Peter Der Manuelian, Philip J. King Professor of Egyptology at Harvard University, visited on June 24-25 to find out more about the digital humanities at Dumbarton Oaks.
While at Dumbarton Oaks, Professor Der Manuelian attended presentations of various Dumbarton Oaks digital humanities projects, including plans for an online catalogue and 3D simulation of Byzantine textiles in the Museum; the online catalogue of Byzantine Seals; the digitization of rare and unique items from the Rare Book Collection; and the indexing and online publication of the Dumbarton Oaks Garden Archives.
Professor Der Manuelian also gave a lecture to the Dumbarton Oaks academic community on The Giza Archives. He has been working for more than a decade on digitizing and making available online the extensive archival records of George Andrew Reisner (1867 – 1942), first Professor of Egyptology at Harvard and director of the joint Harvard University–Boston Museum of Fine Arts archeological excavations at Giza and other archeological sites in Egypt (1905–1947).
The Giza Project aspires to include, in addition to the massive Reisner Archive, new high-res imagery and free, downloadable pdf versions of scholarly texts, including volumes of the MFA’s Giza Mastabas series. Perhaps even more ambitious, the project also proposes to reunite digitally the Harvard-MFA archaeological record with the records and finds from those areas of the Giza Necropolis that were excavated by other institutions (from Berkeley, Berlin, Cairo, Hildesheim, Leipzig, Philadelphia, Turin, and Vienna).
In addition to his teaching at Harvard University, Peter Der Manuelian is Director of the Harvard Semitic Museum, Director of the MA Program in Museum Studies at the Harvard Extension School, and Director of the Giza Project at Harvard.