Wikidata:WikiProject IDEA

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This Wikiproject serves as a working group and process documentation archive for the International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), a project generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and in development at Bard College and Yale University.

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. Our 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.

For more information on this initiative, see duraeuroposarchive.org


Those who are not directly interested in the archaeological site of Dura-Europos in modern Syria may nonetheless find useful the documentation of our process and modeling decisions with regard to:

  • elemental components (buildings/architectural features, people, events, artifacts, archival documents) that represent the network of relationships relevant to archaeological knowledge
  • three-dimensional, multi-phased archaeological space
  • fragmentary archaeological artifacts
  • our adopted solutions to the vexing issue of modeling chronological uncertainty
  • cultivation of a diverse multilingual community of editors to reshape problematic received metadata, and contribute to the correction and epistemological diversification of shared digital infrastructural resources that drive the LOD ecosystem

We invite participation and input from interested parties, and encourage you to sign below as participants.

Data-modeling

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How do we describe and connect data from Dura-Europos, and why? How can another project connect their data to Dura's? Explore our data-modeling decisions on the tabs below.

 Buildings + Features People Archival Photos + Documents Papyri Inscriptions Coins Other Artifacts Events Suggested Workflows 

Main items

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Items associated with the project should all have a statement: "on the focus list of Wikiproject" --> "Wikiproject IDEA": All items on the Wikiproject IDEA focus list

The project is currently working on systematically creating records for all people, buildings/features, artifacts, archival documents, events, and bibliography associated with the site of Dura-Europos.

Queries

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Main queries

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Other queries

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Subpages

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Participants

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[+] Add yourself to the list

The participants listed below can be notified using the following template in discussions:
{{Ping project|IDEA}}

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