Ancient MakerSpaces

The Ugarit Translation Alignment Editor is a web environment that facilitates the creation of manually aligned parallel texts at word-level in historical and low-resourced languages. We currently host 45 languages, including Ancient Greek, Latin, Persian, Arabic, Chinese, Akkadian, Egyptian, Hittite, Hebrew, Georgian, and Armenian, and have over 500 users.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 Digital Archaeology Toolkit (https://osf.io/v54zd/