Vidi

This has been delayed a bit longer than I expected due to a few problems over the pass couple of weeks, so some of the news is a little out of date. On the other hand this isn’t a carnival and I did say it would be irregular.

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News

The damage to Lebanon’s heritage was in the Observer recently along with Middle East Online. Athena at Rites of Passage has had a post on this up for a while. It’s also come to the attention of People’s Geography in the post Ancient Phoenicia under threat.

Rome is to open up the Circus Maximus which is famous from the film Ben Hur rather than Gladiator.

Uncovering a 139-year-old mystery a graduate student is finding out the identities of some corpses in unmarked graves dating from the civil war era.

Artefact-wise it’s been a mixed summer. State warns public against removing artifacts from lakebed is the news from Toledo Bend. There are problems Protecting bluff site in North Carolina. On the plus side is the story Young N.M. Hiker Finds Prehistoric Bowl. I was talking to a New Mexico archaeologist and I think this is the second great find they’re had reported by the public this year.

I missed the fuss about the strange German. If you did too you can find the story at China.org.cn. Bloggers who commented on it included xurfnet, Anthony Campbell and Straight Talking, who also comments on Banksy’s recent work.

Archaeologists have been pushing family values. Lucy has a younger sister, Selam. PhDiva has a couple of links on Lucy II. Time has a blog entry. Scientific American has a few more. It’s all great except Jeffrey Schwartz argues that the new find isn’t A.Afarensis.

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Is Google changing academia?

One reason for the delay were little tasks like preparing something for the pi-CETL launch at Leicester. To demonstrate what is possible with Google Earth I put up a 3D model hoiked from the Google Warehouse with tweaks, rotation, overlays and bookmarks marking out some alignments on site. It’s not perfect, the model of Stonehenge is slightly too large to fit in scale, but it shows some of what could be done with Google Earth. You can download it to play with from the i-Science website. It also makes sense to gather together some other links I’ve been meaning to write about, but haven’t that take Google as inspiration.

MuGeum is one of the sites that looks like it could be really exciting. MuGeum is a directory and storehouse of annotated Google Earth tours. It’s rather empty at the moment, so I’ll have to have a go at writing one, but it looks like it could potentially be a useful learning tool for geographically specified subjects, possibly like the colonisation of Sicily.

I almost certainly found that via the Stoa and a quick search there for Google will reveal other innovations. They’re not just getting to grips with Google. The Stoa also has plenty of entries on Sketchup, which can make models for viewing in Google Earth.

Like any new technology there is the danger of gimmickery. Troels Myrup points to integration of Google Earth with an excavation at Sagalassos, but Google Earth has limited resolution in many areas, is it really academically useful? I’m undecided. I think it will be as the program improves, but at the moment I’m not so sure. It is projects like ArchAtlas which are helping drive the development of projects which will become essential in years to come.

Rather similar is Google’s online search interface Google Maps, which can be accessed through a browser. Google Maps Mania and Nuevobasso are discussing possible teaching applications for Google Maps. I’ve been playing with the api myself, you can see an early attempt here (bizarrely Athens is in the wrong place), and should be able to create a useful atlas, when time permits. Getting the information into such a database is another problem, but this too is being tackled. Google Earth Blog notes the integration between Google Earth and Wikimapia.

Also of interest to me, is something reported by Semantic Humanities (also spotted via the Stoa), a timeline that looks rather similar in execution to Google Maps. I like the concept, it probably works best with a widescreen monitor, but then doesn’t everything?

As for why you should be excited by this, both Semantic Humanities and Digging Digitally have good articles. Digging Digitally notes that the successful web operations at the moment like Google or Amazon make it easy to access niche interests. Almost by definition research into soething new is going to be a niche, because if it was fully explored it would be very difficult to call it new. Semantic Humanities spots another key feature arguing that Web 2.0 should give users tools to visualise and network their own data. And make it easy. I think this last point is very important. Some technoevangelism overlooks that a lot of people aren’t interested in computers, only in what they can do with them. If you’re researching ancient Greece, then learning the idiosyncracies of a new computer system is a delay not a joy.

Other useful tools Google has includes Google Books, who, Natalie Bennett, notes have just released their first list of top searches. There’s also Google Scholar which now has a related articles feature. It’s also fascinating to see what is related. For instance a related article for this paper includes on page three “Wrong is Beautiful”.

On the other hand it should also be noted that Google isn’t above a little evil when it suits them.

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Peter Jones compares Coalition action in Afghanistan to Hannibal’s invasion of Italy among other things at the Friends of Classics site.

The Modern Tribalist asks: British, Irish, Celtic or Basque?

Comparing her to a blogger would, I think, trivialise the Memories of Anne Frank posted at Time and Again, which also posts some useful images to illustrate the text.

In Private Eye recently there’s been a debate on the updating of Camp Coffee. Sepia Mutiny tackles the subject and calls it The Aunt Jemima Problem. via Geoff Coupe’s blog, who also points to this page of the use of the British Empire in advertising and packaging.

Make Mine Mosaic has a post on a modern mosaic school.

Athena has news from the BSR. I’m mildly jealous.

Orbis Quintus has news of an 11,000 year old building in Syria that I’ve missed.

Exploration of perspective finds an excellent reason to avoid eating at the Longhorn Steakhouse in Misplaced History.

Tlönista reveals some of the beauty of Sappho in Pomegranate Seeds.

The Dynamic Spine has a picture of the Ancient History of Scoliosis.

System 13 has news of something I’d love to do, A Viking voyage and part two. Which reminds me of this story on the Argo.

Tropaion is helping me sort out where I’m going and when with news on seminar events in the UK.

Laudator Temporis Acti has a post on Sponges that you might take into the bathroom, but definitely not the bath. via Rogue Classicism.

I’ve added to my file To send to technophobes Support Blogging at Teachin’ on the Information Highway which explains what a blog can do. How you’d get a technophobe to check their email is an unsolved problem.

Conservation Finance has a fascinating post on Indigenous People as Natural Conservationists which shatters a few myths about living in harmony with nature.

Sociolingo’s Africa Blog continues to be well worth a visit. There’s now a section for Archaeology on site. One post of many I’ve seen but not had time to follow-up is The Material Culture of Twins in West Africa. It’s my loss.

If you speak German, there’s more on the disc of Nebra. via Ma’at.

Art Museums for Adults Only? asks Sex in the Public Square. What do you do if you see art and there’s isn’t a fat kid nearby? You get the Art teacher sacked. This could have serious consequences for classics teaching. As you can see the sort of thing you can see to right could seriously deprave a fifth grader. Hopefully the protest will be as successful as the campaign against The Passion of Saint Tibullus.

The International Museum of the Horse has an exhibit The Draft Horse in America. via Bridlepath.

In another exhibit a Reenactment Village Keeps Lesbian History Alive. Observing the site title may help. via Lesbian Pirate Queen.

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Reviews

The Philosopher’s Toolkit by Julian Baggini and Peter Fosl, reviewed at Social Epistemology in Library and Information Studies.

Pompeii: The Living City by Alex Butterworth and Ray Laurence reviewed here.

Archaeological Fantasies edited by Garrett G Fagan reviewed here.

There’s a few more at Rogue Classicism.

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New (to me) blogs

Definitely not new, its finished, is Lewis and Clark: What else happened?. I’ll be starting reading from the beginning soon.

It was Rosetta Stone Part 1 that caught my eye at Kansas Girl, but the other recent posts suggest that it could be worth watching especially if you want read some modern women’s history.

Exploring Environmental History is up to Podcast five and Experience History is up to six.

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I’ll stop it there. My aggregator is still full-to-bursting, so there’s plenty of things I haven’t yet included but if I continue I’ll be here all day. If you’re interested the Google-ish font was created with help from this tutorial.