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 This site was created for educational purposes by Kevin T. Glowacki. All content on this website (including text and photographs), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
Author: Kevin T. Glowacki
URL: http://www/stoa.org/athens
Publisher: The Stoa: A Consortium for Electronic Publication in the Humanities (www.stoa.org), R. Scaife and A. Mahoney, eds.
All of the images presented on this site, unless otherwise noted, are from the personal photographic collection of Kevin T. Glowacki and Nancy L. Klein. The collection is the result of many years studying, teaching, and conducting archaeological research in Athens. You are free to download and use these images provided that you abide by the terms of the Creative Commons License (Attribution - Noncommercial - Share Alike). If you use any of these images for presentations and projects, or have any comments or suggestions, we would appreciate hearing from you by email or post.
Topics:
- What is this website about? What will you find here?
- Who am I?
- Why did I create this website?
- How did this photographic collection develop?
- How did I create this website and generate the image catalogues?
- Why did I move the website to a new server in 2004?
- Acknowledgments
What is this website about? What will you find here?
As stated on the homepage, The Ancient City of Athens is a photographic archive of the archaeological and architectural remains of ancient Athens (Greece). It is intended primarily as a resource for students and teachers of classical art & archaeology, civilization, languages, and history as a supplement to their class lectures and reading assignments and as a source of images for use in term papers, projects, and presentations. We (Kevin Glowacki and Nancy Klein) also hope that this site will be useful to all who have an interest in archaeological exploration and the recovery, interpretation, and preservation of the past.
The site is organized around image catalogues corresponding to the major archaeological zones in Athens. For each site, you will find a short introduction, a link to the relevant image catalogue (or catalogues for the more complex sites, like the Acropolis and the Agora), a short bibliography to help you find reliable sources for further study, and links to a few recommended websites. (I think it is important for all students to realize that not everything you find on the internet is appropriate for use in scholarly papers and projects. This is an issue you should discuss with your teachers.).
Who am I?
Who am I -- and why should you believe anything I have to say on this website? Well ... I am a classical archaeologist specializing in the art and archaeology of ancient Greece. I have a B.A. in Latin and Greek and an M.A. in Greek from Loyola University of Chicago, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology from Bryn Mawr College. I am currently a faculty member in the Department of Classical Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. I have also taught at Harvard University, the University of Cincinnati, and the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. My research and teaching interests include the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age in Greece (especially on Crete), the archaeology of houses and households, the archaeology of sanctuaries and religion, Archaic and Classical Greek sculpture, mythological representation in art, and, of course, the topography and monuments of Athens. I love archaeological fieldwork, and I have participated in excavations and surveys in southern Greece, Crete, and Italy. In 2001, I was honored with the Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from the Archaeological Institute of America.
Why did I create this website?
I first started working on The Ancient City of Athens in 1994. At that time, I had been involved in several pilot projects exploring the use of different emerging technologies for instructional purposes. Since I was teaching a university course on the topography and monuments of Athens, and I wanted to make my slides available to my students, this relatively "new" thing called the web seemed to offer some interesting possibilities. I also remember being annoyed at the price of textbooks and the way that some institutions restricted access to information and images that I wanted to use. So, I used this project as a way to learn some basic web skills, provide my students with necessary visual resources, and also share these images with teachers and students around the world. Plus, I enjoy this kind of thing.
How did this photographic collection develop?
The core of this collection is based on 35mm color slides, taken by me, Kevin Glowacki, and Nancy Klein from about 1981 (when we first visited Greece as students) to the present. From the 2000 on, the majority of the photos were taken with a digital camera. While we have many more pictures than what is included here, these images represent what we think are our best photos (meaning that they look nice, but also that they are the ones we use most frequently when we teach). Most of the details were taken with specific research questions or instructional goals in mind, and we are happy to share these with students and other teachers who have not had the same opportunities to spend a lot of time in Athens. And, of course, we hope that these images will inspire some of you to visit Athens and see the sites and monuments for yourselves.
When you look at the name of an image in the collection, the initial letter "P" means that the image was taken from a slide that was later scanned onto a Photo CD. (P01001 means "Photo CD 01, image 001). The initial letter "S" means that the image was scanned from a slide (but not recorded onto a Photo CD). The initial letter "D" means that the image was taken with a digital camera. (I have also tried to name the digital files to reflect the date when they were taken as YY-MM-DD, so the at D000101001 means "2000-January-01-number 001". At least that is the idea.). It would be too much work to try and figure out the dates for all the earlier slides. I will do what I can, but if there is an image without a "date taken" notation, that probably means I don't remember.
Equipment: For "traditional" cameras, we both have Canon AE-1s and various lenses that have seen us through many years of travel (and hot and dusty excavations). For digital cameras, we have a Nikon Coolpix 950 and a Nikon Coolpix 4500.
How did I create this website and generate the image catalogues?
First of all, let me begin by saying that I am a die-hard Mac user, and have been since 1987. (OK, I admit I flirted with a clone when they first came out. And I have become "bi-lingual" in order to share data with students and colleagues who insist upon using PCs. But I always come home to Apple.). The images were cropped and adjusted using several different versions of Adobe Photoshop for Mac.
The size of the images presented here depends upon several factors. Back when most of my students were using 14.4 or 28.8k modems, I was concerned about file size and the time it took to load the images on a dial-up connection. In the earlier (pre-Stoa) version of this site, I decided on images that were 350 pixels high, at 72 dpi, as a nice compromise. I felt that images of that size could be used in papers and Powerpoint presentations but did not take forever to load. Now that computers, modems, and connections are much faster, that is less of a concern. The present version of the site provides images that are scaled at 480 pixels high X 640 pixels wide. This size looks good on the 1024 x 768 display of my G3 iBook, is big enough for Powerpoint (but still leaves space for teachers to add some of their own captions), and yet is not so big that it will take a long time to load over most modem connections. I hope. Please let me know what you think. (There are still some of the old 350 pixel high images, but I will replace those files when I have the time.).
In the earlier (pre-Stoa) version of this site, each page (for example, "Acropolis") contained a simple list of images, a brief annotation, and a link to the file, all on the same HTML page, without thumbnail images. I did it that way because I did not want (and I did not have the time) to script a separate HTML page for each image. I had been experimenting with various image databases for my archaeology courses, and many of those could create image catalogues for the web, but I was not entirely satisfied with any one product.
A few years ago I came across a program called iView Multimedia, that I really like. (Actually, Nancy Klein found this first and hooked me on the beauty of it.). I think this is a very powerful image database, easy to use, and one that can generate really nice HTML galleries. (That is, it does the work of scripting the thumbnail pages, resizing the images to my specifications, creating the pages where the annotations and the images appear together, etc. I can then concentrate on content and updating my master catalogue.). I have included thumbnail pages in this version of the site, since I think it will make it easier for teachers and student to find the images they need or presentation or papers. Again, I have sized the thumbnails so that they are big enough to give you a good idea of what the image is, but not so big that they will take a long time to load. And I have limited the number to 15 thumbnails per page. Since iView does all of this for me, it is easy to make adjustments in the future.
I then design the other pages on this site to complement the "theme" of the iView catalogues using the Composer in Netscape Communicator. If I need to refine the HTML in any way, I simply use the TextEdit program that came free with my Apple computer to modify the script. I also make use of the free W3C Markup Validation Service to make sure everything checks out as valid HTML 4.01 transitional. Finally, I upload to the server using a free program called Fugu, recommended to me by Ross Scaife.
Why did I move the website to a new server in 2004?
The Ancient City of Athens formerly resided on my research/teaching account at Indiana University. Actually, since there were certain restrictions of the amount of server space a faculty member could have for any one account, I had to divide the files between several accounts, which made it a bit difficult to manage and update. In 2002, Ross Scaife asked me if I would be interested in revising the website as a project of the Stoa, and he offered to provide space on the Stoa server. This was a very generous offer, and one that I was glad to accept, especially because I believe very strongly in the goals of Stoa to foster new styles of scholarly electronic publication accessible to both specialists and to the wider public. Of course, I had other work to do, and it is has taken me a while to accomplish the revision. In fact, the nice thing about an electronic publication is that is can continue to change and grow. The other advantage of moving to the Stoa server is that the site will be properly archived on a regular basis.
I apologize for any inconvenience the move may cause, but I think the long-term benefits are worth it. Although I have taken down the old homepage and text portions of The Ancient City of Athens, I have left the actual images in case anybody has already created links to them. But ultimately (summer 2005?) I would like to remove those files as well (so that I can use the account for my other teaching and research projects). So please update your links with the new URL of this site.
Acknowledgments:
I would like to thank the following people and organizations who have helped make this site possible: Nancy Klein (for the sharing her slides and for many years of travel, discussion, and learning), Charles Paget (a good friend who provided much appreciated financial support for equipment that I use in both my research and teaching), many friends and colleagues in Greece who generously gave of their time to discuss with me the results of their research, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (my "home away from home" and research base in Greece), the Teaching & Learning Technologies Center at Indiana University (for early instruction and support when I was just beginning to explore the use of technology in teaching), my "hosts" Ross Scaife and Anne Mahoney (for inviting me to contribute this site to the Stoa and for providing server space), and last, but certainly not least, my students -- for whom I started all of this in the first place.