This week I made a tutorial on a resource that was proving to be invaluable in my final project work, the Beazley Archive Pottery Database. It’s an online database of over 130,000 Ancient Greek painted pottery. The main function of the archive is as a search engine for pottery, with different options available based on the information you have on the object you’re studying. My tutorial is based on the actual process I did to look for the “Untitled, ewer” object in the Perlman Museum. The information on the object was minimal and needed some background information to make the tool useful, but I tried to explain the best I could. My video is a bit long as a result of that. While the Beazley Archive is quite particular to Ancient Greece, there are other databases that deal with other parts of the world and time periods like the Predynastic Online Database which is for objects from the Predynastic Period of Ancient Egypt. They have their own tutorial that is aimed a bit more at people with experience with the subject. They also have other resources related to other subjects in Classical art. tried my best to explain some basics about Greek pottery as I went along.
While the Beazley Archive is clearly useful to traditional humanists, it is also valuable to Digital Humanities. This is because in DH people are often working on projects that have larger datasets, both in time and space, or in a broader field than some other scholary work. The archive and it’s resources allow a wider variety of people to access information and vessels that are usually published in long, dense, and usually hard to find collection works. It also allows for a faster exploration of pottery. Say I had a pot that I knew was Ancient Greek and I knew the shape, but I didn’t know the period or style. I could filter down until I find similar objects. Honestly the only downside is that most of the artifacts are from Attica since that’s what was originally published in the Archive, therefore if you’ve got something from say Ionia it doesn’t work quite as well.
I made a tutorial trying to narrow down a potential workshop/painter for the lekythos (a vessel used for storing oil) we’re modeling for our project.
My tutorial is a walkthrough of the advanced search option and it essentially retraces the steps I did to find other examples of this sort of vessel. I got quite rambly, as I had to give some context, so I had to split the tutorial into two parts.
3 thoughts on “Week 9- Tutorial on the Beazley Archive Pottery Database”
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Great tutorial, Sam! I appreciate the amount of information you include – it really helps show what questions you need to ask when you’re doing this type of research. The different options you give for characteristics of an item to research are also super helpful, and show the different strategies for narrowing down an object’s origins. Overall great work!
I really appreciate the effort that went into making this tutorial, before I even read it or watched the videos, I clicked on the database and clicked random things until something showed a result (because I didn’t know what I was doing) and even when I found a result I was still not sure what I was looking at, so I really appreciate the care that went into it, you make it very easy to follow!
As someone who has never done research on historical objects in this way, I find this really helpful! I always found it really cool that you could identify objects with so much certainty and have enough background knowledge about different techniques and an styles that hinted at the origins of the artifacts. This tutorial helped me not only learn about what resources are available help identifying, but now unknowing how to explore this resource and use it to look for a certain thing can help build some of that foundation for being able to identify objects more easily on my own! Thanks Sam, this was a very helpful tutorial 🙂