It's been a long time since I've updated this journal about the current workings of the Ur project. We've gotten a generous continuation grant and will thus be working for at least two more years. I'm writing several articles and of course museum blog entries, several of which are already out:

Most recently, I wrote an article for the Center for ( Read more... )

This month's museum blog entry about the Ur project covers the idea of a 'standard house' at the site in the Old Babylonian Period. In fact, there is a lot of debate about just what the 'ideal house' was. There is a good deal of difficulty in reconstructing a house above the remains that still exist. Just how high was the roof? Was there a second ( Read more... )

Last month I decided to cover the living conditions at Ur in the museum blog (click to read that entry). I submitted the entry at the end of December, but with the holidays, it didn't actually go up until last week. In the entry, I discussed the building of the Expedition House with direct quotes gleaned from letters that crowdsourcing helped to ( Read more... )

Last month when I was in London, Dan Pett, a friend of mine at the British Museum asked if I would like to give a short talk about the Ur project at a conference he was helping to organize at University College London. I accepted and now that talk is on YouTube. It's a bit dark in the auditorium, but they've done a good job of integrating video ( Read more... )

I've been travelling a great deal this month, reporting on our first year and attempting to secure funds for the following three years. So my blog entry on the museum website this month is about the scope of the excavations rather than any one artifact. I show field photos of the excavation from the air and of the large numbers of workers employed ( Read more... )

The crowdsourcing website for documents concerning the site of Ur in southern Mesopotamia went live Friday, 14 September. In the first week of being up, we received more than 40 volunteers and transcribed more than 100 documents. That may not sound like much when the total number of documents already scanned (5,000) and the estimates of those yet ( Read more... )

The UrCrowdsource site went live today. In two categories, letters and field notes, 349 documents are currently allocated to be transcribed, but more are on their way. I don't have metadata or relationships between documents associated yet, but am working slowly to put that together. I'd hoped to allow the public to do that as well, but the way the ( Read more... )

Once again I'm happy to see that people are interested in helping with the Ur transcriptions and that the option for presentation of the scans is overwhelmingly to give the document in its entirety and let you figure it out.

I have now created a site using Omeka and Scripto that allows for basic transcription. I'm currently in the process of testing ( Read more... )

Thanks to everyone who took part in the Ur poll. Looks like work with documents in any capacity is the main choice of those polled. After that is helping assign metadata to the documents and/or artifacts (very important since this helps make searches more effective).

I'm trying to get either Scripto or FromThePage running on a server as soon as ( Read more... )

I just returned from LAWDI, the Linked Ancient World Data Institute at ISAW, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in New York City. It was a three day conference in which tech and non-tech people came together to discuss progress in the ideal of sharing archaeological, philological, and geographical data across the web to allow for far- ( Read more... )