Abstracts

Unit 1 (8:00am - 9:05am)

• Konstantinos Kopianos (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens), “ArchaeoCosmos. Historical Geography of the Mediterranean and the Near East from the Prehistory to Late Antiquity”

The ArchaeoCosmos Portal is a hub where parallel and collaborating research programs of the members of the Department of History and Archeology of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece) and other researchers are hosted, with an open philosophy and structure. It is being implemented on ArcGIS Enterprise and PostgreSQL. Its main aim is to create an interactive digital map, which will eventually contain all archaeological sites (from Prehistory to Late Antiquity) in the Mediterranean area and the Near East. Already a total of 33,669 sites have been edited and reviewed. Since 2020 ArchaeoCosmos has been part of the Center of Excellence “Digital Humanities” of National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece).

• Anne Chen and Kyle Conrau-Lewis (Yale University), “Yale Digital Dura-Europos Archive”

Artifacts excavated at the critically important archaeological site of Dura-Europos (Syria) are currently dispersed into collections across the world. The Yale Digital Dura-Europos Archive (YDEA) is aimed at using Linked Open Data (LOD) to reassemble and recontextualize the site’s archaeological data, in an effort to make the site and its artifacts more readily intelligible and discoverable, both for specialist and non-specialist audiences. In this demonstration of a work-in-progress web application powered by Wikidata, we will illustrate LOD’s potential to mitigate challenges presented by datasets with complex provenance histories and physical dispersal among distinct institutions. Included among these challenges is the vexing issue of how to easily locate information relevant to a location or object when naming traditions have varied over time due to historiographic factors or multilingual archival practices (ie. Dura = Doura = Dura-Europos = Dura-Europas = Salihiyed; Tower 2 = Tower of the Archers), or objects have received iterative inventory numbers due to institutional reorganization or the physical transferal of objects to a new institution. Additionally, we will also touch on the equity/inclusion/postcolonial considerations that impacted our choice to develop the project backend in Wikidata, and the pedagogical potential that this choice has introduced into the further development of the project.

As of March 2021, the project backend is substantively in place within Wikidata, with access to some 15,000 artifacts currently held in six different institutions. The urban gazetteer for the site, which will serve as the backbone for enabling the visualization of object findspots, is in an advanced state of development with Pleiades and is anticipated for completion in Spring 2021. We have recently contracted with a web development team to build a frontend for the YDEA web application that will enable user-friendly searches and data visualizations powered by Wikidata. The web-development work is slated for completion by early 2022.

• Christopher Motz (University of Cincinnati), “Integrating custom maps into off-the-shelf database programs with Leaflet”

FileMaker, Microsoft Access, and other pieces of off-the-shelf database software are popular because they make it relatively easy to create and use databases. A major shortcoming of these systems, however, is that they have little to no built-in mapping capabilities—a major problem in fields like archaeology and history that regularly deal with inherently spatial entities. In this talk, I will discuss the development and use of a lightweight web map, built with Leaflet, that could be presented as a simple webpage within a FileMaker database. The map was integrated seamlessly: the current database object was automatically highlighted on the map, users could navigate the map and turn layers on and off, and they could click on an object in the map to jump to its record—all without leaving the FileMaker app. This system was developed for an archaeological excavation that was producing spatial data from photogrammetric models in ArcGIS using a relatively complex process, but the Leaflet system that was used to present the resulting spatial data was quite simple. The final system ran on a local network that was not connected to the Internet, functioned smoothly on mobile devices, and required little effort to update data during the season.

Unit 2 (9:15am - 10:20am)

• Robert Consoli (Independent Scholar), “The Mycenaean Atlas Project”

The goal of the Mycenaean Atlas Project is to map every Bronze Age find site and make this information available online free of charge to those interested.  More than 4000 sites are currently mapped.  Along with this database of locations various analytical tools are implemented; elevation analysis, nearest neighbor and intervisibility, chronological charts, and aspect analysis are currently available.  Users can also write out portions of the database that interest them for further analysis.  Each of the 4000+ sites includes a map, a bibliography, and two sections that detail the find type and the relevant chronological period(s).

• Alexandra Ratzlaff (Brandeis University), “Imaging and Imagining Artifacts in a Virtual Environment”

The overarching aim of the Brandeis Techne Group as Residents at the Autodesk Technology Center in Boston is to develop new equipment and methodologies to help push forward the collaboration between technology and the humanities. With a focus on archaeological research and applications, this group seeks to develop new ways of analyzing the material culture of the ancient world. The initial goal of our project was to fabricate a prototype ‘Single Camera Automated Photogrammetry Platform’ (SCAPP) with the final designs and methodology available for reproduction through an open-source platform. The SCAPP is intended to be relatively low-cost and easily reproduced as an alternative to other digital imaging equipment, that often exceeds them in quality or covers gaps they cannot image. The SCAPP allows us to make accurate 3D models of artifacts through non-invasive methods and is a versatile tool that can be used in both the archaeological field and laboratory environment. After the prototype was completed in 2020, the Techne Group explored best practices for modeling ancient materials using artifacts from the Brandeis Classical Artifacts Research Collection (CLARC). The project then moved on to create an interactive Virtual Museum and Ancient Environment in which to view these artifacts in both a museum and ‘contextualized environment’. This process is a collaborative project involving the Techne Group, Brandeis undergraduate and graduates, the Virtual Reality Club and the Brandeis MakerLab. Virtual CLARC represents an opportunity for students to acquire technical skills and interact with ancient artifacts. The Virtual Museum allows us to place our artifacts in dynamic and accessible environments, opening up new possibilities to experience the ancient world.

• Angela Cinalli, “Poeti Vaganti Project”

The main goal of the Poeti Vaganti website is to draw an overview of the cultural movement of the intellectuals and itinerant professionals of the performative arts of the Hellenistic period, organized by the spatial-narrative criteria. The CHS I.T. team is designing this open-access resource aimed at providing addressed tools to scholars but also to a wider audience a new research tool, allowing to envision the twofold focus of the research, consisting in the spatial dimension of the Hellenistic cultural life and the narration of artistic careers in itinere.

This online product breaks down into setting patterns: a/ cross-referenced epigraphic material, b/ a dynamic map of the Hellenistic world; c/ a selected set of search options. The user will be able to select the search-option chronologically, geographically, and thematically. Besides the epigraphic text, the user will dispose of translation, sectional comment, basic bibliography, and a list of clickable keywords leading to related documents. Sources attesting to extra- agonistic and agonistic performances are being mapped in the virtual space of the Hellenistic Greece in order to reconstruct the artistic travels and routes. On this interactive map, intellectually curious eager to enter the conversation on the Poeti Vaganti project can find basic material and engaging synopsis organized by area.

At the Ancient MakerSpaces Panel of the AIA-SCS Annual Meeting 2022, a prototype on the areas investigated thus far in the framework of the project (Delphi, Delos and Cyclades, Boeotia) will be presented. We will give an overview of the website contents and an insight of the web design; we will show how to make full use of the search options, by inscription and on the dynamic map; we will welcome new possible interactions, enquiries, and suggestions for improvement to the materials of the Poeti Vaganti website.

Unit 3 (10:30am - 11:40am)

• Stella Fritzell (Bryn Mawr College), “Mythodikos: Digital Visualization of Mythical People & Places”

Maps allow us to visualize more than just landmarks. They also enable us to consider the migration of people, the history of trade routes, and the exchange of culture. The Mythodikos project, Ancient Greek for “connected to myth”, will create a dataset and searchable map-interface which will allow a student or scholar to consider mythological figures not just as they are associated with particular texts, authors, and traditions of writing, but also as they are connected to various geographical spaces. Unlike traditional forms of scholarship concerned with literature and mythology, which are readily capable of dealing with questions of “Who”, “What”, and even “How”, this mapping project will open up consideration of the question of “Where” a particular mythological figure appears in literary accounts. Mythodikos will allow us to consider the movement of a particular figure throughout space, speculate on the geographical scope in which their story was transmitted, and imagine the connections between certain localities on account of their shared association with a mythological figure.

Mythodikos is currently in the middle stages of its development. Work has been done to develop a text-mining tool using Python and Natural Language Processing methods that can be used to search the Perseus Digital Library Greek corpus for a test set of person-place connections and to record these search results as a preliminary dataset. Current stages of work involve integration of ancient geographical data provided by Pleiades (https://pleiades.stoa.org/) with the current dataset, and development of a preliminary LeafletJS map that draws upon this information, which will be completed by the time of the SCS-AIA 2022 Annual Meeting. Future work (which will likely be ongoing at the time of the meeting) will include expansion of the initial dataset in Greek, and development of a similar framework for incorporating information from Latin texts.

• Anne-Catherine Schaaf, Natalie DiMattia, Augusta Holyfield, Rose Kaczmarek (College of the Holy Cross), “A Composite Model for Scholia Transmission”

This summer, my team and I are examining a diverse set of Iliad manuscripts in order to identify commonalities in the content of their scholia, as part of the ongoing Homer Multitext Project (HMT). As members of this project, we read, transcribe, and edit high resolution images of 10th and 11th century CE Byzantine manuscripts of the Iliad and their scholia to produce diplomatic editions that are publicly available online. These manuscripts are the earliest surviving complete editions of the Iliad, and before the HMT published images of them, were only available by obtaining permission to look at them in the various monasteries and libraries in which they reside. These manuscripts contain fascinating differences and disparities reflecting their origin as oral compositions. Likewise, the scholia of these manuscripts hold centuries worth of fascinating commentary and intellectual debate with roots in 3rd century BCE scholarship from the Library of Alexandria, yet most are untranslated and their content is still unknown. Within these scholia, we can directly see divergent evolution throughout the texts. While most scholia scholarship has explored the differences between manuscripts, this summer we aim to identify textual “units” of scholia content found in multiple manuscripts and trace their diverging and converging paths to understand the transmission of these cultural materials. These “units” have been compressed, expanded, or combined in the different manuscripts because the scholia were creatively modified through transmission, so there is not an obvious linear relationship. Using a new methodological framework, we will create a composite model of the relationships between the scholia using textual analysis like topic modelling, Levenshtein edit distance, and word vectors. While members of our research team have previously applied these models to the text of the manuscripts, this will be the first time the scholia themselves have been analyzed in-depth using modern digital humanities tools.

• Sabrina Higgins (Simon Fraser University), “Peopling the Past Podcast”

Peopling the Past (PtP) is a collaborative digital humanities project run by six archaeologists, historians, and philologists who specialize in the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world. The goal of this initiative is to produce and host open-access multimedia resources for teaching and learning about real people in the ancient world and the real people who study them. Our intended audience ranges from secondary and postsecondary students to interested members of the general public. The project was launched to the public in September 2020.

• Chris S. Saladin (University of Minnesota), “Mapping Greek History: Survey123 and Crowdsourced Mapping in the History Classroom”

In the Spring 2020 semester, students in a Greek history course at the University of Minnesota engaged in a collaborative mapping project that visualized the changing geographies of the ancient Greek world. Students used the platform Survey123 for ArcGIS to enter spatial data gathered from secondary research and primary sources, such as Homer’s Catalogue of Ships and the Athenian Tribute Lists. These entries produced a series of collective geographic datasets that were presented in a master Esri StoryMap and used for both in-class discussion and the final exam. Students not only produced a compelling class project, but also familiarized themselves with ancient geography, wrestled with the challenges of locating ancient places, and became active participants in the creation of digital course content.