Collaborative Research

IDEA is using new technologies to do public archaeology at a global scale.

A 21st century approach to archaeological archives requires input from a number of stakeholders, including disciplinary specialists and local professional and descendent communities.

Blockbuster ‘Big Dig’ excavations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, like those at Dura-Europos in mandate-era Syria, bear a complex legacy. On the one hand, the finds uncovered in such expeditions have populated textbooks and museum collections, and have productively shaped questions and debates in a number of humanities disciplines over the last century. On the other hand, imbalances of power and privilege at the time of excavation have had long-lasting repercussions not only with regard to who has access to the physical and intellectual products of such expeditions, but also whose perspectives are reflected in the grand narratives about scientific exploration and the interpretation of the ancient past. Inclusion of local professional and community voices is essential not only for reasons of equity and responsibility, but also holds the potential to add significantly to shared understandings and ethical stewardship of archaeological sites and the collections descendant of them.

Meanwhile, archaeology at sites like Dura surfaced material objects that have themselves been subject to specialist study in a range of discreet disciplines like History, Classics, Art History, Near Eastern Languages and Literature, Religious Studies, Papyrology, Epigraphy, and Numismatics (just to name a few). Different disciplines lend complementary perspectives, but divergent conventions around data collection and siloed discipline-specific publication venues (both print and digital) have traditionally presented a challenge to the cross-disciplinary sharing of insights.

Recognizing the need to work cooperatively and inclusively, IDEA is pioneering the co-curation of an open, multilingual dataset of People, Places, Things (including Artifacts and Archival Documents), and Bibliography related to Dura-Europos. Organized as Wikiproject IDEA, the dataset we’re cultivating uses Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons to bring together content of diverse types, collected in institutions across the world, and published primarily in western-European languages. IDEA contributors use structured data statements to assert relationships among People, Places, Things, and Bibliography related to Dura-Europos, anchored with bibliographic citations to print publications and domain-specific databases and LOD Authorities. Piggybacking off of human-generated translations available thanks to the multilingual and global Wiki community, the network of relationships established by IDEA contributors unlocks knowledge from monolingual contexts to share information across language and access barriers. We’re working with heritage professionals and local descendent community members to diversify the range of perspectives brought to bear on existing archival content, and to explore the addition of new resources that showcase perspectives from Syrian contributors. This dataset serves three key purposes:

  1. It provides the collaboratively-shaped content to be dynamically displayed in our forthcoming user-friendly English/Arabic application for browsing archival content related to the site (Dura-Europos Stories).
  2. It provides an accessible entry point for training in Linked Open Data methods for English- and Arabic-speakers, allowing students and professionals to train in emerging digital humanities methods and critical archival practice.
  3. It provides a collective workspace facilitating exchange among scholars, curators, students, descendent community members, and cultural heritage professionals, despite frontiers of language, displacement, and conflict.

Partnerships

To promote interoperability and reusability of IDEA’s dataset, and to contribute to the enrichment and diversification of the shared digital infrastructural resources necessary to bring about Linked Open Data’s enormous potential, IDEA collaborates with recognized digital ‘Authorities’ in each of the domain-specific areas that define our dataset. Our data models are developed in ongoing consultation with LOD experts in geo-spatial gazetteers, archaeology, epigraphy, papyrology, prosopography, numismatics, and GLAM collection metadata.

IDEA is pleased to collaborate with:

Nanopublications and archaeological ethics

Spurred by recent scholarship examining exploitative labor practices as they relate to archaeology past and present, the field of archaeology is grappling with how to more ethically and transparently credit the labor of the many individuals – paid and unpaid –  that frequently goes into modern archaeological work, whether in the field or in the archives. 

What is a ‘Nanopublication’ and how does it relate to archaeological ethics?

Within the Linked Open Data ecosystem, ‘nanopublications’ are granular datapoints contributed to an open knowledge base that are treated as independent publications. Nanopublications can be attributed, cited, and quantified, and as such, they “provide incentives for researchers to make their data available in standard formats that drive data accessibility and interoperability”. In an effort to contribute toward important discussions in the field regarding ethical labor practices, IDEA maintains a project dashboard that tracks and credits the nanopublications contributed by project participants. Students, professionals, and volunteers affiliated with the project are encouraged to list their nanopublication totals on their professional resumes and point to the dashboard maintained by the project for verifiability.

IDEA Core Team Dashboard: https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Bard_College/IDEA_International_Digital_Dura-Europos_Archive/home

IDEA Lab@EH 2023-2024 Dashboard: https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Bard_College/IDEA_Lab_at_EH_Academic_Year_2023-2024

Funding for student research via the IDEA_Lab@EH is generously provided by the Bard College BOLD fund for Undergraduate Research.

Managing Good Quality Data with Many Editors

Coordinated co-curation of Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons records for significant cultural heritage content with members of stakeholder communities offers a path to break down colonially-inflected knowledge silos and to amplify previously occluded perspectives. But key to the success of such an ambition is the ability to create and maintain good quality content that is reliable and interoperable.

Toward this end, IDEA contributors collectively shape ShEx Schemas used to keep editors on the same page about how to structure information related to Dura, and also for computer-aided data alignment checks as part of periodic data maintenance. Mechanisms built into the Wikidata ecosystem, like machine-readable reference citations for every individual metadata statement, auto-logging of (revertible) edit histories for all items, and administrator mechanisms for preventing data vandalism are also key features that IDEA uses to maintain the collaboratively generated dataset.