{"id":840,"date":"2025-10-02T19:20:26","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T19:20:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/duraeuroposarchive.org\/?page_id=840"},"modified":"2026-03-16T12:47:48","modified_gmt":"2026-03-16T12:47:48","slug":"frequently-asked-questions","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/duraeuroposarchive.org\/ar\/frequently-asked-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"Frequently Asked Questions"},"content":{"rendered":"

PROJECT SPECIFICS<\/h3>
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tWhat is IDEA?\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
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The International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA) is a major Digital Humanities initiative funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (2022-5), the OSUN\/Tailloires Network (2024), and the American Council of Learned Societies (2025-7). Our goal is to digitally re-integrate dispersed collections and discipline-specific knowledge related to the important cultural heritage site of Dura-Europos (Syria), and use the fruits of this interdisciplinary work to both bridge accessibility gaps and knowledge silos descendant of early collecting and excavation practices, and diversify the range of professionals thinking with, critiquing, and refining emerging internationally-adopted digital standards and methods. The project\u2019s re-assembly and re-contextualization efforts are driven by Linked Open Data (LOD) methods and critical archival studies. Central to IDEA\u2019s approach is an exploration of how new technologies can be put to use for ethical collaborative interventions related to legacy archeological archives. Our work advances a practical conversation about how to make most ethical use of technology to enhance multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural data-sharing and reuse for the (global) public good.<\/span><\/p>\n

Key questions guiding our work:<\/span><\/p>\n

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  1. How can institutions, scholars, curators, and students who have benefited from access to the byproducts of early excavations of interdisciplinary significance work more effectively together towards the goals above?<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. Can digital humanities methodologies underpin more equitable intellectual exchange, and even help disrupt entrenched hierarchies of knowledge that frequently still exclude local stakeholders?<\/span><\/li>\n
  3. How can emerging technologies help us collaborate with globally-sitatued colleagues across borders in times of conflict and crisis?<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The IDEA team\u2019s \u2018flavor\u2019 of LOD makes creative use of the Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons platforms to create and virtually network records for buildings, artifacts, archival documents, events, people, and bibliography related to the site using structured data. Our approach draws on Wikidata\u2019s inherent multilingualism and the strengths of the LOD ecosystem to both improve comprehensibility of archaeological knowledge among English-speakers while also mitigating knowledge and access inequities that persist in the wake of foreign-run excavations at the site. Our team is committed to developing workflows and open multilingual datasets that can further enable and prepare the way for collaborative curation with Syrian heritage professionals and communities. We make use of low-technical-barrier, free and open tools, and document and share our processes with the hope that our methods may be a springboard into LOD for low-resourced projects and institutions.<\/span><\/p>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t

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    \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tWhat is community archaeology, and which Syrian communities does IDEA seek to engage?\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
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    Community Archaeology is a branch of practice that has grown steadily since the 1970s which seeks to diversify the voices involved in the interpretation of the past (Tully 2007, 155). As Atalay (2012, 3) neatly summarized the stakes more than a decade ago: \u201cIn many communities where archaeologists work, local residents have limited access to the knowledge and other benefits from the research that is taking place in their own backyards. Clearly, archaeologists must become more involved with and must make their work relevant to wider, nonacademic audiences.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

    Since 2022, IDEA has built relationships with Syrian heritage professionals toward the goal of making well-referenced information descendent from a century\u2019s worth of scientific exploration at Dura better accessible to the communities living proximate to the site in the Deir ez-Zor region of Syria. We think of our work as harnessing the power of new technologies to do Community Archaeology at a global scale. <\/span><\/p>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t

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