"Digitizing Data from the Villa del Vergigno Archaeological Project"
Collaborative Research Project
Dr. MacKenzie Lewis and Stone Chen of Waterloo University (ON)
The research relevant to this grant involves materials from an active archaeological field project located near Florence, Italy. Our proposal continues an ongoing initiative to integrate the archaeological data from this interdisciplinary excavation project into meaningful digital contexts. In brief, my research collaborator, Stone Chen, and I will digitize the database of artifacts excavated from the site and integrate this catalogue with existing GIS maps using a new QGIS plug-in specifically designed for recording and visualizing archaeological data in their original context. These maps and accompanying catalogues will, in turn, be made open-source and available online enabling other archaeologists and researchers to become active participants in the research of this villa site and the archaeology of Roman Italy as a whole. The broad goal of this initiative, moreover, is to stay responsibly engaged in current disciplinary methods by using the most instructive, up-to-date tools to publish and make widely available the results of our ongoing research.