Ancient MakerSpaces

Rather than presenting a standalone project, I would like to demonstrate a workflow for integrating independently-developed open-access resources to rapidly create annotated editions of lesser-known Latin texts for student use. There is a rich vein to be mined of early modern Latin editions on Google Books, the Internet Archive, and the websites of libraries around the world. One may find a natural history of dragons, a 16th century play based on Heliodorus’ Aethiopica, and a scientific treatise on the exploration of underground volcanic passages.

All About the Ancient World (AATAW) is a continual online lecture series featuring early career researchers (who we define as graduate students and those who have graduated within the last two years) who discuss any aspect of the ancient world.

In this project I analyze ancient scholarly discussions of Trojan War myth in Byzantine Iliad manuscripts. These stories are central to Greek and Roman culture, but ancient critical works (by grammarians such as Aristarchus of Samothrace and Zenodotus of Ephesus) discussing them have been lost.

In this presentation, I want to sketch out two ways in which the Digital Periegesis project is bringing to the fore spatial patterns underpinning Pausanias’s text, using Book 1 as a case study, while also developing digital tools and methods for research into textual geographies more broadly.

This paper presents an analysis of the spatial organization for the early medieval (800 to 1325 CE) saivite pilgrimage landscape in the Hemakuta Hill area of Hampi, Bellary District, Karnataka. The Pampa tirtha (pilgrimage), prior to the foundation of the Vijayanagara Empire (c.1336), is generallly presented as a relatively homogenous, albeit sacred space. Subsequently, the early medieval period is understudied period at Hampi.

The Blast from the Casts project is an interactive online exhibition bringing the Battle Collection of plaster casts of ancient sculpture, currently held by the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, together as a cohesive collection in digital form to make in-depth, up-close, personal interaction with the casts widely accessible to students and the public.

Large-scale data mining of classical literature has facilitated studies of classical intertextuality in recent years of a type previously unimaginable. Projects like Tesserae and the Quantitative Criticism Lab’s Filium allow researchers to compare classical texts and identify lexical similarities, opening new vistas for academic research. However, these tools are often out-of-reach to students at the undergraduate or high school level. I aim to provide a tool more closely aligned in the first instance to the AP Latin curriculum.

Along with the mass of digitized Latin texts now available to researchers for computational analysis, there exists a number of different formats, markup strategies, encodings, and various editorial decisions that can make it difficult to incorporate texts from various sources into research projects without considerable preparatory work. In this workshop, I demonstrate use of CLTK Readers, a Python-based solution to streamlining the process of working with different collections of Ancient Greek and Latin texts.

The project centers around a small focus group of 6-12th grade educators and their feedback on the usage potential of the Yorescape app in their classrooms. Yorescape, a Flyover Zone application (www.yorescape.com), allows users to stream virtual tours of ancient archaeological sites led by experts that include reconstructions of the site’s ancient appearance.

The primary goal of this project is to show the complexity of the trade of Attic and other Greek pottery and the role of traders in relation to workshops through social network analysis (SNA). This is conducted through the encoding trademark and other branding data known for Greek pottery and analyzing it through the program NodeXL. The current focus revolves around the trademark data catalogued and organized into a typology by Alan W Johnston in his Trademarks on Greek Vases (1979) and Trademarks on Greek Vases; Addendum (2006).