ICS02 Digital Classics
15 credit module: Spring semester (January–March 2025)
Senate House MakerSpace (room 265)
Course tutors: Dr Gabriel Bodard, Institute of Classical Studies; Dr Katharine Shields, King’s College London
We will explore literary, historical and material culture through a range of digital and other technical and cross-disciplinary approaches to the ancient world. This module is suitable for students with no previous technical experience, and interests in any aspect of the ancient world. Greek, Latin or another ancient language are not required, but basic knowledge might be useful.
Digital projects have transformed the way we study the classics in the last several decades. Topics include massive searchable databases of Greek, Latin and Near Eastern literary texts, inscriptions and papyri, which open up new investigations through machine learning, text mining and linguistic methods. We shall also consider Linked Open Data approaches to ancient prosopography (lists of people), geography, bibliography and citation, metadata concerning movement and context of cultural heritage objects, which enable linking between disciplines at an unprecedented scale.
In this module, students will be offered a combination of seminars in London, and several common sessions with the international Sunoikisis Digital Classics programme, which is taught by academics (and attended by students) all around the world via Youtube. We will consider how various technical approaches offer new ways of “reading” textual and material evidence from the ancient world, and provide cross-disciplinary insight into the relationship between historical and literary culture. Students will have the opportunity to put their acquired skills and methods into practice by working on a practical project implementing some of the approaches learned in the module, by agreement with the course tutor, which along with a short report on the work will form the assessment for the module.
Online lectures: Thursdays at 16:00-17:30
In-person seminars: Tuesdays at 11:00-12:30
Timetable of classes, readings and assignments: to follow