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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 the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and in development at Bard College, Yale University, and Birkbeck, University of London.

Check out more detail and browse the Dura Stories application at www.duraeuroposarchive.org.

Schematic representation of the online information landscape for Dura-Europos and the IDEA team’s utilization of a Wikidata/Wikimedia Commons dataset as a flexible multilingual crosswalk among contextually related resources.

Overview

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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/archaeological features, people, events, artifacts, archival documents) that represent the network of relationships relevant to archaeological knowledge
  • three-dimensional, multi-phased archaeological space
  • fragmentary 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 Models

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Our data models can be found here.

Project Items

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Items associated with the project should all have a statement: on focus list of Wikimedia project (P5008) -> WikiProject International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (Q114241199): All items on the Wikiproject IDEA focus list

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

Example Items

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Wall Painting: Julius Terentius Performing a Sacrifice

Coin: Tetradrachm of Trebonianus Gallus, Emperor of Rome, from Antioch, Yale University Art Gallery, inv. 1938.6000.808

Archival Photo: Dura-Europos archival photograph, YUAG Negative number dura-ds85~01

Archival Drawing: Dura-Europos archival drawing of David and Goliath fresco, YUAG Negative number y301

Papyrus: P.Dura 126. Decision of tribune, Laronius Secundianus, on division of property among family members; example of local law being upheld after Constitutio Antoniana

Inscription: Inscription PR2.D3 from Palmyrene Gate, Dura-Europos

Pictorial graffito: Standing Male graffito, Temple of Bel, Dura-Europos

Building: Temple of Bêl

Ancient Person: Julius Terentius

Modern Person: Clark Hopkins

Event: Yale-French Excavation Season Three at Dura-Europos

Group of similar objects from different find contexts, accessioned as a group: Double Wooden Combs, Yale University Art Gallery, inv. 1933.450a-j

Oral history: Ancient construction practices in Dura-Europos (Djuss)

Example for how to reference inferred "depicts" statements: Archival photograph (see "depicts")

Statue reconstituted of various fragments with discrete findspots and dates of discovery: Statue of Palmyrene Child, Yale University Art Gallery, inv. 1932.1214

Example Queries

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Experimental queries

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  • Global Temples with locations, compared with temples from Dura-Europos: https://w.wiki/Rwyi
  • List of photographs featured in the "Faces of Dura-Europos" online exhibition and outreach activities

Need help writing queries?


What Now?

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Are you already a participant looking for resources? Would you like to get involved? Would you like to take a look at our data models and offer feedback? Are you interested in applying our workflows to other data sets? Please use the tab (or tabs) that apply to you:

 Resources for Participants Get Involved! A Look Under the Hood Suggested Workflows 

Translation

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Dismantling linguistic barriers is an integral part of our objective. As most of our project members are fluent in English, it is our first language for entering information in Wikidata. Most of our translation efforts have been focused on Arabic, to allow greater access to and facilitate collaboration with Arabic speakers, in particular Syrian cultural heritage professionals. Since Francophone archaeologists and institutions took part in the excavations and French national collections contain objects from Dura, we are also prioritizing French translations. We also welcome help with translating item labels and descriptions into other languages. Please use the tab below to find information about translation work in our project:

 Translation Work 

Housekeeping

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For data, resources, etc. that are not currently directly relevant to our work but that we would like to make publicly available to the Wikidata community, our housekeeping subpage can be found here.

Subpages

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Participants

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

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