Seminar: A Museum of Words and Deeds (Friday 19th June)
Gabriel Bodard
A Museum of Words and Deeds: Combining artefacts and Latin texts in an online exhibition
Friday, 19th June 2026, 13:00-14:00 BST (online only)
Alina Kozlovski and Sarah Lawrence (University of New England)
Streamed live: https://youtu.be/5LKSKWw5m-c
Museum classificatory systems attribute culture to objects in complex ways. The distinction of what exactly makes something “Greek”, “Roman”, “Egyptian”, a combination, or “Other” can be difficult to explain. These ideas find an interesting point of comparison in Valerius Maximus’ Facta et Dicta Memorabilia (“Memorable Deeds and Sayings”). This ancient text is effectively a museum of words and deeds, rather than objects, and its multitude of stories is carefully categorised to separate Roman and “foreign” examples. In this talk we explore the process of creating an online exhibition (available here: https://une.pedestal3d.com/page/wordsanddeeds/) which plays with and interrogates cultural categories and the concept of classification as informed by ancient objects’ cataloguing histories and the ideas in Valerius Maximus’ text. Using the Pedestal3D platform and digitised artefacts from the University of New England Museum of Antiquities in Australia, we look at how online exhibitions can display complex ideas from ancient texts together with object histories. In the exhibition, we employ the objects’ digital surfaces as the direct mediators between text and viewer through the creative use of annotations and invite viewers to consider what we gain and lose by the cultural categorisation of ancient objects.
Reader in Digital Classics
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