Kerameikos.org receives NEH Digital Humanities Advancement grant

The Kerameikos.org scientific committee is pleased to announced that the National Endowment for the Humanities has granted the project about $85,000 to develop the full range of Archaic and Classical Greek pottery concepts and a series of software development features and APIs. This is an 18-month Level II Digital Humanities Advancement Grant project. Below is a portion of our application that briefly describes our primary goals for this phase of the project:

Final Product and Dissemination

Experience from development and proliferation of Nomisma.org principles suggests that community buy-in of shared vocabularies and technical methodologies can only come when non-technical specialists (in Nomisma’s case: numismatists and archaeologists) are able to see and use functional web applications. In numismatics, broad buy-in therefore only came after the publication of the first phase of Online Coins of the Roman Empire project, with its multilingual interfaces, geographic and quantitative distribution visualizations, and photographs of coins aggregated from several prominent collections. Similar analytical and visualization tools have been built into Kerameikos.org directly, derived from the small subset of Greek vases from the British Museum and the Getty that were ingested in the initial proof-of-concept phase in 2014. It is our hope that the Linked Open Greek Pottery project will foster similar buy-in among archaeologists, art historians, and museum professionals. These specialists will play an integral role in the long-term curation of data and, ultimately, in the expansion of Kerameikos.org beyond its current Archaic and Classical Greek scope. The final products of this 18-month phase fall into three broad categories, culminating in dissemination:

1. Archaic and Classical Greek Pottery Concepts

All time periods, materials, pottery shapes, styles, production places, and corporate and personal entities (painters, potters, and associated workshops) relevant to Archaic and Classical Greek pottery will be represented in Kerameikos.org according to our metadata application profile (a combination of linked data ontologies). These concepts will be linked to matching concepts in other relevant vocabulary systems, such as the Pleiades Gazetteer of Ancient Places and the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus. The metadata application profile will be fully documented in similar fashion to those of the Digital Public Library of America and Europeana. Furthermore, we will register a Wikidata.org property for Kerameikos.org and integrate our vocabularies into Wikidata for broader reuse within the Wikipedia community.

2. A Core Set of Research Data and Tools

Using partners that embrace Open Data principles, we will aggregate Greek vases connected to the concepts defined in Kerameikos.org. These partners include large museums with internationally recognized collections, such as the Getty and the British Museum, but also smaller university museums including the Fralin Museum at the University of Virginia, the Harvard Art Museums, and the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology at the University of Reading (UK). The aggregation of these collections will facilitate sophisticated (even if incomplete) geographic and distribution analyses and will demonstrate the potential of Kerameikos.org as a research tool for the discipline. The vases will be encoded in CIDOC-CRM conforming to the specifications outlined in linked.art, a community-oriented project driven primarily by Linked Open Data specialists at the Getty Museum.

3. Software Development Extensions for Data Aggregation, Manipulation, and Export

In order to thrive and grow, it is necessary to build and document tools to enable the cleaning and harvesting of data by non-technical specialists. A harvesting application will be developed in the Kerameikos.org back-end that will be able to consume vase data from linked.art-compliant JSON-LD (a linked data model aimed at developers) APIs. One of the most important features of the Linked Open Greek Pottery project is its OpenRefine reconciliation APIs. The Kerameikos.org reconciliation API enables museum curators or archaeologists to standardize labels of shapes, styles, people, etc. to the preferred labels defined in Kerameikos.org, and insert Kerameikos.org URIs directly into the source data. This sort of normalization makes it easier to integrate datasets into the broader Greek vase LOD cloud. The Linked Open Greek Pottery project will expand the functionality of existing APIs, as well as provide documentation for usage. Finally, like Nomisma.org, Kerameikos.org can serve as a content hub for smaller collections that lack personnel or technical expertise to provide data directly to the Pelagios Commons project. Object data stored within the Kerameikos.org SPARQL endpoint will be exported directly into Pelagios’ own RDF model.