Immersive Coordinates: Digital Anatolia

FAIN: HD-51465-11

UCLA; Regents of the University of California, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA 90024-4201)
Christopher John Johanson (Project Director: March 2011 to April 2014)

The development of a software platform, using two archaeological digs in Turkey as test cases, to present findings from archaeological sites with particular attention given to data management, curation, and publication.

Funding from the NEH is requested to support the development of a lightweight infrastructure for pre-publication release of curated, 4D cartographic data and narratives centered on two, lesser known archaeological sites in Roman Asia Minor, modern-day western Turkey. The project is the direct result of a five-year investigation into data-management and curation methods at the Turkish archaeological sites of Nysa and Magnesia on the Maeander. While so many efforts are working successfully to allow for depositing data in repositories, few have focused on what is arguably the most important element when exploring such complex data: effective communication through visual argumentation. Using a neo-geographic, web 2.0 approach that has been highly successful when applied to broad, urbanistic studies of modern cities, this project will focus on developing pre-print publications of two ongoing excavations of urban-scale archaeological sites.