December 16, 2024
Congratulations to the individuals, projects, and publications that received AIA Awards. They will be formally recognized at the 2025 AIA Awards Ceremony, which will take place during the 126th Annual Meeting. We have contacted this year’s winners to gather insights about their projects, experiences, and what inspired them to pursue a career in archaeology.
International [Digital] Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA)
Founder/co-director: Anne Chen (Bard College)
Award: Award for Outstanding Work in Digital Archaeology
Project Description:
The International [Digital] Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA) is guided by the ambition that new digital methods can transform colonially-entangled collections of artifacts and archives into intergenerational and intercultural learning laboratories where students, professionals, and stakeholder communities worldwide can grapple together more inclusively with the unintended legacies (ie. inequities in access, epistemic biases) of archaeology’s problematic past. To address the fragmentation of contextually-related collections, siloed disciplinary expertise, and long-standing access inequities descendant of early excavations, IDEA is creating the first globally accessible, multilingual, inter-institutional register of content related to one of archaeology’s blockbuster sites in the form of a Linked Open Data (LOD) dataset curated through interdisciplinary collaboration and engagement with Syrian communities. This co-curated dataset powers an English/Arabic web application, provides an accessible entry-point for training students and global professionals in emerging LOD methods and critical archival practices, and establishes a reusable and extensible multilingual workproduct that can be built on for future research.
What drew you to archaeology?
Archaeology was not on my radar as a career path until college when distribution coursework at my undergraduate institution sparked my imagination. I credit inspiring professors, including Jeffrey Becker, Natalie Kampen, and Dorothy Verkerk, for opening my mind to the study of material culture, and for the insight that knowledge of the past as pieced together from chance archaeological and textual survivals is more akin to an evolving puzzle than a singular definitive record. While, like many, the opportunity to participate in excavations was part of the allure of the profession, I have come to appreciate in recent years how new digital methods are opening the field to a broader range of participants for whom extended field seasons far from home are not possible due to a range of personal and economic factors.
Tell us about your history with the AIA:
I joined the AIA as a student member in the final year of my undergraduate work (2006), and I still remember how excited I was to receive my first membership card and AIA logo decal in the mail. I have maintained my membership over the years, and am active in the Digital Archaeology (DigArch) and Roman Provincial Archaeology (RPAIG) interest groups.
What’s next for you professionally?
We are looking forward to the public release of the Dura-Europos Stories web application in late 2025 and are currently formulating a ‘phase 2’ of IDEA that will extend our community engagement work. Representatives from the IDEA team are active in a newly-formed working group developing ethical guidance on the digitization of legacy archives related to excavations in the Middle East/North African (MENA) region. We feel strongly that as disciplinary experts working in the wake of early excavations recognize the biases of the existing cultural heritage digital ecosystem and the power differentials in who is currently driving the majority of decision-making relative to its future direction, a key part of our work must be to seek ways to bring a more diverse range of experts–like the many Syrian heritage professionals who have been on the front lines protecting sites and collections–into international conversations about shared digital futures that in large part continue to exclude them. As we further develop the Dura dataset at the core of the IDEA project, we intend to continue leveraging it as a practical training tool that helps us welcome students and colleagues in locations across the globe to learn alongside us and think together about more equitable practices in a shared digital future.
How did you get started with your project?
The inspiration for IDEA came as pandemic shutdowns limited library and collection access worldwide; born of the closures was the realization that Linked Open Data (LOD) methods and an investment of disciplinary expertise in a moment when other work was impossible to carry out could bring together existing–but still siloed–digital resources in ways that would simultaneously benefit researchers, communities, and students. With the support of Tom Elliott, Jeffrey Becker, and Eric Poehler, the work to aggregate dispersed collections/resources began with the systematic definition of a geospatial gazetteer for the focus site (Dura-Europos, Syria) with building-level specificity to serve as a virtual ‘spine’ for the digital reassembly of contextually-related content.
Questions? Learn more about AIA Awards here or reach out to awards@archaeological.org
