From Stone to Screen: First AIA lecture of the year!

Back to another year of school and free lectures!

We started off this year with a wonderful introduction to what the Grad students in the Classical, Near Eastern and Religous Studies department have been up to. Heather Odell and Haley Bertram were courageous enough to give a very informative and interesting lecture. The students have been working on digitizing the departmental collection of artefacts as well as a large collection of epigraphic squeezes. These squeezes were originally collected by Dr. Malcolm McGregor who was head of the Classics Department at UBC from 1954 to 1975. The collection is made up of inscriptions mostly found in Athenian Agora. It is pretty cool that UBC holds copies of the Athenian Tribute Lists from the 5th century!

The two gave short histories of Dr. McGregor, his work and career, and talked about things like the Tribute Lists and all the work done on these important historical inscriptions. All together the lecture wasn't too long and they broke up themes and topics between themselves which made for variation. They used images and slides to support the lecture with pictures of the reconstructed Tribute List stelae and visual comparisons of the different photography methods they tried when taking photos of the squeezes. It really makes you think about the best ways to take a photo of a piece of paper, but the students have come up with a rather innovative way to best capture the raised inscriptions. They have developed with Digital Initiatives method that involves slanted lighting from various angles with high definition photographs. The final product is noticeably easier to decipher.

The project hopes to upload all of this information to a public database available for anyone to study globally. At the moment they already have a number of squeezes uploaded to the library's website at digitalcollections.library.ubc.ca/cdm/landingpage/collection/squeezes.

The lecture was full; I don't think there was an empty seat in the house and just a really exciting project to hear about. It is really nice to see what is going on in the department and how much they got done over the summer.

Really great job Heather and Haley and I hope to see you all at the next lecture!