A New Digital Resource for Historians of Islamic Art and Culture:
The Islamic Manuscripts of the Walters Art Museum
With the help of a Preservation and Access Grant from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, and with additional funding from an
anonymous donor, the Walters At Museum is pleased to announce the
completion of its program to create digital surrogates of its collection
of Islamic manuscripts and single leaves. All the data is licensed for
use under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0
UnportedAccess Rights,
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/legalcode
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/legalcode> . Images
are free for any noncommercial use, provided you follow the terms of the
license. There is no need to apply to the Walters prior to using the
images.
Highlights of the collection include a fifteenth-century Timurid Qur'an
(Ms. W.563); a late seventeenth-century copy of the Book on Navigation
by Piri Reis (Ms. W.658); and a sixteenth-century de luxe Mughal
manuscript of Amir Khusrau Dhilavi's Khamsa (Ms. W.624). As you will
see, images were taken of all parts of the manuscript, including the
binding, fore-edge, and spine. Text pages were imaged at 600 dpi;
illuminated pages were taken at up to 1200 dpi. The manuscripts have
been catalogued by Adam Gacek (Principal Cataloguer) and Amy Landau. The
details are as follows.
The data is up at:
http://www.thedigitalwalters.org/ <http://www.thedigitalwalters.org/>
The general ReadMe file is at:
http://www.thedigitalwalters.org/03_ReadMe.html
<http://www.thedigitalwalters.org/03_ReadMe.html>
The technical ReadMe file is at:
http://www.thedigitalwalters.org/04_TechnicalReadMe.html
<http://www.thedigitalwalters.org/04_TechnicalReadMe.html>
The easiest way to access the raw data is at:
http://www.thedigitalwalters.org/01_ACCESS_WALTERS_MANUSCRIPTS.html
<http://www.thedigitalwalters.org/01_ACCESS_WALTERS_MANUSCRIPTS.html>
As you will see, the Islamic Manuscripts are fully catalogued in XML
according to TEI P5 guidelines. You will see English, German, Dutch,
Armenian, Byzantine, and Ethiopian Manuscripts up there as well, but
these have not yet been fully catalogued, so don't expect any TEI for
them yet: we are in the middle of that process.
Obviously, although this is our core data, this presentation of the
material is not primarily for the general public. We have two main
portals for user-friendly derivatives of our data. All our illustrated
pages we post on Flickr, for which check out:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/medmss/sets/
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/medmss/sets/>
We also publish full PDFs for download of all our manuscripts on the
Walters Website: For example:
http://art.thewalters.org/viewwoa.aspx?id=23935
<http://art.thewalters.org/viewwoa.aspx?id=23935>
Just under the title of the manuscript, you will see that you can
download the PDF. The PDF begins with a full human readable catalogue
description of the manuscript, transformed as part of the PDF from the
TEI XML.
We do hope that this resource will prove useful to you in your work and
play. We would be grateful if you would let your colleagues know about
it. If you administer a list-serve, than we would be grateful if you
would let your readers know about it.
We would also be most grateful for your feedback, and to hear any
questions you may have. Please contact us at alandau(a)thewalters.org,
wnoel(a)thewalters.org, or mss-curator(a)thewalters.org
<https://email.hood.edu/owa/UrlBlockedError.aspx> .
Thank you very much
William Noel
Amy Landau
Dear DM-L,
It is my pleasure to announce the results of the Digital Medievalist
Executive Board elections for 2011.
In this case re-elected were:
Malte Rehbein
Peter Stokes
Torsten Schaßan
And newly joining us is:
Dominique Stutzmann
The other candidates all scored very highly and it was a close run
race. I would like to thank the other candidates for allowing their
names to be placed on the ballot. Having such a good slate of
qualified people wanting to assist DM to further its goals is
demonstrative of its stability as a community. It is always hard to
get the balance of continuity of service and new input, and the board
will be discussing several possible changes that might benefit DM
inthis area. Members of the public are always welcome to volunteer to
assist DM in its various goals without being Board members, and I
would encourage any of you who want to get more involved to email us.
These election results cannot be announced without mentioning the one
DM Board member who chose not to stand for re-election. Daniel
O'Donnell has been fundamental in progressing Digital Medievalist to
its current state. It is he who set up a mailing list in 2003 on best
practice for digital medieval resource creation with others such as
Peter Baker, Martin Foys, Murray McGillivray and Elizabeth Solopova
that eventually led to the creation of the DM-L mailing list. It was
Dan who helped the DM Journal start and thrive, and helped us move
towards a more open and fully-elected Executive Board. Although Dan
was already DM's leader he served as its elected director from our
first elections in 2007 until 2009. It is his continued ongoing
commitment to DM that helps convince the University of Lethbridge to
allow us to have a virtual machine which runs the
www.digitalmedievalist.org website (and various other DM
infrastructure). Simply put, without Dan, we wouldn't be here! Thanks
Dan for your commitment to DM and continued support of it.
As part of the election survey we asked a question as to what DM
could do in the future to serve you, the DM community, better. We
received a wide and varied selection of comments, and the DM Board
will be discussing these to see how we may act on them. But feel free
contact us at any time with suggestions, proposals to host DM events,
or similar via board _at-sign_ digitalmedievalist.org.
Thank you to all of you who voted, while the turnout was good compared
to previous elections, it would still be better to get a larger
turnout in the future.
Many thanks,
James Cummings (Director, Digital Medievalist)
Marjorie Burghart (Digital Medievalist Board Member)
election(a)digitalmedievalist.org
Dear DM-L,
The Digital Medievalist Executive Board elections are now open. To
vote, please fill in the brief survey at:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/VDRG7CR
You do not have to be a medievalist to vote, nor highly technical. If
you are on the DM-L mailing list (where this message has been posted),
then that is the only qualification needed to vote. The only
information we ask is to confirm the email address you are subscribed
with, and choose (up to four) candidates to vote for. (There is an
optional question about how DM can improve at the end.) The
biographies of the candidates are available on the survey page. The
information will be destroyed afterwards.
The survey will close at midnight GMT this Friday 8th July 2011.
The slate of candidates is impressive:
Fred Gibbs
Yin Liu
Samantha Rayner
Malte Rehbein
Torsten Schaßan
Grant Simpson
Peter Stokes
Dominique Stutzmann
Please cast your vote early at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/VDRG7CR
Many thanks,
James Cummings (Director, Digital Medievalist)
Marjorie Burghart (Member, Digital Medievalist Executive Board)
election(a)digitalmedievalist.org
*** sorry for cross-posting ***
Dear everybody,
the advisory board of the conference "Digital Diplomatics 2011: Tools
for the Digital Diplomatist" has decided about the programm. You can
find it at
<http://www.cei.lmu.de/digdipl11/organization/program>
It wasn't an easy choice among the almost 80 interesting proposals we
received, but we hope it will appeal to many scholars of diplomatics,
digital humanities and information sciences. If you consider to
participate we invite you to register at
<http://www.cei.lmu.de/digdipl11/organization/registration>
Regards
Georg Vogeler
Members of this list would likely have interesting perspectives to
contribute to this workshop.
On 7/1/11 1:22 PM, "Livia Predoiu" <livia.predoiu(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
>Apologies for cross-posting.
>Please forward to interested parties.
>***************************************************************
>
>
>Workshop on "Semantic Digital Archives" DEADLINE EXTENDED to *15. July
>2011*
>(see Important Dates below)
>
>
>**************************
>CALL FOR PAPERS
>**************************
>
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
>-----------------------------------------
>International Workshop on ³Semantic Digital Archives - sustainable
>long-term curation perspectives of Cultural Heritage² to be held as
>part of the 15th International Conference on Theory and Practice of
>Digital Libraries (TPDL).
>29.09.2011 in Berlin
>http://sda2011.dke-research.de
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
>-----------------------------------------
>
>
>
>OBJECTIVES:
>
>The Semantic Digital Archives Workshop aims at promoting and
>discussing sophisticated knowledge representation and knowledge
>management solutions specifically designed for improving Archival
>Information Systems.
>
>Over the past couple of decades, digitally created content has come to
>permeate all aspects of our lives and the life cycle of these objects
>is increasingly exclusively digital. Therefore, sustainable long-term
>curation perspectives for our digital cultural heritage are essential.
>Digital content poses many socio-cultural and technological challenges
>which create obstacles to long-term or indefinite preservation.
>Changing technologies and shifting user communities as well as the
>increasing complexity of digital content being enriched with software
>and multimedia attachments are only a few examples. Dealing with these
>challenges is the central theme of the workshop.
>
>This full day workshop is an exciting opportunity for collaboration
>and cross-fertilization between the Digital Libraries, the Digital
>Archives and the Semantic Web community. It specifically encourages
>closer dialogue between the technical oriented communities and
>researchers from the (digital) humanities and social sciences as well
>as cultural heritage institutions.
>
>
>
>TOPICS OF INTEREST:
>
>We intend to have an open discussion on topics related to the general
>subject of Semantic Digital Archives. The following list of topics is
>meant as an initial guide.
>Hence, we welcome contributions that focus on, but are not limited to:
>
>* ontologies and linked data for digital archives and digital
>libraries, e.g. semantic extensions of common knowledge models of the
>digital archiving and digital libraries domain, e.g. METS, EAD,
>PREMIS, ...
>* ontologies and (semantic) web services implementing the OAIS standard
>* theoretical and practical archiving frameworks extending or
>replacing the OAIS standard
>* logical theories for digital archives
>* implementations and evaluations of digital archives
>* semantic or logical provenance models for digital archives or
>digital libraries
>* information integration/semantic ingest (e.g. from digital libraries)
>* trust for ingest and data security/integrity check for long-term
>storage of archival records
>* semantic search and semantic information retrieval in digital
>archives and digital libraries
>* visualization and exploration of digital content (stored or to be
>stored in a digital archive)
>* semantic extensions of emulation/virtualization methodologies
>tailored for digital archives
>* migration strategies based on semantic (web) technologies
>* semantic long-term storage and hardware organization tailored for AIS
>* (empirical) studies evaluating end-user needs and its evolution as
>well as information seeking behaviour of end-user needs and its
>evolution
>* knowledge evolution
>* web archiving
>
>
>
>SUBMISSION DETAILS:
>
>Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished research papers
>related to the aforementioned topics. We invite:
>* regular papers (8 to 12 pages)
>* short papers (2 to 6 pages)
>
>All submissions are required to be in pdf format. Paper submissions
>should be in the Springer¹s LNCS format.
>
>Submissions are to be made via the submission web site:
>https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sda2011
>
>Submissions will be reviewed by the three members of the Program
>Committee. All papers accepted at the Semantic Digital Archives
>Workshop must be presented during the Workshop by a SDA Workshop
>registered participant. All papers will be published in workshop
>proceedings, which will be available as a separate publication after
>the Workshop
>
>
>
>IMPORTANT DATES:
>
>* Deadline for Submissions: 15. July 2011
>
>* Acceptance Notification: 12. August 2011
>
>* Camera-ready Papers: 26. August 2011
>
>
>
>ORGANIZING COMMITTEE & PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
>
>The Organizing Committee members and the Program Committee members are
>mentioned at: http://sda2011.dke-research.de/index.php/committees
>
>
>
>FURTHER DETAILS:
>
>http://sda2011.dke-research.de
>