Welcome to the Lux Project: The Hetherington Online


Welcome to the inaugural blog post of the Lux Project: The Hetherington Online! We’d like to begin by telling you a bit about how it all got started, what the goals of the project are, and who we (Simone Reis and myself, Melissa Funke) are.

How it all got started: As with many great research ideas (at least in Classics), the Lux Project began over a few beers, with a former U of W student and our intrepid chair, Matt Gibbs. They told me (Melissa) about the teaching collection of Egyptian antiquities held in the anthropology lab on campus and having been involved with the From Stone to Screen digitization project at the University of British Columbia, I immediately thought, “We need to digitize this stuff and make it available online, and why aren’t we using it more on campus?”.
When I was teaching at UBC, we had a few serendipitous rediscoveries of teaching collections of epigraphic squeezes, Near Eastern antiquities, and Roman coins (stashed behind some old exams!). A group of graduate students there seized the opportunity to preserve these items digitally, and they’ve since built a multifaceted project connected to scholars around the world. Part of the project involves creating teaching resources, which I demo’d in my classes at UBC, so I’ve seen the ways that students can connect to antiquity when they have better access to the objects of everyday ancient lives.

After a few discussions with Val McKinley, who runs the anthropology lab here at U of W, and the recruitment of my co-director (Simone Reis), we officially started creating images of the Hetherington Collection in the winter of 2018. (See us at work below) We have big plans, from posting the collection online for scholars and students anywhere to use, to researching the provenance of the collection itself (more on that mystery in a future post), to creating teaching modules that can be used by teachers in remote communities as part of the Manitoba curriculum. We hope that we’ll be able to connect to and learn from digital humanities veterans as part of the process.

Melissa Funke, co-director

Our Goals: We have big plans, from posting the collection online for scholars and students anywhere to use, to researching the provenance of the collection itself, to creating teaching modules that can be used by teachers in remote communities as part of the Manitoba curriculum. We hope that we’ll be able to connect to and learn from digital humanities veterans as part of the process.

As part of this project, we involve undergraduate volunteers, who will have the opportunity to build a variety of skills including photography, web design, archival research, and social media management. Students will get a chance to interact with antiquity hands-on as we build our database of objects.

Ultimately, we’d like to let the university community, Winnipeggers, and Manitobans know about this wonderful collection of antiquities held right here in our community. We’re excited to get started and can’t wait for the opportunities we’ll discover along the way.

Who we are: Our co-directors are Dr. Melissa Funke and Simone Reis. Melissa is just finishing her second year teaching here at her undergraduate alma mater after teaching for 5 years at the University of British Columbia. While she more typically researches literary topics like fragmentary Greek tragedy and epistolary fiction, she also has a great passion for social history (tracing the everyday lives of people in Greco-Roman antiquity), especially as it reveals the lives of women and girls. Melissa holds a PhD in Classics from the University of Washington (2013). She is thrilled to back in Manitoba, sharing her love for the ancient Mediterranean with her students here at U of W.

Simone Reis, co-director
Simone graduated with a B.A. in Classics (Hons) at the University of Winnipeg in 2017, where she discovered an interest in Classical archaeology. After participating in the excavations of Ancient Sikyon, Greece during the 2016 season, Simone realized that her constitution was better suited to an air conditioned museum. She has since enrolled in the University of Winnipeg's Curatorial Practices program, and will be earning her M.A. in October of 2018. She is especially interested in reassessing original documentation of excavations from the late 19th and early 20th century and discerning the influence of modernism on those interpretations.

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