“A Browser Edition of the Royal Palace of Urkesh: Principles and Presuppositions,”
in P. Butterlin et al. (eds.), Les Espaces Syro-Mesopotamiens: Dimensions de l’experience humaine au proche-orient ancien, Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 49-55.
The explanation of a new way of publishing information about the Royal Palace of Urkesh is the topic of this paper. A new approach, based on a ‘browser edition’ [see Urkesh Global Record (UGR)], is proposed and developed, describing its rationale and its benefits.
A digital record of the data is not perceived as an alternative technology but as a “tool that allows us to do ‘better’ what was already being doing before” (p. 49). The possibilities of organizing (or even better, ‘ordering’) information in a searchable network available online is indeed one first reason.
A second advantage is the possibility of realizing a structured categorization of data (thus, having a proper ‘data base’)structured according to a well-defined ‘grammar’ [see Grammar].
Furthermore, this digital approach also impacts on our mental outlook, creating new ‘mental templates’, this digital mindset allowing a ‘structured fluidity’. Digital publication also provides us with the possibility of having a different perspective on archaeological structures or materials, implementing the basic linearity of a paper publication, offering an “analysis [which] can be intrinsically and dynamically multi-referential” (p. 51).
Four practical archaeological ways can be outlined from this theoretical background: 1) the possibility of better analyse the structure of the stratigraphic data; 2) the realization of new procedures used in the recording, aiming to allow data to ‘speak’ each other ‘symphonically’; 3) the generation of networks of correlations, creating digital indexes; 4) the availability of a new type of access to the stratigraphic record, making possible to gain a transparent ‘globality’ of the information in a ‘digital environment’.
Moreover, a global and digital record helps in breaking the paradigm of archaeology as a destructive process, allowing excavators “to come as close as possible to the basic scientific ideal of repeating an experiment” (p. 54), through the possibility of retracing any stage in the excavation process.
The final paragraph (pp. 54-55) presents the experiment of the digital recording at Urkesh, for which the best view can be achieved in directly looking at its physical outcome [see Record].