Heritage Bytes

WFU Museum of Anthropology Online Artifact Database

Francis Deblauwe — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 18:55:18 +0000

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.

CSA Newsletter

Francis Deblauwe — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 03:38:54 +0000

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.

Digitising Cultural Heritage at the BM

Francis Deblauwe — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 02:21:47 +0000

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

AMNH Explorer

Francis Deblauwe — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 02:25:40 +0000

The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City has just released an iPhone app to serve as a virtual guide to its collection. “Chart your own course at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City with AMNH Explorer—a new app that is part custom navigation system, part personal tour guide for the Museum’s world-famous halls. Providing turn-by-turn directions, AMNH Explorer takes visitors from the edge of the universe to the age of the dinosaurs. Choose from a variety of Museum-designed tours or create your own from a list of popular exhibits, specimens, or artifacts. AMNH Explorer also lets you share your adventures with friends and family by linking directly to your Facebook and Twitter profiles. Download AMNH Explorer now and start planning your next visit or use your iPhone or iPod touch to discover the Museum’s must-sees from anywhere in the world. It’s the new way to find your way at the American Museum of Natural History.”

Maybe somebody can offer us his/her impressions on how useful and user-friendly this app is? Calling on readers with iPhones who can check out this museum…

One Week, One Tool

Francis Deblauwe — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 22:44:36 +0000

The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University organized One Week, One Tool. A Digital Humanities Barn Raising during the last week of July.

… a unique summer institute, one that aims to teach participants how to build an open source digital tool for humanities scholarship by actually building a tool, from inception to launch, in a week. … A short course of training in principles of open source software development will be followed by an intense five days of doing and a year of continued remote engagement, development, testing, dissemination, and evaluation. Comprising designers and developers as well as scholars, project managers, outreach specialists, and other non-technical participants, the group will conceive a tool, outline a roadmap, develop and disseminate an initial prototype, lay the ground work for building an open source community, and make first steps toward securing the project’s long-term sustainability. One Week | One Tool is inspired by both longstanding and cutting-edge models of rapid community development. For centuries rural communities throughout the United States have come together for ‘barn raisings’ when one of their number required the diverse set of skills and enormous effort required to build a barn—skills and effort no one member of the community alone could possess. In recent years, Internet entrepreneurs have likewise joined forces for crash ’startup’ or ‘blitz weekends’ that bring diverse groups of developers, designers, marketers, and financiers together to launch a new technology company in the span of just two days. One Week | One Tool will build on these old and new traditions of community development and the natural collaborative strengths of the digital humanities community to produce something useful for humanities work and to help balance learning and doing in digital humanities training.

How did it turn out? Find out more at these blogs:

O yeah, the project result was Anthologize: “a free, open-source, plugin that transforms WordPress 3.0 into a platform for publishing electronic texts. Grab posts from your WordPress blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly within Anthologize. Then outline, order, and edit your work, crafting it into a single volume for export in several formats, including—in this release—PDF, ePUB, TEI.”

Cross-posted from the Digging Digitally blog

Online archaeological-site catalogs

Francis Deblauwe — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 22:12:34 +0000

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.”

Mobile learning/research user needs

Francis Deblauwe — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 18:16:12 +0000

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

Francis Deblauwe — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 21:36:37 +0000

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!

Tutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation

Francis Deblauwe — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 03:48:38 +0000

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!

Documenting and Sharing the “Living Art” of Iraq

Sarah Whitcher Kansa — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 21:59:31 +0000

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.