What’s Happening

The Venice lagoon is a natural lab for which long-term observations exist, documenting changes in geomorphological and ecological structures in response to climatic and anthropogenic forcings. I will briefly review the environmental changes documented over several centuries in the Venice lagoon through maps and documents, discussing the controlling processes and showing how remote sensing and mathematical modelling can help us extract process characteristics from patterns.

Digital publication in the humanities today ranges from the online publication of traditional essays to a much wider range of formats. These might include electronic archives, games, virtual exhibitions, multimedia maps, or data visualizations.  How do we understand, create, and assess such work as part of our scholarly practice in the humanities? This talk will focus on the affordances of digital media projects in this context, emphasizing their database-driven, multimodal, and collaborative attributes.

Digital visualization affords us the possibility to recreate an important aspect of the visual landscape of ancient cities that is now totally missing – the thousands of statues that once inhabited public space.  What might the process of “re-statuefying” an ancient context tell us about ancient sculpture that a de-statuefied context does not?  What are the potential problems and pitfalls of such a project?  And just because we can do it, should we?

What is knowledge?  What is the most effective way to teach?  This term “Gothic Cathedrals,” taught by Caroline Bruzelius and Todd Berreth, is experimenting with a fusion of online learning (recorded lectures on Panopto) and in-class teamwork to involve students in more a engaged and “hands-on” learning experience.  Todd and Caroline will talk about how they are conducting this educational experiment. You can see the course website here – be sure to check out some student projects. Relevent readings: Thomas and Brown, A New Culture of Learning

In these two sessions we will practice authoring mulit-layered Google Maps and Google Earth projects in support of digital humanities projects. We will focus on placing Sketchup 3D models in maps, text and multimedia annotation, point and polygon overlays, data imports from GIS shapefiles, online tours, and web-based map publication.