PH

Petra Hermankova

Also known as: Petra Janouchová, Petra Heřmánková

Aarhus University, Aarhus Universitet, Macquarie University Faculty of Arts, Charles University

ORCID iD 0000-0002-6349-0540
Follow

About

Petra is a digital epigrapher, an ancient historian, and an archaeologist specializing in the epigraphic production of the ancient Mediterranean. Petra combines her diverse background with her experience in software development to develop a unique approach to epigraphy: using digitally enhanced quantitative methods, she focuses on the long-term socio-cultural changes and their effect on the population of SE Europe in Antiquity, all while being FAIR and following principles of Open Science. She is an active member of a community of digital epigraphers, being a long-standing member of Epigraphy.info and a member of the Epigraphy.info Steering Committee since 2021.

Employment
From 2023, Petra is an Assistant Professor at Aarhus University / UrbNet. As part of the Past Social Networks Project (PI Tom Brughmans, Aarhus; https://projects.au.dk/pastnetworks), she is focusing on reconstructing the past social networks in Greek and Latin epigraphy. Petra works with published large digital epigraphic corpora, such as the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg or Clauss-Slaby Database to address society-wide phenomena and compare them across space and time.
From 2022, Petra is involved in the FAIR Epigraphy Project co-directed by Marietta Horster (Mainz, Germany) and Jonathan Prag (Oxford, UK), https://inscriptiones.org/. She is involved in the development of FAIR tools and standards for the epigraphic discipline, as well as providing guidance to the community.

FAIR Mission
Petra advocates for FAIR and Open Science. All her projects are fully open (under CC BY-SA 4.0 Int license) and accessible via GitHub, Open Science Framework or Zenodo. To achieve transparency and reproducibility of research, Petra writes her analysis in R, or Python. Petra is interested in the application of digital approaches to traditional scholarship and the world of digital epigraphy. She is promoting the use of FAIR principles and actively contributing to the development of LOD in epigraphy.

Teaching
She is a certified instructor for the Software Carpentry community and actively teaches her colleagues about the world of automation, data wrangling, data modelling, visualisation, preservation of information, quantitative statistical analysis and the spatio-temporal uncertainty of historic/archaeological data. She is currently developing her class introducing archaeologists to digital epigraphy.

Field archaeology
Petra has 15+ years of archaeological fieldwork experience, participating in various projects in Israel, Greece, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Australia. The range of projects covers traditional excavations, systematic field surveys, field prospection, but also satellite remote sensing and analysis, using the latest digital tools, such as FAIMS Platform, QGIS, R.

Software development
Petra has an experience of several years of software development coordination as part of her involvement in the FAIMS Project. She helped various field researchers and projects to make the successful transition from analogue to digital field data collection. Her portfolio of 15+ projects from 2016-2018 contains i. e. archaeological excavations in China (TRAP) and in Turkey (Boncuklu), archaeological transect surveys in Malawi (MEMSAP) and Australia (Lake Mungo), ecological projects in New South Wales, Australia (Griffith Ecology Lab; AWARE Project), or geochemical sampling in Western Australia (CSIRO).

Employment

  • Aarhus University VIP, Associate Professor
    2026 - Present
  • Aarhus Universitet Postdoc
    2019 - 2023
  • Macquarie University Faculty of Arts FAIMS Project, Client Manager
    2016 - 2016
  • Language School Horizonty English and Czech language teacher
    2015 - 2016
  • University of New South Wales - Randwick Campus Tutor of Ancient Greek History (ARTS2283)
    2013 - 2013

Education

  • Macquarie University Faculty of Arts International postgraduate exchange
    2016 - 2016
  • Charles University PhD
    2011 - 2017
  • Charles University Mgr. (MA)
    2005 - 2011

Projects & Funding

Projects & funding information is unavailable.

Publications (71)