News and opinions

• July 13, 2016: Simple text exchange with 82XF, version 2. On Monday, I suggested that a convention for a simple delimited text format could capture the complete OHCO2 model of...
• July 11, 2016: A simple text-interchange format. OHCO2 is an abstract model for citable texts. It views texts as a set of citable nodes with four distinct properties...
• July 02, 2016: The data/acceptor/analyzer pattern for parsing morphology. Finite state transducers (FSTs) are the core of a system for parsing Latin morphology. This post serves to illustrate...
• April 09, 2016: Introducing Kanónes, a system for building Greek morphological parsers. Kanónes is a system for building Greek morphological parsers. It is distinguished from other automated parsing syste...
• March 28, 2016: Comparing Unicode strings with listutils 1.1.0. Yesterday, I pushed two gists that use the listutils package to compare strings. Since a Unicode string can by defi...
• March 27, 2016: Gists for LCS and SCS of two strings. I’ve published a pair of gists with groovy scripts using the listutils package to find the LCS and SCS of two strings...
• March 26, 2016: Comparing ordered lists. Scholarly discussions of texts often depend on readings or analyses that can be organized in lists (passages of the I...
• March 25, 2016: listutils 1.0 released. I’ve released a 1.0.0 version of my listutils package. Like the previous versions, it supports comparing and diff’in...
• March 22, 2016: 1. Introducing Latin morphology with SFST tools. The introductory post in this series proposed four requirements for a Latin parsing system, and defined two key techn...
• March 21, 2016: Specifications and prerequisites for a system for parsing Latin morphology. For most of this academic year, I’ve been working on a system for parsing Greek morphology. The mutual interaction o...
• February 12, 2016: Ode on a Grecian URN. One conversation I have repeatedly centers around why we should use technology-indepedent URNs for scholarly citation...
• January 21, 2016: An uncounted Linux user. The Linux Counter Project tries to estimate the number of Linux users world wide. It invites all kinds of linux use...
• December 21, 2015: Sort Greek in the Attic alphabet. Version 1.0.3 of the attic library corrects the behavior of sorting Greek in Attic orthography. Only alphabetic char...
• December 19, 2015: Type like Thucydides. I’ve added some specifications to the library for working with Greek in the Attic alphabet. The initial announcement...
• December 15, 2015: Semantic versioning for documentation. Why we need semantic versioning for documentationSemantic versioning is not just an easy, logical way to assign versi...
• December 09, 2015: Library for Greek in Attic alphabet. I’ve added a new orthographic module to the greeklang project. The attic library supports working with texts in the...
• November 25, 2015: Inheritance in code: the rich get richer. Because the GreekNode class of the greeklang foundational libraries extends the XmlNode class in the groovy XML utili...
• November 24, 2015: Serializing parsed XML trees in xmlutils 1.2. It is delightfully easy to work with parsed XML in groovy; it’s much less easy to write a parsed node as an XML strin...
• November 16, 2015: Greek, sortable, and in XML. The 2.x series of the greeklang library adds a GreekNode class for working with XML data when text nodes contain vali...
• November 14, 2015: Utilities for working with parsed XML trees. Groovy’s XML parser is a convenient way to get an in-memory parse tree from an XML source like a file or a string of ...
• November 09, 2015: Road trip! Following my students remotely. On Friday, our teams at HC MID were smaller than usual. Of our new quartet studying manuscripts with chants written ...
• November 02, 2015: Working with canonically citable texts at scale. I’ve been reading a lot about Apache Spark recently, and am intrigued with its potential to open up distributed compu...
• October 28, 2015: 1.1.0 release of greeklang foundational libraries. The 1.1.0 release of greeklang foundational libraries adds a new Syllable class with static methods for dividing a Gr...
• October 27, 2015: 1.0.1 release of greeklang foundational libraries. This release fixes minor bugs in working with strings representing fractional values in Milesian notation.Unlike the ...
• October 24, 2015: 1.0.0 release of greeklang foundational libraries. I have organized the greeklang project into three sections managed as gradle subprojects: foundational libraries for...
• October 17, 2015: The best software for Classics you've never heard of?. I first learned about Harry Schmidt’s Parsley a little over a year ago, when, in preparing for work on a new Greek mo...
• September 08, 2015: Atom: an editor for digital humanists?. This summer, github’s Atom, “a hackable text editor for the 21st century,” went public with an official 1.0 release. ...
• September 07, 2015: Reflecting on labor in the HC MID Club. On this Labor Day, I picked up Barry Schwartz’ book Why We Work, and before I reached the end of page 2, was astonish...
• July 31, 2015: Everything I know about manuscripts in one minute. When I first learned about the public radio program The Academic Minute, it sounded like a joke. Summarize a complex...
• July 07, 2015: Things I wish all my students would read. I added a new page to the jumble of material on this site: “A few things I wish all my students would read.”
• July 06, 2015: Automatic XML validation simutaneously in two validation systems. Contributors to the Homer Multitext project use software preinstalled in a virtual machine running Ubuntu 14.04 to va...
• July 02, 2015: Scholarly kitchen. I recently noticed this provocative post by Kent Anderson, Publisher at AAAS/Science. I understand the individual wo...
• May 27, 2015: Good news for Latin in the US?. Greg Crane points out the alarming drop in Ancient Greek and Latin enrollments in US postsecondary institutions in an...
• April 18, 2015: Updates to greeklang. Version 0.0.9 of the greeklang computational system for working with ancient Greek includes minor bug fixes and expan...
• March 22, 2015: DH preflight checklist. I’ve started a new repository with a simple checklist of key points to know before starting a digital scholarship pro...
• March 21, 2015: Convert XML texts from beta code to Unicode. Classicists have been active digitally since before the first Unicode standard, and long-standing projects like Perse...
• March 18, 2015: Fractional numbers in greeklang 0.0.5. I’ve added initial specifications for working with fractional values in “Milesian” notation to the greeklang library:...
• March 15, 2015: Milesian numbers in greeklang 0.0.3. I’ve added initial specifications for working with numeric values in “Milesian” notation to the greeklang library (sp...
• March 07, 2015: listutils 0.1.0. I pushed up a 0.1.0 version of listutils, utilities including comparison and diff’ing of ordered lists of any type of...
• February 15, 2015: Atom feed added. You can keep up with updates to this site with this atom feed: http://neelsmith.github.io/atom.xml
• February 14, 2015: Welcome!. Introducing a new and reorganized version of this site, with a selection of my openly available work on github. (The...