PRESENT

• James Harriman-Smith
• John Levin
• Seth Woodward
• Eric Hellman

AGENDA

• Project GITenberg

GITENBERG

Reading Material

• Full listing of books is: https://github.com/GITenberg
• Python scripts make and upload book repos: https://github.com/sethwoodworth/GITenberg
• GITenberg mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/gitenberg-project
• HackerNews thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8214564
• Eric’s project: http://unglue.it
• Overview of file formats of PG books https://github.com/sethwoodworth/GITenberg/blob/master/docs/file_endings_freq

Presentations

• Seth: Give overview of where we are (see reading material above)
• James: PhD student working on ‘reception’ studies, interested in GITenberg as text transmission
• John: PhD student, likes very large catalogs of text, lit/digital-humanities, wants large groups of text (BALZAC)
• Eric Hellman: behind unglue.it – license conversion -> collect money -> release openly: when books are free, the book distribution system breaks; even libraries don’t want free books, don’t know how to deal with them or handle them; interested in out-of-copyright books; have been making the store/resource/service for free books; became familiar with PG’s lack; created GitenHub, found GITenberg, joined forces. Believes that the posibilities of version controlled archive, should be the way ebooks should go.

Questions:

• James: GIRenberg will both allow generation of books (once tools are in place), and allow version control, altering sources of publication. Two sides, but what about peculiarities of text, you need vc to track those things, yet what happens when there is a bad ‘correction’?
  • Seth: Do we want to follow Gutenberg’s policies? They have concept of ‘editionless’ edition, roughly based on a specific printing, but not a precise reproduction… GITenberg might be better seen as creating our own editions, one that could be printed/distributed as a ‘reasonable’ copy
  • Seth: NB: In order to produce ebooks (and even print) it has to go through an intermediate html / CSS step
  • Eric: not just version control, but the forking and merging process too: we can keep multiple branches of the same work, efficiently pull in changes from one branch to another; no reason we couldn’t maintain a branch which is faithful to a given copt from 1915 along with a book that doesn’t have the mistake of ‘with with’
    
    
• James: but what about authority of a fork?
  • Seth: Authority on GitHub is distinguishable, number of followers
    
    
• John: how much of this is transferrable? GITenberg is great, how does it go further? e.g. with the big bunch of 18thc texts released from ECCO database by Gale-Cengage (http://www.textcreationpartnership.org/tcp-ecco/, and http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ecco/)
  • Seth: yes: very extendable, as much as possible
    
    

• Seth: a big issue is the applicability to other texts: yes. Archive.org has become a clearing-house for scanned books, but it has no proof-reading process, and would be a great place to extend GITenberg in the future.

• Seth: another big question: which formats?

1. Markdown: NEG: not standardized, no pagination, no footnotes, and can only be improved by making our own bespoke version, which would have to be maintained. POS: Penflip, etc. are using it, so might have scope…
2. Restructured text: has a spec, is extensible, Distributed Proofreaders use it, but has only one complete implementation in python, urls are clunky, it seems to being sidelined…
3. TEI: lack of software, doesn’t seem to be a lot of to and fro, big ask

• Responses:
  • Eric: TEI is probably overkill for everything; you need just enough markup to produce deliverables, like ootnotes, ToC
  • James: further useful questions here: how much support does each format have? Can we test formats?
    
    
• Seth: Another big question: annotations
  • Seth has done work on annotator, cares for textual annotation a great deal. Annotation is the obvious win for a digital book, since such works have infinite margins and can take a variety of forms
  • Demo for some of the more exciting things that can be done: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/html5-audio-read-along/launch. Such projects imply a potential later connection with librivox.
  • This is more of a question for the developers, although the utility of line numbers is already clear

Other Observations

• Seth: ePub v.3 is very cool, but annotation on ePub readers looks to be very tricky…
• John: re: Internet Archive OCR: possibility of machine correction of OCR’d text for IA books, but they seem nonplussed. This is the kind of thing that Gitenberg could help with

NEXT STEPS

• Seth: Publish actionable tasks for more developers
• Seth: Shift Gitenberg to GitLab
• Everyone: continue to publicise this project

PRESENT

• James Harriman-Smith
• John Levin
• Lieke Ploeger
• Iain Emsley
• Tod Robbins (text only)

AGENDA

Big things

• Panton Principles for Humanities
• Progress on Textus
• OpenGLAM-dev
• Open Humanities Award

Housekeeping

• Tasks from last week
• Next meeting
• Tasks

Panton Principles for Humanities

• See ‘#Oxford contact’ below

Progress on Textus

• Annotations now being pulled through to front end!Texts are being marked up!
• Github up to date: https://github.com/okfn/textus-wordpress
• Next task: track down the source of current layout issuses: suspect a javascript conflict causing current problems
• This taks could be offered to volunteers on OK Labs

Oxford contacts/talk

• Iain met with OERC director (David de Roure), discussed First Folio release as CC-BY 3, and brought up idea of principles for definition of open data in humanities. The principles will now hopefully be discussed in meetings around Oxford (OERC, Bodleian).
• OKFest mentioned to de Roure, but slightly tangential to Iain’s role in OERC
• Oxford already has quite a community for Open Knowledge in Oxford, stuff coming forward on the science side soon
• Currently same problems in Oxford as elsewhere: not enough communication between different levels of hierarchy. Note, however, that Oxford is looking for a digital humanities champion: perhaps an internal candiate only, but this a process we should watch

OpenGLAM-dev? / Identity of this call

• This is connected to the perennial musing about whether there are any other humanities projects lurking
• If we move to a more dev-orientated list we must be careful that focus on projects doesn’t alienate parts of the audience.
• A solution to this could be to cycle around between projects, and let the call work as an arena for both showcasing and feedback for specific problems
• There was some concern that such reorientation of the call would distinguish us from GLAM but then overlap with Labs. This could be overcome by making the session accessible to a wide(r) audience.
• Lieke told us that this wouldn’t overlap with OpenGLAM, which tends to be about policy, events and updates from specific countries
• So perhaps we should try and organise a big quarterly call where people come and show their ideas and hack ‘together’
• In the short term, next month’s call can test out this format with ‘open gravestones’ discussion

Open Humanities Awards

• Info: http://openhumanitiesawards.org/
• Wondering if any one on list is going to apply: currently no-one as of yet
• Award has been sent to OKF channels, Europeana, OpenGLAM, OpenHum, DigHum departments and lists
• Any further help with promotion is welcome!

Open Gravestones

• https://github.com/todrobbins/Open-Gravestones
• Originally discussed by James and others
• Tod would love feedback and direction (very conceptual at this stage)
  • Open Gravestone Research doc: here
• A first step might be extracting cemetery info from OSM and then encoding it with microdata (Schema.org) and then work out a data model for burial data
  • macro = mapping/plotting the cemeteries on the glove; micro = pinpointing specific remains (graves, urns, memorials, etc.)
• We should organise a one-off OpenGLAM / Open Humanities chat on this project, with a bit of homework to do beforehand
  • Homework could include: look for open source projects which could contribute to this: TimeMapper for example, also PyBossa / Crowdcrafting
  • Some overlap already noted with Open Plaques, and Find A Grave

Update on tasks from last week

• IE: To write a newsletter piece on Textus for OKF blog – todo
• IE: Write documentation – todo
• IE: Create an OKFest proposal – general piece? – done
• IE: Oxford contacts? – done
• IE: Organise next meeting – done
• JHS: Email session proposals to the list and ask for champions – Iain for Panton Principles one (ref. gmail account) – done
• JHS: Email request to list for datasets / tools for the Open Humanities Event – done
• JHS: Post minutes to OH blog – done
• ALL: Send availabilities for Open Humanities event to Lieke – Iain can’t do Saturday 27th September

Next meeting

• Focus on OpenGravestones
• Currently set for Tuesday 10th June, 6pm UK time, 11am Utah time for Tod

TASKS

• IE: push current Textus update out to Labs to see if anyone can help with conflicts
• IE / Jenny Molloy: post data from Oxford Nobel Prize hack
• JL: Send Open humanities Award to Humanist list Done!
• TR: Send out a call on about Open Gravestones on OpenGLAM, OpenHUM, OKLabs, perhaps with starter questions
• JHS: Put these notes online
• IE: Publicise next call with an overview of how it will be structured. Push to Labs, Discuss as well.

PRESENT

• James Harriman-Smith
• Iain Emsley
• Rufus Pollock

AGENDA

• Tasks from last week
• Update on Textus
• Open Knowledge brand changes
• OKCon progress
• Open Knowledge Wiki
• Reorganising Open Humanities WG

Tasks from last week

• IE: To write a newsletter piece on Textus for OKF blog – to do
• IE: Write documentation
• IE: Create an OKFest proposal – general piece? – done
• IE: Oxford contacts? – meeting arranged
• IE: Organise next meeting – done
• JHS: Email session proposals to the list and ask for champions – Iain for Panton Principles one (ref. gmail account) – done
• JHS: Email request to list for datasets / tools for the Open Humanities Event – done
• JHS: Post minutes to OH blog – done
• ALL: Send availabilities for Open Humanities event to Lieke – Iain can’t do Saturday 27th September
• ALL: Hunt out some datasets: Open Shakespeare, BL materials… – ?

Update on Textus

• Viewer is now basically working and we just need to integrate into wordpress: https://github.com/okfn/textus-viewer

Open Knowledge brand changes

• Information about the changes: http://wiki.okfn.org/About_the_Open_Knowledge_brand
• Happy with the logo
• Same gripe about ‘data’ in tagline, also tagline is very clear on ‘activist’ emphasis
• Alt taglines (http://wiki.okfn.org/About_the_Open_Knowledge_brand/tagline_discussion) – current tagline is best of a bad bunch

OKCon progress

• Feedback due next month
• Iain will discuss open humanities principles with Dave de Roure (OERC director) to try and get some momentum ahead of the conference

Open Knowledge Wiki

• What needs doing: http://wiki.okfn.org/Wiki_upgrade_planning
• For now we’ll set up profiles (see link above) and then organise a sprint for the next call

Refocussing the Working Group

• Should OpenHumanities appeal to Open Glam? Yes – would allow us to recross the streams, presenting ourselves as ‘OpenGLAM dev’
• Send out mails to OK Labs and OK GLAM for next month
• Split the call into housekeeping and an interesting discussion of a project to attract more interest
• More people we email, more people we get

AOB

• Event in Oxford/online next week to hunt for public domain publications of Nobel prizewinners
• Next meeting due for 8th May – will be a wiki-updat sprint

Tasks

• IE: Circulate info about Oxford event
• All: Advertise future meetings on Labs list
• IE&JHS: Create OKF wiki profiles
• All: Set up a wiki sprint for next meeting
• JHS: email Iain’s availabilities to Lieke
• IE: Organise next meeting for 8th May 2014
• JHS: brand feedback to Katelyn
• JHS: Publish these minutes

Present

Apologies

Agenda

• Feedback from last week http://humanities.okfn.org/2012/01/18/meeting-2012-01-18/
• Project Updates
• TEXTUS update
• OKFest
• OKF in US

Summary

Last Meeting

• James to follow up on unfinished actions

Project Updates

• Open Shakespeare, now on Github:
• http://github.com/okfn/shakespeare
• http://github.com/okfn/shakespeare-material

• Open Correspondence

• Definitely worth discussing integration with Textus, but HyperNotes might also be a possibility (http://hypernotes.dev.okfn.org/)
• Some of the Open Correspondence data is now in Bibserver, XML into JSON over the weekend
• Perhaps could be tied in with the Dickens anniversary celebrations?

TEXTUS

• Sign up for TEXTUS user testing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEhSTy1rYk9pOFNzbTJZUmt5NDRJZEE6MQ – please circulate
• Tentative slides for tomorrow – https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14Z_LJZYqw86VT2aBhgPToX8z80wH8dfKykvqx-h0pao/edit (not really meant to be stand-alone)
  • Potential danger of defining ‘annotation’ so formally, when the word is used widely and loosely across the OKF?
• More information about TEXTUS
  • https://github.com/okfn/textus
  • http://wiki.okfn.org/Projects/Textus
• TEXTUS emails should be kept on the Open Humanities list, until they become too numerous:
  • http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-humanities
  • http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/humanities-dev
  • Pure philosophy questions will remain on Open Philosophy, in order to insulate the Open Philosophy advisory board

OKF in the USA and elsewhere

• All OKF members should really be signed up and visible on http://okfn.org/members
• One example of USA project is the Annotator: http://okfnlabs.org/annotator/
• THATcamp: lots in the states, and one for SL and JHS to investigate in Luxembourg: http://luxembourg2012.thatcamp.org/

Actions

• ALL: Sign up to http://okfn.org/members
• RP: Fix OS concordancer
• IE: Celebrate Dickens’ birthday? – http://blog.archive.org/2012/02/07/please-sir-i-want-some-more/
• SL: Put documents from Goldsmiths on Open Humanities
• SL: combine Open Humanities and Textus lists
• SL: Open Correspondence & https://republicofletters.stanford.edu/
• JHS / SL: http://luxembourg2012.thatcamp.org/
• JHS: Write Kat and Laura Newman re: OKFest
• JHS: bug sysadmin re: despamming on wiki.openliterature.net – http://trac.okfn.org/ticket/1106
• JHS: Ping Etienne about last month
• JHS: write blog post about repo

Next Meeting: 21st March 2012, 5pm GMT