Abstract: Text, Code and Data Visualization: Analyzing a Travel Journal from the ‘Golden Age’ of Egyptian Archaeology
By Sarah L. Ketchley, University of Washington
American Oriental Society Meeting 2017
Friday March 17th afternoon - ANE II, Bunker Hill Room
Omni Hotel, California Plaza, 251 South Olive Street, Los Angeles
For over two decades between 1889 and 1914, Mrs. Emma B. Andrews traveled the Nile with millionaire lawyer turned archaeologist, Theodore M. Davis, and was present when he discovered 18 of the 42 tombs now known in the Valley of the Kings. Her as yet unpublished diaries are significant resource for the history of archaeology and Egyptology during this so-called ‘Golden Age’, as well as a detailed yet under-explored commentary on the social and political history of Egypt at the time.
Computational investigation has focused on identifying and investigating broad historical themes running through the diaries. These include the effect mass tourism and archaeology had on the Egyptian landscape, particularly ancient monuments, over two decades of travel. The results of this research will be presented in a non-traditional way, in the form of a layered and interactive digital map. This paper will discuss the methods used to create the encoded texts and thematic visualizations.
The diary text was encoded in XML/TEI, based on a schema to capture basic text structure, people’s names, geographic and archaeological locations. An XSLT script was then used to mine each volume for people’s names and places, returning an alphabetized index including spelling variants. The index of people has formed the basis of the ‘Emmapedia’, a biographical database currently listing over 600 individuals and forming the basis of an analysis of fin-de-siècle Egyptian social networks. The geographical database has been compiled by geoparsing the text to extract place names. NYPL’s Mapwarper was used to georectify historic maps which are used as base layers in the Neatline mapping tool. Individual diary entries are plotted on contemporary open source maps, and associated with images and other travelers’ accounts and correspondence to present a multi-layered eye-witness synopsis of Egyptology and archaeology at the time.
Ultimately, the geographical and biographical versions will be merged into a digital edition of the diary, offering readers the opportunity to interact with this historical text both textually and visually.