Abstracts

Unit 1: Digital Approaches to Language and Literature (8:10am to 10:15am)

Chiara Palladino (Furman University) and Joshua Kemp (Furman University), “Ugarit: a tool for Translation Alignment on Ancient Languages”

We will present on the Ugarit Translation Alignment editor and its applications. Ugarit is a web environment that facilitates the creation of manually aligned parallel corpora, and it is specifically designed for historical and low-resourced languages. The aligned corpora are published online and used for pedagogy and integration with reading interfaces. The resulting data are currently used in research, for the systematic comparison of translations, the study of textual transmission and cross-linguistic dynamics, and for the creation of dynamic lexica. Moreover, the aligned corpora in Ancient Greek have been used for the development of a Language Model for automatic alignment with modern translations. A short presentation will be propedeutic to a demo, where participants will be able to test the tool and its functionalities.

Anna Conser (University of Cincinnati), “Pitch Accents and Melody in Greek Tragedy”

I have developed software to analyze the melodic patterning of pitch accents in Greek lyric texts. In the ancient musical documents that survive with music notation, the rises and falls of the melody are often coordinated with the pitch contours of the word accents according to set principles. I have created a suite of python algorithms that apply these principles to texts with no melodic notation. In the case of Greek tragedy, my software compares the texts of paired stanzas (originally sung to the same music) and calculates various statistics on their musical qualities. This accentual data, alongside the more standard application of metrical analysis, allows researchers to interpret lyric texts within the context of their partially reconstructed musical settings. It also shines new light on differences between authors and the development of musical styles across time. In the future, I hope to develop a portal to make these tools available to literary scholars with no coding knowledge.

Ana Santory Rodríguez (University of Michigan), “Mapping Myth: Medea on the World’s Stage”

This project essentially uses software designed for creating “mind maps,” diagrams representing concepts linked to and arranged around a central idea — in this case, Medea – in order to map the character throughout time, space, and media. Thus, the intersecting patterns of her reception are revealed by a kind of living illustration: a map that moves as research does, allowing the user to both zoom in to trace a specific line of thought and zoom out to see it within a wider context. I hope this visualization of connections enriches seasoned scholars and incipient students alike, simply by challenging the hierarchy of traditional linear approaches to reception.

Charles Pletcher (Columbia University), “Write what you know: Enabling open, collaborative publications with commercial tools”

Open Commentaries, a project of the New Alexandria Foundation, aims to allow scholars, educators, and enthusiasts to annotate and edit public domain texts. Previously, Open Commentaries maintained its own editing and reading environments, which, while accessible to editors and non-technical users, took resources away from the platform’s core functionality of publishing digital editions. It also required editors to translate their work from their usual environment — Microsoft Word vel sim. — to Open Commentaries’ writing tools. Moreover, source texts came mainly via TEI XML and required specialized knowledge and expertise to make full use of them. Recent advancements in the Open Commentaries platform have prioritized allowing editors to write their commentaries and editions using the tools that they know best, like Microsoft Word, Open/LibreOffice, and Markdown. (Gregory Nagy’s “A Pausanias Reader in Progress” is currently being written in Microsoft Word, with updates being synced seamlessly to the Open Commentaries platform.) These commentaries can include not only textual data but also rich and interactive data like images, maps, and cross-references to other works or named entities. By leveraging syncing technologies and the open specifications behind these formats, Open Commentaries shortens the feedback loop between editing and publishing on the platform, allowing more people to take part in the collaborative process of producing online editions.

Unit 2: Legacy Data and Collections Accessibility (10:25am to 11:30am)

Emily Pearce Seigerman and Benjamin Hellings (Yale University Art Gallery), “Magnifying the Minute: Numismatics and digital accessibility at the Yale University Art Gallery”

In May 2022, the Yale University Art Gallery opened its inaugural gallery dedicated to the display of numismatic objects. As part of the gallery design, the curatorial department was faced with an age-old question: how do you effectively display an object with multiple sides? Being the only curatorial department, at the time, seeking digital offerings to enhance the visitor experience, the Bela Lyon Pratt Gallery of Numismatics became the Art Gallery’s first exhibition space to utilize mobile-triggered technology to help depict the full contexts of displayed objects. Using Smartify, a UK based web application geared towards the museum experience, visitors are able to more deeply engage with objects, particularly coins, by viewing their obverse and reverse faces in exacting high resolution and detail. In addition to deeper magnification and images, the collection’s curators can now utilize Smartify’s capabilities to create pedagogically motivated content, with accessibility at the forefront, geared towards building knowledge of and appreciation for these minute masterpieces, for our visitors.

Tyler Jo Smith (University of Virginia), “Kerameikos.org: Digital Accessibility for Ancient Greek Vases”

Considering the importance of Greek figure-decorated pottery for researchers in the fields of Classics, archaeology, art history, and history, there exist a variety of accessible databases within both museum collections and digital archives, among them the Beazley Archive Pottery Database. While the basic ideas underlying the classification of ancient Mediterranean pottery are shared across languages (e.g., shape, production place, painter, potter, iconography, etc.), there are no firm standards for describing, representing, and publishing pottery datasets on the web. Additionally, due to the wide variation in the native languages of these databases (and lack of consistent, controlled vocabulary even among databases of the same languages), it is difficult to conduct research across multiple systems. Kerameikos.org is a thesaurus that seeks to define the intellectual concepts of Greek pottery according to open web standards. Rather than relying on textual strings as controlled vocabulary (the painter, Exekias, in most Western scholarship is transliterated to 埃克塞基亚斯 in Chinese), concepts are represented by HTTP URIs, following the definition of Linked Open Data (LOD) by Tim Berners-Lee: https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html. By definition these concepts link to identical concepts in other information systems. Kerameikos.org aims to provide a pathway to normalisation for many pottery databases, enabling the large-scale data aggregation and subsequent analyses that are not currently possible within the discipline. While the project is focused primarily on the definition of concepts within Athenian black- and red-figure pottery, Kerameikos.org is extensible toward the definition of concepts in other fields of pottery studies.

Allison Sterrett-Krause (College of Charleston), “A Commercial Low-code Database for Legacy Archaeological Data”

We developed a database system for artifacts from a legacy archaeological project (excavated in the early 1990s) using Caspio, a commercial low-code/no-code cloud-based data management platform. The primary research aim of the project was to allow for pandemic-related cross-platform access to data during data entry and analysis; long term aims include digital data archiving. Pedagogically this project offered students in information systems and archaeology opportunities to collaborate on developing a fully-functional data system.

Anne Hunnell Chen (Bard College), “The International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive”

The International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, is aimed at reassembling and recontextualizing archaeological information from the ancient site of Dura-Europos (Syria). Using Linked Open Data, and the Wikidata platform specifically, IDEA is working to digitally reassemble materials in separate collections across the world, provide more transparent and easily intelligible context for buildings and artifacts discovered at a time when interest was more in unearthing museum-quality pieces than in highlighting contextual relationships and assemblages, and finally, to improve inequalities in access to the information and materials from the site that are held in the West. In an AMS 2024 presentation, we propose to introduce IDEA’s methods and recent work on archival photographs, papyri, inscriptions, and graffiti from the site. At the heart of this work lies the development of EpiDoc XML and Wikidata models for organizing and publishing ancient written documents which, building on the current epigraphic and papyrological standards and integrating data in a digital urban gazetteer, aim to improve the accessibility and searchability of the rich multilingual heritage of Dura-Europos (including but not limited to Greek, Latin, and Aramaic).

Unit 3: Teaching Made 3D (11:40am to 12:50pm)

Dorian Borbonus (University of Dayton), and Niels Bargfeldt (University of Copenhagen), “At home, visiting graves in Rome: VR environments as spaces for virtual collaboration”

With data from a digital mapping campaign of funerary monuments in Rome we are working on a visualization and multi-person VR environment with integrated tools aimed at remote access and collegial collaborations. The past few years have highlighted for society in general the need to maintain work and continue development during periods where meeting physically for collaboration is not an option. However, for archaeological research conducted on an international scope these issues are not new, and the access to sites, objects, and colleagues has always been hampered by distanceand funds. Using survey data from the cemetery Necropoli di S. Paolo on the Via Ostiense outside of Rome that were gathered by this team under the auspices of the Sovrintendenza Capitolina we have collaborated on the analysis and interpretation of the site from locations across the Atlantic – one of us is based in the States and the other in Europe. Our collaboration has been facilitated by the survey data itself as we have built digital visualizations of the cemetery for our analysis of the site. A scientific report of the work, work process, and findings of the project has just been published (Bargfeldt & Borbonus 2022). Additionally, we are working on a VR environment that gives multiple researchers access to the virtual site at the same time. Within this environment we are experimenting with various tools. Our VR environment will allow researchers from widely different regions to remotely access an archaeological site together, call in other specialist, and collaborate on relevant questions. The VR environment also has the potential to be converted into dissemination and learning scenarios for a wider public.

Michelle Martinez (Walnut Hills High School), “Using TinkerCAD in 7-12”

This project aims to bring the topography and city of Rome alive to students in a Latin classroom. This project was done primarily with students aged 12-13 over a one month period of time. The primary goal is to help students envision and interact with the material aspects of the ancient world. We spend a lot of time reading Latin when in a class focused on language acquisition, but the ACL and ACTFL Joint Standards on Latin include cultural competency as well. In language classrooms we often speak about the three Ps: products, practices, and perspectives and how these interact to give a student an idea of ‘culture’ as a whole. This project seeks to put students in the driver’s seat: researching a building or an object, planning how to recreate said object, and then executing this

Alex Elvis Badillo (Indiana State University) and Marc N. Levine (University of Oklahoma), “A virtual exploration of art and architecture at the prehispanic capital of Monte Alban through edify’s VR learning platform”

Our goal is to create a VR environment, accessible via computer or headset, where students can explore, manipulate, reconfigure, and annotate large stone slabs bearing hieroglyphic texts and iconography from the Prehispanic capital of Monte Alban. Located in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, Monte Alban is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that is visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists each year. Monte Alban was initially founded around 500 BC and is widely recognized as one of Mesoamerica’s first urban centers. For decades, archaeologists have debated a host of questions regarding Monte Alban’s initial founding, political growth, and the role of warfare and religion in these development. Interpretation of the site’s hundreds of carved stone monuments is critical to this scholarly work.

Prior to engaging in the VR experience, students will be primed with a set of scholarly articles presenting the major debates concerning Monte Alban’s origins and the role that carved inscriptions from Building L play in these debates. Then, students will engage in a VR lesson, either teacher- or student-led, that transports them to Monte Alban where they can virtually experience and interact with the site’s monumental center.