C.I.T.E - The Infrastructure of the Homer Multitext (Part 1 - Introduction)

I just posted on Casey Dué’s “Oral Poetry” blog Part 1 of an overview of the technological infrastructure of the Homer Multitext.

The first steps - #2 in a series

The elaborately synchronized plans that will take us to Lichfield Cathedral, and thence to the Real Monasterio de El Escorial outside of Madrid have lurched into motion.

I’ll go into more details in a future post, but the short version of our plans for Europe this summer is this: I will be tagging along with the team from Kentucky as they take digital Images of two books at Lichfield Cathedral. The first is the so-called Saint Chad Gospel, and the second is an early English translation of the Bible. The Kentucky team and I, joined by my Homer Multitext colleagues, will (if all goes well) go to Spain to capture imagrery in 2-dimensions and 3-dimensions, of two early Greek texts of the Homeric Iliad.

The Conservation Copystand, a big hunk of equipment built for the Center for Hellenic Studies by Manfred Mayer in Graz, has begun its journey from Greece. If all goes well, it will be waiting for us in Lichfield when we get there.

The excellent Christos Giannopoulos, who manages the CHS’s center in Nafplio, Greece, has made arrangements to pack the huge, heavy thing. Matt Field of the University of Kentucky’s Vis Center handled the arrangements from the US side.

David Jacobs, Juan Garces, both of the British Library, and Chris Collins of the British Museum, will be going to Lichfield and El Escorial to set up environmental monitoring equipment that will give us baseline data on the circumstances that these ancient manuscripts are accustomed to. According to David, the important thing is to avoid changing the environment too much as we photograph the books.

Next week, I will drive to Kentucky for the hardware-integration test, where we will see if the multispectral lights, the digital camera, and the 3-d mapping system can work together.

In the meantime, I have been working with Andrew Canon, a rising Senior at Furman University, on issues of XML markup of Greek texts. He will be joined in this work by Susannah Morris and Andrew Corley when they get back from Turkey.

More details about all of this anon...

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Bringing it together - #1 in a series

The main reason I started writing this blog, after years of eschewing the “social internet” was to keep a public record of things, personal thoughts and experiences certainly, but mainly things related to the projects that occupy so much of my time.


I think that this might be particularly interesting to current or prospective students of Furman University, where I teach Ancient Greek in the Department of Classics.

My two main research projects these days are closely related. The first is the work I do for Casey Dué and Mary Ebbott, who are the Editors of the Homer Multitext, a project of the Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University; my friend Neel Smith and I work on the technological infrastructure for this digital-library project.

This project aims to collect as much real information about the history of Homeric poetry as possible, and share it with the widest possible audience in the most useful ways we can imagine. Along the way, the project’s editors hope to further their insights into the fundamental nature of the Homeric poems as oral compositions, products of a tradition of composition-in-performance (like jazz music) whose influence persisted long after the poems ceased to be songs to be sung and had become mainly written texts to be read and studied.

The second is my work with Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky’s Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments, on an NSF-funded project called “FoLIO: Framework for Longitudinal Image-based Organization”. I have worked closely with David Jacobs and Juan Garces of the British Library on this, as well.



This project aims to develop techniques and standards for organizing collections of images and registering them with each other in such a way as to allow measurement along different axes. For example, how can we organize images of a manuscript taken in 1900 and others taken in 2007 in such a way as to measure change in the physical artifact over time? Or, how can we organize the collection of a patient’s medical imagry that might include x-rays, MRI imagery, and ultrasounds, so that the same structures can be measured and compared precisely?

This work is nothing but pleasure for me, for a number of reasons. First, my professional collaborators are both brilliant, and great friends. Words cannot express what a luxury this is to me.

Second, my professional collaborators range from senior scholars to undergraduates at Furman University, and it is impossible to imagine this work going anywhere without all of their contributions.

So, in the postings that follow, I am going to try to describe each of these projects, include some pictures, and generally set the stage for the regular updates I plan to post this summer, as my collaborators and I pursue our projects in Greenville, as well as in England, France, and Spain.

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On Shooting Stuff

I have been able to take my kids camping a few times recently, to our family's land in Lancaster, SC. Our preferred spot is in the "Grandpa Tract", so named because it was the site of my great-grandfather's childhood home (now long gone).


This is Zoe, my 9 -year-old daughter, earlier in the Spring, having her first outing with the Marlin .22 rifle that my buddy Roy gave to my wife some years ago.

Most recently, I took my son Will down, and we spent a Saturday morning trying out my first batch of hand-loaded ammo for my Garands. It is soooo much easier doing this kind of thing out in the woods, than at the Gun Club, since I can do all tha back-and-forth adjusting the target-stand, the chronograph, and all that, without having to inconvenience anyone else.

For anyone interested in these things, here are the specs on the batch of .30-'06 that Will and I tried out:

• Brass: Korean mil. surplus, headstamped PS-76, once-fired, trimmed to 4.840"
• CCI #34 primers
• 150-grain FMJBT bullets (Winchester bulk)
• 48 grains of IMR-4064

They shot fine. I shot a string of Korean surplus M2 Ball for comparison. That string averaged 2877 fps, with a standard deviation of 18.94 fps. The group at 100 yards was about 3", on average.

My batch averaged 2772 fps, with a standard deviation of 17.02. The group was closer to 2 moa.

Now, I am a lousy shot, having difficulty hitting the side of a barn when I'm inside the barn, so I'm mostly looking for consistent velocity here.

Actually, this time, I was mostly looking for not blowing up the rifle or my own self. In that at least, I was successful. I want to bring down the velocity a bit, and see if I can get smaller groups shooting off the bag. Every milsurp M2 round I've ever chrony'ed out of my two Garands has even well above the nominal 2700 fps. I don't know if that is my chronograph, or the fact that they both have new barrels, or what.

But anyway, Will and I had a good time, and I was thoroughly satisfied by the fruits of my neophyte efforts at reloading.

As a break from the books-and-computers realm of my professional life, the world of metal, powder, scales, and calipers of the reloading bench is very satisfying.

Be safe, and remember Jeff Cooper's Rules of Gun Safety!

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