Throughout the workshop, graduate students and faculty visited famous archaeological sites and archaeological museums focusing on inscriptions in their context. They worked together on analyzing particularly problematic or controversial epigraphical documents, exploring how digital methods can help us solve thorny scientific questions.
We began on May 4th hosted by the Ecole française d’Athènes in its Conference Room with a general presentation of the Visible Words Program and about Digital method and tools for epigrahy opened to the scientific fellows of the Institute and colleagues from other institutions at Athens. See presentations on SlideShare Channel.
In Athens, we focused on the Tribute Lists from the Peloponnesian War, seeking ways to chart the different geo-political situations presented on each document and on the Casualty Lists. In the Stoa near by the Theater of Dionysos, groups of students paired (one from France, one from USA) were trained to read directly on the stones and to write transcriptions of their readings, first step to be done for any edition. Their work (digital edition in TEI/EpiDoc and comment) was achieved and presented later in Larissa. See detailed program for Athens.
In Larissa (Thessaly), we visited the 2 theaters and used social networking techniques to trace the different families represented in the inscriptions of the theater, thereby looking into questions of romanization and social mobility in Roman Greece.
Finally, on Thasos, after a visit to the archaeological site of Argilos with one of the Director of the excavations, Prof. Jacques Perreault, Université de Montréal, on our way to the island, we focused on the Passage des Théores, tracing social and family networks through the centuries and exploring the prosopography of the island by cross-referencing external documents with the inscriptions.
All along the workshop, students were instructed to use the EpiDoc/TEI XML markup and other tools or workflows, stabilized or more experimental as the visualization of social networks that was developed at Tufts for Marie-Claire Beaulieu’s Journey of the Hero class (2014): the annotation tool Hypothes.is tool and the visualization tool based on the GapVis code developed for the Hellespont Project. We applied these technologies to one of the main documents studied by the Visible Words group, namely the Passage of the Theoroi on Thasos, monument records hundreds of names of Thasian magistrates from the Archaic to the Roman period. The students were tasked with cross-referencing the names listed on a small area of the monument with data found in the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names and indicating the relationships among those names. To do so, we used the SNAP prosopographical standards and controlled tagging conventions. A prototype was produced which records father-son pairs, which we intend to enhance with further family and social relationships. For timelines, we used Timemapper to test Michèle Brunet’s reconstruction of the Passage of the Theoroi. As the monument has crumbled over time, the reconstitution of the arrangement of the blocks is crucial in understanding the chronological organization of the inscription. Entering the data in Timemapper and thus reconstituting the proposed sequence of magistracies has allowed us to verify the chronological succession and arrangement of the blocks. We enhanced the Timemapper workflow by creating a CITE Image Collection of drawings of the blocks and including links to specific regions of interest on these images, referenced by stable CITE URN.
To learn more go to the Student’s notebook
Participants in the Field Workshop
Coordinators, Visible Words Program, Face Foundation
- John Bodel , Professor of Classics, Brown University, Providence, USA
- Marie-Claire Beaulieu, Assistant Professor of Classics, Tufts University, Medford, USA
- Richard Bouchon, Maître de Conférences en Histoire grecque, Université Lyon 2, Laboratoire HISoMA, France
- Michèle Brunet, Professeur d’Epigraphie grecque, Université Lyon 2, Laboratoire HISoMA, France
- Véronique Chankowski, Professeur d’Histoire grecque, Université Lyon 2, Laboratoire HISoMA, France
- Laurent Coulon, Directeur de Recherche, Egyptologie, Laboratoire HISoMA, France
- Emmanuelle Morlock, Ingénieur d’Etudes, Humanités Numériques, Laboratoire HISoMA, France
US Students
- Scott DiGiulio, Brown University
- Gaia Gianni, Brown University
- Julia H. Lenzi, Tufts University
- Dominic Machado, Brown University
- Kelly Nguyen, Brown University
- Mahmoud Samori, Brown University
French Students
- Thibault Clérice, HISoMA, Perseus & DH Center Université de Leipzig
- Clément Crosnier, Université Lyon 2
- Nicolas Genis, Université Lyon 2
- Adeline Levivier, Université Lyon 2
- Elise Pampanay, Université Lyon 2
- Marion Joanna Penot, Université Lyon 2
Other participants (Larisa)
- Clément Sarrazanas, membre scientifique, Ecole française d’Athènes, Grèce
- Bruno Helly, Directeur de recherches émérite, Laboratoire HiSoMA, France
Other participants (Thasos)
- Alcorac Alonso Deniz, chercheur, ANR E-PIGRAMME, Laboratoires ANHIMA et HiSoMA, France
- Monica Berti, Professeur, DH Center Leipzeig Universität, Coordinator of the Sunoikisis Program, Germany
- Nicolas Bresch, architecte, Laboratoire IRAA, France
- Simona Stoyanova, PhD student, DH Center Leipzig & King’s College London