OSTRAKON #0: Welcome!
Hello and welcome to Ostraka — a Durham University Classics Society blog. This journal / blog is first and foremost designed for you to show the world what you can do. But in order to make sure you don’t have to do that alone this series exists.
So what is this? The Ostrakon series is a proof of concept more than anything else. It does not aim to be revolutionary or big — quite the opposite in fact! Its aim is to collect little things. Easy things that open small doors to bigger worlds. Every Friday I will add one of these to our pile of shards. In this weekly series I want to collect pop-cultural and ground-level expressions of the Classics and things that make bigger backgrounds more accessible. I will explore and pontificate upon a variety of materials from videos, to articles, to blogs, objects, and whatever else I have come across on the internet over the last couple of years. Sometimes these things will be useful, sometimes they will be silly, but what will unite them all is the idea that they are all pieces (shards if you will) that can fit into a bigger picture.
I strongly believe that Classics has something to offer for and is for everyone — That it is called the first interdisciplinary science for a reason. To be clear, my idea of science is the German term Wissenschaft. As a word, it describes the entirety of human knowledge which humans systematically expand, collect, archive, teach, and pass on. Its definition covers and therefore unifies what the english language has (in my opinion unhelpfully) divided as “sciences” and “humanities”. In German these two classifications are called Naturwissenschaften (“sciences of nature”) and Geisteswissenschaften (“sciences of mind”) — two terms that are loaded, problematic, and hard to translate in their own regard, but that do not deny the inherent kinship of these two pursuits. My shards will keep that in mind and hopefully surprise you with the connections they make.
At the end of every installment of Ostrakon I will leave two or three suggestions of books or articles that can illuminate the topic at hand further and far better than I can and that hopefully create even more connections further down the line.
Stay tuned for Ostrakon #1 coming out tomorrow, Friday the 05/10/19. It features the find that sparked the idea of Ostraka and this series!
Do you have a suggestion for a future topic? Do you have an idea to share with your friends? Send us a message and follow the Durham University Classics Society on Twitter (@DUClassSoc) and Facebook (@DUClassics Society) to keep up with this blog and our other adventures!
