A nice article (also available as pdf) in the news section of the recently-revamped Archaeological Institute of America website introduces the Museum of Anthropology Online Artifact Database at Wake Forest University (Winston-Salem, NC).
“The Museum of Anthropology’s collections of approximately 28,000 archaeological and ethnographic objects represent ancient and contemporary traditional non-Western cultures from around the world. … The collections are used for teaching university and K–12 students, in public outreach, for long-term exhibits and loans to other institutions, and are the basis of scholarly publications and academic theses.”
“Three successive grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ Museums for America program funded the three phases of this digital database project. The purpose of Phase 1 was to create a new computerized database of the Museum of Anthropology’s collections of archaeological and ethnographic objects so that the staff and public could access useful and accurate records of all objects quickly and effectively.”
“In Phase 2 we updated the computerized database and integrated photos of objects so that staff and members of the public were able to access accurate records and images of all objects quickly and effectively though the web, using Visual Re:discovery for Internet software.”
“The overall goal of Phase 3 was to provide broad public access through the web to cataloguing information and digital images for the archival collection.”
At first sight, this database is easy to navigate. The entries have good photos, the descriptive text is to the point, short but complete. The browse function is a little odd, e.g., when using “Iraq” as a country, it shows the results for “Irian Jaya (Indonesia),” the next country category alphabetically after the absent Iraq… Overall though, a nice online database it is.
Posted in Reviews.
Tagged with Africa, anthropology, archaeology, Asia, database, Mesoamerican, museum, site review, the Americas, user communities, user needs.
I’d like to draw attention to a resource probably known to some of our readers but not all: the CSA Newsletter. According to the CSA website, “the Center for the Study of Architecture … is devoted to advancing the use of computers, computer technologies, and digital information technologies in the service of architectural history, archaeology, and related disciplines that explore our common heritage.” The triannual newsletter offers a wealth of thoughts, reviews and information. A few examples of interesting articles in the latest issue, XXIII, 1 (April 2010):
- Tony Austin, “ADS+ and Fedora Commons“: ADS+ stands for Enhancing and Sustaining the Archaeology Data Service Digital Repository (see the ADS review in this blog);
- Harrison Eiteljorg, II, “Designing Scholarly Web Sites“: “Should we try to look more au courant, or does that matter?”;
- Harrison Eiteljorg, II, “The Scholarly Apparatus: When Should It Be There?“: “Looking about on the web I have found plentiful examples of signed and unsigned material. There seems to be no standard, and often the difference is between a web item that has a paper counterpart (and therefore a defined author?) and one that does not. Does that reflect the kinds of materials now available or a new sensibility? Indeed, it has been suggested that I am simply betraying my age by expecting the web to continue a tradition tied to print.”
Besides the customary keyword search, there is also an index of articles from the newsletter since 1995 grouped by broad theme, e.g., use of electronic media in the humanities.
Posted in Reviews.
Tagged with archaeology, architecture, site review.
A study day at the British Museum
Saturday 4 September, 09.55–16.30
Stevenson Lecture Theatre
Free, booking advised
As well as revolutionising modern work and social life, digital technology is also transforming cultural heritage management. The power to store, organise and distribute vast quantities of complex data makes it possible to do things that only 20 years ago were dreams.
This study day brings together a selection of projects that embrace the potential of the digital world to broaden and enrich access to the world’s shared cultural heritage.
| 09.55 |
Welcome
Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum |
| 10.00–10.30 |
The British Museum collection online
Julia Stribblehill, British Museum |
| 10.30–11.00 |
The international Dunhuang project
Sam van Schaik, British Library |
| 11.00–11.30 |
Tea break |
| 11.30–12.00 |
Vindolanda tablets online
Alan Bowman, University of Oxford |
| 12:00-12:30 |
Integrating digital papyrology
Gabriel Bodard, King’s College, London |
| 12.30–13.30 |
Lunch break |
| 13.30–14.00 |
The Ashurbanipal library project
Jon Taylor, British Museum |
| 14.00–14.30 |
The Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus
Steve Tinney, University of Pennsylvania |
| 14.30–15.00 |
Persistent digital archives in cuneiform research and cultural heritage management
Robert K Englund, UCLA |
| 15.00–15.30 |
Tea break |
| 15.30–16.00 |
The Syrian Digital Library of Cuneiform
Bertrand Lafont, CNRS, Paris |
| 16.00–16.30 |
Cooperation among research institutes and museums: the digital edge
Jürgen Renn, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin |
Posted in Events.
Tagged with archaeology, China, cultural heritage, cuneiform, database, Greco-Roman, Mesopotamia, museum.
I’d like to point out two examples of what I would call online archaeological-site catalogs, i.e., databases that provide brief but to-the-point info on as many sites as possible of a specific region. The first example is the Delta Survey. An information centre for the archaeological sites of Lower Egypt, an initiative of the Egypt Exploration Society (UK). “Information on the archaeological sites of the Delta is presented here in the form [of] web-pages containing an alphabetical listing of sites. Where a substantial amount of information is available, or photographs of the site exist, links are provided to supplementary pages.”
The second “catalog” is Archaeology in Greece Online/Chronique des fouilles en ligne, an initiative of the British School at Athens and the École française d’Athènes, that joins their individual annual reports on the subject published on paper. “The database is organised by region, searchable both by toponym and via maps. Searches using key words and chronological terms lead directly into site records in either French or English. Alternatively, individual researchers may pursue their particular interests through free text searches.”
Posted in Reviews, survey.
Tagged with archaeology, database, Egypt, Greece, site review.
The Comité International pour l’Égyptologie/International Committee for Egyptology (CIPEG, a committee of ICOM) provided the impetus for the Global Egyptian Museum project (GEM). It is “an international electronic database of Egyptian objects as a tool for scholarly research” (14,975 entries) but also including a version geared toward the general public (1,340 entries). “The aim of the GEM is not to replace or substitute local databases, but to be an extension and supplement of them. Now that most museums have digitized their old file cards in any database system, it should not be too difficult and complicate [sic] to convert object information from a local system to the GEM. Both data entry and retrieval occur with the help of the Multilingual Egyptological Thesaurus, which CIPEG concluded as the standard for electronic databases in 1996. In this new version of the GEM the hierarchy of the main attributes is shown clearly. Data entry can be done in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. The Arabic version will be available soon as well. For free text we prefer and recommend English.” It’s well designed and user friendly. Check it out!
Posted in Reviews.
Tagged with archaeology, database, Egypt, museum, site review.
An article in The Guardian (UK)—tip of the hat to Heather Baker—drew my attention to an Egyptological gem: the Tutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation website. This labor of love by a team led by Jaromir Malek of Oxford University, started in 1993 and finally in sight of the finish, “is ambitious in its scope but simple in its aims: to make the complete records of Howard Carter’s excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamun available on these web pages. It is astonishing, but no longer acceptable, that some eighty years and thousands of articles, hundreds of books, and dozens of exhibitions after the discovery of the tomb, this most famous event in the history of Egyptian archaeology has not yet been fully published. The documentation is presented in its original form and all, scholars, interested members of the public and school students, can consult it. We hope that this will help bring the knowledge and love of ancient Egypt to everybody.” Surely an example to follow in any field of archaeology!
Posted in Reviews.
Tagged with archaeology, data sharing, database, Egypt, user communities.
Yesterday’s New York Times Art & Design section features a piece entitled “
Iraq’s Modern Art Collection, Waiting to Re-emerge.” This article provides an excellent overview of the tragic fate of Iraq’s modern art that has inspired the creation of the Modern Art Iraq Archive (MAIA).
MAIA is a collaborative effort between
Nada Shabout, an assistant professor of art history at the University of North Texas, and researchers at the
Alexandria Archive Institute (AAI) and UC Berkeley. Since 2003, Prof. Shabout, who is the project lead, has been documenting artwork destroyed and looted from the Iraqi Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad. In 2009, she teamed up with the AAI to create an online, open access system to share and further document the works. For many of the works, further documentation by the public is critical, as many were never properly accessioned into the collection… meaning that the only record that these works ever existed in the museum is in the memories of the people themselves. Thus, key features of the MAIA system will be user contributions and tools to easily browse and broadcast the content elsewhere on the Web. Funded by an
NEH/IMLS Digital Humanities Start-Up grant (under the name “OMACI”), the MAIA system incorporates elements from two open source systems,
Omeka and
Open Context. MAIA will be be available in English and Arabic and will be online in September 2010. The New York Times article also offers a poignant
video about the current state of Iraq’s “living art.” More information on the MAIA project can be found in the
abstract for the MAIA project presentation at the
Digital Humanities 2010 conference.
Posted in Projects.
Tagged with archives, art history, digital humanities, Iraq, looted art, modern art.
