The Role of Sculpture in Communicating Archaeology in Museums

In this article I discuss an innovative museum strategy that aims to create a more evocative and engaging visitor experience. I argue that the inclusion of contemporary art, and specifically sculpture in exhibition design, activates visitor agency, empowering the public to take part in interpreting the human past. I explore the unique sensory engagement sculpture provides and the important role this can play for the public presentation of archaeology. I also examine an existing project that has called upon sculpture as an interpretive resource at the National Museum of Scotland, discussing its impact on visitors and its contribution to the discipline. I conclude with a discussion of a selection of living sculptors including Rachel Whiteread and Antony Gormley whose work, I argue, signals exciting opportunities for future artist-curator collaboration. By considering both current examples and future possibilities, this article builds a case for sculpture as an important and dynamic tool for the public understanding of archaeology in museums

Documenting historical research for a collection information modelling. A proposal for a digital asset management system.

The paper describes part of the conceptual structure produced within the still ongoing project B.A.C.K. TO T.H.E. F.U.T.U.RE. (BIM Acquisition as Cultural Key TO Transfer Heritage of ancient Egypt For many Uses To many Users REplayed). The aim of the project was to use a semantic web infrastructure to describe archival research and tracking informations related to a hidden museum collection ‘expedition models of Egyptian architecture’ partially stored in the depots of the Museo Egizio of Turin. The outcome will be an interactive web-presentation portal of high-resolution 3D models enriched by historical and archival set of content, from the digitization procedure applied to collection objects, to the digitization process of related data and information. The development of the collection documentation of the project illustrates how is crucial to declare the semantic description underlying narrative contents. Data about single collection objects were conceptually modelled using generalizable formulas already known by CIDOC-CRM community. The description of provenance of knowledge related to the historical investigation process was modelled using CRMinf extension, exploring the possibility of making beliefs based on the available documentation and validating the results of the assumptions made during the research

Dimensions of social meaning in post-classical Greek towards an integrated approach

Especially in the first half of the twentieth century, language was viewed as a vehicle for the transmission of facts and ideas. Later on, scholars working in linguistic frameworks such as Functional and Cognitive Linguistics, (Historical) Sociolinguistics and Functional Sociolinguistics, have emphasized the social relevance of language, focusing, for example, on linguistic concepts such as deixis, modality, or honorific language, or embedding larger linguistic patterns in their social contexts, through notions such as register, sociolect, genre, etc. The main aim of this article is to systematize these observations, through an investigation of how the central, though ill-understood notion of “social meaning” can be captured. The starting point for the discussion is the work that has been done in the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. This framework distinguishes “social” (“interpersonal”) meaning from two other types of meaning, and offers a typology of different types of contexts with which these different meanings resonate. In order to achieve a more satisfactory account of social meaning, however, I argue that we need to connect to a theory of how signs convey meaning. The discussion is relevant for Ancient Greek in its entirety, but focuses specifically on Post-classical Greek: as a case study, I discuss five private letters from the so-called Theophanes archive

Technology in Education

This paper will examine how technology is useful in education and should be integrated into curriculum. The participants for the Capstone Project included 23 fifth-grade students in a public middle school on the Central Coast of California. This project focused on using a web-based art program called Canva to create infographics based on students’ knowledge and study of Ancient Egypt. The students also commented on their peers’ work on a blog page the researcher created. The researcher found that students had difficulty using a new application. They were also less creative than the researcher expected, which could be due to a limited attention span or being distracted all of the time. As an aspiring teacher, the researcher knows that using technology in the classroom will be a sought-after job skill because administrators want technologically-savvy teachers. Technology can help students be more successful in their future careers

Coptic SCRIPTORIUM: Digitizing a Corpus for Interdisciplinary Research in Ancient Egyptian

Coptic, having evolved from the language of the hieroglyphs of the pharaonic era, represents the last phase of the Egyptian language and is pivotal for a wide range of disciplines, such as linguistics, biblical studies, the history of Christianity, Egyptology, and ancient history. The Coptic language has proven essential for the decipherment and continued study of Ancient Egyptian and is of major interest for Afro-Asiatic linguistics and Coptic linguistics in its own right. Coptic manuscripts are sources for biblical and extra-biblical texts and document ancient and Christian history. Coptic SCRIPTORIUM will advance knowledge in these fields by increasing access to now largely inaccessible texts of historical, religious, and linguistic significance. The project designs digital tools and methodologies and applies them to literary texts, creating a rich open-access corpus

Modeling a Body of Literature in TEI: The New Handbook of Syriac Literature

The New Handbook of Syriac Literature (NHSL) is a born-digital TEI-encoded reference work for the study of Syriac literature. The first volume, Bibliotheca Hagiographica Syriaca Electronica, was published by Syriaca.org in 2016 using a simple TEI schema to describe a single genre (hagiography) (Saint-Laurent et al. 2016; see also Saint-Laurent 2016, Zanetti 2016). Past TEI-encoding practice has focused on describing specific manuscripts or creating editions of works. By contrast, the NHSL seeks to describe abstract or conceptual works (including unpublished ones) and to relate them to people, places, and other works, as well as to the manuscripts, editions, and translations that embody them. Two key features of this encoding model include using for description of works and fully leveraging @source for scholarly citations. In preparation for expanding the NHSL to include other genres, Syriaca.org is revising the TEI schema used for hagiographic works. Among other revisions, the new model will employ RDF classes and properties as @type and @ref values, respectively, in order to aid RDF serialization. The authors actively seek feedback, suggestions, and criticism concerning this revised schema

Lexical Diversity in Kinship Across Languages and Dialects

Languages are known to describe the world in diverse ways. Across lexicons, diversity is pervasive, appearing through phenomena such as lexical gaps and untranslatability. However, in computational resources, such as multilingual lexical databases, diversity is hardly ever represented. In this paper, we introduce a method to enrich computational lexicons with content relating to linguistic diversity. The method is verified through two large-scale case studies on kinship terminology, a domain known to be diverse across languages and cultures: one case study deals with seven Arabic dialects, while the other one with three Indonesian languages. Our results, made available as browseable and downloadable computational resources, extend prior linguistics research on kinship terminology, and provide insight into the extent of diversity even within linguistically and culturally close communities

Network analysis of a corpus of undeciphered Indus civilization inscriptions indicates syntactic organization

Archaeological excavations in the sites of the Indus Valley civilization (2500-1900 BCE) in Pakistan and northwestern India have unearthed a large number of artifacts with inscriptions made up of hundreds of distinct signs. To date there is no generally accepted decipherment of these sign sequences and there have been suggestions that the signs could be non-linguistic. Here we apply complex network analysis techniques to a database of available Indus inscriptions, with the aim of detecting patterns indicative of syntactic organization. Our results show the presence of patterns, e.g., recursive structures in the segmentation trees of the sequences, that suggest the existence of a grammar underlying these inscriptions.Comment: 17 pages (includes 4 page appendix containing Indus sign list), 14 figure