Women classicists on Wikipedia

Wikipedia, according to its tagline, is “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” – and yet according to the most recent survey only around 14% of the people who actually do edit the English language version are women, and the percentage of its biography pages which are about women is only slightly higher, at c.18%. Increasingly, projects are trying to address this gender imbalance by getting more women involving in editing and by creating and improving more pages about notable women: “Women in Red“, for instance, aims to turn “redlinked” references to women – for pages that don’t yet exist – into existing “bluelinked” ones. To improve the representation of women classicists in particular, the UK Women’s Classical Committee has been running a project called WCCWiki. I thought getting involved would be an interesting way of learning about women in Classics I might not know much about (as well as being a productive way of procrastinating from other writing…), so yesterday I went along to one of their training sessions to find out more about the project.

Dr Emma Bridges explains Wikipedia’s gender imbalance. Photo courtesy of Claire Millington.

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Touring the Balkans with the Ladies of Ploutarchou 9 — From the Archivist’s Notebook

A nice post here from Jack Davis about the travels of two American archaeologists, Ida Thallon Hill and Elizabeth Pierce Blegen, around the Balkans in the 1930s:

Jack L. Davis, Carl W. Blegen Professor of Greek Archaeology at the University of Cincinnati and a former director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (2007-2012), here writes about women travelling alone through the western Balkans in the late 1930s, on the eve of WW II. The […]

via Touring the Balkans with the Ladies of Ploutarchou 9 — From the Archivist’s Notebook

Second call for papers – Diversity of writing systems

Just a reminder of the call for papers for the conference I’m co-organising, ‘Diversity of writing systems: embracing multiple perspectives’ (the 12th international workshop of the Association for Written Language and Literacy). The CfP is open to anyone from any discipline who studies writing systems – whether that’s in classics or linguistic/archaeological studies of other ancient writing systems, contemporary or theoretical linguistics,  digital humanities, sociology, psychology, education and literacy, or anything else I haven’t thought of! Deadline is September 30th, abstracts for both talks and posters are being accepted, and PhD students and early-career researchers are particularly encouraged to apply. Details here.

The ‘oldest text of the Odyssey’?

Image via BBC

There’s been a lot of media excitement in the last few days over the discovery of a clay tablet at the ancient Greek sanctuary of Olympia (home of the original Olympic Games), with 13 lines of the ‘Odyssey’ inscribed on it. It’s certainly a very nice find – unlike in the Late Bronze Age period that I study, inscriptions of any kind on clay tablets are unusual at this point (the 3rd century CE, when Greece was part of the Roman Empire) – though it’s fair to say that most of the excitement has been due to the Homeric text and particularly to the claim that this is the oldest text of any part of the Odyssey. As plenty of other Classicists have been quick to point out, this isn’t actually true – there are plenty of earlier texts of (parts of) the Odyssey, e.g. on papyri from Egypt, and the oldest known example is an inscription on a potsherd from Olbia, modern Ukraine, dating to the 5th century BCE. This is just a quick post to provide some helpful links for anyone wanting to know more about this find:

Here is the original press release from the Greek Ministry of Culture (in Greek).

Here is a blogpost by ‘The Philological Crocodile’ correcting some of the errors that have appeared in a lot of the media reports, and speculating that the inscription could be a votive offering by a rhapsode (a reciter of the Homeric poems).

Here is a very detailed blogpost by ‘Kiwi Hellenist’ with a transcription and annotated photograph, as well as lots more details and a round-up of some of the news stories.

‘Processes of script adaptation and creation in Linear B’ now available online

Last year saw the publication of the first ‘Understanding Relations Between Scripts‘ conference, which focused on the Aegean and Cypriot writing systems – I’m now pleased to be able to make the pre-print of my chapter, ‘Processes of script adaptation and creation in Linear B: the evidence of the “extra” signs’, available online. In it I talk about the group of Linear B signs which can be used to replace some of the syllabary’s ‘core’ signs in certain circumstances – for instance, the writing system doesn’t normally represent the sound /h/, so the core sign a could represent either /a/ or /ha/, but there’s an extra sign a2 that can used specifically for /ha/. I look at the wide range of different reasons why these signs exist in the first place – some were inherited from Linear B’s parent script Linear A, but many of them seem to have been specially invented within Linear B because they would be particularly useful for the kinds of administrative records that it was used to write. If you want to find out more, you can read the paper! It’s freely available in the Cambridge online repository, and also on my academia.edu page. Also, abstracts are currently being accepted for the third Understanding Relations Between Scripts conference, ‘Exploring the Social and Cultural Contexts of Historic Writing Systems’ – any interested researchers should check out the CfP here!

Karpathia the Procrastinating Priestess, and other stories

I recently joked that a priestess called Karpathia, who’s recorded in a Linear B tablet from Pylos as failing to work properly, should be the patron of Twitter, and a lot more people seemed to like the idea of a procrastinating Mycenaean priestess than expected – so I thought I’d write a bit more here about Karpathia and her fellow priestesses, and what we know about them from the Linear B records.

I'm not procrastinating. I'm actively engaging in the disruption of traditional academic narratives via social media.

— Shit Academics Say (@AcademicsSay) June 15, 2015

The Lego Acropolis: history brick by brick

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