The Possibilities and Pitfalls of Digitizing Classics
The first Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) paper I — then a young graduate student — ever presented sought to tease out some of the potential consequences of the growing influence of the military in Late Antiquity. I assembled a data set of extant portrait sculpture and inscriptions from Aphrodisias, then counted the number of times military costumes and paraphernalia appeared. I made lists, pie charts, and graphs to visualize the patterns of frequency and relative percentages I had “discovered.”
Of course, I didn’t have time, in a fifteen-minute AIA talk, to explain how I had chosen the data. How…
Elizabeth Wueste
Assistant Professor of Archaeology and Classics at the American University of Rome. Likes: fieldwork, sarcasm, hard cheeses, soft cheeses, bad puns.
