Digital Project Overview for Art and Archaeology of the Greco-Roman Near East and Egypt

Aims and Introduction: In this brave new digital world, all students need to educate themselves about how to engaged with and use technology. In this course, rather than a 20-page (5000-7000 word) paper about an object or building, identifying the object’s salient features and context, as well as analyzing the significance of the object students have been asked to create a digital project, a website, about a certain object, building or site from the Greco-Roman Near East or Egypt. This paper combines researching an object, site or building in a conventional manner (library, archival and site research) with developing digital skills.

Students are asked to use wordpress, personal publishing platform (i.e., blogging), to create a website.

This is a beta version of website: https://columnofjerash.commons.gc.cuny.edu/

This site shows some of the introductory research that I and Jared Simard (PhD Candidate, Classics) are conducting on a Column from Jerash (Jordan) that is now located in Queens.

It is to serve as mental model and template for a website that each student will build using wordpress. You do not have to follow the model exactly, but it might help.

I suggest that you use the theme Twenty-Eleven for your website. You can choice another one; we will discuss themes in class. Amendment: Twenty-Twelve is probably a better bet

The websites will not be public (we will show how to turn off this setting), unless you decide to make yours public. The professor will be added as an admin to the project so that she can view it and grade it.

Units of the Assignment

Because this type of project is new to most students, we will have a significant amount of scaffolding. You cannot do it last minute!

 

1. Introduction to wordpress
   1. Tutorial on wordpress with Andrew McKinney, Digital Fellow, CUNY Graduate Center – March 20^th (digital classroom meeting, Computer lab room 6418)
2. Select object/site/building to research
3. Establish a provisional website structure (i.e., create pages and menus) – April 10th
4. Complete annotated bibliography and webograpy – April 24th
5. Research object/site/building and begin constructing the website
   1. Begin to flesh out and provide content (i.e., text and images) for individual pages for aspects of the object / building (via drop-down menu)
      1. For example, discuss significance of the object on a page
      2. The (social, political, culture, or economic) context of the object/building
   2. Locate photographs for use on the site (via Oxford DAMS database or another source with useable images)
   3. Work on other aspects (including proper attribution of images, sources, etc)
   4. May 8: Draft website presentations and critiques (digital classroom meeting, Computer lab room 6418)
6. Complete Project – FINAL Digital Projects due Monday May 20^th at 9 am

Troubleshooting (because there is always something that goes wrong)

1. *when in doubt, google your problem because so many people use wordpress, there is a lot of information about it online (there are also great youtube videos)*
2. Also visit https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/wordpress-help/
   1. Post a help topic (and wait for the answer)
3. And visit https://help.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
4. Email EML (last resort)