tanta vis admonitionis inest in locis; ut non sine causa ex iis memoriae ducta sit disciplina. “Places have so great a power of suggestion that the technical art of memory is with good reason based upon them.” — Cicero, De Finibus, 5.2. "The 'living wolf' inside her enclosure on the Campidogli[o] from (above) L’Illustrazione Italiana no. 49 December... Continue Reading →
Working Together to Transcribe Ancient Documents During COVID-19
As the pandemic known as COVID-19 grips the globe, thousands of instructors in the United States and elsewhere have been asked to transition their courses online for the remainder of the semester. To some instructors, such as the superb Classics professors at the Open University, distance learning has become a normalized pedagogy. To many others... Continue Reading →
Taking a Sapphic Stanza: Papyri, Digital Humanities, and Reclaiming the Work of Ancient Women
This semester, I am teaching our department's Archaic to Classical Greek Survey. I specialize in late antique Roman history and GIS, and thus this has been a departure from my normal research interests--and just one reason we are searching for a Homerist with DH skills right now. However, reading and teaching Greek does not mean that... Continue Reading →
Redesigning WOAH: Women of Ancient History
For a long time now, I have been interested in the ways in which digital humanities projects can be used to amplify, to visualize, and to give agency to underrepresented groups. Put another way: How can digital humanities contribute to social justice? One of the shining examples of this type of DH project is the... Continue Reading →
The Gospel of Unicode: Digital Love Letter(s) and Art Through Numbers
Over at Hyperallergic this week, I discuss the proposed release of over 2,000 Hieroglyphs into Unicode by 2020 or 2021. If you are a classicist then you know how important the Unicode movement has been in standardizing the visualization of Greek texts in particular. But the non-profit Unicode Consortium encodes many other ancient and endangered... Continue Reading →
How Can Libraries and Digital Humanities Spaces Co-Exist?
Over at Hyperallergic, I have contributed a new article on the removal of books from the fine arts library at UT-Austin and the planned movement of books from the libraries at UW-Madison [Article Here]. The tales of these two libraries is an increasingly familiar one, wherein thousands of books are deaccessioned or moved into off-site... Continue Reading →
Replacing the Squeeze? Teaching Classical Epigraphy With 3D Models
This semester, I am incorporating more epigraphy into my undergraduate and graduate level courses. The University of Iowa has a top-flight classics program (if I do say so myself), but we do not have a proper squeeze collection to work with (something I took for granted while at UNC-Chapel Hill). As such, in addition to... Continue Reading →
Mapping Racism And Assessing the Success of the Digital Humanities
This week, The Chronicle of Higher Education published a piece (now behind a paywall) written by Prof. Timothy Brennan. In it, the digital humanities as a field is essentially assessed as a "bust." A concluding critique seemed particularly harsh: "Rather than a revolution, the digital humanities is a wedge separating the humanities from its reason to exist... Continue Reading →
Mapping the Digital Humanities at the University of Iowa
As I drove from Milwaukee to Iowa City last year, I thought about the digital humanists at the University of Iowa and the diversity of their work. Though the richness of the digital interfaces for the projects had drawn me in, it was their scope – the methodologies, the content, the geographic focus – that gripped... Continue Reading →