A Summer of Roman Pottery Pictures?

I've been posting a few pictures of Roman pottery (writ large) to my Twitter feed. My colleague at ISAW Irene Soto has posted a nice image of an amphora display case from the Crypta Balbi in Rome to my wall on FaceBook.

Perhaps more pottery-loving folk want to join in the fun? I prefer Twitter for this sort of sharing because it skips the FaceBook "confirm friend" step. Tweet and everyone can see it.

Then in the fall Irene and I will host an informal get together at ISAW along the lines of "What Roman Pottery I Photographed this Summer." With an emphasis on the "informal". As in, "host" may be a strong word and it's not something that we'd even call a "workshop", let alone "conference". We'll at least set up a projector in a room and share what we have. Obviously, not many people will be able to come but perhaps it will work out for at a few folk already in NYC.

How about a hastag of #rompot2012 for tweets? I'll start using that.

And I don't mean this to be a call for posting unpublished material. More along the lines of, "If a museum let's you take pictures, that may well mean they don't mind you tweeting." Make your own determination and join in if you can.

Finally, yes, this can work for other categories of ceramics, and for pieces not in museums, or other objects for that matter. Roman pottery is on my mind right now, but so are many other things.

A Quote from the NEH LAWDI Proposal

In February 2011, Tom Elliott, John Muccigrosso and I wrote and submitted a proposal to the NEH's "Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities" program. It was accepted, which is way cool. So on Thursday - the day after tomorrow (yikes!) - we begin the "Linked Ancient World Data Institute" (#LAWDI).

We definitely wrote about RDF, RDFa, SPARQL, etc. But to give you a flavor of what we're trying to achieve, here's a quote from the narrative:

Finally, we stress that it is not our intent to ask LAWDI participants to adhere to a single standard that dictates how each project and discipline brings its intellectual content into digital form. We recognize that existing data is heterogeneous and that many digital humanities projects have invested substantial time and money in creating resources according to their own needs. In this environment, any attempt to create a single unifying standard of data representation will fail and so we have not adopted that language in this proposal. We are also sensitive to the principle that overly detailed standards presume that a discipline knows all that it wants to say about its topic of study. This is certainly not the case for the Ancient World, where the basic terms of analysis continue to change in exciting ways. Of course, recognizing complexity as the starting point of discussions does not mean that useful interoperability cannot be achieved.

I think the above makes a lot of sense at this stage in digitizing the Ancient World. I'd also reformulate the sentiment as "Sure it's your data, but put it on the public internet in such a way that others can make use of it with existing tools and best practices."

Test of awld.js

I am trying to install awld.js on this blog. If it worked this link to Wikipedia will have a popup if you hover over it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_red_slip.

Here's a link to Pleiades: http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/648772

I may delete this post after publication.

...

It seems to be working but I need to do some work to isolate the awld.js css from the blogger css. That counts as a detail.

Still playing... Corinth.