International Digital Dura-Europos Archive
Available
Directors
- Anne Hunnell Chen, Director
- Eleanor Martin, Assistant Director
- Emily Helm, Assistant Director
Description
Between the world wars, Middle Eastern archaeological sites like Dura-Europos (Syria) were excavated on a grand scale, now remembered as "Big Digs". Those digs filled museums, populated textbooks, and formed the evidentiary basis of humanities disciplines. They also created imbalances of power and privilege, determining who has access to the physical and intellectual products of those endeavors and whose perspectives are reflected in not just historical narratives, but the digital infrastructure that powers online searches. With an ambition to use digital methods to shift the power dynamics within archaeological archives, IDEA is making creative use of the multilingual Wikimedia ecosystem and Linked Open Data (LOD) methods, demonstrating how digital approaches already gaining ground to serve certain disciplinary and institutional interests can be harnessed to de-silo disciplinary perspectives, bring about more equitable access to the intellectual products of colonially-entangled excavations, speak back to archival biases, and begin rebalancing processes of knowledge-making. Colonial archives don’t have to march unchallenged into the digital future; with low-barrier technologies, they can become spaces for connection and dialogue across divides (geographic, linguistic, class, disciplinary), and learning laboratories for building more equitable familiarity with emerging digital methods. IDEA's work to date has begun to address key inequities in access to important archival source materials connected with the history of Dura-Europos, and determined the feasibility of using these resources to provide digital up-skilling to both students and a demographic of heritage professionals currently underrepresented in international conversations driving best practices in cultural heritage information management.
Resources
- recommended settings and Wikidata data models for Cultural Heritage (buildings, people, archival documents, papyri, inscriptions, coins, other artifacts, events).