https://catalog.ecds.emory.edu/files/original/09b60b127b68d9a29ebba6b55fa7975e.png 1d4da61af83f6d548ba957e0dbbb1531 https://catalog.ecds.emory.edu/files/original/6bcc6bd76b6c2ecd49d027ff5bd868d5.png 0197bbb8a156fc57d0600a7c5243b613 ECDS Project Project Website The primary URL of the project website. (eg: https://soundingspirit.org/ ) https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/samothraciannetworks/ Name of ECDS Member Who are the ECDS folks that have been involved in the project? Joanna Mundy Sara Palmer John Halbert Name of Project Lead Who is the ECDS person taking the lead? Joanna Mundy Name of Faculty Lead Who is the primary Faculty contact that has been involved in the project? Sandra Blakely Student Name Undergraduate and graduate level students involved in the project. Olivia Te Kolste Jahee (Phoebe) Han Lauren Oates Joe Fritsch Leigh Cole Furrh Alex Jester Name of Non-ECDS Member A person or group involved that is not within ECDS. (eg: CDC, Bugs Bunny, Department of Silly Walks, etc) List: https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/samothraciannetworks/introduction-2/credits/ Short Description of Project A short description of the project. This is the blurb on the back of a book. This is the elevator pitch. This is what you politely explain to the elder/unfamiliar family member who doesn't know what you do for work at that obligatory holiday gathering. This will be displayed publicly. In Samothrace Mariner, a study of ritual and mobility in the ancient world, we are building bridges between: <ul> <li>academic and scientific research, integrating theory and method from anthropology, geography, Classics, religion and ancient history</li> <li>pedagogical needs, supporting instructors in primary and secondary education</li> <li>gaming applications with broad potential for public education in the most informal of settings.</li> </ul> These three approaches– research, pedagogy, and popular culture – are united through shared reliance on a unique database built on ancient sources. The core of the database comes from inscriptions, a form of historical data least accessible to the non-specialist. These inscriptions have provided the geospatial and chronological parameters for a QGIS platform; to this we bring data from ancient history, poets, geographers and politicians, giving access to ancient voices located in the geospaces they occupied. This project has combined research is social network analysis and educational gaming to learn more about the ancient world. Moving to Casual Educational Gaming Samothrace Mariner continues to work on the development of gaming applications to address pedagogical needs, to support instructors in primary and secondary education. The project began to develop separate casual educational games, now including Kottabos VR, the Royal Game of Ur, and Petteia, as minigames. These were originally developed to be components within the Sailing with the Gods game. Samothrace Mariner is now focused on developing, in partnership with <a href="https://www.kennesaw.edu/ccse/academics/software-engineering-and-game-development/index.php">Kennesaw State University</a>, these games as freestanding casual educational games for independent release. The games are being developed to release freely through the Steam gaming site for use in classrooms and independently. The above three games are all being redeveloped from minigames created by Kennesaw State game design students for Sailing with the Gods. You can find information on the students and their work on <a href="https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/samothraciannetworks/introduction-2/credits/">the Credits page</a>. Find out more about these games on <a href="https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/samothraciannetworks/casual-educational-gaming/">the Educational Gaming page</a>. Project Long Description This is the description of the project that is more involved and in-depth. This is the conversation you have with a colleague. This is the chat you might have at the conference social hour with a peer who holds a similar role elsewhere. Please attach the write-up as a PDF or DOCX. Please use the suffix "-pld". (eg: ECDSProject01-pld.docx) This will be displayed publicly. <h2 class="entry-title">Introduction</h2> <div class="entry-content"> <h2>Sailing an ancient sea</h2> In Samothrace Mariner, a study of ritual and mobility in the ancient world, we are building bridges between: <ul> <li>academic and scientific research, integrating theory and method from anthropology, geography, Classics, religion and ancient history</li> <li>pedagogical needs, supporting instructors in primary and secondary education</li> <li>gaming applications with broad potential for public education in the most informal of settings.</li> </ul> These three approaches– research, pedagogy, and popular culture – are united through shared reliance on a unique database built on ancient sources. The core of the database comes from inscriptions, a form of historical data least accessible to the non-specialist. These inscriptions have provided the geospatial and chronological parameters for a QGIS platform; to this we bring data from ancient history, poets, geographers and politicians, giving access to ancient voices located in the geospaces they occupied. Our interest at all three levels is maritime mobility: how did ancient travelers move safely through seas as full of risk as profit? Highly developed sailing skills were one route; social contracts, often guaranteed by the gods, were another. These contracts, part of the Greek institution of proxenia, bound the parties to non-aggression, information sharing, and mutual support in ports of call. <a href="https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/samothraciannetworks/introduction-2/how-it-worked/">See “how it worked.”</a> They are recorded on inscriptions which provide dates, places, and the names of otherwise anonymous individuals charged with ensuring their city’s good behavior toward travelers and merchants from other cities around the Mediterranean world. Starting with Samothrace Our project began with an investigation of the mystery cult of the Great Gods of Samothrace, a cult which was unique in promising safety in sea travel as the reward to its initiates. <a href="https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/samothraciannetworks/introduction-2/how-it-worked/">See more information on Samothrace.</a> We are expanding our focus in two ways, positioning the Samothracian promise in the larger Mediterranean world of proxenia, and incorporating the legend of the Argonauts. The Samothracian network of proxenia supports extensive analysis of the social networks created among its participants: these let us model how the information flows and social contracts from that site would have worked. In an ancient world full of ritual responses to maritime risk, Samothrace became the most famous and most prestigious of the rites to ensure safe travel: the addition of the other networks will provide a more nuanced analysis not only of the Samothracian sea these contracts created, but of the wider world in which Samothrace took pride of place in its maritime effectiveness. Adding the Argonauts: from research to pedagogy and gaming The inscriptions from Samothrace let us model how nearly anonymous ancient people interacted under the protection of those gods. We can hypothesize likely itineraries based on node centrality, but we lack any indication of actual routes taken. The myth of Jason and the Argonauts is the oldest Greek epic of long distance voyaging. Its sailors took care to get Samothracian initiation enroute: <blockquote> …..In the evening, at the suggestion of Orpheus, they brought their ship to Samothrace, the island of Elektra, daughter of Atlas. He wished them to undergo holy initiations, to learn the rites that may not be uttered in order to sail with greater safety over the chilling sea. Of these I will speak no further; but I bid farewell to the island and the daimones who dwell within her, to whom belong the mysteries, which it is not lawful to speak to the uninitiated’ Apollonius of Rhodes Argonautica I: 916-921: </blockquote> Unlike our epigraphic records, the epic positions the Argonauts’ initiation in an <a href="http://www.argonauts-book.com/maps.html">itinerary</a> which reached from the Black Sea to Italy and south to Libya. It also provides accounts of how the Samothracian gods intervened to help these sailors. Cybele helps the Argonauts when they are stuck in port at Cyzicus, with no wind to help them (Apollonius of Rhodes Argonautica 1.1104-1152); the Dioskouroi, in the midst of a storm at sea, experience the miraculous appearance of two stars over their heads – the iconography for their identification with St. Elmo’s fire (Diodorus Siculus 4.43.1-2). The lessons learned from the epigraphic record, however, encourage us to look more broadly into the Argonautica for traces of the practical human actions which would have assured safe sailing. Toward that end, we have collected the geospatial data for each of the Argonauts – not only the route they sailed, but the town of every sailor’s origin and experience. Each man, a hero in his own right, brought his own family history as well as his city’s associations with him onboard. These provided the potential for cooperation in port, as is demonstrated by Jason’s eagerness to share each crewmember’s genealogy with his dinner host Lycus in the land of the Mariandyni (Apollonius of Rhodes Argonautica 2.762-3). The integration of the Argonautica into the scholarly analysis of networks opens a new frontier in integrating mythical and epigraphic information – an innovation with tremendous potential to bridge the qualitative and quantitative in our ancient sources. The epic is also, however, among the most visible in popular culture, inspiring movies in 1963 and 2010, a mini-series in 2000, and a series of games in the last decade. This has encouraged us to develop an exploration of the Argonautica aimed at the needs of primary and secondary school educators, on the one hand, and a game which will appeal to the broadest, most informal kind of public education. <div style="width:600px;" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/samothraciannetworks/the-game/play-the-game/"></a> In the Game: <a href="https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/samothraciannetworks/the-game/play-the-game/">Sailing with the Gods</a> </div> Moving to Casual Educational Gaming Samothrace Mariner continues to work on the development of gaming applications to address pedagogical needs, to support instructors in primary and secondary education. The project began to develop separate casual educational games, now including Kottabos VR, the Royal Game of Ur, and Petteia, as minigames. These were originally developed to be components within the Sailing with the Gods game. Samothrace Mariner is now focused on developing, in partnership with <a href="https://www.kennesaw.edu/ccse/academics/software-engineering-and-game-development/index.php">Kennesaw State University</a>, these games as freestanding casual educational games for independent release. The games are being developed to release freely through the Steam gaming site for use in classrooms and independently. The above three games are all being redeveloped from minigames created by Kennesaw State game design students for Sailing with the Gods. You can find information on the students and their work on <a href="https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/samothraciannetworks/introduction-2/credits/">the Credits page</a>. Find out more about these games on <a href="https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/samothraciannetworks/casual-educational-gaming/">the Educational Gaming page</a>. </div> Project Documentation Site Is the project documentation being held somewhere specific for the team? Microsoft Teams link, Dropbox, Box, NAS resource, etc https://github.com/kddressel/sailingwiththegods and https://github.com/ecds/vrkottabos/ and https://github.com/GamesByKylie/GameOfUr and OneDrive shared from Sara Palmer: https://emory-my.sharepoint.com/personal/sepalme_emory_edu/_layouts/15/onedrive.aspx?id=%2Fpersonal%2Fsepalme%5Femory%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2FBox%2Fsamothrace%2Dmariner&FolderCTID=0x0120008CA27E9CBD7F2F498DE18AE996141639&view=0 and Google Drive (samothracian.networks@gmail.com) and ECDS Trello 1 (gaming): https://trello.com/c/AIRpSM5b/122-sandra-blakely-sailing-with-the-gods-argonauts-and-samothracians-in-an-ancient-sea and ECDS Trello 2 (network): https://trello.com/c/Y7r3s7Qf/65-sandra-blakely-samothrace-mariner-network-analysis Project Supporting Website Any website that is associated with the project that isn't the project main website. Github, social media, collaborative groups hosting content, etc. Database: https://samothraciannetworks.ecdsdev.org/admin/login/?next=/admin/ Support Technologies Platforms (Wordpress, Omeka, ...), Tools (need example), Languages (PHP, Python, etc) Unity, Scholarblogs/WordPress, Gephi, Django Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sailing with the Gods / Samothrace Mariner / Samothracian Networks Django Educational Gaming Network Analysis Scholarblogs Unity Web App Wordpress