There is a tendency for websites to remain anonymous, in contrast with paper publications. For the Urkesh website, we prefer to revert to a full identification of authorship, for three primary reasons.
- Authorship entails responsibility. It is important to know who stands behind both the documentary effort and the interpretive superstructure, at all levels of communication.
- Authorship implies personality. There is a certain coherence that emanates from personal involvement, and this ought to be identifiable through specific attribution.
- Authorship conveys merit. This is of particular importance for junior colleagues who put great creative energy in the service of the project, and need to have this count for their professional advancement.
The explicit identification of individual authorial responsibility is very important especially in collaborative efforts. Accordingly, each page on our website is signed as well as dated (you can find the list of all staff abbreviations here). In addition, we indicate on separate pages who are the main editors, the webmaster, the IT support person, the section editors, and the main contributors, with a brief description of their main involvement.
The section on the Ephemerides provides information about the nature of the work done by authors and contributors during the various stages through which the website will progress.
Finally, specific indices provide a complete listing of all the pages for which individual authors can be credited. These indices may be referred to as regular entries in the curricula vitarum of the respective authors.
See also the entry on bibliographical status.
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