Hot on the heels of a very successful showing at the remote AIA-SCS 2021 Joint Annual Meeting, Ancient MakerSpaces (AMS) is back and putting together another dynamite program for the next meeting in January 2022. We don’t know yet whether we’ll be in San Francisco, virtual, or hybrid, but we’re ready for any eventuality and we want you to join us!
In case you’re not familiar with us, AMS is a day-long event showcasing digital approaches to the study of the ancient world. Since 2017, AMS has served as a venue at the AIA-SCS Annual Meeting for scholars, librarians, and students to share their ongoing digital scholarship and pedagogical work, as well as a space for hands-on, peer-based learning about digital resources and computational methods.
At the most recent AIA-SCS meeting AMS showcased 14 exciting projects and initiatives, broken down into sessions on “Interdisciplinary Digital Methodologies”, “Pedagogy and Public Digital Scholarship”, and “Digital Scholarship and the Ancient World: Current Challenges and Future Questions”. We had both lightning talks and longer, active demonstrations of projects carried out in Zoom break-out rooms; we also hosted well over an hour of fruitful discussion about the problems and promise of digital scholarship as well as tools, tips, and tricks for carrying it out.
AMS 2022 looks to build on this success, and we are soliciting individuals or groups to present lighting talks and live project demonstrations. We invite submissions from anyone working on digital tools, platforms, repositories, or techniques for engaging with ancient texts and material culture. Whether in the context of research, outreach, or teaching, we welcome digital work in all stages of planning and completion: in-progress or unpublished builds, published projects, and those left glitching or unfinished.
We have no predetermined themes for our sessions, so submissions related to any ancient world subject area are encouraged. We are, however, particularly interested in presentations related to failure in digital scholarship. Projects that fail, regardless of how far they make it on the journey from conception to completion to obsolescence, are generally not our first choice for conference presentation subjects. Yet it is often our failures that teach us the most, and that lay most clearly bare systemic problems. So if you’ve had a project that did not work out, or that had to be discontinued, please consider giving a lightning talk about it!
You can find the full Call for Papers at the AMS 2022 website, and can get in touch with Savannah Bishop, the contact person for the AMS Steering Committee, by email at ancientmakerspaces [at] gmail.com. You can also reach out to the other committee members on Twitter: Aaron Hershkowitz (@ahersheykow), Rachel Starry (@rachellstarry), Natalie Susmann (@nsusmann), Daniel Libatique (@dlibatique10), and Sean Tennant (@sean10ant).