ECAI Iraq grew out of the 14th ECAI Conference held in April, 2003 in conjunction with the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology Congress held in Vienna. At that time, the war in Iraq was causing concern among the archaeologists and heritage managers. During the conference, the keynote speech by the Federal President of Austria, Dr. Thomas Klestil, called on the participants to help protect and make known the cultural heritage of Iraq.
Ruth Mostern, a member of the ECAI Central staff in charge of content collection, recommended that the conference issue a declaration of concern about the situation. ECAI members at the meetings as well as other interested scholars from Europe drafted a press release regarding the dangers to the important archaeological sites in Iraq and the museum collections of priceless artifacts from the ancient past. The full text of this document is linked under “Vienna Declaration.”
A press conference was set by the hosts of the Congress and information about the Declaration and the concerns of the scholars were made known to reporters representing new agencies around the world. The Director of ECAI, Lewis Lancaster was one of the group of four, including (Ortolf Harl and Prof. Helga Trenkwalder below) who spoke and responded to the questions of the reporters. An opening statement was read by Christine Finn.
Following the interviews with the press, ECAI members, organizers of the CAA, and representatives from the Department of Archaeology of the City of Wien continued to meet and explore ways of dealing with the Iraq crisis. Fortunately, many museums, libraries, and research centers already had large amounts of data on several hundred Internet sites. The problem was how to provide links between all of these sites.
It was decided that ECAI with TimeMap software offered the best existing method for dealing with numerous sites in various locations. ECAI Central accepted the task of constructing a website to respond to the request of the delegates for assistance in bringing together the available resources for the cultural heritage of Iraq.
Project Design and Development
After returning to the campus at Berkeley, ECAI approached Ruzena Bajcsy at the Center for Information Technology in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) for assistance with the project. She introduced the idea of such an atlas to Rick McGeer, the campus liaison with Hewlett Packard Company. The idea was presented to the leadership at HP and within a few days funds became available for the work. The early response from HP meant that work on ECAI Iraq could begin a few weeks after the Vienna meeting.
Jeanette Zerneke, head of ECAI Tech, became the manager and designer of the project. She was joined by Kim Carl, head of technical development in ECAI, Ruth Mostern from content collections, and Peter H. Chang, the designer for the site. This team was able within a two-month period to identify several hundred important resources available on the internet and to create dynamic maps and descriptions of the data.
The structure of ECAI Iraq allows users to access available information in a variety of methods, through dynamic maps, timeline selections, direct links to websites, and queries based on “time” and “place.” The data that is linked in this site is taken from the online data of major institutions as well as individual scholarly projects.
Advisors
In order to have review of the information that is provided, Berkeley campus faculty members, Niet Veldhuis, Marian Feldman, Nezar Alsayyad agreed to serve as advisors for the project. In the second phase of the work, an international group of scholars are being recruited to help with the collection and review of the data that will ultimately be included in the website. While ECAI Iraq points to existing data around the world, the dynamic maps, indices, metadata, and software links are all products of the Berkeley staff. This first release of ECAI Iraq in September, 2003 is the result of all these conversations and efforts.
Next Steps
The present website represents the completion of the first phase of this project. ECAI plans to continue the work in the coming months and the second phase will begin shortly. A full historical gazetteer of place names needs to be constructed in order to expand the usefulness of the GIS spatial mapping associated with information. Holders of data will be approached and encouraged to consider indexing their material by latitude/longitude and time in order to make it more easily used interactively. For example, there is a need geo-reference the thousands of archaeological sites for display on a dynamic map. ECAI collaborations and training sessions for scholars and heritage managers can provide help for those who wish to enhance the quality of their data presentation in this way.
Responses from the users are of great help as the project moves into the second phase. Comments can be sent to ecai@socrates.berkeley.edu.
