{"id":259,"date":"2021-06-28T21:00:31","date_gmt":"2021-06-28T21:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/insidecrane.utoronto.ca\/?p=259"},"modified":"2021-06-28T21:00:37","modified_gmt":"2021-06-28T21:00:37","slug":"old-information-new-context-the-antioch-digital-companion-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/insidecrane.utoronto.ca\/?p=259","title":{"rendered":"Old Information, New Context: The Antioch Digital Companion Project"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Antioch Project, comprising a series of excavations at this great imperial city in southeastern Turkey in the 1930s, was among \u201cthe most ambitious, and altogether problematic, excavations ever undertaken,\u201d says Andrea De Giorgi<\/a>, an Associate Professor in the Department of Classics at Florida State University. Working in the city of Antakya (or Antioch as English speakers called it at the time), the excavators recorded a vast number of images, architectural plans and other data, which CRANE\u2019s partner, the OCHRE Data Service<\/a>, had already made available through its institutional partner, the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. But De Giorgi says the data was never organized with any kind of meaningful context: \u201cThey\u2019re essentially JPEGs, just very static images that don\u2019t really communicate in terms of where they were found and why they were situated there.\u201d This led De Giorgi, working with CRANE\u2019s Stephen Batiuk<\/a> and Julia Gearhart<\/a> at Princeton University, to initiate the Antioch Digital Companion Project<\/a>, which aims to help people navigate all this data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea for the Antioch Digital Companion Project came about after De Giorgi co-authored the book Antioch: A History<\/a><\/em> with A. Asa Eger<\/a>, an Associate Professor of the Islamic world at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, with maps created by Stephen Batiuk. De Giorgi says they were impressed by the way CRANE\u2019s system could be used to \u201cdocument the modifications of the city from the Hellenistic foundation to the Ottoman era,\u201d and he, Eger and Batiuk came up with the idea to do the same thing on a larger scale, allowing the user to see where every item stands in relation not only to the topography of the area, but the topography of the excavations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
GIS map of ancient Antioch, courtesy of OCHRE.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

With the help of CRANE, De\nGiorgi continues, the Digital Companion Project was able to take a bare piece\nof data like an architectural plan, and present it \u201cbasically\nre-contextualized. It\u2019s not just floating, it\u2019s not just an image of a\nbuilding; we have fully appropriated and reinserted it into an image of the\nterritory as it was after the excavation.\u201d This is possible because of CRANE\u2019s\nsystem; \u201cthanks to GIS processing, and thanks to aerial\nphotographs and thanks to remote sensing,\u201d De Giorgi says, it\u2019s possible to\nshow \u201cthe correlation between the ancient landscape and the way the terrain\nlooks today.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now that the Digital Companion is almost finished, De Giorgi says they will move on to the nearby Mediterranean coast, where the original Antioch Project ventured for some unfinished expeditions, and use these tools to create a similar resource. De Giorgi is enthusiastic about CRANE\u2019s ability to help them take raw, unprocessed information and give it an intelligible shape: \u201cWe would like to go back to these fragmented narratives,\u201d he explains, \u201cand we would like to try to piece them together.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Written by Jaime Weinman<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Antioch Project, comprising a series of excavations at this great imperial city in southeastern Turkey in the 1930s, was among \u201cthe most ambitious, and altogether problematic, excavations ever undertaken,\u201d says Andrea De Giorgi, an Associate Professor in the Department of Classics at Florida State University. Working in the city of Antakya (or Antioch as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":260,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-259","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/insidecrane.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/insidecrane.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/insidecrane.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insidecrane.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insidecrane.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=259"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/insidecrane.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":266,"href":"https:\/\/insidecrane.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259\/revisions\/266"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insidecrane.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/insidecrane.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insidecrane.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insidecrane.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}