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John Taormina

John J. Taormina

John J. Taormina

Curator of Visual Resources, Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Website
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John J. Taormina received his BA in Art History from John Carroll University and MA in Art History from George Washington University. From 1982-1999, he was head of the visual resources/image collections at George Washington University, Oberlin College, The Ohio State University, and the University of Michigan. Since 2000 Taormina has been the curator of visual resources in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke. As the head of the Visual Media Lab at Duke, he oversees all aspects of the extensive digital and analog image collections. He also manages the department’s communication program and the department’s exhibition spaces in Smith Warehouse.

Taormina served for ten years as editor of the VRA Bulletin, the professional journal of the Visual Resources Association (VRA), the international organization of image media professionals, and served on the VRA Executive Board for seven years. In 2005 he received both the Distinguished Service Award and the Nancy DeLaurier Achievement Award from the Visual Resources Association.

Taormina has been the metadata and image consultant to the Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database project since its inception in 2011. In 2015, he co-organized with Caroline Bruzelius the Wired! symposium, “Apps, Maps & Models: Digital Pedagogy and Research in Art History, Archaeology & Visual Studies.” Since 2018, he has been part of the Building Duke Bass Connections project team. After three years of research, John published his 150-page Digital Humanities Bibliography in 2019, with ongoing revisions and additions.

Current Collaborations

Building Duke
The Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database

Scholarship

Publications

  • Taormina, John J. VRA Bulletin. Guest Editor, special issue on “Digital Humanities and the Visual,” (44:2, Winter 2016).
  • Taormina, John J. Review: Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp, Digital _Humanities (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012) in VRA Bulletin 43:2 (Winter 2016).
  • Taormina, John J. VRA Bulletin, Guest Editor, special issue on “New Directions, New Challenges,” (37:2, Summer 2010).
  • Taormina, John J. VRA Bulletin, Guest Editor, special issue on “Digital Collaborations,” (35:2, Summer 2008).

Public-Facing Scholarship

Presentations

  • Bruzelius, Caroline, William Broom, and John Taormina. “The Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database Project: From Conceptual Design to Management.” Paper presented at Digital Matters in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Duke University, Durham, NC, April 6-7, 2018.
  • Taormina, John J. “Project Creation: Making Concept into Reality,” in The Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database Project: From Conceptual Design to Management. Symposium on Digital matters in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Duke University, April 2018.
  • Taormina, John J. “Reconfiguring Knowledge: Making the Digital Humanities Visual.” Session Organizer and Moderator. Annual Meeting of the Southeastern College Art Conference, Pittsburgh, PA, October 2015.
  • Taormina, John J. Digital Humanities Special Interest Group. Co-organizer and Co-moderator. Visual Resources Association annual conference, Denver, Co, March 2015.
  • Taormina, John J. “Cultural Heritage in a Computational Environment: Making the Digital Humanities Visual.” Session Co-organizer and Co-moderator. Visual Resources Association annual conference, Denver, Co, March 2015.
  • Taormina, John J. and Jenni Rodda. “Cultural Heritage in a Computational Environment: Making the Digital Humanities Visual.” Session organized at the Annual meeting of the Visual Resources Association, Denver, CO, March 2015.
  • Taormina, John J. “The Politics of Change: Digital Humanities and the Visual Arts.” Session organizer. Art Libraries Society of North America annual conference. March 2014. Washington, DC.
  • Taormina, John J. “Digital Technologies and the Visual Arts: Reconfiguring Knowledge in the Digital Age.” Paper presented as part of the panel “Making the Digital Humanities Visual: Opportunities and Case Studies” at the Annual meeting of the Visual Resources Association, Providence, RI, April 2013.
  • Taormina, John J., and Mark Pompelia. “Connections and Transformations: New Technologies in the Arts and Humanities.” Session organized at the Annual Meeting of the Southeastern College Art Conference, Greensboro, NC, October 2013.
  • Taormina, John J., and Mark Pompelia. “Enhancing Education Beyond the Classroom Experience via Digital Technologies.” Session organized at the Annual meeting of the Visual Resources Association, Providence, RI, April 2013.
  • Taormina, John J., and Mark Pompelia. “When the Past Collides with the Present: Moving Beyond the Single Classroom Experience via Digital Technologies.” Session organized at the Annual Meeting of the Southeastern College Art Conference, Durham, NC, October 2012.

Edward Triplett

Edward Triplett

Edward Triplett

Lecturing Fellow in Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Website
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Ed Triplett received a PhD in Art and Architectural History from the University of Virginia in 2015. He also has an MFA in 3D Modeling and Animation from Savannah College of Art and Design, and an MA in History & Museum Studies from the University of Delaware. His dissertation focused on fortress-monasteries and castles occupied by Iberia’s military-religious orders, and he continues pursuing his two main interests: medieval architecture and historical and cultural visualization. Ed teaches courses on historical mapping, medieval castles, and Gothic cathedrals. He is working on a book manuscript about the role castles played in the formation of borders in Medieval Iberia. His publications include an article about his current Wired! project The Book of Fortresses in Creating Place in Early Modern European Architecture, (2021) a chapter in Digital Methods and Remote Sensing in Archaeology discussing historical uses of photogrammetry and 2D and 3D viewshed analysis (2016), and an article for a special issue of Historical Geography discussing architectural projections of power and influence on medieval Iberia’s fluctuating frontier (2017).

Ed originally came to Duke as a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow tasked with data curation for visual studies in 2015, and he continues to work with the Wired! Lab and other digital scholarship groups on campus. His collaborative digital project seeks to spatially reconstruct The Book of Fortresses—a bound collection of perspective drawings and plans of 58 castles on the border between the kingdoms of Portugal and Spain in 1509-1510.

Past Collaborations

Statues Speak

Scholarship

Books & Book Chapters

  • Triplett, Edward. “Drawing Borders with Castles and Maps—Making Sense of the 16th Century Livro das Fortalezas.” In Creating Place in Early Modern European Architecture. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021.
  • Triplett, Edward. “Visualizing Medieval Iberia’s Contested Space through Multiple Scales of Visibility Analysis.” In Remote Sensing Current Methods and Applications, edited by Maurizio Forte and Stefano Campana. New York: Springer, 2017.

Public-Facing Scholarship

Articles

  • Jaskot, Paul B., Hannah L. Jacobs, Mark Olson, Victoria Szabo, and Edward Triplett. “Shaping the Discipline of Digital Art History: A recap of an advanced summer institute on 3-D and (geo)spatial networks.” The Iris. December 19, 2018. http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/shaping-the-discipline-of-digital-art-history/.
  • Triplett, Edward. “Mapping Spheres of Influence on Medieval Iberia’s Religious Frontier via Viewshed Analysis and Cost-Distance Analysis.” Historical Geography 45 (2017): 66-91.

Presentations

  • Triplett, Edward. “Maps and Views, Plans and Landscapes: The Capabilities of 3D GIS in Liberal Arts Teaching and Research.” Keynote Paper for “Fostering Humanistic Tools for Digital Mapping” ACM Faculty Career Advancement Program at St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN, July 2019.
  • Jacobs, Hannah L., Paul Jaskot, Mark J.V. Olson, Victoria E. Szabo, and Edward Triplett. “Advanced Topics in Digital Art History: 3D (Geo)Spatial Networks.” Panel presentations at the College Art Association Conference, New York, NY, February 13, 2019.
  • Triplett, Edward. “Borders and Panoramas in Early Modern Portugal: Integrating Architectural and National-Scale Spatial Analyses with 3D GIS.” in “DH in 3D: Multidimensional Research and Education in the Digital Humanities.” American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, January 2019.
  • Jacobs, Hannah L., Paul Jaskot, Mark J.V. Olson, Victoria E. Szabo, and Edward Triplett. Presentation at “Coding Our Collection: Datathon.” National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, October 25, 2019.
  • Szabo, Victoria E., Ciara Capulli, Cristina Mosconi, Estefanía López-Salas, Burcak Ozludil, Edward Triplett, and Augustus Wendell . “Advanced Topics in Digital Art History: 3D (Geo)Spatial Networks.” Panel discussion at the College Art Association Conference, Chicago, IL, February 13, 2020.
  • Triplett, Edward. “The Book of Fortresses: An Early Modern Visualisation of a Historical Buffer-Zone.” Paper presented at Digital Matters in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Duke University, Durham, NC, April 6-7, 2018.
  • Triplett, Edward. “Drawing Borders with Castles and Maps—Making Sense of the 16th Century Livro das Fortalezas.” Paper presented at The Spaces of Early Modern Architectural Production, Max-Planck-Institute für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin, Germany, May 17, 2018.
  • Triplett, Edward. “Historical Mapping in Three Dimensions: Obstacles and Opportunities” in “Geographical History: From Maps as Documents to Maps as Method.” Panel presented and co-organized with Susan Gagliardi at the American Association of Geographers conference, Boston, MA, April 2017.
  • Triplett, Edward. “Recontextualizing Decades-old Excavation Materials Through 3D Visualization.” Paper presented at Computer Applications in Archaeology Conference, Atlanta, GA, March 2017.

Funding & Sponsorships

Augustus Wendell

Augustus Wendell

Augustus Wendell

Assistant Professor of the Practice, Computational Media
Website
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Augustus Wendell, Assistant Professor of the Practice, researches the application of digital spatial modeling and analysis in historical studies. He brings several decades of experience in the modeling and simulation of complex spaces to the lab. On the Building Duke project he is working with students on the creation and programming of an interactive 3D model of the Duke University historical development. Both Deconstructing Urban Visions: Computational Analysis of Aerial Engravings and Modeling Agency: Historical Agent Based Modeling feature the ongoing development of originally programmed 3D spatial analysis tools. Augustus enjoys overlapping the orbit of computational humanist inquiry with students of Computer Science and Mathematics. He has an MFA in Computer Art from The School of Visual Arts and a BS from Northeastern University. Augustus has also held appointments at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Parsons the New School for Design, The New York School of Interior Design and Virginia Tech.

Scholarship

Articles

  • Wendell, Augustus, Ozludil, Burcak and López-Salas, Estefanía. “Calculating Movement – An Agent Based Modeling System for Historical Studies”, Sousa, JP, Xavier, JP and Castro Henriques, G (eds.), Architecture in the Age of the 4th Industrial Revolution – Proceedings of the 37th eCAADe and 23rd SIGraDi Conference – Volume 1, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal, 11-13 September 2019, pp. 541-550.

Presentations

  • Wendell, Augustus; Ozludil, Burcak. “Agent-Based Modeling in Art History: Simulating an Insane Asylum” Digital Humanities 2019 Conference, Utrecht, the Netherlands.
  • Wendell, Augustus; Ozludil, Burcak. “Living Beings and Movement in Historical Space: Opportunities in Agent-based Modeling” CAA 2020 Conference, Chicago, Illinois, USA.