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DAHVC Members Co-Lead 2nd Visualizing Cities Summer Institute

July 9, 2024

A person presents in front of a large projection.
Professor Victoria Szabo (Duke) shares her collaboration with Professor Cosimo Monteleone (Universita degli Studi di Padova) to interpret and visualize fictional sites from H.P. Lovecraft’s writings.

From June 3-7, 2024, members of Duke’s Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab convened the Visualizing Cities Summer Institute, the second meeting in a two-year institute generously funded by the Getty Foundation. The institute took place at Venice International University (VIU), Isola di San Servolo, Venice, an international consortium of which Duke is a member. In addition to the Getty Foundation, Duke University, and VIU, the institute’s partner institutions included the University of Exeter and Universita degli Studi di Padova.

A person stands wearing a VR headset and holding a hand controller.
Professor Paul Jaskot (Duke) explores one participant team’s virtual reality application.

The institute’s theme, “Exhibiting Hidden Histories: Bringing Art History Projects to Publics through Digital Exhibitions and XR,” brought together 8 research teams—consisting of faculty and staff leaders, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and other project participants—from around the world to share their work over the past year and to consider key questions in digital art history. Project teams presented demos of current research, led critical discussions, and engaged in concentrated group work time. Questions that participants grappled with throughout the workshop concerned the rise of AI and its impact on research and teaching; ethical approaches to conducting historical research and creating public-facing projects; and representations of place and space through 3D GIS, extended (virtual and/or augmented) reality, and AI.

The Visualizing Cities Summer Institute builds on 6 prior summer workshops hosted at VIU and several international gatherings in collaboration with the Visualizing Cities Consortium (formerly Visualizing Venice). Institute Co-Directors and faculty are Professors Paul Jaskot, Mark Olson, and Victoria Szabo, all of Duke University. Additional faculty included Andrea Giordano (Università degli Studi di Padova), Hannah Jacobs (Duke University), Cosimo Monteleone (Università degli Studi di Padova), Fabrizio Nevola (University of Exeter), Luca Pes (VIU), David Rosenthal (University of Exeter), Edward Triplett (Duke University), and Augustus Wendell (Duke University).