Hi Team!

First, an introduction. My name is Ashleigh and I’m working on the Forma Urbis Romae project over at Stanford. I just started in January but am already really enjoying the project and learning a lot. I spoke to Erik regarding this website and the blog, and he suggested that I kick things off.

Since our team continues to grow and evolve as the project progresses, we thought it would be a good idea to make a central place for us to be able to check in with each other and see what we are all working on. Consequently, this is an internal blog that we can use to update each other, bounce ideas around, and track the general progress and trajectory of the project. We also thought that this would be a good platform to get to know each other a little better and see how all the puzzle pieces are fitting together. Consider this a space to share whatever is relevant to your work, new discoveries or insights you have made, and things you are excited about.

Over at Stanford, Laura and I have been working on tracing plates 30 and 36. As this is my first plate, it’s been my primary focus of late because I really want to master tracing on Illustrator. Recently Laura has been working on creating the digital facsimile of the Lanciani map. In the end of summer and fall, she was researching the information contained in Lanciani’s annotations on the map about the ‘scavi’/excavations. This included doing her own reading about these excavations, and then determining which texts/resources the annotations referred to and if we could access them. I have also been doing a little brainstorming regarding ideas on what our final product could look like once we’ve created all these vector maps and compiled all the data and info that we have for each site. Here are some questions that I feel will help us focus the scope of the project a little more:

• Who are our users?
• What do we want our users to get out of the product?
• What is the main focal point of our project?
• What do we want to be able to do?
• What platform will best suit these wants and needs?
• What do we need to move forward with the project?
• What is our next step?

I will create a separate blog post for everyone to comment on the above questions and to give their thoughts on the overall vision of the project.

We would love to hear what everyone else is working on in the other parts of the country!

-Ashleigh