cpwoolsey / daea

Digital Atlas of Egyptian Archaeology

daea

Digital Atlas of Egyptian Archaeology

http://matrix-msu.github.io/daea/

Collaborative project in the Fall 2014 ANP455: Ancient Egyptian Archaeology class (http://anthropology.msu.edu/anp455-fs14) at Michigan State University. Students all chose a specific site on which to write a site report (details can be found at http://anthropology.msu.edu/anp455-fs14/assignments-grading/). They created the wb page for the atlas entry (basic HTML, CSS, and some light JS if they felt ambitious), added the pin to the map by adding their site's information (Lat/Lon, time period, brief site description) to a CSV. Leaflet Omnivore (https://github.com/mapbox/leaflet-omnivore) was used to pull the data out of the CSV and onto a simple Leaflet based map. In addition to doing focused research and writing on a specific Egyptian archaeological site, students learned basic HTML/CSS and GitHub (forking, pull requests, comitting, etc) during the course of the assignment.

The project has several goals. First, it allowed the students to have focused engagement with a specific archaeological site (and write about the site). Second, students learned some digital skills during the process, such as working with HTML, digital mapping skills, version control, etc (things that are normally not part of a senior level archaeology class...things that they can easily apply in other settings). Finally, students built something public, they contributed to the collective knowledge and resources available on the open web about the archaeology of ancient Egypt