nb the site you are looking at is our testing ground for our workflow and technology. The official site will be hosted at the carleton.ca domain, softly launching the summer of 2017

☞ Epoiesen

ἐποίησεν (epoiesen)- made - is a journal for exploring creative engagement with the past, especially through digital means. It publishes primarily what might be thought of as ‘paradata’ or artist’s statements that accompany playful and unfamiliar forms of singing the past into existence. These could be visualizations, art works, games, pop-up installations, poetry, hypertext fiction, procedurally generated works, or other forms yet to be devised. We seek to document and valorize the scholarly creativity that underpins our representations of the past. Epoiesen is therefore a kind of witness to the implied knowledge of archaeologists, historians, and other professionals, academics and artists as it intersects with the sources about the past. It encourages engagement with the past that reaches beyond our traditional audience (ourselves). We situate Epoiesen in dialogue with approaches to computational creativity or generative art:

I think that generative art should ideally retain two disparate levels of perception: the material and visual qualities of a piece of art, and then a creation story or script and the intellectual journey that led to the end result. It possibly should bear marks of that intense interaction with the spatial environment that the visible work manifests.

• Paavo Toivanen ‘On Generative Art‘

☞ How

Epoiesen accepts code artefacts, written submissions in text files (.md) written with the Markdown syntax, videos, 3d .obj files, html, or other formats (contact us if you are unsure: we encourage experimentation). Digital artefacts should be accompanied by the descriptive paradata or artist’s statement.
Submissions will be reviewed, and the reviews will be published at the same time as a Response, under the reviewers’ own names. Submissions and Responses will each have their own Digital Object Identifiers. Epoiesen is indexed in XXXXXX and supported by Carleton University’s MacOdrum Library. Submissions are accepted at any time, and published as they become ready. Each year’s submissions will be organized retroactively into ‘annuals’. The entire journal will be archived and deposited in a dataverse-powered repository at Carleton University.
There are no article processing fees. We are generously supported by MacOdrum Library at Carleton University for at least five years.
This website is generated from a series of markdown formatted text files, which are run through a series of templates to create the flat-file html architecture. There is no underlying database. For an introduction on how to do this for your own website, and why you might want to, please see Amanda Visconti’s tutorial in The Programming Historian, ‘Building a Static Website with Jekyll and Github Pages’. Epoiesen uses Hexo as its site generator.

☞ Why

Michael Gove, the Conservative British politician, said in the run-up to the United Kingdom’s 2016 referendum on European Union membership, “people in this country have had enough of experts”(¹). And perhaps, he was right. There is a perception that archaeology is for the archaeologists, history for the historians. On our side, there is perhaps a perception that speaking to non-expert audiences is a lesser calling, that people who write/create things that do not look like what we have always done, are not really ‘serious’. In these vacuums of perception, we fail at communicating the complexities of the past, allowing the past to be used, abused, or ignored, especially for populist political ends. The ‘know-nothings‘ are on the march. We must not stand by.
In such a vacuum, there is a need for critical creative engagement with the past². In Succinct Research, Bill White reminds us why society allows archaeologists to exist in the first place: ‘it is to amplify the whispers of the past in our own unique way so they can still be heard today‘(³). We have been failing in this by limiting the ways we might accomplish that task.
Epoiesen is a place to amplify whispers, a place to shout. Remix the experience of the past. Do not be silent!

☞ Who

Editor-in-Chief
Shawn Graham, Carleton University
Editorial Board
Sara Perry, University of York
Megan Smith, University of Regina
Eric Kansa, The Alexandria Archive Institute
Katrina Foxton, University of York
Sarah May, University College London
Sarah E. Bond University of Iowa
Gianpiero di Maida, Christian-Albrechts Universität zu Kiel
Gisli Palsson, University of Umea

Articles

• This site is a testing ground
• en-counter-maps
• Publish and Perish
• Publish and Perish: First Response
• Publish and Perish: Second Response
• Remembering the Romans in the Middle East and North Africa: memories and reflections from a museum-based public engagement project
• Truth & Beauty Bombs - The personal/political/poetics of online communication in #archaeology