serialisation, foregrounding a process of collecting/dispersing fragments

Appraisal and the Future of Archives in the Digital Era

Discussion of the implications of new technologies, changing public policies, and transformation of culture for how archivists practice and think about appraisal

The Digital Critical Edition of Fragments : Theoretical Problems and Technical Solutions

The process of creating a digital critical edition of fragmentary texts is also a valuable op- portunity to look at the nature of such texts under a new light. This paper contains some reflections about how the nature of fragments can be more appropriately represented in a digital critical edition and what challenges this task poses

Making history: intentional capture of future memories

Lifelogging' technology makes it possible to amass digital data about every aspect of our everyday lives. Instead of focusing on such technical possibilities, here we investigate the way people compose long-term mnemonic representations of their lives. We asked 10 families to create a time capsule, a collection of objects used to trigger remembering in the distant future. Our results show that contrary to the lifelogging view, people are less interested in exhaustively digitally recording their past than in reconstructing it from carefully selected cues that are often physical objects. Time capsules were highly expressive and personal, many objects were made explicitly for inclusion, however with little object annotation. We use these findings to propose principles for designing technology that supports the active reconstruction of our future past

Digital Preservation, Archival Science and Methodological Foundations for Digital Libraries

Digital libraries, whether commercial, public or personal, lie at the heart of the information society. Yet, research into their long‐term viability and the meaningful accessibility of their contents remains in its infancy. In general, as we have pointed out elsewhere, ‘after more than twenty years of research in digital curation and preservation the actual theories, methods and technologies that can either foster or ensure digital longevity remain startlingly limited.’ Research led by DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) and the Digital Preservation Cluster of DELOS has allowed us to refine the key research challenges – theoretical, methodological and technological – that need attention by researchers in digital libraries during the coming five to ten years, if we are to ensure that the materials held in our emerging digital libraries are to remain sustainable, authentic, accessible and understandable over time. Building on this work and taking the theoretical framework of archival science as bedrock, this paper investigates digital preservation and its foundational role if digital libraries are to have long‐term viability at the centre of the global information society.