List of readings by date for Fall 2025 iteration of “Digital Approaches to Classical Antiquity”

see also our course Zotero library for a more complete set of references

Week 2: What is/are Digital Humanities, anyway?

An introduction to a very vexed question.

Readings

  1. Brennan, Timothy. 2017. “The digital humanities bust”. The Chronicle of Higher Education, https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Digital-Humanities-Bust/241424
  2. Busa, Roberto. 1980. “The Annals of Humanities Computing: The Index Thomisticus.” Computers and the Humanities 14: 83-90.
  3. Gold, M.K., and L.F. Klein. 2023. “Introduction: The Digital Humanities, Moment to Moment.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, ix–xvi. University of Minnesota Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv345pd4p.3
  4. Kirschenbaum, M. 2014. “What is ‘Digital Humanities,’ and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things about It?” differences 25.1: 46-63.
  5. Liu, Alan. 2012. “The State of the Digital Humanities: A Report and a Critique.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 11.1: 1-34.
  6. Krämer, S. 2023. “Should We Really ‘Hermeneutise’ the Digital Humanities? A Plea for the Epistemic Productivity of a ‘Cultural Technique of Flattening’ in the Humanities.” Journal of Cultural Analytics 7 (4). doi:10.22148/001c.55592

Reading for project in digital forensics/archaeology

  1. Tringham, R. 2022. “On the Digital and Analog Afterlives of Archaeological Projects.” In Critical Archaeology in the Digital Age, edited by Kevin Garstki, 185–200. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press.

Week 3: Community and AI

What a lot of Digital Humanities reflection and criticism seems to be converging on.

Readings

  1. For this session, please browse the recent open-access textbook Introduction to Digital Humanism, H. Werthner, C. Ghezzi, J. Kramer, J. Nida-Rümelin, B. Nuseibeh, E. Prem., A. Stanger, eds. (Cham: Springer, 2024), https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/87619. In addition to browsing, be sure to read the chapter by Heitzinger and Woltran, “A short introduction to artificial intelligence: methods, success stories, and current limitations”, pp. 135-149.

Week 4: Does a humanist need to code? Guest speaker: Dr. Lars Hinrichs, English and Linguistics

If AI can write your code for you, do you need to know how to do it?

Readings

  1. Pollin, Christopher. 2025. “Haters gonna hate: Why the criticism of Vibe Coding is justified.” Digital Humanities Craft. https://dhcraft.org/excellence/blog/Vibe-Coding/
  2. Bleeker, E., M. Koolen, K. Beelen, L. Melgar, J. van Zundert, and S. Chambers. 2022. “A Game of Persistence, Self-Doubt, and Curiosity: Surveying Code Literacy in Digital Humanities.” DH Benelux Journal 4:11.

Readings for student-led discussion #1: impact of AI on DH

  1. Gattiglia, G. 2025. “Managing Artificial Intelligence in Archeology. An Overview.” Journal of Cultural Heritage 71:225–33. doi:10.1016/j.culher.2024.11.020
  2. Klein, L., M. Martin, A. Brock, M. Antoniak, M. Walsh, J.M. Johnson, L. Tilton, and D. Mimno. 2025. “Provocations from the Humanities for Generative AI Research.” arXiv. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2502.19190.
  3. Ma, R., M. Dedema, and A. Cox. 2025. “A Dancing Bear, a Colleague, or a Sharpened Toolbox? The Cautious Adoption of Generative AI Technologies in Digital Humanities Research.” arXiv. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2404.12458.

Tools: AI coding environments, R and R Studio, Jupyter Notebooks (this is a good introduction to coding notebooks)

Resources:

Week 5: Digital initiatives, museums, and funding. Guest speaker: Koven Smith, lately of the Knight Foundation

Digital projects in the museum world: lifecycles, funding, and challenges

Readings

  1. Gill, S. (Sam) S. 2023. “Why Foundations? The Theory and Strategy of the General-Purpose Foundation.” The Foundation Review 15 (4). doi:10.9707/1944-5660.1680. (suggested by Koven)
  2. Nikolaou, P. 2024. “Museums and the Post-Digital: Revisiting Challenges in the Digital Transformation of Museums.” Heritage 7 (3):1784–800. doi:10.3390/heritage7030084
  3. Terras, M. 2022. “Digital Humanities and Digitised Cultural Heritage.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities, 255–66. Bloomsbury. doi:10.5040/9781350232143.ch-24.
  4. Galeazzi, F., P.D.G.D. Franco, and J.L. Matthews. 2015. “Comparing 2D Pictures with 3D Replicas for the Digital Preservation and Analysis of Tangible Heritage.” Museum Management and Curatorship 30 (5):462–83. doi:10.1080/09647775.2015.1042515

And, if you have time, these might be of further interest (we’ll come back to some of the concepts in Cook 2019):

  1. Biedermann, B. 2021. “Virtual Museums as an Extended Museum Experience: Challenges and Impacts for Museology, Digital Humanities, Museums and Visitors – in Times of (Coronavirus) Crisis.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 015 (3).
  2. Cook, S. 2019. “The Uses of Wikidata for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums and Its Place in the Digital Humanities.” Comma 2017 (2):117–24. doi:10.3828/comma.2017.2.12

Resources:

Week 6: Digital pedagogy and working with students. Guest speaker: Dr. Jessa Dahl, Director, UT’s Japan Lab

What can you realistically do with undergraduates in a semester?

Readings

Students were asked by Dr. Dahl to spend an hour playing one of the following games:

Readings for student-led discussion #2: DH and Digital Pedagogy :star2: :leopard:

  1. Bonds, E. Leigh. “Listening in on the conversations: An overview of digital humanities pedagogy.” CEA Critic 76:2 (2014), 147-157.
  2. Clement, Tanya. “Multiliteracies in the undergraduate digital humanities curriculum: Skills, principles, and habits of mind,” in Digital humanities pedagogy: Practices, principles and politics (2012), 365-388.
  3. Georgopoulou, Maria Sofia, Christos Troussas, Evangelia Triperina, and Cleo Sgouropoulou, “Approaches to Digital Humanities Pedagogy: a systematic literature review within educational practice”, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 40:1 (2025): 121–137.
  4. Morris, Sean Michael, and Jesse Stommel. An Urgency of Teachers: The Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy. Hybrid Pedagogy, 2018. “Critical Digital Pedagogy: a Definition,” and “Winona Ryder and the Internet of Things”
  5. Selwyn, Neil. “Digital degrowth: toward radically sustainable education technology.” Learning, Media and Technology 49:2 (2024), 186-199.

Resources: O’Donnell, C. 2014. Developer’s Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators. Inside technology. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. (available online via UT Libraries)

Tools:

Week 7: Virtual reconstructions, 3D modeling, metadata, paradata, and uncertainty. Guest speaker: Michael Neylan, PhD candidate, Monash University

3D environments and our perception of truth

Readings

  1. Rabinowitz, A. 2019. “Communicating in Three Dimensions: Questions of Audience and Reuse in 3D Excavation Documentation Practice.” Studies in Digital Heritage 3 (1):100–16. https://doi.org/10.14434/sdh.v3i1.25386
  2. Börjesson, L., O. Sköld, and I. Huvila. 2020. “Paradata in Documentation Standards and Recommendations for Digital Archaeological Visualisations.” Digital Culture and Society 6 (2):191–220. doi:https://doi.org/10.14361/dcs-2020-0210. (pdf)
  3. The London Charter (2.1, 2009)
  4. The ICOMOS Seville Principles (2017)

Readings for student-led discussion #3: VR, AR, 3D: documentation and ethics

  1. Forte, Maurizio. “3D Archaeology: New Perspectives and Challenges—The Example of Çatalhöyük.” Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology & Heritage Studies 2, no. 1 (2014): 1–29. https://doi.org/10.5325/jeasmedarcherstu.2.1.0001
  2. Torres, A., Medina-Alcaide, M. Ángeles, Intxaurbe, I., Rivero, O., Rios-Garaizar, J., Arriolabengoa, M., Ruiz-López, J. F., & Garate, D. “Scientific virtual reality as a research tool in prehistoric archaeology: the case of Atxurra Cave (northern Spain).” Virtual Archaeology Review, 15(31), 1–15 (2024). https://doi.org/10.4995/var.2024.20976
  3. Ulguim, P. “Models and Metadata: The Ethics of Sharing Bioarchaeological 3D Models Online.” Archaeologies 14, 189–228 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11759-018-9346-x

Tools:

Week 8 (October 15): Data and more data. Guest speaker: Michael Shensky, UT Libraries

What do you do once you’ve reduced information to data?

Readings

  1. Berners-Lee, T. 2010. “Linked Data - Design Issues.” Www.W3c.Org. https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html. (this is a foundational essay and not too long)
  2. Kansa, S.W., L. Atici, E.C. Kansa, and R.H. Meadow. 2020. “Archaeological Analysis in the Information Age: Guidelines for Maximizing the Reach, Comprehensiveness, and Longevity of Data.” Advances in Archaeological Practice 8 (1):40–52. doi:10.1017/aap.2019.36. https://escholarship.org/content/qt3m35127j/qt3m35127j.pdf (OA)
  3. Browse the Guides to Good Practice created by the Archaeology Data Service (UK) and the Digital Archaeological Record (US).
  4. Browse the data publication of the excavations of the Etruscan site of Murlo/Poggio Civitate in Open Context.

Readings for student-led discussion #4: FAIR, CARE, and data standards

  1. Carroll, S. R., Garba, I., Figueroa-Rodríguez, O. L., Holbrook, J., Lovett, R., Materechera, S., … Hudson, M. (2020). The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance. Data Science Journal, 19.1, 43.
  2. Lien-Talks, A. (2024). How FAIR Is Bioarchaeological Data: With a Particular Emphasis on Making Archaeological Science Data Reusable. Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology, 7(1), 246+.
  3. Carroll, S.R., Herczog, E., Hudson, M. et al. Operationalizing the CARE and FAIR Principles for Indigenous data futures. Sci Data 8, 108 (2021).
  4. Larsson, Å.M., Bornsäter, B. & Hacke, M. Developing practices for FAIR and linked data in Heritage Science. npj Herit. Sci. 13, 53 (2025).
  5. Hagmann, D. (2024). Adopt, Adapt, and Share! FAIR Archeological Data for Studying Roman Rural Landscapes in Northern Noricum. Journal of Open Humanities Data, 10(1), 13.
  6. Laguna-Palma, D., & Barruezo-Vaquero, P. (2024). Advancing the LOUD+FAIR Data Principles in Eastern Mediterranean Archaeological Research: Insights from the PERAIA Project. Advances in Archaeological Practice, 12(4), 359–374. doi:10.1017/aap.2024.16

Optional Reading (if you want some continuation from Matt’s discussion last week)

  1. Matthieu Quantin, Sarah Tournon, Valentin Grimaud, Florent Laroche, and Xavier Granier. 2023. Combining FAIR principles and long-term archival of 3D data. In Proceedings of the 28th International ACM Conference on 3D Web Technology (Web3D ‘23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 16, 1–6.

Resources:

Tools:

Week 9 (October 22): Digital numismatics, epigraphy, and history. Guest speakers: Dr. Alex Walthall and Dr. Naomi Campa

Ancient evidence that lends itself to datification

Readings

  1. Wigg-Wolf, D., and K. Tolle. 2025. “Linked Open Data for Coin Finds. Antike Fundmünzen in Europa (AFE).” In Proceedings of the XVI International Numismatic Congress, 11-16.09.2022, Warsaw, Vol. IV: Medals, Modern and General Numismatics, 267–73. Warsaw Studies in Archaeology 13. Brepols Publishers. doi:10.1484/M.WSA-EB.5.145487. https://www.brepolsonline.net/doi/abs/10.1484/M.WSA-EB.5.145487.
  2. Rabinowitz, A., R. Shaw, and P. Golden. 2018. “Making up for Lost Time: Digital Epigraphy, Chronology, and the PeriodO Project.” In Crossing Experiences in Digital Epigraphy. From Practice to Discipline, edited by Annamaria De Santis and Irene Rossi, 202–15. Warsaw: De Gruyter Open. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110607208-017.

Readings for Student-led Discussion #5: Digital Epigraphy

  1. Heřmánková, P., V. Kaše, and A. Sobotková. 2021. “Inscriptions as Data: Digital Epigraphy in Macro-Historical Perspective.” Journal of Digital History 1. https://doi.org/10.1515/JDH-2021-1004?locatt=label:JDHFULL
  2. Assael, Yannis, T. Sommerschield, A. Cooley, et al. 2025. “Contextualizing Ancient Texts with Generative Neural Networks.” Nature 645: 141–47. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09292-5
  3. Bodel, John, Jonathan Prag, and Charlotte Roueché. 2024. “Open Scholarship: Epigraphic Corpora in the Digital Age.” In Proceedings of L’épigraphie Au XXIe Siècle. Actes Du XVIe Congrès International d’Épigraphie Grecque et Latine, edited by Pierre Fröhlich and Milagros Navarro Cabellero. 91-117. Bordeaux: Ausonius. https://open-epihub.cnr.it/bibliography/7B9QFPEV. PDF available here
  4. Prag, Jonathan, and Alfredo Tosques. 2024. “I.Sicily as a Tool for the Study of Roman Sicily: An Experiment in Institutional Annotation.” Gerión. Revista de Historia Antigua 42(Eng.): 73–91. https://doi.org/10.5209/geri.95520
  5. Please explore I.Sicily database

Extra/Further Reading on Applications:

  1. Hamidović, David, Claire Clivaz, and Sarah Bowen Savant. Ancient Manuscripts in Digital Culture: Visualisation, Data Mining, Communication. Vol. 3. Digital Biblical Studies. Leiden: Brill, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004399297

  2. Soriano, Isabel Velázquez, and David Espinosa Espinosa, eds. Epigraphy in the Digital Age. 1st ed. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2021. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/utxa/detail.action?docID=6719341

And really just for fun:

  1. Ceccarelli, S., M. Rippa, and G. Caruso. 2025. “Pulsed Thermographic Analysis of Herculaneum Papyri.” Sci Rep 15, no. 34466. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-19911-w

Plus, the pre-print article on VLMs:

  1. Zhang, Nonghai, Zeyu Zhang, and Jiazi Wang. “VaseVQA-3D: Benchmarking 3D VLMs on Ancient Greek Pottery.” arXiv:2510.04479v2. Preprint, October 10, 2025. https://arxiv.org/html/2510.04479v2#S6

Resources:

Tools:

Week 10 (October 29): Student presentations – digital project archaeology/autopsy

What makes a project survive? What happens when a project dies?

Readings (for after presentations, as food for thought)

Online projects to be reviewed

Week 11 (November 5): AI, deep learning, and geospatial data. Guest speaker: Dr. Leila Character, Texas A&M

What does a computer see, and can it help us to see things we otherwise wouldn’t?

Readings for student-led discussion, focus on ethics paper and skim the broad overview (Mina)

  1. Janowicz, K. (2023). Philosophical foundations of geoai: Exploring sustainability, diversity, and bias in geoai and spatial data science. In Handbook of geospatial artificial intelligence (pp. 26-42). CRC Press. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.06508
  2. Mai, G., Xie, Y., Jia, X., Lao, N., Rao, J., Zhu, Q., … & Jiao, J. (2025). Towards the next generation of Geospatial Artificial Intelligence. International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, 136, 104368. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1569843225000159

Tools:

Readings for Dr. Character’s presentation (suggested by Dr. Character)

  1. Character, L., M. Moline, M.W. Breece, E. White, D. Davis, and C. Colbourn. 2025. “Deep Learning for Detection of Underwater Aircraft Wrecks from US Conflicts.” Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology 8 (1):139–55. doi:10.5334/jcaa.179.
  2. Character, L., T. Beach, T. Inomata, T.G. Garrison, S. Luzzadder-Beach, J.D. Baldwin, R. Cambranes, F. Pinzón, and J.L. Ranchos. 2024. “Broadscale Deep Learning Model for Archaeological Feature Detection across the Maya Area.” Journal of Archaeological Science 169:106022. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2024.106022.
  3. Zeynali, R., E. Mandanici, and G. Bitelli. 2025. “A Technical Note on AI-Driven Archaeological Object Detection in Airborne LiDAR Derivative Data, with CNN as the Leading Technique.” Remote Sensing 17 (15):2733. doi:10.3390/rs17152733.
  4. Berganzo-Besga, I., H.A. Orengo, F. Lumbreras, M. Carrero-Pazos, J. Fonte, and B. Vilas-Estévez. 2021. “Hybrid MSRM-Based Deep Learning and Multitemporal Sentinel 2-Based Machine Learning Algorithm Detects Near 10k Archaeological Tumuli in North-Western Iberia.” Remote Sensing 13 (20):4181. doi:10.3390/rs13204181.

Week 12 (November 12): Computational photography workshop

No readings or discussion: we’ll spend the whole session working on computational photography capture and processing (photogrammetry and RTI), using items from the UT Classics collection

Week 13 (November 19): Digital approaches to ancient art

Note that we will be conducting a capture session for the Blanton Vases starting at 10am on Monday, November 17th

Week 14 (December 3): Concluding discussion and digital project hackathon