SCS-33: AncientMakerSpaces (Workshop, Joint Session)

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.

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.

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 distance and funds.

Animating Antiquity is a classroom-based project where students design their own VR experiences related to Roman art and architecture. Separate groups of students were assigned four different topics--Death, the Roman House, the Roman Forum, and Entertainment Venues--and in a group format devised a VR experience that was meant to be educational, entertaining, immersive, and interactive.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.