On November 11th, the University’s new Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures hosted a daylong symposium on “The Humanities in a Digital Age.” The symposium included two panels—one on Access & Ownership and the other on Research & Teaching—and two keynote talks.

The first keynote was given by Stephen Ramsay, Associate Professor in the Department of English and Fellow in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln.

The second keynote was given by Dan Cohen, Associate Professor in the Department of History and Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History in New Media at George Mason University.

Panel 1: Access and Ownership

Jeremy Boggs, Humanities Design Architect, UVa Library Scholars’ Lab
Ann Houston, Director of Humanities and Social Sciences, UVa Library

Keynote: Stephen Ramsay, “Textual Behavior in the Human Male”

Panel 2: Research and Teaching

Alison Booth, Professor, Department of English
Mitch Green, Horace W. Goldsmith Distinguished Teaching Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy

Keynote: Dan Cohen, “Humanities Scholars and the Web: Past, Present, and Future”

As always, you can listen to (or subscribe to) our podcasts on the Scholars’ Lab blog, or on iTunesU.

On November 4th, the UVa Music Library and the Scholars’ Lab welcomed Dr. Johannes Kepper, Entwicklung/Betreuung Kooperationspartner at the Edirom Project, and Mr. Julian Dabbert, Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter on Project TextGrid at the University of Paderborn.

Dr. Kepper and Mr. Debbert discussed the requirements, characteristics and benefits of digital editions based on the Music Encoding Initiative schema, as well as MEI-based applications such as the Edirom toolset and the MerMEId metadata editor. The whole group also discussed the impact of these technologies on scholarly editing in general.

As always, you can listen to (or subscribe to) our podcasts on the Scholars’ Lab blog, or on iTunesU.

On September 28th, the Scholars’ Lab welcomed Tim Powell, Director of Native American Projects at the American Philosophical Society where he oversees the Native American Endangered Languages Digital Archive. Dr. Powell is also a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Consulting Scholar for the Penn Museum. He has worked closely for the last ten years with the Eastern Band of the Cherokee and Ojibwe Bands in northern Minnesota. He has won three NEH grants to create Gibagadinamaagoom: An Ojibwe Digital Archive.

Talk Summary:
Thomas Jefferson began the Native American language preservation project while President of the American Philosophical Society (APS) from 1797-1815. The APS recently received two Mellon Foundation grants to digitize its entire Native American audio recordings collection, totaling more than 3000 hours. The collection contains invaluable linguistic and historical recordings that scholars and Native American communities are using to bring languages back from extinction. The project also raises important questions about the meaning of Digital Humanities in august archives. In his talk, Tim introduced us to these efforts and discussed how cross-institutional work in the world of cultural heritage organizations might serve as a model for academic digital humanities writ large.

As always, you can listen to (or subscribe to) our podcasts on the Scholars’ Lab blog, or on iTunesU.

On June 8th, the Scholars’ Lab welcomed visiting scholar Tim Sherratt, digital historian, web developer and cultural data hacker who’s been developing online resources relating to archives, museums and history since 1993. Tim is currently employed by the National Museum of Australia, as well as being an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Digital Design and Media Arts Research Cluster at the University of Canberra. He is one of the organizers of THATCamp Canberra and is a member of the interim committee of the new Australian Association for the Digital Humanities.

Tim’s talk investigated what happens when you equip an impatient historian with some rudimentary coding skills and a borderline obsession. Reflecting on his experiences in and around a number of Australia’s national cultural institutions, he considered how digitally-enhanced impatience can change our relationship both with our sources and the institutions that hold them.

Explore Tim’s digital tools and renegade APIs at WraggeLabs Emporium.

As always, you can listen to (or subscribe to) our podcasts on the Scholars’ Lab blog, or on iTunesU.

Our Grad Fellows in Digital Humanities are asked to make a final presentation the results of their work at springtime luncheon talks. This April, our 2010-2011 fellows (Chris Clapp, Department of Economics; Tom Finger, Corcoran Department of History; and Alex Gil, Department of English) spoke in the Scholars’ Lab.

Chris Clapp

Chris (our first Econ fellow) discussed his research on the effects of congestion pricing policies on commuter behavior, residential location decisions, and ultimately congestion itself.

Tom Finger

Tom discussed his dissertation research highlighting the growth of the North Atlantic grain trade between the United States and Great Britain during the nineteenth century, offering a case study of the ways in which technologies, ecosystems, and human social groups interact over large scale economic systems.

Alex Gil

Alex showed a series of mock-ups that exemplify his concept for “deep representation” of texts in a digital environment. His talk focused on showing where we are now in terms of digital scholarly editing, and where we can go from here. Alex used examples from his own editorial work on Aimé Césaire’s Et les chiens se taisaient.

As always, you can listen to (or subscribe to) our podcasts on the Scholars’ Lab blog, or on iTunesU.

On April 20th, the Scholars’ Lab welcomed visiting scholar Andrew Hankinson, a PhD candidate in the Distributed Digital Music Archives and Libraries Lab at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University.

Mr. Hankinson’s talk introduced work at the Distributed Digital Music Archives and Libraries Lab on creating optical music recognition systems for recognizing printed music books, specifically focusing on the use of MEI to encode and preserve musical works. Hankinson also presented applications in notation data analysis, searching, and discovery of printed music works.

As always, you can listen to (or subscribe to) our podcasts on the Scholars’ Lab blog, or on iTunesU.

On May 6th, Myron Gutmann, Head of the NSF’s Social, Behavioral & Economics Directorate and Professor in the Department of History at the University of Michigan, spoke as part of the UVa Digital Humanities Speaker Series. Mr. Gutmann’s talk was jointly sponsored by the Scholars’ Lab at UVa Library, SHANTI, IATH, and the College of Arts & Sciences Quantitative Collaborative.

In his talk, Gutmann discusses changes in the twenty-first century data access and preservation environment, especially as relate to data for social, behavioral and economic sciences. He suggests ways that all potential stakeholders in the process — funding agencies, universities, data archives, libraries, researchers, teachers, and students — might work together to get the most out of our data investments.

As always, you can listen to (or subscribe to) our podcasts on the Scholars’ Lab blog, or on iTunesU.

On March 25th, John Unsworth, Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign spoke as part of the UVa Digital Humanities Speaker Series. This is a speaker series jointly sponsored by SHANTI, IATH, and the Scholars’ Lab at UVa Library.

In this talk, Unsworth announced that Indiana University and the University of Illinois were soon to launch the HathiTrust Research Center — which will develop “cutting-edge software tools and cyberinfrastructure to enable advanced computational access to the growing digital record of human knowledge.” A formal press release for the project has since appeared.

As usual, you can listen to (or subscribe to) our podcasts on the Scholars’ Lab blog, or on iTunesU.

Visiting Scholar Jeremy Boggs spoke in the Scholars’ Lab on March 3, giving a talk entitled A Plea for Open Digital Humanities Work: or, A DH Grad Student Reflects on Years of ‘Study’.

Jeremy will join the faculty of the Scholars’ Lab full time in June, as our new Humanities Design Architect. We hope you’ll enjoy the podcast of his talk.

The house in its final phase dates to the third century A.D. and exhibited some of the most complete eastern Roman mosaics, all of which were removed from the site following the 1930′s excavations and placed in American museums (including Richmond’s very own Virginia Museum of Fine Arts).  What better way to view the mosaics than to recreate the environment in which they existed?  Mosaics in museums are entirely out of their original context.  Many floor mosaics are now hanging on walls.  Even in occasions that museums create elaborate sets to mimick the rooms from which the artwork was taken, it is impossible to recreate the entire structure or accurately recreate the lighting and allow us to view the mosaics as the original owners of the House of the Drinking Contest would have.

In my previous project of modeling the House of the Faun, one of the largest houses in Pompeii, I had a lot of information to work with.  I had many photographs and artists’ reconstructions to consider.  While the ceilings and roofs are gone, the walls are still more or less intact, and so are many of the wall paintings.  The House of the Drinking Contest is much more of a challenge since the walls collapsed and were removed long ago, leaving at most a half a meter of brick and rubble left.  There are clues, however, that let us accurately estimate the height of the walls, and hence a full reconstruction.  The plan indicates that columns were about 0.9 meters in diameter.  From our knowledge of classical orders and the overall dimensions of the house and rooms, we can assume the columns would not have been Corinthian or Ionic since both would have been too out of proportion with respect to the rest of the house.  The reason is that Corinthian and Ionic columns have 10:1 and 9:1 height-to-diameter ratios, respectively.  We can then safely assume an average-height Doric colonnade at a 5.5:1 ratio.  Other clues and experimentation with natural light simulation allow us to predict plausible window locations.

(click for larger image)

Lighting simulation and computer modeling enable us to take this a step further and create timelapse animations demonstrating how light shifted throughout the hours of the day or days of the year.  We then know when mosaics would have been exposed to direct sunlight or were in the shade.  I found it useful to create an animation of standing in the triclinium (dining room) of the house, looking west toward the courtyard, to see if the triclinium received direct sunlight at any point of the day.  So far I have found that it does on March 21st of A.D. 200, and probably throughout the spring and autumn.  In fact, the room’s mosaics are illuminated quite beautifully right around dinner time.

[Link to video].

While there is still work to do in the modeling, texturing, and animation of this particular Roman house, the use of accurate modeling techniques and lighting simulation can have a profound impact on archaeology, particularly in cultures that are solar-oriented.  I attended the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology conference last week in Williamsburg, and while there were many demonstrations of 3D models, none of the projects focused on incorporating temporal lighting and analyzing the outcome.  In nearly every case, temporal lighting is not even a consideration.

I did get a chance to informally demonstrate some of my work on the House of the Faun and the House of the Drinking Contest to some other classical archaeologists who are also involved in virtual reconstruction, but this facet of computer modeling has yet to hit the mainstream digital archaeology field, it seems.  Perhaps I will have the opportunity to demonstrate it to a wider audience at CAA next year.