Digital Janiform: Research and Pedagogical Applications of Digital Objects in Archaeology

The Concept of the Digital Janiform

• The digital object is defined as a product of dual engagement between objects of inquiry and digital technologies.
• These objects are described as janiform because they can face toward research or teaching equally and without contradiction.
• While digital objects for the ancient Mediterranean are common in research contexts, they are not frequently enough reoriented for pedagogical use.
• Bringing these research products into the classroom validates the learning experience by providing students with authentic, real-world data without the use of reductive, intermediating lessons.

Video Tours and Comparative Urbanism in the Roman Empire

• In the summer of $2015$, research was conducted on traffic circulation in Roman cities across the southwest of Turkey and the southeastern coast of France.
• Data was captured using a Google Glass headset to record hour-long tours of ancient cities, documenting the physical context of wearing patterns on street features that indicate traffic direction.
• The resulting videos offer comparative value regarding the landscape of Roman urbanism, highlighting unique visual experiences based on several variables:
  • Geography and Geology: Where the city is located in the empire and the building stones locally available.
  • Chronology and Scale: The age and physical size of the urban center.
  • Preservation and Excavation: How the city was destroyed and subsequently recovered.
• Pompeii serves as a quintessential archetype and "control" experience due to its status as the most excavated and best-preserved Roman city, despite popular misconceptions regarding its perfection as a norm.

Structure of the Urban Landscape Assignment

• Students establish a "control iconography" by watching a Google Glass video of Pompeii.
• They compare Pompeii to cities in Turkey and France using stabilized (‐S‐) or original, unstabilized (‐US‐) video versions and online GIS maps which utilize satellite imagery.
• Specific sites included in the comparative curriculum are Ambrussum, Aspendos, Ephesus, Glanum, Hieropolis, Laodiceia, Perge, Sagalossos, Side, and Vaison-La-Romaine.
• Exercise requirements for students include:
  • Drawing a line on a map to trace the video path across the city.
  • Placing a digital pin at $5$ important landmarks, buildings, or features.
  • Writing a $100$ to $200\,\text{word}$ description for each pin, including citations and links to web imagery.
  • Drafting an essay of no less than $1000\,\text{words}$ to compare and contrast the urban landscapes.

Teaching Excavation through Digitized and Born-Digital Records

• Traditional classroom teaching of excavation often atomizes the method into principles (stratigraphy, seriation, terminus post quem, terminus ante quem), which can lead to students who understand definitions but cannot recognize stratigraphic layers in a trench.
• Relying on digitized records demonstrates to students that archaeological practice is not uniform but varies based on time period (e.g., $1970$ vs. $2009$), subdiscipline (Greek vs. Roman), and individual supervisor recording styles.

Investigation of Isthmia Notebooks

• Students analyze digitized trench notebooks from Isthmia, Greece, from the years $1970$, $1971$, and $1972$ via the ARCS project.
• Students answer questions via a Google Form regarding trench dimensions, the number of recorded trenches, and the pace of work.
• Critical analysis of recording units identifies terms such as "basket" and "box" to evaluate how excavators adhered to stratigraphic theory in the field.
• The notebooks reveal values of the archaeologist, such as prioritizing the tracing of illegible coins as circles while leaving soil deposit relationships implicit in the recording order.

Comparison with Digital Records from Pompeii

• This phase uses born-digital records from the Pompeii Archaeological Research Project: Porta Stabia generated four decades after the Isthmia notebooks.
• Materials include supervisor notebooks and $144$ database forms documenting every stratigraphic unit encountered.
• Key observations from student comparison include:
  • Scale and Speed: Modern trenches are smaller and excavated more slowly.
  • Recording Focus: Effort is shifted toward soil stratigraphy and features rather than artifacts.
  • Specialization: A near-complete segregation of excavators and finds specialists exists at Pompeii.
  • Distributed Recording: Digital tools allow all team members to participate in recording, rather than relying solely on a supervisor.
• Students learn local specific nomenclatures such as "marl", "stereo", "lapilli", and "quarry pit".

Integrating Artifact Records and Spatial Mapping in Pompeii

• The Pompeii Bibliography and Mapping Project (PBMP) is used to contextualize the artifactual record, which is often missing from architectural maps.
• Mario Pagano and Raffaele Prisciandaro published a landmark recording of $3,253$ objects found in daybooks between $1748$ and $1859$.

Digitization and Quantitative Analysis

• In $2014$, students digitized these records to calculate which artifacts early excavators privileged and whether collection variety increased over time.
• Analysis revealed biases in recording, such as the absence of pottery and common coins, which challenges the "Pompeii Premise"—the idea that the site is a perfect, time-frozen record of daily life.

Mapping in ArcGIS Online

• In $2016$, students used ESRI ArcGIS Online to map artifacts to specific building addresses (houses, shops, workshops, public buildings).
• Students were the first to slice these data chronologically and spatially to examine distributions of graffiti, statues, and carved gemstones.
• This work contributes to the PBMP as a layer titled "Artifacts of the Bourbon Excavations".

3D Scanning and the Analysis of Urban Infrastructure

• During $2016$ fieldwork, a "Structure Sensor" was used to capture 3D textures of Paving stones, ruts, curbstones, sidewalks, drains, ramps, and hitching holes in Pompeii.
• One scan captured a long scar on a travertine curbstone where cart axles made contact.
• Assignment Goals:
  • Perform measurements within 3D models embedded in PDFs using Adobe Reader.
  • Use a custom-built spreadsheet to tabulate results to determine vehicle size and construction.
• Challenges and Lessons:
  • Parallax Errors: Rotating the model while taking measurements caused points to move out of plane, leading to dimension errors.
  • Failure as Advancement: The technical setbacks served as a lesson that experimental failure leads to methodological improvement.
  • Grade Anxiety: Instructors must remind students that experiments can fail and that the process is more important than the defined outcome/grade.

Survey of Student Technical Literacy and Academic Tool Knowledge

• A survey of first-year students titled "What we Know Now" provided data on incoming digital proficiency:
  • General Comfort: $81\%$ identified as "comfortable" or "very comfortable".
  • Office Suites: High familiarity with Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. High daily use of Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Microsoft Access was almost entirely unknown.
  • Academic Technologies: Students use Gmail and Drive over Microsoft Exchange and Box. Dropbox is the most popular non-campus cloud service.
  • Library Skills: Only $15\%$ had used library databases or search tools more than once. Interlibrary loan and citation management software were unknown.
  • Platforms: Host solutions and WordPress were unfamiliar. A plurality used audio and visual processing software.

Faculty Perspectives on Blended Learning Integration

• The Five Colleges Blended Learning Program (5CollBL) supported $31$ faculty and $24$ courses between $2014$ and $2018$ via a Mellon Foundation grant.
• A survey of these faculty (97% response rate) indicated:
  • Impact on Teaching: Overwhelmingly positive.
  • Student Reaction: Generally perceived as positive by faculty.
  • Barriers: The initial workload to integrate digital objects is significant and often requires financial incentives or existing research data.
  • Reusability: Once created, digital assignments are easy to rework and reuse in subsequent semesters.
  • Role of Technology: Viewed as a meaningful enhancement but not a substitute for face-to-face teaching in liberal arts.

Methodological and Professional Implications of Digital Objects

• "Rough edges" in digital data (vagaries, imperfections) are pedagogical benefits because they demonstrate archaeology as a multiplicity of practices rather than a single standardized process.
• Inviting students into research projects creates a sense of ownership and investment, moving learning beyond a simple transactional expectation of passing assessments.
• Technological barriers mean that students are not the "digital natives" they are often imagined to be; they require deliberate training in specific parts of complex software.
• Assignment Life Cycle: The useful life of a digital assignment is estimated at approximately $10\,\text{years}$ before updates to platforms, file formats, and institutional regimes render it obsolete.
• The virtuous circle of research and teaching is maintained by the janiform nature of the data, allowing faculty to reorient research into instructional materials continually.