ICS02: 4. Annotating secondary materials

Sunoikisis Digital Classics, Spring 2019

Session 4. Linking and annotating secondary materials: case study of Wood Diaries and Palmyra

Thursday January 31, 16:00 UK = 18:00 EET

Convenors: Jen Baird (Birkbeck) & Gabriel Bodard (Institute of Classical Studies)

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/YmYSL0vWmew

Slides: https://github.com/SunoikisisDC/SunoikisisDC-2018-2019/raw/master/SunoikisisDC_2019_4_Baird%2BBodard.pdf

Session outline

Following from the introduction to the Recogito tool and geographical annotation in the previous session, we shall discuss an in-progress project: Digitizing and Annotating the Wood Notebooks (DAWN), based on a set of 18th century materials in the Hellenic and Roman Library's rare books collection. We shall present some further possibilities for annotating both transcribed texts and page images, and discuss the concepts of free-form disambiguation (using "folksonomy" or online vocabularies), and consider the potential for this project to engage a public with an interest in Middle Eastern antiquities in crowd-sourced or community-focussed annotation—including especially annotation of features relevant to local residents and other non-academic participants who may have narratives we don't know we're missing.

Seminar readings

• Bonacchi, Chiara. “Digital Media in Public Archaeology.” In Key Concepts in Public Archaeology, edited by Gabriel Moshenska, 60–72. London: UCL Press, 2017. Available: http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1574530/1/Key-Concepts-in-Public-Archaeology.pdf
• Dallas, Costis. “Curating Archaeological Knowledge in the Digital Continuum: From Practice to Infrastructure.” Open Archaeology 1.1 (2015). Available: https://doi.org/10.1515/opar-2015-0011

Further reading

• Baird, J.A., and L. McFadyen. 2014. “Towards an Archaeology of Archaeological Archives.” Archaeological Review from Cambridge 29 2: 14–32.
• De Cesari, C. 2015. “Post-Colonial Ruins: Archaeologies of political violence and IS.” Anthropology Today 31 6: 22–26. doi:10.1111/1467-8322.12214.
• Dunn S & Hedges M (2012), "Crowdsourcing Scoping Study: Engaging the Crowd with Humanities Research." Arts and Humanities research COuncil. Available: https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/5786937/Crowdsourcing_connected_communities.pdf
• Harmanşah, Ö. 2015. “ISIS, Heritage, and the Spectacles of Destruction in the Global Media.” Near Eastern Archaeology 78 3: 170–177.
• Jones, C.W. 2018. “Understanding ISIS’s Destruction of Antiquities as a Rejection of Nationalism.” Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies 6 1: 31–58.
• Kamash, Z. 2017. “‘Postcard to Palmyra’: bringing the public into debates over post-conflict reconstruction in the Middle East.” World Archaeology 49.5 : 608-622. doi:10.1080/00438243.2017.1406399.
• Milligan, I. (2016). “Lost in the Infinite Archive: The Promise and Pitfalls of Web Archives.” International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 10 1 (March 1): 78–94. doi:10.3366/ijhac.2016.0161.
• Munawar, N. 2017. “Reconstructing Cultural Heritage in Conflict Zones: Should Palmyra be Rebuilt?” EX NOVO Journal of Archaeology 2: 33–48.
• Putnam, L. 2016. “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast.” The American Historical Review 121 2 (April 1): 377–402. doi:10.1093/ahr/121.2.377.
• Ridge M, (2012). "Frequently Asked Questions about crowdsourcing in cultural heritage." Open Objects. Available: http://www.openobjects.org.uk/2012/06/frequently-asked-questions-about-crowdsourcing-in-cultural-heritage/

See also

• Wood, R. 1753: The Ruins of Palmyra, Otherwise Tedmor in the Desart, London. https://archive.org/details/ruinsPalmyraoth00Wood
• Dr. Salam Al Kuntar and Dr. Steven Zucker, "Palmyra: the modern destruction of an ancient city," in Smarthistory, January 5, 2018, accessed December 11, 2018, https://smarthistory.org/palmyra-destruction-2/
• https://soundcloud.com/radiosputnik/its-premature-to-reconstruct-palmyra-salam-al-kuntar

Essay title

• tba

Exercise

1. Register for an account on Recogito if you do not already have one.
2. Visit the DAWN pilot collection in the ICS Library's Recogito space, and browse the 17 manuscript, sketchbook, or printed pages uploaded there.
3. Consider the features that you would find interesting to annotate in these pages, what words you might transcribe and disambiguate, what features of the images to highlight, comparisons with the plates from the 1753 volume, and how you might choose authorities or your approach to creating your own tags to characterise the content.
4. After deciding on an approach, preferably in cooperation with classmates, use the image annotation tool in Recogito to highlight, identify, comment and tag several dozen features of interest.
5. Think about the annotations you and your colleagues have added, and those that were in the document before you started. What can you learn about the interests of the annotators? What surprises you, as a classicist/historian about the features other have chosen to tag? How might a different audience (Syrian locals, tourists, archaeologists, etc.) choose different features? How would you approach these audiences and encourage them to participate? What might the annotators get out of this project?