Event Title
Hegemony of the Written Word (Apulian Vases, Network Visualizations, and the Hegemony of the Written Word)
Location
CB1-309
Start Date
3-11-2017 1:45 PM
End Date
3-11-2017 3:15 PM
Description
How do you read an ancient vase? What can a ceramic object and its decoration tell us about the people who made and used it more than two millenia ago? Such questions have occupied scholars of Greek figure-decorated pottery throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Despite the importance of the visual and tactile dimensions of pottery, however, verbal narratives have dominated how ancient Mediterranean ceramics are analyzed and presented.
The seminal works of the founder of South Italian and Sicilian vase-painting studies, Arthur Dale Trendall (1909-1995), exemplify the hegemony of the written word in ancient art historical and archaeological studies. Throughout his 60+ year career, Trendall relied on his trained eye and eidetic memory to analyze some 20,000 figure-decorated vases dating to the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Trendall's method of analyzing the images, known as connoisseurship, lead him to identify thousands of relationships between vases, vase-painters, and pottery workshops.
Despite the rich network of connections Trendall identified in South Italian and Sicilian vase-painting, his publications are, fundamentally, lists: verbally-dense descriptions of each vase, with groups of vases introduced by short passages describing the iconographic and stylistic characteristics of each painter or workshop. Trendall's lists are fundamental to the study of Greek colonization of the Western Mediterranean, and his observations continue to provide a framework for contextualizing and giving voice to archaeological artefacts which would otherwise remain mute objets d'art. Since his magna opera were published, other scholars have tackled the same materials in diverse ways, but approaches remain firmly entrenched in using the written word as the means for exploring, extracting, and presenting the objects' stories.
This presentation will explore how network visualizations may offer a novel perspective on the narrative of ancient figure-decorated pottery. The network of painters and workshops from a subset of Trendall's lists will be mapped using Gephi to visualize the interconnections between groups of artists working in the South Italian region of Apulia during the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Subsequently, additional iconographic data collected on representations of music and musicians within the Apulian vase corpus will be mapped. By placing these visualizations alongside one another and considering where the networks converge and diverge, the presenters aim to generate a discussion about a common type of monolingualism in the digital humanities: the dominance of the written word and verbal modes of expression and analysis. In addition, what is lost when verbal data are presented in a single, monodirectional narrative will be considered, as well as the challenges of translating from physical object, to digital image, to verbal data.
Hegemony of the Written Word (Apulian Vases, Network Visualizations, and the Hegemony of the Written Word)
CB1-309
How do you read an ancient vase? What can a ceramic object and its decoration tell us about the people who made and used it more than two millenia ago? Such questions have occupied scholars of Greek figure-decorated pottery throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
