Ancient MakerSpaces 2019

Digital Tools for Ancient World Study

Society for Classical Studies
2019 Annual Meeting
San Diego Marriott Marquis & Marina.
San Diego, CA.
Marriott Grand Ballroom 8 (Second Floor)

Saturday January 5, 2019 8:30am - 3:00pm

An all-day Digital Classics workshop featuring
presentations, demonstrations,
and lightning talks.

WORKSHOP OPEN TO ALL AIA/SCS 2019 ATTENDEES • NO ADVANCED SIGN-UP REQUIRED

View the AMS 2019 schedule here.

about

For the third year running…

About Ancient MakerSpaces

Almost all research, teaching, and scholarly communication in ancient studies today bears the imprint of digital technology in some way, yet the growing number of projects and the rapid rate of technological development present a distinct challenge for scholars who are interested in taking advantage of advances in the digital humanities.

This workshop is a space for students and scholars to interact with a variety of digital techniques and digital projects of broad application, providing participants the opportunity to engage in hands-on, peer-based learning.

Experienced digital humanists from various disciplines within ancient studies have developed demonstration curricula and will coordinate teams of trained demonstrators for each workshop station. The emphasis will be on learning to do things of immediate utility to scholarship and pedagogy. The workshop is comprised of five demonstrations and a series of lightning talks; together they will present techniques and projects dedicated to:

  • mapping
  • text tagging, annotating, searching, and editing
  • epigraphic squeezes
  • podcasting
  • collaborative commentaries
  • and more…
Schedule

AMS2019 Schedule

presentation-a

From Stone to Screen and the DIY Method: Digitization, Integration, and You

Chelsea Gardner, Lisa Tweten, Kat Solberg, Jaymie Orchard University of British Columbia
9:00-9:40am

The From Stone to Screen project is an open-access digitization project founded in 2012 by graduate students at the University of British Columbia. Since its inception, it has evolved into a pedagogical resource for the study of ancient artifacts and epigraphic squeezes. This project has also been illustrative of the difficulties faced by small-scale DH projects with limited funding, and this presentation showcases some of the “DIY” solutions to these problems. Following a brief presentation about the current mission statement of the project, the directors of the project will demonstrate three aspects of From Stone to Screen through interactive workstations: 1) the process of squeeze image manipulation in Photoshop; 2) the various successful (and not-so-successful) web hosting platforms and social media endeavours; and 3) the open-access pedagogical resources produced through our collections.

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presentation-b

CommentarySandbox: Creating Custom Digital Commentaries for the Classroom

Bret Mulligan
Haverford College
9:50-10:30am

Do you write commentaries for (or with) your students? Or would you like to, but have been frustrated by the limitations and inefficiencies of using a word processing program to commentaries that display text, notes, and vocabulary? CommentarySandbox is a plugin for the WordPress CMS that mimics the easy-to-read format of Dickinson College Commentaries. With the plugin, you can quickly juxtapose notes and vocabulary (or other content) in tabs alongside a text. Because it builds on the powerful and popular WordPress platform, the plugin makes it easy to incorporate multimedia into your commentary, as well as other digital elements. (You can see an example of a student-created “Sandbox” commentary here). In the workshop we will demonstrate the basics of how to use the plugin to build a digital commentary and have sample commentaries with which participants can experiment.

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presentation-c

Mapping Text with Recogito

Elton Barker The Open University
10:40-11:20am

Learn to use Recogito, the free online tool developed by Pelagios that enables semantic annotations of digitized historical texts and images. We will show how to create your own annotations about places, people, and events; add tags and comments; associate place references in the documents to actual geographic coordinates using gazetteers of the ancient world (like Pleiades or the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire), explore different map-based visualisations, and download the data in any of the available formats, from simple CSV tables to RDF and TEI-XML.

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lightning

Lightning Talks

Patrick J. Burns, Moderator
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
11:30am-12:30pm

In the interest of bringing attention to as many projects in Digital Classics, Archaeology, and related fields as possible, Ancient MakerSpaces 2019 will host an hour-long Lightning Talks session. Presenters will have four minutes each to introduce their project, address its application in Classics research, pedagogy, or outreach, and explain how contributors, volunteers, or users can get involved.

AMS2019 Lightning Talks will include SCS Membership Map, PlayCanvas for Archaeology, Coptic Scriptorium, Krateros, Database of Religious History, and more.

If you are interested in participating in the Lightning Talks, contact Patrick J. Burns at patrick.j.burns@nyu.edu.

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presentation-d

Make Your Own Ancient Studies Podcast

Scott Aaron Lepisto
Hillsdale College
1:00-1:40pm

This workshop takes participants through every step of developing a podcast, from the idea phase through publication. It will cover conceptual, legal, and technical aspects, including audio editing using Audacity, operating a Zoom H4N portable audio recorder, and publishing through Libsyn, a podcast-hosting platform. You can use podcasts to flip the classroom, communicate research to a broad audience, or as a forum to discuss classics in ways that might not fit into traditional academic discourses.

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presentation-e

Analyzing Ciceronian Networks with Gephi

Caitlin Marley
University of Iowa
1:50-2:30pm

Explore Cicero’s social network and learn to make your own network map. I will describe how we can map different social interactions in Cicero’s letters, from the exchange of letters to gossip. I will also show you how to make quick visualizations of those interactions in Gephi. Come with the latest version of Gephi already downloaded; datasets will be provided to get participants started.

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