Keywords: research resources, digital tools, student collaboration
Abstract:
The end of the 19th and early 20th centuries saw great archaeological activity in Egypt, a period that came to be known as the ‘Golden Age’ of Egyptology. The unpublished diaries of Mrs. Emma B. Andrews, who traveled the Nile with the millionaire lawyer turned archaeologist, Theodore M. Davis for over two decades between 1889 and 1914, are an important yet underutilized resource for the history of this time. Mrs. Andrews was present when Davis discovered eighteen of the forty-two tombs now known in the Valley of the Kings. and her writing provides a detailed record of excavation often lacking in contemporary publications. Our research corpus has expanded to include a wide range of unpublished correspondence, historical ephemera and historical newspapers, which give an overview of the social, geographical and political history of Egypt at the time within the broader context of history of archaeology and Egyptology, gender studies and the social, cultural and political history of the Victorian era.
Our Project is developing a ‘Who Was Where When’ database, in an effort to provide a range of contextual data for research and analysis. A founding member of the University of Washington’s Newbook Digital Texts, we have offered internships to over 180 undergraduate and graduate students in digital humanities. Students work alongside faculty to transcribe, encode, conduct historical research and develop digital tools for textual markup, visualisation and analysis. This paper will discuss the range and significance of the primary source material, highlighting the digital tools built by students, and the lessons learned about workflow management and project sustainability. Student development work includes a ‘Historical Markup Tool’ to automate the process of encoding documents in XML-TEI, capturing named entities including locations and people, and an interactive D3 visualisation built on a contemporary map, linking locations, dates, encoded primary sources and a range of historical biographies from our Omeka database.