Medfarm Play

Abstract: Constructing the sacred, visibility and ritual landscape at the Egyptian necropolis of Saqqara (Stanford University Press), a born-digital monograph utilizing a 3D GIS model of the ancient site of Saqqara, was published in 2020. One of the goals of this fully online work was to make transparent all the data visualization decisions necessary for creating this type of ?reconstruction? model. In this presentation, the author will discuss some of the challenges inherent in representing long-occupied archaeological sites like Saqqara as a data visualization and the decisions made to try and represent an ancient site in a new way.

Elaine Sullivan (M.A. and Ph.D. in Egyptian Art and Archaeology, Johns Hopkins University) is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Sullivan is an Egyptologist and a Digital Humanist whose work focuses on applying new technologies to ancient cultural materials. Her born-digital publication, Constructing the Sacred (Stanford University Press), utilizes a geo-temporal 3D model of the necropolis of Saqqara (near modern Cairo) to investigate questions of ritual landscape at the site. She served as the project coordinator of the Digital Karnak Project, a multi-phased 3D virtual reality model of the famous ancient Egyptian temple complex of Karnak. Her archaeological work in Egypt includes five seasons of excavation with Johns Hopkins University at the temple of the goddess Mut (Luxor), as well as four seasons in the field with a joint UCLA-Rijksuniversiteit Groningen project in the Egyptian Fayum at the Greco-Roman town of Karanis. She has also excavated at sites in Syria, Italy, and Israel.

A version with closed captions is available on YouTube.

Kontaktperson för denna film
Isto Huvila, Institutionen för ABM

Kanalinformation

CAPTURE research project investigates what information about the creation and use of research data that is paradata) is needed and how to capture enough of that information to make the data reusable in the future. The wickedness of the problem lies in the practical impossibility to document and keep everything and the difficulty to determine how to capture just enough. The empirical focus of CAPTURE is archaeological and cultural heritage data, which stands out by its extreme heterogeneity and rapid accumulation due to the scale of ongoing development-led archaeological fieldwork. Within and beyond this specific context, CAPTURE develops an in-depth understanding of how paradata is being created and used today, elicits methods for capturing paradata, tests new methods in field trials, and synthesises the findings in a reference model to inform the capturing of paradata and enabling data-intensive research using heterogeneous research data stemming from diverse origins. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme grant agreement No 818210.

1. CAPTURE Talk #1 Dr. Sarah Callaghan: Frontiers of data publishing
2. CAPTURE Talk #2 Dr Samantha Kanza & Dr Nicola Knight - One Does Not Simply ?Digitise Scientific Research?: The Challenges and Opportunities of Technology in the 21st Century
3. CAPTURE Talk #3 Dr. Kathleen Gregory: Disciplining data
4. Capture Talk #4 Dr Elaine Sullivan ReConstructing Saqqara Challenges in 3D Data Visualization and publication