Most readers of this blog are involved in some form or another in the design, editing or maintenance of web sites/pages/applications. We usually consider first of all regular users sitting behind a desktop or laptop. However, mobile devices are growing ever more capable of meaningful web surfing. The iPad is just the latest example. Mobile versions of websites as well as web applications are gathering momentum. So what are the possibilities and pitfalls coming our way? In May of next year, one of the attempts to address these issues, the Third International m-Libraries Conference, will take place in Brisbane (Australia). The first-conference proceedings (M-libraries. Libraries on the Move to Provide Virtual Access) are now available for free download.
The Global Egyptian Museum
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.
Tutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation
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.
Documenting and Sharing the “Living Art” of Iraq
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.
Travelers in the Middle East Archive
The Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA) at Rice University in Houston “is a digital archive that focuses on Western interactions with the Middle East, particularly travels to Egypt during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. TIMEA offers electronic texts such as travel guides, museum catalogs, and travel narratives, photographic and hand-drawn images of Egypt, historical maps, and interactive GIS (Geographic Information Systems) maps of Egypt and Cyprus.” Actually, the GIS map feature doesn’t work right now: “1/19/2010: TIMEA’s interactive GIS maps are temporarily unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience.” Here’s hoping it will come back soon. ”In addition, TIMEA provides educational modules that set the materials in context and explore how to conduct historical research.”
Posted in Uncategorized.
Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland
The Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland (CRSBI) is a growing, well-designed database of this particular type of Medieval sculptures in the British Isles (nothing yet for Scotland though). “Significant quantities of previously unrecorded material have come to light in the course of the project, and there are many examples of sculpture that are here being recorded, catalogued and photographed in an academic context for the first time. Concurrent with its academic importance is the project’s role in raising awareness of the British Isles’ rich twelfth-century heritage, helping to ensure its conservation and preservation. Much of the sculpture is exposed to the risk of wear, damage and theft. Records of the sculpture’s condition are invaluable for conservators and the church and heritage bodies responsible for its protection.” I esp. like the possibility of browsing the contents by county via a map interface. Worth a visit.
Posted in Reviews.
New Data Publication in Open Context: Khirbat al-Mudayna al-’Aliya
Interested in the archaeology of Jordan? Check out hot-off-the-press data from Khirbat al-Mudayna al-’Aliya, an early Iron Age settlement in a semi-arid zone of west-central Jordan (co-directed by Bruce Routledge and Benjamin Porter). Start with the project overview and then move on to browse around the project data. A highlight of this project is the pottery database which includes downloadable illustrations of every single sherd. This project also has faunal data authored by Justin Lev-Tov, who has also already published his extensive Hazor zooarchaeological data in Open Context.
Posted in Data publications, Reports.
Online Museums and Indigenous Cultural Heritage
I am starting to explore and use the academia.edu website. I made myself an account and receive notifications of papers uploaded in my fields of interest. I’d like to point an interesting one: “From Loss of Objects to Recovery of Meanings: Online Museums and Indigenous Cultural Heritage” by Jeremy Pilcher and Saskia Vermeylen, in M/C Journal, 11, 6 (2008). A few excerpts:
Traditional methods of displaying Indigenous heritage are now regarded with deep suspicion and resentment by Indigenous peoples … A number of related issues such as the appropriation, ownership and repatriation of culture together with the treatment of sensitive and sacred materials and the stereotyping of Indigenous peoples’ identity … have been identified as the main problems in the debate about museum curatorship and Indigenous heritage.
The technology employed in cybermuseology provides the means by which control over meaning may, at least to some extent, be dispersed … In this way online museums provide the opportunity for Indigenous peoples to challenge being subjected to manipulation by one authoritative museological voice. One of the ways this may be achieved is through interactivity by enabling the use of social tagging and folksonomy …
We regard an important potential benefit of an online museum as the replacement of accessing material through the “unassailable voice” with the multiplicity of Indigenous voices. A number of ways to do this are suggested by a variety of new media artworks, including those that employ a database to rearrange information to reveal underlying cultural positions …
Posted in Uncategorized.
ICONEA’s ICOBASE
The International Conference of Near Eastern Archaeomusicology (ICONEA) maintains an online Database of Middle and Near Eastern Archaeomusicological Data, in short ICOBASE. “It is the receptacle of the iconography, the terracottae, extant instruments, cuneiform texts, and all materials relevant to the subject.” Tags and categories allow for finding relevant entries for, e.g., balag-drums. ICOBASE is still small but growing.
Posted in Uncategorized.
British Museum collections database
The British Museum collections database is getting larger:
“The collections of the Department of the Middle East are now available online on the British Museum website: …
The catalogue includes more than 230,000 objects and inscriptions from the Middle East, ancient and modern. There you will also find relevant objects from ancient Egypt and other parts of the world.
Images are freely available for non-commercial use; for full details please see the website: … Many high-resolution images suitable for print publication are also available through the website.
The online catalogue is a work in progress. It brings together information from registers, catalogues, card files and other sources. Much information is still to be entered, and many entries require updating, correction or improvement. In addition, not all entries are yet available. The remaining entries will appear soon, however.”
Posted in Uncategorized.