*Ancient Theater WWW site (fwd)

[P. Eversmann]

This message was forwarded to me and since it might be of some interest to
some of the people on this list I just pass it on.
 
Regards
 
Peter Eversmann
Institute for theatre studies
University of Amsterdam
The Netherlands
 
 
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 24 Mar 1996 15:06:19 -0800 (PST)
From: Linda Wright <lwright at cac.washington.edu>
To: classics at u.washington.edu
Subject: *Ancient Theater WWW site (fwd)
 
 
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 24 Mar 1996 15:45:47 -0600 (CST)
From: John R. Porter <porterj at duke.usask.ca>
Subject: Ancient Theater WWW site
 
For some time now I've regretted the lack of a WWW site dedicated to the
ancient stage. A large number of classicists teach Greek and Roman
theater in some form or another, but most of us seem to deal with the
archaeology of the ancient stage little, if at all-- a surprising
situation given the wealth of material available (vase paintings,
mosaics, frescoes, figurines, inscriptions -- not to mention excavations
of ancient theaters). In part this seems due to the lack of easily
accessible (and useful) teaching aids: few of us have students who can
afford the available books, while the commercial collections of slides
that I've seen are far from satisfactory.
 
The University of Pennsylvania Museum has produced a CD-ROM on "The
Ancient Greek Theater" (which I have not seen), and a similar project has
been undertaken by Richard Beacham of the University of Warwick -- both
have been announced on Didaskalia's "Watch This Space!" page.
 
It strikes me, however, that this sort of subject is ideally suited to
the WWW. There is already a fair amount of material related to the
ancient stage available on the Web, and many of us have our own slides of
ancient theaters that we could put up on the Web with relatively little
effort. As for vase paintings, mosaics, and the like -- these would be
more tricky. Museums are often very guarded in handing out rights to
their images, and photographs that would appear to good effect on a
computer screen are difficult to generate in any case. Still, it strikes
me as a worthy project.
 
As a result, I've initiated a site dedicated to images of the ancient
stage and have given it the title Skenotheke. At the moment the selection
is limited to a treatment of some archaeological details of the Theater of
Dionysus, images of a couple of smaller theaters, and links to other
appropriate sites on the WWW (mainly from Perseus). I would hope that I
could convince others to suggest links to other appropriate pages on the
Web and perhaps even contribute scanned images of their own material for
inclusion on the site. Eventually I'd like to explore the possibility of a
more ambitious collection of images, but one must begin somewhere.
 
In any case, I invite you to visit the site and pass along your
impressions. The URL is:
        http://www.usask.ca/classics/skenotheke.html
 
Finally (if I may extend an already lengthy post): please let me
encourage those of you with sites on the WWW not to include links to
isolated images (i.e., JPEGs or GIFs that are not incorporated into a
proper HTML document). Given the nature of the WWW, there is a likelihood
that others will want to incorporate links to your images in their own
documents: isolated images -- without captions and links leading back to
the sites to which they belong -- lead to blind alleys, with no
possibility that the interested viewer will be able to explore what else
you have on your site.
 
--------------------------------
John R. Porter
Department of Classics
University of Saskatchewan
porterj at duke.usask.ca
--------------------------------