Introducing the Manar al-Athar Photo-Archive
written by Miranda Williams
The Manar al-Athar Photo-Archive, based in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Oxford, provides high resolution, searchable images for teaching, research, and publication. These images of archaeological sites and buildings, cover the areas of the former Roman empire which later came under Islamic rule, such as Syro-Palestine/the Levant, Egypt and North Africa, as well as some adjoining regions. The chronological range is from circa 300 BCE through the Islamic period.
The photo-archive is structured geographically around curated, sequenced photo-sets for individual sites and/or buildings which allow users to understand a whole building or site and visually place key details in context. Each photograph is stored with its description, credit line, and other information in its metadata, which is downloaded together with the image file and is visible in applications such as Adobe Bridge or Lightroom. Photographs of material in majority Arabic speaking countries are labelled bilingually, in both Arabic and English, to facilitate local use.
In collaboration with Pelagios, Manar al-Athar intends to embed GPS coordinates, alternative site names and Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) for sites for which the photo-archive holds photographs into the image metadata via a bespoke script and interface which will enable the semi-automatic collation of this data. The data will then be made accessible to users both via the Manar al-Athar website and via the download of individual image files. Embedding this information will also facilitate the location of individual Manar al-Athar resources through web searches as well as the creation of a map interface for the website. The addition of this supplementary metadata to Manar al-Athar photographs will be undertaken progressively, one geographical region at a time, starting with Libya, a region for which Manar al-Athar is currently substantially expanding its coverage.
We look forward to collaborating with the Pelagios Network on this project, and learning from other network partners.
Contact us at: manar@classics.ox.ac.uk
Follow us on social media: @ManarAlAthar
