Evening Lecture by Barbora Weissova (Assistant professor in the Institute of Archaeological Studies Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany).
“Archaeological Archives in the Digital Era. Attika 2.0”
On Wednesday 19/4/ April 2023 at 17:30 in H-232
Abstract
To acknowledge the 40th anniversary of the Attica Archive kept in the Institute of Archaeological Studies at the Ruhr University in Bochum, I initialised a new digitisation project funded by the University program ‘DataScience’ in 2020. The project aimed to encompass the archival records originating from Bochum’s research in Attica in a ‘Digital Attica Archive’ that intuitively links the vast array of diverse materials. The archive’s interface is created as an interactive web map application that allows overlays with maps such as the historical ‘Karten von Attika’ and targeted access to the archival record on previously published sites. In this way, it offers new impulses for understanding the ancient Attic landscape via a contextualisation of the archived materials with its digital representation. Conducted as a part of the academic training, the project opens new ways to old datasets and promotes student’ research as well as external enquiries. With this talk I not only present the results of the project and share the current state of the art but I also show several ways of the possible implementation of the digital tools developed in its framework.
Bio
Barbora Weissova has received her BA, MA and PhD in Classical Archaeology at the Charles University in Prague, as well as a Phd in Classical Archaeology at the Free University in Berlin, with a Dissertation about the Regional Economy, Settlement Patterns and the Road System in Bithynia (4th Century BC – 6th Century AD). She is presently an Assistant Professor at the Ruhr University in Bochum (Germany) with more than six years teaching experience in the fields of classical and digital archaeology. She deals extensively with the manifold spatial analytical possibilities of geoinformation systems for archaeological questions and the modelling of spatial and quantified data, focused on the analysis of the archaeological datasets from NW Asia Minor between the Hellenistic and the Late Roman Periods. She has been intensively involved in questions of digitization and the sustainability of digital records (The Archive of Attica and the Archive of Miletus), Big Data (NFDI for Objects), and the visualization of statistical data (RuColA, R). She is also involved in digital documentation in the field, from the use of apps (MERGIN) for paperless documentation to drone flights to generate orthophotos and 2D and 3D modelling of terrain and plans or maps with GIS and CAD. She has published one monograph one editorial work.