DM Reviews – June 2018.” Digital Medievalist 11(1): 4, Pp
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Commissioned Reviews How to Cite: Litta, Eleonora, Traianos Manos, and Lisa Fagin Davis. 2018 “DM Reviews – June 2018.” Digital Medievalist 11(1): 4, pp. 1–24, DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/dm.79 Published: 27 July 2018 Peer Review: These are commissioned reviews in Digital Medievalist, a journal published by the Open Library of Humanities. Copyright: © 2018 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Open Access: Digital Medievalist is a peer-reviewed open access journal. Digital Preservation: The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service. Litta, Eleonora, et al. 2018. “DM Reviews – June 2018.” Digital Medievalist 11(1): 4, pp. 1–24, DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/dm.79 COMMISSIONED REVIEWS DM Reviews – June 2018 These are three reviews for Digital Medievalist, published in order of acceptance. In the first review, Eleonora Litta reviews Bodard, Gabriel and Matteo Romanello’s (2016) Digital Classics outside the Echo-Chamber: Teaching, Knowledge Exchange and Public Engagement. Digital Classics Outside the Echo-Chamber is mainly addressed to Digital Humanists. It showcases exciting methodological examples of the application of digital tools to the Humanities, and demonstrates their impact on pedagogy and public outreach. In the second review, Traianos Manos reviews the online database ALIM: Archivio della Latinità Italiana del Medioevo. The Archive of the Italian Latinity of the Middle Ages (http://en.alim.unisi.it/), which aims “to provide free online access to all the Latin texts produced in Italy during the Middle Ages”. After presenting Archive’s new website, the review discusses issues in editorial approach, usability, digital tools available and more. It concludes that the Archive, wherein there are still opportunities for further enhancements, is one of the most important digital libraries of medieval Latin texts that exist today. For the final review, Lisa Fagin Davis reviews Codicology and Palaeography in the Digital Age 4. Codicology and Paleography in the Digital Age 4 (henceforth CPDA4) continues the series of volumes that began with the proceedings of a 2009 conference, in this case combining solicited contributions to the proceedings of the “Machines and Manuscripts” conference organized under the auspices of the eCodicology project and held in Trier, Karlsruhe and Darmstadt, 2014–2016. Contributions are by senior and junior digital scholars, working alone or in teams, presenting works both in-progress and complete. CPDA4 thus functions as a “state of the field,” focusing more on case studies and methodology than theory, demonstrating how the theoretical approaches of the previous volumes can be put into action. The editors have chosen to divide the volume into two sections, “Digital Codicology” and “Digital Paleography.” Contributions are in English or German, with abstracts in both languages. Each contribution is accompanied by a detailed bibliography listing both printed and online resources. Keywords: Classics; Digital Humanities; Pedagogy; Public Outreach; Italian Latinity; Medieval Studies; Italian Middle Ages; Medieval Latin Literature; Digital Editing; Digital Paleography; Digital Codicology Art. 4, page 2 of 24 Litta, Manos and Fagin Davis: DM Reviews – June 2018 Bodard, Gabriel and Matteo Romanello (eds.). (2016). Digital Classics outside the Echo-Chamber: Teaching, Knowledge Exchange and Public Engagement. London: Ubiquity Press. Pp. 234. ISBN 9781909188617. £34.99. Eleonora Litta Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, DE [email protected] Digital Classics Outside the Echo-Chamber is mainly addressed to Digital Humanists. It showcases exciting methodological examples of the application of digital tools to the Humanities, and demonstrates their impact on pedagogy and public outreach. In the last two decades, Classics has grown to be one of the most technically advanced humanities fields. Developments in the archaeological sciences and ancient geography, the availability of 3D reconstructions, digitized textual corpora from epigraphs to papyri, treebanks, morphological analyzers, and POS taggers for Ancient Greek and Classical Latin all signal the field’s technological advance. Increasing popularity and quality of its scholarly outputs has combined to confer proper disciplinary status to the Digital Classics. Indeed, it is now difficult to imagine new research in the fields of Classics without the employment of some well-tested methodology involving the use of digital tools. The volume under review collects a number of excellent contributions that explore the potentials of Digital Classics outside their comfort zone (what editors Gabriel Bodard and Matteo Romanello call their “echo-chambers”), either by applying their techniques to different contexts, or, by importing techniques from the sciences and applying them to the Classics. The book’s final section continues its “outside the echo-chamber” approach by closing with three chapters that deal with how to better engage the general public and adapt Classics resources to be more easily accessible for a non-academic user. The editors open their book with a detailed discussion of its aims and an introduction to the portal http://www.digitalclassicist.org/, with which Bodard has Litta, Manos and Fagin Davis: DM Reviews – June 2018 Art. 4, page 3 of 24 been involved since founding it in 2004. The Digital Classicist website has become an important discipline-wide resource, collecting information about most digital classics projects, and also hosting a blog and a discussion list. Bodard and Romanello are also the active force behind the successful Digital Classicist seminar series that has been staged in London and Berlin for several years. Indeed, some of the papers contained in this volume were originally presented as works in progress during those seminars. In their introduction, Bodard and Romanello stress our collective responsibility as scholars of the classics to communicate to the wider public the importance of the outcomes of our work. In their view, classicists need to engage students in new and stimulating ways that keep pace with the rapid development of technologies offered by the world outside academia, urging that we must find ways of applying their techniques, even if seemingly distant from our subject, to resolve questions and problems that are still unanswered and unsolved. The book is divided into three main sections: 1) Teaching, 2) Knowledge Exchange, and 3) Public Engagement, each reflecting the editors’ overarching theme of the need for open access to digital resources. Section 1, Teaching, consists of five chapters stressing not only how digital projects have broadened our knowledge of the classics, but also how they have recast the role of students and other non-experts from being more or less passive recipients of that knowledge from their teachers into one in which they can now be part of the resource building process. Chapter 1, “Learning by Doing: Learning to Implement the TEI Guidelines Through Digital Classics Publication” by Stella Dee, Maryam Foradi and Filip Šarić, focuses on how adult learners with existing knowledge in the humanities, specifically in the field of Classics, can approach and learn the TEI guidelines for the encoding of structured data in XML in a digital (online) environment. It includes a short digression on the history of learning methods, from ‘chalk-to-talk,’ to class discussion, and to more recent digital learning approaches for students of higher education. The chapter emphasizes that classicists need only to learn about TEI in relation to their particular activities or projects. Art. 4, page 4 of 24 Litta, Manos and Fagin Davis: DM Reviews – June 2018 Chapter 2, “Open Education and Open Educational Resources for the Teaching of Classics in the UK” by Simon Mahony, explores lessons learned about the potentials of Open Educational Resources (OER) during the conduct of three projects aimed at the creation, use, and re-use of online educational resources for the teaching of Classics. This chapter dwells on the lack of OERs for Classics and regrets how the state of the art in this area is still palpably behind that of other disciplines. Chapter 3, “Epigraphers and Encoders: Strategies for Teaching and Learning Digital Epigraphy” by Gabriel Bodard and Simona Stoyanova, contains a history of EpiDoc training that lays out how this practice evolved over time to include what is currently being taught in free EpiDoc training sessions. This narrative is accompanied by observations about how the teaching of EpiDoc and Epigraphy can be compared, where they overlap, and whether they indeed can be brought together in a unique teaching module keyed to future Epigraphy instruction. Chapter 4, “An Open Tutorial for Beginning Ancient Greek” by Jeff Rydberg-Cox, describes an online tutorial of Ancient Greek targeted to non-specialists based on the digitization of a 19th century Ancient Greek reader into HTML. Users of this resource can follow their learning progress by taking a series of multiple-choice quizzes while their interest is stirred by a gamification environment. The author exposes data on the hits received by his website (15,178 visitors visited the website