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ispartof: Archaeology and economy in the ancient world 53 pages:1-3 ispartof: pages:1-3 status: published

ispartof: Ancient Society: journal of ancient history of the Greek, Hellenistic and Roman worlds vol:51 pages:217-244 status: published

Data visualisation is commonly used by (digital) humanities researchers to interact, explore, and analyse data as it can successfully support new readings into otherwise known data. Nevertheless, visualisations also tend to transmit a false sense of objectivity and finality in their depictions(Kennedy et al. 2016), as their design and their use of conventions, unwillingly hide underlying data issues and uncertainties from their user-readers. Accordingly, as historical datasets often contain partial,incomplete, biased or even contradictory data points, their visualisation can bring misguided confidence in the analysis. Accounting for data issues and uncertainties in data visualization is therefore a crucial challenge the humanities overall (Windhager, Salisu, and Mayr 2019). In this paper, we present SiteVis, an interactive visualisation for data analysis that tries to account for underlying data uncertainties of the archaeological dataset it represents. SiteVis was developed as part of the Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project and was theresult of a two year-long collaboration between archaeologists and data visualization researchers. Located in south-west Turkey, the archaeological site and 1200 km2wide study region of Sagalassos has been the focus of intensive interdisciplinary research for over thirty years. During this time, by means of excavation, extensive and intensive surveying, and geophysical and remote sensing research the project sampled over 300 locations in the region and assembled a comprehensive settlement dataset indicating past periods of human activity as well as the ecological contexts of these. SiteVis, was meant to facilitate the exploration of thisdataset forinsightsand help answer questions such as why settlements were built at specific locations and what drove their continuity or instability over time. Underlying data issues, however,related to the project's deployment of discrepant data collection methods, the contextual field settings as well as various interpretational assumptions made in the data collection process, broughtuncertainty to the emerging insights and provoked a critical stance from the archaeologists. Rather than overlook these issues, weinstead encoded the archaeological methods alongside the core settlement dimensions, added features to make the interpretations transparent and allowed data to be viewedunder different levels of assumption. We thus discuss the process of creating this visualisation, our design choices in relation to the issues we encountered as well as lessons learned from the deployment. We close with a critical reflection on howinterfacesfor the digital humanities can become more transparent and account for inherent uncertainties of humanities data.We believe that this paper will be of interest to humanities projects that use visual analytics as part of their research process and, just as archaeologists, only have access to partial, incomplete or even contradictory datasets. References Kennedy, Helen, Rosemary Lucy Hill, Giorgia Aiello, and William Allen. 2016. “The Work That Visualisation Conventions Do.”Information Communication and Society19(6):715–35. Windhager, Florian, Saminu Salisu, and Eva Mayr. 2019. “Uncertainty of What and for Whom - And Does Anyone Care? Propositions for Cultural Collection Visualization.”Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities (VIS4DH), Part of IEEE VIS.

The water supply network and its management at the Pisidian city of Sagalassos (SW Turkey) are relatively well-known but recent archaeological research has uncovered further remains of this supply network which not only add to our understanding of the network itself but also of its impact on the cityscape. An Early Roman Imperial fountain built on the newly organised Upper Agora of Sagalassos was the result of the combination of traditional form and innovate city-scaping. The new fountain did not merely supply water to the urban populace. Through its prominent situation within the urban landscape it offered a visual statement of the amenities which the city provided. The construction of the monumental fountain also signalled an important change in the public use and display of water. In the end, the fountain gave way to the Antonine Nymphaeum, as part of a developing urban landscape with the intention to surpass the existing monument with a new template of representation

no ISSN ispartof: pages:31-38 ispartof: Shops, workshops and urban economic history in the Roman world vol:42 pages:31-38 ispartof: 19th International Congress of Classical Archaeology location:Cologne/Bonn date:22 May - 26 May 2018 status: published

ispartof: Detur Dignissimo. Studies in Honour of Johan van Heesch, Travaux du Cercle d'Études Numismatiques 21 pages:357-386 ispartof: pages:357-386 status: published