Education
Experiences
Last publications
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Be a Scribe!: Working for a Better Life in Ancient Egypt
Authors: Michael Hoffen, Christian Casey, Jen Thum
Callaway • 2024
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Collaborative Annotation and Computational Analysis of Hieratic
Authors: Julius Tabin, Mark-Jan Nederhof, Christian Casey
LNCS, volume 14193 • 2023
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Building Digital Projects to Outlive Their Funding
Authors: Christian Casey
Avar, Vol. 2 No. 2 • 2023
Sustainability is a well-known issue in the digital humanities, but it is rarely discussed in print. Too many valuable online research tools struggle to secure the funding to remain available indefinitely. This problem is especially pronounced in the case of short-term, grant-funded projects, which face the dual problem of limited development time and a horizon of active support. Yet these projects often produce bodies of knowledge that remain useful long after the project ends. Taking one specific case as a prototypical example, The Zodiac Glossary, this paper examines various strategies for ensuring the longevity of online digital resources. What works in extremis is easier to implement in other circumstances. This paper is, on one hand, an implicit call for better funding for digital projects. On the other, it is a brief guide to navigating the situation as it stands. Those working on digital projects may find strategies here to guide their own decision-making processes.
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Egyptian Phonology Beginning from the End
Authors: Christian Casey
In the House of Heqanakht • 2022
The fortuitous survival of Arabic-language texts in the Coptic script should be a cause for celebration in Egyptology. Much like the Rosetta Stone, they provide an indispensable but imperfect window into the language of ancient Egypt. However, the lessons of these texts have been too easily ignored, largely because the answers they offer don’t accord perfectly with our expectations for the pronunciation of Coptic. We brush them aside or over-interpret them to say what we would like them to say. In this paper, I take James P. Allen’s advice to heart and let the data speak for themselves. The result includes minor challenges to some views on Egyptian phonology, but also some unique insights. In particular, I suggest a new pattern for the usage of voiced stop graphemes and a new set of possibilities for the phonetic value of Coptic <ϫ>, which neatly marries our understanding of earlier Egyptian phonology with the evidence of our own ears today.
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Assassin’s Creed Origins: Video Games as Time Machines
Authors: Christian Casey
Near Eastern Archaeology • 2021
Assassin’s Creed Origins offers a virtual visit to ancient Egypt during the Ptolemaic and Roman eras. The game is fun, of course, but what value could it possibly hold for scholars? After all, everything in it is either based on information that we already know or reconstructed from incomplete evidence. In this paper, I argue that this immersive game world has value beyond simply scratching an Egyptologist’s itch to visit ancient Egypt, and that this value holds in spite of the occasional bit of speculation. The game designers’ attention to historical detail results in a simulated world that is strikingly rich and accurate, while the experience of interacting with this world carries over into our understanding of ancient Egypt as a real place. With this enriched understanding, we are able to evaluate scholarly questions with a broader and more robust sense of perspective.