Musings on Daily Life in the Ancient and Early Medieval Mediterranean By Sarah E. Bond
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 →
It is syllabus time for many once again. If you are like me, you want to save your students from spending too much on textbooks, but still want to have a rich array of current reading for students assigned on your syllabus. A few years ago, I put together a popular list of "Open Access... Continue Reading →
Originally known as the Flavian Amphitheater, the Roman Colosseum is oftentimes directly associated with the death of Christians; however, as Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard point to in The Colosseum, there is no authentic evidence from the first century to support the notion that Christians were ever martyred within it: The fact is that there are no... Continue Reading →
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 →
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 →
A few weeks ago, I began to ponder the ways in which Greek and Roman art is presented within the modern museum context--and to ruminate on whether we put a bit too much emphasis on the perceived front of a piece of art rather than the side or back of it. This led to a... Continue Reading →
This week over at Hyperallergic, I wrote about new exhibits at the British Library and the Victoria & Albert Museum which both engage with the cultural heritage of ancient and medieval Ethiopia. An examination of the Ethiopian cultural heritage held in the libraries and museums of Britain can perhaps demonstrate a seminal point about digitization and... Continue Reading →
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 →
Over at Hyperallergic this week, I had an essay come out that was about four months in the making. It discusses how and why museums should use labels--those little tituli to the side--in order to engage with America's history of slavery. The piece was inspired by a trip to the Worcester Art Museum (Worcester, MA) over the December... Continue Reading →
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 →
History From Below 