Digital Latin Library

Digital Latin Library - project and website

digitallatin.org

"The Digital Latin Library (DLL) is a joint project of the Society for Classical Studies, the Medieval Academy of America, and the Renaissance Society of America. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Scholarly Communications Program funds the project, and the University of Oklahoma hosts it.

We use the word "library" to describe our project because that word's many meanings apply to what we're building: a library of texts and resources, a place where individuals and groups can study and collaborate on projects, a series of volumes published according to a uniform standard, and resources for digital applications."


Timeline (http://digitallatin.org/about-project/project-timeline)

2015–2017

In January, the OU DLL team submitted a proposal to the AWMF for a two-year implementation grant to build and implement the Digital Latin Library (DLL).

By the middle of 2017, we will deliver a collection of resources collectively known as the Digital Latin Library (digitallatin.org):

• a specialized, standards-based library catalog of Latin texts and related resources, including authority files for authors, works, and manuscripts
• a digital archive of scholarly materials related to critical editions
• three pilot critical editions for the LDLT
• a desktop application for advanced visualization and analysis of Latin texts
• web-based applications for reading, annotating, creating, and sharing texts and commentaries
• documentation for the continued maintenance of these resources after the funding period has ended.

The making of a digital language?

To be a digital, online language we might expect that various support tools are required, foundations if you like.

Languages need computer support, digital tools and from these a range of advances become possible. Without these tools and foundations then might languages struggle in an online world?

This is only a starting point, but we might well ask:

• what is a digital language; and 
• what might be necessary or sufficient to support a digital language?

A digital lib-bib-cell-hus

National Library of Wales [photo by Dylan Moore]

Library

Llyfrgell

Bibliotheque

Which will stand the test of time?

• Library (English) from librarium (Latin) - a chest for books.
• Llyfrgell (Welsh) - from Latin a cell for books.
• Bibliotheka - from Ancient Greek to Latin. Biblio- (from Byblos a port in today's Lebanon from where papyrus was imported to Greece) and -theke ( from Greek tithemi - to place or put).

We lost, in Middle English, bochus (from Old English) - a house for books.

In these digital days, do we need a place to store books, or a place to 'put' them. Printing a character on wood or paper seems quite similar to storing or 'printing' our digital data on magnetic or optical media - but we don't think of it like that very often and we can't see it without machines to translate back into our own languages. Our digital vaults (computer machine rooms) are more like the libraries of old - sealed, protected places where only the authorized may wander.

What about a digitheke - or is that the world-wide-web as we know it? The loss of the bibliothecary seems a shame, but lives on in the twittersphere - of course (@bibliothecary)

Gwaith Dafydd ap Gwilym

Dafydd ap Gwilym website: http://www.dafyddapgwilym.net

The editors of the works of Dafydd ap Gwilym included on the site are visualised using Cytoscape. The layout is manually tweaked after being laid out by Cytoscape's algorithms. Raw data can be found here

New Republic Article: The Immense Promise of the Digital Humanities

From: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117711/digital-humanities-have-immense-promise-response-adam-kirsh

"Adam Kirsch’s recent piece in The New Republic on the “false promise” of the digital humanities doesn’t probe very deeply into the broad range of experimental approaches to humanistic scholarship that have been bubbling up over the past decades. But it does make some misleading assertions that merit a response."

The early History of the internet in Wales

Dr Rhys Jones' work is currently being written as a chapter for the Routledge Companion to Comparative Internet Studies (forthcoming in 2015).

It focusses on the portrayal of the Internet in the English-language press in Wales, and in the Welsh-language press, 1990-1996. These are the years when the Internet could be regarded as being in its infancy. Taken as a whole across both languages, the press articles demonstrate competing and complementary discourses regarding a new technology during a relatively early stage of its enculturation: the largely technophilic attitude towards new media during this time, characterised as ‘Internetphilia’ by Patelis (2000), is critically analysed, together with elements of moral panic in some other stories.

In a comparative context, the Welsh-language press emphasises language, cultural pressures and nationhood as the key factors likely to be shaped by the internet. The English-language articles, whilst concerned about Wales as a nation, adopt the rhetoric of the ‘information superhighway’ as a key driver of economic progress.

(Alex Berry)

Twitter and the Welsh Language

Work from Dr. Rhys Jones recently published jointly with D. Cunliffe and Z.R. Honeycutt : ‘Twitter and the Welsh language’, in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Vol. 14 No. 7, pp. 653-671).

The project used an online questionnaire in order to gain an insight into the thoughts and feelings of Welsh speakers towards Twitter. It showed that Twitter provided a new domain for the production and consumption of the Welsh language, as well as enabling new connections between members of the Welsh-speaking community. It was in turn also a new domain for the production and consumption of the English language by Welsh speakers.

The intention is to continue research in this area via the use of further online questionnaires in order to gain a wider insight into the impact of Twitter.

(Alex Berry)

Delighted Beauty

“We want to make digital tools to help us explore world culture, by comparing how the same work is translated differently, over time and space, in the same and different languages.  We want to develop text analysis and data visualization tools which will contribute to cross-cultural understandings and enable new research, new learning and teaching.”

A piece of work initially funded by RIAH (Research Institute for Arts and Humanities) and more recently by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council under their Digital Transformations’ theme: AH/J012483/1

It aims to apply the power of digital media in order to come to a greater understanding of images of world culture via the use of an innovative idea the ‘Translation Array’. The project’s initial global cultural text used as a case study for this idea was Shakespeare’s Othello. The project has carefully analysed the multitude of translations of this work via the creation of a system to clearly overlay these variations and present them in a clear format for comparison and investigation. The project is still on going and can be visited at its own website here: http://www.delightedbeauty.org/

(Alex Berry)