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Author: Lanah Koelle


Ancient Archives, Modern Libraries, and Star Wars: Rogue One

December 30, 2016 Posted by Lanah Koelle under News, Uncategorized

From our friends at the Institute for Study of the Ancient World:

Ancient Archives, Modern Libraries, and Star Wars: Rogue One
by Gabriel McKee — December 21, 2016

Despite the movies’ opening assertion that it was “a long time ago,” the world of Star Wars would seem to have little to do with antiquity. And so I was surprised to find significant overlap between the most recent film in the franchise, Rogue One, and the world of libraries, both ancient and modern. Fair warning: spoilers for Rogue One abound ahead.

Rogue One tells a story that takes place immediately before the original Star Wars, detailing how the Rebel Alliance obtained the plans to the Galactic Empire’s super-weapon, the planet-destroying Death Star. The movie’s eponymous squadron is an ad hoc team of commandos who, in the film’s climactic sequence, infiltrate the imperial stronghold on the planet Scarif and make off with the secret plans that will enable Luke Skywalker to destroy the Empire’s ultimate weapon.

It’s worth noting that Scarif is not just an Imperial base, but is also the government’s archive: the final battle of Rogue One takes place in, around, and over a library. The spire of Scarif’s central structure is a silo in which information cartridges are stored, accessible through a robotic retrieval system. The collection seems to be poorly cataloged for a culture that has invented the hyperdrive—the Rebels essentially need to guess the title of the file they’re trying to locate. It’s possible that the Imperial officer that the Rebel robot K-2SO knocks unconscious upon entering the spire is an archivist, who presumably would have access to a finding aid for the collection. (Granted, the cataloging of classified military documents is dicey territory, but if the Defense Technical Information Center can establish guidelines for the US Department of Defense, it is hard to imagine that this is beyond the organizational powers of Emperor Palpatine.)

The Imperial Archive on Scarif in 'Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.'The Imperial Archive on Scarif in ‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.’Aside from its poor search interface, the Imperial archive’s retrieval system—a robotic arm that travels around the storage column to retrieve information cartridges—is actually not too different from the storage and retrieval systems used in many libraries. Facilities like Columbia and Princeton’s ReCAP have 30-foot tall shelves, and use a forklift to retrieve bins of books. Some libraries use a robotic retrieval system to surface items in storage, as seen here in videos from Macquarie University and the Newcomb College Institute of Tulane University.

Unless you happen to be one those humans who doesn’t know what happened in the first Star Wars film (Episode IV: A New Hope), it will come as no surprise that the rebels ultimately succeed in retrieving the Death Star plans. Far more surprising is the reaction of the Death Star’s commander, Grand Moff Tarkin, to the attack on the Imperial archive: he fires the Death Star’s main cannon on the planet, destroying the library entirely (and a sizable chunk of the planet along with it). The destruction of the Imperial archive raises lots of interesting questions: Did the Empire have a data backup plan? What else was stored there, and was any of that data backed up elsewhere? Did Tarkin have authorization to, for lack of a better word, deaccession the entire archive? And could anything of Scarif’s archive have survived such apocalyptic weeding? Is this where the story of Star Wars merges with that of Mr. Robot, with the Empire to suffer the fate of E Corp?

Continue reading on the ISAW blog

Ancient Makerspaces | Workshop at AIA/SCS

December 12, 2016 Posted by Lanah Koelle under Conferences and Workshops, News, Professional Development

Forum members attending the 2017 Society for Classical Studies and Archaeological Institute of America meetings in Toronto may be interested in the workshop, “Ancient Makerspaces: Digital Tools for Classical Scholarship.” The workshop takes place on Saturday, January 7 from 8:30am – 4:00pm in the Sheraton Centre VIP Room.

The organizers describe the workshop as “a space for students and scholars to interact with a variety of digital techniques and digital projects of broad application, providing participants the opportunity to engage in hands-on, peer-based learning.” No registration is required. View the schedule of demonstrations and presentations at https://diyclassics.github.io/ams/.

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Save the Date: 2017 Forum Meeting

November 17, 2016 Posted by Lanah Koelle under Uncategorized
3 Comments

During the 2017 AIA/SCS conference, the Forum will meet on Saturday, January 7 from 9:30-11:30am in the Norfolk Room at the Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel (view floor plan).

Forum members are invited to submit agenda items via the online form. Minutes from previous meetings are available here.

We look forward to seeing you in Toronto!

Colin McCaffrey, chair, and Lanah Koelle, secretary

 

Translated Texts for Historians E-library: 60+ ancient texts in history, religion and literature translated for the first time

June 30, 2016 Posted by Lanah Koelle under Uncategorized

TTHflier-2016

Our friends at the University of Liverpool have shared information about a wonderful resource:

The renowned Translated Texts for Historians E-Library makes available historical sources from A.D. 300–800 translated into English, in many cases for the first time. This indispensable collection contains 64 volumes from the series that bring together a wealth of important early medieval texts in translation, with scholarship from leading academics.

  • Wide-ranging: The texts have been translated into English from Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, Georgian, Armenian and Old Irish. The geographic range covers Syria, Arabia, Armenia, Georgia and Egypt in the East; North Africa; major cities of the Roman Empire (Antioch, Alexandria and Constantinople); and Spain, Gaul, Italy, Britain and Ireland in the West.
  • Comprehensive: 64-volume digital library with over 14,500 pages of translated historical sources, from the political letters and speeches of Ambrose of Milan to Zachariah of Mytilene’s Chronicle.
  • Variety of texts: Types of writing include histories, chronicles, letters, annals, formularies, compendia, political speeches, military and theological handbooks, poems, documentary sources, records of church councils, biblical and theological commentaries, sermons, church histories, Christian treatises, Christian and pagan panegyric and polemic, neoplatonic texts, lives of saints, bishops and popes.

Browse all 64 volumes in the e-library at www.online.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/series/tthe.

If you have any questions or would like to order the TTH E-library please contact Jennie Collinson, Head of Sales at j.collinson@liverpool.ac.uk.

Try before you buy
We offer institutions 30-day free trials of the Translated Texts for Historians E-library so you can try before you buy.

Prices
One-off purchase: £1617 / US$2457
The TTH E-Library is available for one-off purchase with online access to all content in perpetuity.

CHS Summer Internship in Publications

March 10, 2016 Posted by Lanah Koelle under Uncategorized

The Center for Hellenic Studies (CHS) Summer Internship Program in Publications offers college students the opportunity to work at the CHS in Washington, D.C. on projects related to publications and content development from June 1-July 31, 2016. Interns will have access to the library resources and will have opportunities to engage with the scholarly community at the CHS.

Interns will work approximately 175 hours over the course of the summer and receive $12.00 per hour. The work schedule is relatively flexible and provides ample opportunity to see Washington, D.C. The CHS will provide housing on-campus.

This year, the publications internships will focus on the Open Greek and Latin Project, in particular, a self-standing subset of it called the Free First Thousand Years of Greek. The goal is to make freely available the corpus of the first thousand years of Ancient Greek as attested in manuscripts with a modern search engine, the ability to download authors and works, the capacity for including textual variants, and numerous other features.

The work involves a range of activities: scanning texts, verifying and correcting OCR’d texts, running a morphological parser on texts to test their integrity and correct errors, ensuring that the XML markup of texts is correct, uploading corrected texts to a GitHub repository, and so on.

There will also be occasional work in other online publication projects of the CHS, such as A Homer Commentary in Progress or Particles in Ancient Greek Discourse, which will include archiving publications, editing texts, and entering data into bibliographic databases.

Learn more on the CHS website.

Deadline for Applications: April 1, 2016
Deadline for Recommendations: April 8, 2016

2016 Forum Meeting

December 14, 2015 Posted by Lanah Koelle under Uncategorized

During the 2016 AIA/SCS conference, members of the Forum will meet on Thursday, January 7 from 2:00-4:00pm. The meeting room is Union Square 16, inside the Hilton San Francisco Union Square Hotel.

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Agenda items include an introduction and update on a new instructional initiative and a report on the further development of the Open Greek and Latin Project which took some important steps forward earlier this Fall.

Any Forum members who wish to contribute agenda items should contact Colin McCaffrey, chair.

Global Library Partnerships

July 20, 2015 Posted by Lanah Koelle under Uncategorized

News from our friends at ISAW and the CHS:

ISAW donates hundreds of books to the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani

by David Ratzan

The ISAW Library donated 362 volumes to the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani, as part of its mission to support and encourage the study and preservation of the ancient world.

The citadel of Erbil in heart of ancient Iraqi Kurdistan, approximately 100 miles northwest of Sulaimani. The citadel’s first occupation layers date to the 5th millennium BCE.

Last week the ISAW Library shipped 19 boxes of duplicate and out-of-scope books to the American University in Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS). The one-time capital of the 18th- and 19th-century Kurdish Baban principality, Sulaimani (or Sulaymaniyah) lies just west of the Kurdish cities of Erbil and Kirkuk in northern Iraq.

Continue reading on the ISAW blog.

Collaboration between the National Library of Greece and the Center for Hellenic Studies

by Christina Lafi

The Center for Hellenic Studies, within the framework of its collaboration with the National Library of Greece (Greek acronym: EBE), has donated to the Library a complete series of its publications, the Hellenic Studies Series. The CHS publishes works by academics of international repute that highlight Hellenic civilization and its humanist values. This donation marks the starting point for the expansion of collaboration between the two institutions in many fields, such as scholarly research, the digitization of manuscripts, the sharing of expertise, seminars on Digital Humanities, etc.

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Continue reading on the CHS Kleos blog.

Do you work at a library that is collaborating with another institution abroad? If so, we’d love to hear about it.

Early Explorations at Nimrud

May 8, 2015 Posted by Lanah Koelle under Uncategorized

From our friends at the Institute for Study of the Ancient World:

Austen Henry Layard and the early exploration of Nimrud
by Gabriel McKee — May 05, 2015

Last month, The Islamic State of Syria and the Levant issued a video depicting the vandalizing of the ancient Assyrian city of Kalhu, better known as Nimrud. The IS claims to have vandalized sculptures and bulldozed structures prior to the detonation of heavy explosives in the vicinity of the city’s palaces. This is the latest in a series of such events, including the destruction of antiquities in the Mosul Museum, damage tothe Hatra site, and the destruction of numerous Shi’ite shrines in Mosul. The IS has made grandiose claims about the extent of the destruction, but there has been virtually no outside confirmation of how much damage has actually been done at Nimrud. Nevertheless, the possibilities are troubling.

Fortunately, the palace district of Nimrud/Kalhu is one of the better-explored Assyrian sites, largely due to the publications issued following the site’s initial excavation, many of which are held by the ISAW Library. The first excavation at Nimrud was undertaken in 1845 by a French-born Englishman named Austen Henry Layard. Layard, whose uncle had achieved some success in Ceylon, began a lengthy sojourn in the Near East in 1839. He set out from London intending to travel by land to Ceylon to secure a Civil Service appointment, hoping perhaps to follow in his uncle’s footsteps. But he soon fell in love with travel itself, and spent the next several years wandering in Persia, Asia Minor, and the Middle East. He was briefly appointed as a secretary to Sir Stratford Canning in Constantinople before departing for Iraq in 1845 to search for Assyrian antiquities. He was initially invited by French archaeologist Paul-Émile Botta to join his excavation of the Kouyunjik Mound, on the opposite bank of the Tigris from Mosul. But, concerned about the watchful eyes of the people of the city, he instead selected a site some twenty miles south: the city of Nimrud.

James Fergusson. The Palaces of Nimroud Restored. From Austen Henry Layard. A Second Series of the Monuments of Nineveh. London: Murray, 1853, pl. 1.

The Kalhu site, dominated by a 140-foot conical mound containing the remains of a large ziggurat, was known to Layard from his previous travels in the region. The city was called Calah in Genesis, and its ruins were described by Xenophon, who called it Larisa. The site was named “Nimrud” in later years, owing to local tradition that connected the city to the Biblical figure Nimrod (who is named alongside with the city in Gen 10:8-12). The city fell to the Babylonians in about 612 B.C.E., and was abandoned. The site was described but not excavated by Claudius Rich in 1820, and Layard was the first to explore the ruins systematically.

The local Ottoman rulers posed problems for Layard, particularly Mohamed Pasha, the tyrannical Ottoman governor of Mosul, and the kadı of Mosul, an Ottoman official who believed Layard wished to send the Assyrian sculptures “to the palace of your Queen, who, with the rest of the unbelievers, worships these idols.” There was some concern that any sculptures discovered would be destroyed as blasphemous idols, as had happened to a sculpture uncovered at Koyunjik by Claudius Rich in 1820. Other locals were certain that Layard had information regarding the location of gold inside the mounds, while some believed that European archaeologists were searching for proof that the territory had once been held by the Franks, in order to justify the colonial seizure of the region. Layard needed to repeatedly re-secure his permission to excavate.

Continue reading on the ISAW blog

Some modern problems in controlling ancient names

February 18, 2015 Posted by Lanah Koelle under Uncategorized

From our friends at the Institute for Study of the Ancient World:

“He lied to the people, saying ‘I am Nebuchadnezzar’”: Some modern problems in controlling ancient names

by Gabriel McKee — Jan 30, 2015

The ISAW library recently received a copy of Nebukadnezar III/IV by Jürgen Lorenz, which assembles the primary sources for two little-known political upstarts in the Achaemenid Empire (ca. 550-330 BCE). The two rebel Nebuchadnezzars—and all the other would-be contenders in ancient history—pose a problem for libraries and researchers: how do we catalog and search for history’s losers?

One of the fundamental principles of cataloging is the concept of “authority control.” As all of us who have studied or done research in the ancient world know, an individual person, thing, or concept may be described with different terms, in different languages, or with variations in spelling. On the other side of the coin, the same name may describe different individuals from different regions or periods in history. Libraries (and other entities) overcome this multiplicity by tying related versions together under a single, “authorized” form of the name, which is used in cataloging materials related to that topic or individual. But choosing which name to use can be challenging, particularly when it comes to figures from ancient history.The ISAW library recently received a copy of Nebukadnezar III/IV by Jürgen Lorenz (ISLET Verlag, 2008). A revision of the author’s thesis, the book assembles scattered primary sources regarding two little-known political upstarts from the early Achaemenid Empire (ca. 550-330 BCE). They both arose in the midst of the upheaval surrounding Darius I (r. 522-486 BCE)’s accession the throne. In late 522 BCE, a man named Nidintu-Bêl declared himself Nebuchadnezzar III, King of Babylon. He claimed to be a son of Nabonidus (r. 556-539 BCE), the final king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, whom Cyrus II (r. 559-530 BCE) had defeated in 539 BCE. Nidintu-Bêl seems to have actually ruled Babylonia for about two months, until Darius defeated him in two battles that December. Darius then besieged Babylon and put him to death. The following year, an Armenian known as Arakha staged another rebellion, also claiming to be a son of Nabonidus and also adopting the name Nebuchadnezzar. Arakha’s rebellion lasted from May to November of 521 BCE, when Darius’ subordinate Intaphernes reduced the city and crucified the rebels.

The primary source of information for both figures is the Behistun Inscription (pictured above; full transcription here), which records Darius’ own biased account of several revolts against his early rule. The source is (of course) less than fully reliable, as Darius seems to have engaged in some creative fabrication in order to magnify his own stature as a military leader. Several of the rebels he claims to have defeated do not seem to have been able to raise an army: what sort of “kings” or “rebels” were they, then? And the chronology of Darius’ victories is also unclear: he seems to have shifted dates in order to be able to claim that he suppressed all of the revolts against him within a single year. But Darius is crystal clear in this inscription about their claims to legitimacy: “[Nidintu-Bêl] lied to the people, saying ‘I am Nebuchadnezzar’.”

The two rebel Nebuchadnezzars (and all the other rebels against Darius) pose a problem for libraries or any organization that wishes to create a unified data set, like Google. That is to say, they pose a problem for authority control. Though these rebels’ real names are known, they are also known—perhaps even better known—by their adopted royal names. And yet, for good reason, most reasonable people would hesitate to class them among the true or legitimate kings of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, with the likes of Nabonidus (556-539 BCE) and Nebuchadnezzar II (605-562 BCE). The Persians had effectively destroyed the Empire, and so each would-be king had, at best, limited control for a matter of months over a besieged Babylon.  Ancient politics, oddly enough, resurface when one creates metadata for works about figures like Nebuchadnezzar III and IV. What do we call these people? How and in what way, or at what level, do we recognize their pretensions to power?

Continue reading on the ISAW blog

 

Call for Papers: Digital Resources for Teaching and Outreach

February 2, 2015 Posted by Lanah Koelle under Uncategorized

From our friends at the Digital Classics Association, who are sponsoring a panel at the next AIA/SCS meeting:

American Institute of Archaeology and the Society for Classical Studies (AIA / SCS) Meetings, January 6-9, San Francisco, CA.

Digital resources are increasingly opening up new opportunities for classics education and outreach. Some, like MOOCs, have been intensively discussed. The goal of this session is to highlight new and less familiar approaches and encourage reflection on how we can best achieve our educational mission in this changing environment. We now have access to free online language textbooks with exercises. Students can play online games in which they guide animated characters through Roman history. They can also contribute to research by publishing translations and annotations in major online repositories. Papers are invited that introduce these and other sorts of tools and techniques and / or reflect on the present and future use of digital methods for pedagogy and outreach.

Anonymous abstracts of no more than 400 words should be sent to digitalclassicsassociation@gmail.com, with identifying information in the email. Abstracts will be refereed anonymously by three readers in accordance with SCS regulations. The session will be proposed as a joint AIA / SCS colloquium, so abstracts from members of both societies are welcome. In your email, please confirm that you are an AIA or SCS member in good standing. Abstracts should follow the formatting guidelines of the instructions for individual abstracts on the SCS website. The deadline for the submission of abstracts is 5 p.m. Eastern Time, Monday, March 16, 2015.

Please direct any questions to ncoffee(at)buffalo.edu.

See this call on the SCS website.

 

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