Abstracts

Unit 1: Spaces (8am to 9:50am)

Peter J. Cobb (University of Hong Kong) and Juuso H. Nieminen (University of Hong Kong), “Virtual Reality for Spatial and Visual Learning about the Past”

We have been experimenting with virtual reality headsets for teaching students and the public about our archaeological excavation in Armenia. Our field project conducts work in the Vedi River valley of Armenia, where we are studying human life and mobility within the unique constraints and affordances of a mountain-plain intersection. We excavate the 3000-year-old site of the Vedi Fortress whose prominent position encouraged its reuse 1500 years ago. Our goal is to leverage group immersive experiences in coursework or with the remote public to introduce the valley and site, as well as how archaeologists construct knowledge, including our landscape approach. We are specifically interrogating how VR can better support and enhance the spatial and visual learning of the audience. Through embodied experiential learning, within the social context of a group tour, we anticipate that visitors can better gain knowledge about distances, viewsheds, perspectives, scale, mobility, and other topics. Our project is very much a work in progress as we continually refine our models, reconstructions, interactive features, and the ways users experience the virtual space, as well as experiment with new hardware and software.

Robert Stephan (University of Arizona) and Caleb Simmons (University of Arizona), “Bringing the World to You: Pedagogical and Practical Implications for Virtual Reality Course Design in Online Cultural Heritage Education”

This session examines the use of virtual reality as a pedagogical tool in online college classrooms, specifically its ability to provide previously inaccessible global educational experiences to online students. Through a case study, presenters will examine theoretical pedagogical foundations, best practices for VR content creation, and implications for future research. The intended audience is anyone interested in immersive pedagogy, VR environments and their implementation in cultural heritage educational spaces.

Garth Henning (Running Reality), Valentina Mignosa (Università degli Studi di Udine), Stefania De Vido (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice), and Arianna Esposito, (Université de Bourgogne), “Mapping Ancient Sicily, TeMAES, and Running Reality: Exploring Coin and Inscription Data with the Running Reality Toolset”

Mapping Ancient Sicily (MAS) was born out of the need to study ancient Sicily holistically. MAS attempts to overcome the boundaries between disciplines and the fragmentation of evidence. But it also stems from the desire to represent this research on a map and through a user-friendly tool capable of responding to the needs of historical research. MAS aims to unfold spatial and temporal visualizations of the history of different areas of Sicily. To do this, we have worked with the Running Reality (RR) application; we have inserted different categories of evidence in it, geo- and time-referencing them. The categories of objects entered are mainly inscriptions and coins, but other types of evidence (archaeological and literary sources) have been analyzed as well. We decided to start with the area around Mount Etna and to work on the period between the eighth and fifth centuries BCE. To better understand this period, digital tooling was required that could show the intersection of geospatial and non-geospatial data and that could show the data to be analyzed against the wider cultural context of each year. The Running Reality project has built advanced tooling tailored specifically for analyzing digital historical data from this perspective. Inscription data and coin data were analyzed for the period between 600 BCE and 200 BCE to identify and visualize patterns. Experimental techniques were applied including Augmented Reality for visualization of data points in their historical context and Artificial Intelligence / Machine learning to extract structured data on Sicilian settlements from prior narrative research.

The intended audience is Digital Humanists, especially Historians and Archaeologists working on different periods (Greek, Roman, Medieval, etc.), requiring software tooling tailored to their specific needs, i.e.: researchers requiring tooling that handles both geospatial and non-geospatial data sets in one system, including GeoJSON, MF-JSON, JSON-LD, RDF, EpiDOC, CSV, GPX formats; researchers interested in advanced data visualization including interactive online maps, video, and augmented reality; researchers who need to analyze temporal data and imprecise data, especially data not handled well by GIS systems; and researchers who want to extract structured data from narrative data using Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning large language models.

Unit 2: Objects (10am to 11:15am)

Mervenur Sevil Kandemir (Koç University), “Identification of Osteological Information of Archaeological Remains through AI”

The project aims to identify osteological information of archaeological remains, mainly type of bone, with integration of visual data into an AI program. By either scanning or photographing of a bone from archaeological context, the program would give the information related to the type of bone. As the first step of the project, a data pool containing both archaeological and medical examples of bones will be created. If it is possible to reach appropriate data range and the program capability, fragmented bones which are commonly encountered in archaeology would be even identified. This helps archaeologist who do not have a particular expertise in physical anthropology or osteology in identification of the specific type of bone without consulting an expert. The project's intended audience is the group of scholars and researchers who work in archaeology and anthropology and do not have an expertise in osteology.

Michael McGlin (Brandeis University), “Laser cutting and the Ancient World”

This project reproduces ancient documents on a laser cutter. Laser cutting accomplishes two larger goals. It reinforces the interdisciplinary nature of a classical education. Language students can use these documents to learn about grammar, syntax, and spelling, history students about context beyond an author’s historical narrative, and material culture students about the production of and decoration on the object itself. Secondly, these documents are a solution to the problem of access to ancient materials for secondary and higher-education institutions. Laser cutters can democratize access to the ancient world and, through a tactile learning experience, expand student engagement with Greece and Rome. The intended audience for this project are collegiate and secondary education instructors as well as a graduate student audience looking to diversify their approaches towards teaching the ancient world. No previous knowledge of Greek or Latin would be necessary to use these in the classroom.

Unit 3: Texts (11:30am to 1:20pm)

Neel Smith (College of the Holy Cross) and Ashley Terjanian (College of the Holy Cross), “A digital Complutensian Bible”

Our project is inspired by the first multilingual Bible, the six-volume Complutensian polyglot of 1520. Like the Complutensian, we include a Masoretic Hebrew Bible, a Latin Vulgate, a Greek Septuagint and the Aramaic Targum Onkelos. Like the Complutensian, we implement functionality to support readers who have not mastered the languages as well as for new forms of scholarly investigation based on cross-lingual alignment of similar functional features. We present new systems for morphological analysis of Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and show how they allow us to identify overlapping semantic spaces and syntactic structures in the different texts. The project’s intended audience is anyone interested in using digital methods to isolate features of Greek, Latin or Hebrew texts.

Giuliano Sidro (UC Berkeley), Sarah Tew (University of Florida Libraries) ,Todd Hickey (UC Berkeley), Maddie Qualls (UC Berkeley), and Millie You (UC Berkeley), “histpap.info: A New Digital-Edition Illuminating the Early History of Papyrology”

histpap.info is a static website that allows users to browse, search, and view historic correspondence between papyrologists B.P. Grenfell and A.S. Hunt to classical scholar G.J. Smyly concerning the Tebtunis papyri, the largest collection of papyrus texts in the Americas, held by the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri (CTP) at the University of California, Berkeley. The sixty-two pieces of correspondence have been transcribed and encoded manually by a collaborative team that includes undergraduate students, high-level researchers, and a digital humanist. This project was built with Transkribus, OpenSeadragon, libvips, Hugo, and Oxygen XML Editor. Histpap.info is a model not only of a digital edition which increases access to important archival documents but also of a collaborative and interdisciplinary experiential learning project for undergraduate and graduate students, library professionals, and subject-matter experts. The beta version of histpap.info is already live and drawing attention from the academic community. We are currently receiving feedback from interested classicists and will continue to use histpap.info as a teaching and outreach tool. Apart from its notable contributions to accessibility of the archival documents and understanding of the Tebtunis papyri specifically, the project’s foundation in minimal computing, low financial cost and use of largely open-source tools make histpap.info a valuable model for others seeking to develop web-based digital editions and other projects.

Hannah Lents (University of Texas at Austin) and Steven Friesen (University of Texas at Austin), “The Visual Cultures of Revelation”

The book of Revelation is one of the most visually striking books of the New Testament, but interpreters tend either to under- or over-read artifacts and images from the Roman Empire into the text. The Visual Cultures of Revelation (VCR) is a developing Omeka open-access web resource that presents a catalog of artifacts and images from the first to third-century Aegean keyed into the text of Revelation. VCR has two central aims. First, the project seeks to present visual resources available to the text’s early audiences to unsettle modern expectations of the vibrant and often fantastical descriptions of the writer’s visions. For example, would the audience imagine the angel whose trumpet blow conjured hail, fire, and blood from the sky with white feathered wings and a shining halo like a Christmas tree topper? Or might they recall an image like the wingless man climbing Jacob’s ladder painted in the synagogue of Dura Europos?

The second goal is to trouble the exegetical relationship between artifacts and this enigmatic text. The angel from Dura no more explains the literary or theological function of angels in Revelation than the angelic trumpeter explains the presence of the angel in the synagogue. Instead, by providing multiple images of a single term, VCR moves modern viewers away from the old paradigm of searching for a piece of evidence that is allegedly the key to unlocking a particular verse. Instead, we hope to foster an awareness of a range of ancient images that were part of the author's and readers’ world.

VCR has two primary audiences: scholars working on Revelation and instructors and their students in New Testament and related courses. Scholars of Revelation tend to search for artifacts related to either the seven churches addressed in the letter (Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamon, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea) or the Roman Empire in general to either explain the text’s historical context or decipher its bizarre imagery. The site will serve as a finding aid designed to surprise these users with lesser-known artifacts and unexpected juxtapositions of images and text. Similarly, users who teach this text in secular or confessional spaces will be able to use images in their teaching as more than just placeholders on slides. Each image provides information on its provenance and relationship to the text, which will help instructors incorporate these images into their teaching in ways that will help their students learn to work with visually rich texts and objects in more nuanced ways.