Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey on the Web

After a bit of a sabbatical, the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey  (EKAS) has returned to the web (albeit only in beta... for now). 

David Pettegrew and I have put up a very basic EKAS page that includes a very basic interactive map.

Survey projects on the web are tricky things. 

Nemea Valley Archaeological Project
Pylos Regional Archaeological Project
Sydney Cyprus Survey Project
Troodos Archaeological and Environmental Survey Project
Rough Cilicia Archaeological Survey Project
Kythera Island Project
Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project
Australia Paliochora Kythera Archaeological Survey
Saronic Harbors Exploration Project
Sikyon Survey Project
The Shala Valley Project

As these links suggest, survey project websites are a mixed bag.  (In fact I could not find any presence on the web for some projects like the Nikopolis Survey and the massive, long running, and complex Argolid Exploration Project (aka Southern Argolid Survey)).  It seems to me that since many survey projects tend to be less stable institutional entities with life spans between a few years and a decade and make little investment in semipermanent, physical infrastructure (e.g. dig houses, site guards, fences, et c.), this often translates to instability on the web.  Big digs, in contrast, with their well-developed infrastructures, long term (and sometimes permanent) staff, and persistent financial commitments from home institutions seem to have better chances for producing a stable presence on the Internet.  The preceding links to survey projects show how most (but not all!) have broken links, pictures that fail to appear, or offer little more than static data (nice photos, some maps... in fact, much of this doesn't count as data at all; of course, some surveys, like the the Sydney Cyprus Survey Project, have archived their data officially in places like the Arts and Humanities Data Service ). 

None of these observations are profound, and this is not to suggest that EKAS is better.  In fact, EKAS totally vanished from the web for a time (and because it's previous home http://web.stcloudstate.edu/eleftheria/ blocked robots like the Internet Archive the site is gone from public view in a profound way! One cannot even "excavate" an early version of the site).

This is all to say that EKAS has reemerged, and the only reason that it has come back is because for David Pettegrew's class in Classical Archaeology.  So, enjoy it while you can!

Comments

[maddy]

A site about EKAS would have been really useful about a year ago, when I was writing my master's...not as a resource in a traditional sense, but still handy. It seems to me that even without publishing data online, project websites at the very least serve two basic purposes: 1) to give the general public an idea of what the project is and why it is important, and 2) to give those interested in learning more the resources to do so (bibliographies, contacts, etc). In this sense the website can function as a portal and is a good way of communicating with the public (if you're into that kind of thing). I'm still shocked by how many projects don't have websites.

[Shawn]

Have you seen the Omeka site? http://omeka.org/ It might be a useful suite of tools for putting up survey data in the dynamic way you mention, and would also serve the purposes suggested in the comment by Maddy.