Conference Papers and Invited Lectures
Shai Gordin (11/2022) “When Networks Matter: Interpreting Patterns in Social and Geographical Networks of First Millennium BCE Babylonia”. SBL 2022 Annual Meeting, session: Literature and History of the Persian Period.
Shai Gordin and Avital Romach (07/2022) “Optical Character Recognition for Complex Scripts: A Case-study in Cuneiform”. DH 2022, Tokyo, Japan 25-29 July 2022. long paper.
Shai Gordin (06/2022) “Neo-Babylonian Scribal Habits from a Stylometric Perspective”. Invited lecture, Archival Scribes and Archival Literacy in Babylonia: Theory and Practice, 1-2 June 2022, Leiden University, the Netherlands.
Shai Gordin (12/2021) “The Babylonian Engine: Studying ancient Babylonia using OCR, NLP and ML”. Journal of Electornic Imaging Webinar - Deep Learning: Applications and Recent Directions, Bar-Ilan University. See recorded lecture
Shai Gordin and Samuel Clark (06/2021) “MAPA: A Linked Open Data Gazetteer of ancient Babylonia”. Conference poster, Digital Humanities Summer Institute – Online Edition, 7-11, 14-18 June 2021, University of Victoria, Canada.
Shai Gordin (04/2021) “Walking among the orchards of Gilgamesh: the role of spatial memory in and around the Neo-Babylonian City”. Transcultural Mobilities and Memories, Minho University, Portugal.
Shai Gordin and Ethan Fetaya (11/2020) “The Babylonian Engine: Human-Machine collaboration for restoring ancient Mesopotamian heritage”. CHNT 25: Conference on Cultural Heritage and New Technologies, Vienna.
Shai Gordin (11/2020) “Mesopotamian Ancient Place-names Almanac: Doing Historical Geography in the Age of Linked Open Data Spatial Data”. Metadata in Assyriology: Spatial Analysis, and Historical Geography, Uppsala University, Sweden.
Past Events of the DigPasts Lab
Human - Machine Cooperation in Archaeology, Epigraphy and Ancient History (19-20 Feb 2020)
The conference and workshop Human-Machine Cooperation in Archaeology, Epigraphy and Ancient History was devoted to the application of digital tools in projects related to ancient history, material culture, and texts. This approach assumes that the application of digital tools to the study of ancient times shares similar challenges, and the output of such projects may be of interest to all participants in the workshop. We brought together international and Israeli scholars of archaeology, epigraphy, biblical studies, ancient history, computer science, digital humanities, and members of the Israeli high-tech industry in order to investigate the following issues:
- Presentation of specific projects, their challenges, paths taken to accomplish them, and possible outcomes.
- The application of newly developed algorithms and technologies.
- Interaction between teams and technologies – making technology a member of the ancient history and archaeology community.
- Technology in the service of scholarship – what can technology teach us that we cannot learn without it?
- The intended users (scholarly community, the general public, others).
- Databases vs. TEI, and choosing the right conventions.
- Copyrights vs. opening and sharing our sources.
- Intensive small learning workshops on the implementation of digital humanities tools.
We would like to thank all participants for their fascinating talks and workshop sessions. A summary of the talks and workshops with abstracts can be viewed in the following link.