ICS02 Digital Classics: Linking Written and Material Culture

20 credit module: Autumn semester (October - December 2021)
Venue to be confirmed
Dr Gabriel Bodard, Institute of Classical Studies

We will explore the relationship between literary, historical and material culture through a range of digital and other technical and cross-disciplinary approaches to the ancient world.

Digital projects have transformed the way we study the classics in the last several decades: from the massive searchable databases of Greek, Latin and Near Eastern literary texts, inscriptions and papyri, which open up new investigations through text mining and machine learning, or grammatical and morpho-syntactic annotation; through structured data and semantic web approaches to ancient prosopography (lists of people), geography, bibliography and citation, and the movement of cultural heritage objects in their modern contexts, enabling the linking between disciplines at an unprecedented scale; to the imaging and modelling in two or three dimensions of archaeological artefacts, ancient landscapes and works of art or writing to reconstruct fragmentary objects and lost meaning.

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) from around the world, via Google Hangouts. We will consider how various technical approaches offer new ways of “reading” texts 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.

Common sessions programme (Weekly asynchronous online lecture:1 hour 30 minutes)

Seminars/tutorials programme (Tuesdays at 11:00-13:00)

Timetable of classes, readings and assignments: to follow

Enquiries about enrolment to Mrs Valerie James (ICS) valerie.james@sas.ac.uk.