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?

The Winograd Schema Challenge

An alternative to the Turing Test, an annual challenge with its first submission in October 2015.

See Nuance's website for more information.

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)

Network Visualization: word association & Cytoscape

Having used gephi, http://www.gephi.org for some time, I've been wanting to look at alternative network engines, as people keen coming up with interesting data sets that sometimes seem to cause me a problem in Gephi for one reason or another. Finally with a 7 hour train journey behind me I took a look at one of the options I had previously shortlisted. This is Cytoscape, http://www.cytoscape.org. and a graph of some word association data that I previously gathered. It is imported into Cytoscape as a .csv file and with very little tweaking draws graphs such as this. Click on the image for a larger version.

Cytoscape layout of chained word association data: (c) Steve Williams, Swansea University [cc-by]