I'll admit that I am currently obsessed with Omeka (and particularly excited about their new foray into cloud hosting). As any reader of this blog knows, it's a free, open-source web-publishing platform. And I have begun to use it extensively to publish images from my archaeological work in the Mediterranean. The software is powerful and relatively easy to use. I've managed to build three archives so far. The first included the works of Ryan Stander who was the artist in residence at the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project this past summer. The second, which I featured in this blog yesterday, included images taken of the site of Lakka Skoutara over the course of 9 years showing archaeological formation processes playing out in the Greek countryside. Yesterday, I uploaded a series of maps documenting the distribution of material across our study area in Cyprus. The maps show the distribution of artifacts by chronotype across the coastal zone of Pyla Village, and these maps will be linked to places within a working draft of a chapter for the upcoming PKAP monograph on the distributional analysis of material at the site.
Distribution of Hellenistic to Early Roman period artifacts
Distribution of Early Roman period artifacts
Eventually, a working draft of this chapter (part of which have appeared, albeit in very fragmentary forms in this blog in Thinking Out Loud One, Two, Three, Four) will appear on my Scribd page or, better still, in my Omeka archive alongside the other maps and images using their clever Google powered document viewer plug-in.
None of these applications took me more than a few hours to find my comfort zone and I can uses these applications to continue to expand the personal-professional archive that began with the blog. Each archive is designed to accommodate different types of material, operates with slightly different principles of organization, and has a different aesthetic of display (or user-interface as the kids call it).
The scholarly process becomes more transparent and de-mystified.
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