History of the project

Giorgio Buccellati – July 2023

The 4banks project

The 4Banks project provides the framework within which to see the initial intent and the subsequent developments. One will find it presented in some detail in the parent website devoted to the project Cybernetica Mesopotamica.

In the itinerary leading to the current version there were four major phases.

1. A companion website

Originally (in the early 2000s), while working on the Italian version of the volume «Quando in alto i cieli», I planned the website as a companion to the printed volume, offering an annotated bibliography in the traditional sense. It was going to be “digital,” but simply in an “electronic” sense. It was going to be an analog produced from the very start in digital format, but essentially linear like a printed book.

2. The digital divide

As a result of the work that was then being done on the Urkesh archaeological project, I became progressively more aware of the greater potential of a properly “digital” approach, one that would fully implement the interaction among different levels of analysis, what eventually I came to define as interplanarity. The Religion website was in effect the first within the Bibliography domain to take shape in this sense, and served as the backbone for what turned out to be the first completed and full-fedged website of this type, the one devoted to the Critique of Archaeological reason.

3. Website completion and additions

In 2019, Jonah Lynch took on the full responsibility of the project, and this marked a decisive moment in the evolution of the website, bringing it to where it can now be opened for public access. The results of his work can be summed up as follows:

Coverage. – It was necessary to achieve a degree of completeness and coherence in the data, and this meant working on both levels of the Argument and the Record.
With regard to the Record, this required entering a substantial number of bibliographical entries, with the concomitant task of dealing with excerpts and reviews.
With regard to the Argument, a very substantial effort went into creating an extensive set of notes, adding also a brief overview on the history of the discipline.
Research group. – A very effective study group was set in place: what distiguished it from the one for the Critique website was the fact that the Mes-rel research group was guided by a regular work routine, in terms of both meeting times and task assignments. It is described in detail below.
Core narrative. – The notion of a core narrative is an important feature of the bibliographical websites. For the first edition of the 4Banks websites this consists of the printed version of a book, which cannot be integrated digitally in the rest of the website. Jonah Lynch introduced major new feature, a section in which an extensive summary of the printed book is given, thus ameliorating the problem.
Multinodal Index program.– This program was written by Jonah Lynch to produce an index that indicates the varying degrees of relationship among items in the bibliography (keywords or authors), in the form of a graph as used in network theory.

In 2020, Marco De Pietri added the section on Sources: it gives the full text in the original languages and generally two translations of all the texts that were given only in an Italian translation in the original edition.

4. Format revisions

In 2022, Marco De Pietri reformatted the entire website so that it could be used with the DABI program.