Classics in the Digital Age
Groningen Classicists are at the forefront of the development of digital tools to aid the study of the ancient world.
In collaboration with the CIT department and the spatial expertise center (Geodienst), Lidewijde de Jong and her team have developed a digital database (Digital Tombs) combining iconographic, epigraphic, spatial, and material components of funerary materials from the Roman period. As part of her NWO-VICI project MARE, this database is currently developed into a research tool and a digital archive for legacy and orphaned collections. She also works with Manuela Ritondale, who focuses on digital heritage and the adoption of digital applications in archaeology.
Digital initiatives are also part of the NWO Open Competition project Connecting the Greeks directed by Christina Williamson and Onno van Nijf. The project focuses on festivals and network analyses and maintains an online database of athletes and festival connections in the ancient world. Christina Williamson’s project Deep-mapping sanctuaries as festival hubs examines how these networks played out on the ground at sanctuaries, in space and over time. She makes use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to combine a wide variety of data that extends over time and in space. This approach is then translated to ESRI Story Maps, which can communicate the results to a broader audience.
Bettina Reitz-Joosse is co-editor of the project Fascist Latin Texts, a digital library of 120+ Latin texts written under Italian Fascism (1922-43) on political themes. Saskia Peels-Matthey co-authors the online Collection of Greek Ritual Norms Project. In this ongoing project, Greek inscriptions of a normative nature dealing with religious rituals are re-published, together with translations in English and French, a new commentary and a bibliography. Together with researchers from Groningen’s computational linguistic group, she also studies the application of Natural Language Processing Tools (AI) to Ancient Greek, and to semantic change more generally.
Sofia Voutsaki and her team in the Ayios Vasileios excavations (early Mycenaean cemetery) employ digital documentation (photogrammetry, digital excavation archive) and Virtual Reality in order to produce 3D reconstructions of prehistoric tombs.
PhD students currently working within this theme:
| Last modified: | 22 April 2024 1.53 p.m. |