Charles Jones Receives Digital Archaeology Award

ISAW Senior Fellow and former Head Librarian Charles Jones has been honored by the Archaeological Institute of America among its 2015 AIA Award Winners. Jones will receive the award for Outstanding Work in Digital Archaeology in recognition of his blog AWOL: The Ancient World Online, in which he catalogs open-access material related to the ancient world, serving more than 1.1 million unique site visitors since its inception in 2009. The award will be conferred during a ceremony on Friday, January 9, 2015 at 5:30 pm during the AIA Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The AWOL blog is also the focus of current digital humanities work at ISAW under the joint direction of Jones and Associate Director for Digital Programs Tom Elliott. With generous support from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, ISAW is working to bring information about the digital resources described in AWOL into the Zotero bibliographic research tool, into ISAW's Ancient World Linked Data JavaScript library, and into the ISAW library cataloging process. Collaborators include Pavan Atri (Master's student in Computer Science at NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering), Ronak Parpani (Master's student in Computer Science at the NYU Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences), Sebastian Heath (ISAW Faculty), David Ratzan (ISAW Head Librarian), Gabriel McKee (ISAW Assistant Research Scholar/Cataloger), and Dawn Gross (former ISAW Assistant Head Librarian). AWOL-derived bibliographic data is slated for public release in Summer 2015.