An Archaeology of Textual Things

Citation:

Gabriel H. Pizzorno and Daniel Lord Smail. 2018. “An Archaeology of Textual Things.” In Situ.
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An Archaeology of Textual Things

Abstract:

In the past few decades, the efforts of museums and other cultural institutions to digitize and make their collections accessible online have made massive amounts of information about artifacts available to the general public and researchers alike. From Harvard alone, one can obtain detailed information about hundreds of thousands of objects, ranging from those in museums, such as the Art Museums (250,000 objects) or the Peabody (700,000 records), to those of individual projects, such as the Sardis Expedition, featured in the Spring 2017 issue of In Situ.

This availability of information about tangible things, however, has not been matched by a similar increase in the access to information about textual things, that is, objects described in textual sources. Our project, the Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe (DALME), focuses on the latter, and aims to develop a publicly accessible and fully searchable online database of material culture that will enable researchers to seamlessly integrate object descriptions in contemporary documents, such as inventories, as the textual counterparts of objects found in museum collections and artefacts retrieved from in archaeological excavations.

Last updated on 03/31/2022