ISAW Library Research Digest 2024

By David Ratzan
01/15/2025

The ISAW Library is first and foremost a place where the ISAW and wider ancient studies communities can find support for their research and teaching, but it is also center of research itself at ISAW. Here is a brief update as to what our staff have been working on in 2024.

Since 2022, when he became director, the head of the ISAW Library David Ratzan has been focused on organizing the NYU Amheida Excavations in the Dakhla Oasis of Egypt. The project had a successful 2023 season, and there is still some hope that the team may get out to Dakhla later this spring. In the meantime, he has been seeing various publication projects related to the excavations through to completion, such as the most recent volume in the Amheida series of ISAW Monographs: Nicola Aravecchia's Early Christianity at Amheida (Egypt's Dakhla Oasis), A Fourth-Century Church: Volume 1, The Excavations (Amheida VII), which appeared in September 2024 and garnered the attention of the mainstream press, including the New York Times. The third volume of ostraca from Trimithis (the ancient toponym for the site) is now in proofs and expected to be published September 2025 as Amheida VIII.

Among other engagements, David presented this past year in Pittsburgh at the annual meeting of The American Research Center in Egypt ("Networking Trimithis") and at Yale as part of the Yale Egyptological Lecture Series ("The NYU excavations at ancient Trimithis (Dakhla Oasis): Field report and recent developments 2023–2024.”) He now busy finalizing two catalogs of coins excavated from Amheida, a joint article about fragments of imported Roman mortaria, and a biographical entry about the late classicist A. Thomas Cole. His book review of Maria Nowak's Bastards in Egypt: Social and Legal Illegitimacy in the Roman Era (Peeters 2020) will appear in the next volume of the Bulletin of American Society of Papyrologists (61; 2024); and for those of you interested in teaching and games, his contribution to Re-rolling the past: Representations and reinterpretations of antiquity in analog and digital games appeared late in 2023: “New strategies for teaching old games: Playful approaches to teaching ancient economic and institutional history.” In D. Wolin and G. Mckee (eds.), Re-rolling the past: Representations and reinterpretations of antiquity in analog and digital games. ISAW Papers 22.7.

Gabriel Mckee, ISAW's Librarian for Collections and Services, has been very active this year. Taking pride of place is the imminent publication of his book The Saucerian: UFOs, Men in Black, and the Unbelievable Life of Gray Barker from the MIT Press (available in bookshops and imperial star cruisers on April 22, 2025). Late last year Gabriel anticipated his book with a shorter study stemming from his research, "Office Copying Technology in the Flying Saucer Subculture: Gray Barker's Saucerian Books." Book History 27:2 (Fall 2024). Anyone who has studied scriptoria or the impact of copying technology on the production and circulation of ancient literature will find this an interesting read. Finally, just out is a catalog that Gabriel co-edited for an exhibition at the Grolier Club: A First-Class Fool: Mark Twain and Humor, edited by Susan Jaffe Tane, Julie Carlsen, Gabriel Mckee, and Kevin Mac Donnell (New York: The Grolier Club, 2025). The exhibition opens today, January 15, and runs through April 5. Gabriel presented at five conferences in 2024, on such varied topics as "Metaphysics in the World(s) of DC Comics" (Roundtable at the 54th Annual Meeting of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association) and " 'A Wordless Scream at Ancient Power': Religious Ritual and Sacred Space in the Cure's Faith" ("Bela Lugosi's Dead" at 45: A Celebration of Goth Music and Culture).

Last, but certainly not least is our resident Associate Research Scholar for Digital Projects, Patrick J. Burns. In addition to presenting at several institutions and gatherings across the United States and Europe, Patrick co-organized with Clifford Robinson a panel at last year's Annual Meeting of the Society for Classical Studies in Chicago, entitled "Future Most Vivid: Creating the Conditions for Human-AI Collaboration in Classical Studies," and building on this technological theme, he also presented a paper of his own as part of the Digital Classical Association panel on "Opening Up Classics with AI" at this year's SCS on teaching Latin with large language models: "Prompt Engineering for Latin Teachers." Related work on computational approaches to Latin pedagogy were also on offer in Patrick's presentations this year at CANE ("Latin in an Environment of Infinite Extensive Reading") and CAAS ("The Collocations You Really Need to Know").

Patrick also found time in 2024 to publish two papers, both related to generative AI and Latin:

Finally, Patrick was a guest co-editor of a special issue of the Journal of Open Humanities Data, a collection entitled "Representing the Ancient World through Data." The short data papers collected therein publish datasets, analyses, and methodological papers pertaining to many different realms of ancient studies, from cuneiform and Assyrian state letters to archaeological datasets, Greek epigrams, and consular dates. The aim of the special issue was to prioritize the publication of ancient world data and highlight the work of corpus design and data curation; see the ISAW Library Blog post on the special issue here. Patrick was also a co-author of a data paper in this collection with his former colleagues from UT-Austin's Quantitative Criticism Lab:

  • Dexter, J. P., Chaudhuri, P., Burns, P. J., Adams, E. D., Bolt, T. J., Cásarez, A., Flynt, J. H. Li, K., Patterson, J. F., Schwartz, A., Shumway, S. 2024. "A Database of Intertexts in Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica 1: A Benchmarking Resource for the Evaluation of Computational Intertextual Search of Latin Corpora," Journal of Open Humanities Data in "Representing the Ancient World through Data." https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.153.