UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Charles E. Jones, the Tombros Librarian for Classics and Humanities at Penn State University Libraries, has been honored with a 2015 Digital Humanities Award for his blog, “The Ancient World Online” (AWOL) after being voted the Best Digital Humanities Blog Post or Series of Posts. AWOL received a digital badge of excellence in the category.
“It’s gratifying to get this kind of recognition from this international forum,” Jones said. “I initiated AWOL as an extension and next phase of a project I have been working on since 1994 called ABZU. I launched AWOL in January 2009 as a hub for open access material relating to the ancient world and other types of networked information as it becomes available.”
AWOL, which is partnered with the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, averages a monthly readership of about 100,000 page views, collecting more than a million a year.
The Digital Humanities (DH) Awards is an international forum where resources are nominated and voted for entirely by the public. A nomination committee sorts out nominations based on the appropriateness of each category, the content’s relation to digital humanities, and the resource’s frequency of publication. The DH Awards recognition was made to encourage “representation from minority languages, cultures and areas of DH.” As such, they accept nominations from all locations, languages and fields of humanities.
“Chuck's highly regarded work toward sharing important scholarship on the ancient world, particularly in an open access format, is exemplary and a point of pride for the University Libraries,” said Barbara I. Dewey, dean of University Libraries and Scholarly Communications at Penn State. “His work on AWOL is a highly valued contribution to the digital humanities at Penn State and worldwide.”
In 2015 Jones received the Outstanding Work in Digital Archaeology Award for his work on AWOL from the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), during the organization’s annual meeting.
For more information about AWOL, please contact Charles Jones at cej14@psu.edu.