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Pompeii digital magazine. While excavation is in progress, information is already going online

When excavations began in Pompeii in 1748, it was forbidden to take notes and make drawings without special authorisation from the king of Naples. Today, the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, an institute with scientific and managerial autonomy under the Italian Ministry of Culture, publishes scientific data from new excavations and research online in a new digital journal, the ‘E-Journal degli Scavi di Pompei’, often while field work is still in progress. A choice of “radical transparency”, as the director of the UNESCO site, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, labelled the project, which was launched last May. Now the first nine articles, published during the year 2023 on important discoveries via the Archaeological Park's website (pompeiisites.org/e-journal-of-the-pompeii-excavations/) have been collated in a single volume - also in digital format.

"The internet is changing the way we live, and archaeology cannot escape this transformation," says Director Zuchtriegel, "now our task is to manage the digital transformation proactively in order to develop its enormous potential. Through the E-Journal and our platform open.pompeiisites.org, we can achieve a level of data accessibility that was unimaginable in the past, and we can share data almost in real time. All this will change the way of doing archaeology: we are moving towards a model of collective and connective knowledge, supported in the future by Artificial Intelligence tools, which, as the Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano, said, must be granted and mastered. Pompeii confirms itself at the forefront of 21st century archaeology."

 

E-Journal link: https://pompeiisites.org/e-journal-degli-scavi-di-pompei/raccolta-e-journal-2023/