29 April 2021
Familiarization trip to Bir Madhkur, 2016. (USAID SCHEP Collection, ACOR Digital Archive.) 
Petra, site visit and workshop for SCHEP site stewards, 2017. (USAID SCHEP Collection, ACOR Digital Archive.)
Today, April 29, 2021, we join proponents of digital humanities all over the world in celebrating the Day of Digital Humanities (DH) 2021! This year’s theme is multilingual digital humanities, a topic that is close to our hearts here at ACOR. Over the past several years, we have made a concerted effort to make more primary and secondary sources on the history and heritage of Jordan available online. These efforts have intensified over the past year due to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on how research is conducted.
We are especially pleased to be launching a new collection in our digital archive today, the USAID SCHEP collection. This is the first born-digital, fully bilingual collection in the ACOR Photo Archive. It currently contains nearly 5,000 images from the first four years of the ACOR USAID SCHEP project. At a later stage, photos from 2019 onward will be added to the archive. The SCHEP Photo Archive team has worked since June 2020 to make these images, along with detailed metadata in both English and Arabic, available to researchers, practitioners, students, local community members, would-be travelers, and anyone else who may be interested. This collection is also a celebration of the entire USAID SCHEP team’s efforts toward achieving the goals of the project and supporting the sustainable, community-led management of Jordan’s heritage. None of this would be possible without their dedication.
To dip your toe in and get an introduction to the aims and contents of the collection, see our photo essay announcement.
To see curated galleries of different subcollections (Site Development, Capacity Building, Awareness, Tourism Development, and Events), visit the USAID SCHEP collection gallery homepage.
Or you can access the full collection!
You may recall that late last year we also launched the ACOR Digital Archive project, which is supported by a Title VI Department of Education grant. This project aims to diversify the types of content available through our archive and to increase the Arabic-language information and searchability of the material. All 18,000 objects digitized through this project over the next four years will be described in both Arabic and English to enhance the accessibility of the information and resources to local as well as international researchers, students, and members of the public. Finally, the project will enlist U.S. educators with fellowships to create educational materials that utilize the digital archive to engage students in learning about any number of topics related to Jordan and the wider Middle East. You can read more about this project in “Announcing the ACOR Digital Archive: Developing a Multimedia Teaching and Learning Resource.”
Other digital initiatives we have undertaken over the past year include:
- The creation of the ACOR publications website, featuring open-access books and scholarly journals, including Archaeology in Jordan.
- The collection of information about various ACOR-led and -supported archaeological projects throughout Jordan in a new page at acorjordan.org.
- An online lecture series featuring talks on a range of topics in both English and Arabic.
- Two Wikipedia edit-a-thons focusing on increasing Arabic-language content on Jordanian archaeologists, sites, and scientists.
Follow us on Twitter and Instagram to learn more about our digital archive team and other digital initiatives, with a focus on multilingual content, throughout this entire week! As always, you can browse our digital archive at acor.digitalrelab.com.
