NEWS ARCHIVE
U.Va.’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities Receives IBM Research Grant
Dec. 12, 2006
The University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology
in the Humanities plans to develop to enhance its visualization projects
thanks to an IBM Shared University Research award. The University of
Virginia is one of 10 academic institutions from three continents chosen
to receive the IBM grant. The SUR award allows each university to use
IBM’s Cell Broadband Engine technology to connect top researchers
in academia with IBM researchers and to facilitate projects of mutual
interest.
[Read the Full Article], and listen to
Prof. Frischer's comments on IATH's accomplishment. [ Audio ] 
The World of Dante Bookmarked:
University of Virginia Magazine
Winter Issue 2006
Created by Italian professor Deborah Parker while a fellow with the University's Institute for Advanced Technologies in the Humanities, this Web site brings Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy" to life through hundreds of images that are accessible through tagged text (in both Italian and English). A grant from teh National Endowment for the Humanities will allow Parker to expand the site to include Dante's "Purgatory" and "Paradise."
Virtual Williamsburg Project Launched
July 2006
On July 27, 2006, IATH and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation began a project to capture high-resolution 3D data from the entire town of Williamsburg, Virginia. Williamsburg served as Virginia's capital from 1699 to 1780. In the 1920s, large tracts of the areas surviving from the colonial period were purchased and restored to their original appearance. The goals of the Virtual Williamsburg project are to create a state 3D model of the entire area of Colonial Williamsburg, including the roads and public spaces as well as the exteriors, interiors, and furnishings of the buildings; to correct physical restorations made in the twentieth century that architectural historians of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation consider to be erroneous; and to create a temporal 3D model showing how the town developed from its origins to the end of the eighteenth century. The overall project is expected to last seven to ten years. In 2006-7, thanks to a generous planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the partners are engaged in planning activities and creation of a trial 3D model of the Douglass Theater near the Capitol.
NEH Awards Grant to The World of Dante
May 2006
The
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded a grant of $184,060
to Deborah Parker, Professor of Italian Language and Literature, to extend
her electronic teaching resource on Dante’s Divine Comedy, The
World of Dante. This multi-media
website is an educational tool intended to deepen students understanding of
Dante’s remarkable visual
imagination. While many of Dante’s comparisons are readily accessible, some
depend on knowledge of places or structures in Italy that few readers have
seen. The World of Dante currently includes the Italian text of the Inferno,
an English translation, illustrations and other visual material for every canto
and a scalable map of Hell. The project helps students visualize and understand
Dante’s remarkable journey through the afterlife. For the past eight years,
educators and students at other institutions of higher education and at the
secondary school level have benefited from the site.
The grant from the NEH Division of Education will allow Professor Parker to add
the Italian text and English translation of Purgatory and Paradise, illustrations
to these canticles by Sandro Botticelli John Flaxman, Gustave Doré and other
artists, a three dimensional virtual reality map of Hell based on Botticelli’s
design, a map of Dante’s Italy, and photographs of sites and monuments mentioned
in the poem. NEH has also offered an additional $10,000 award if the project
can raise $10,000 in matching funds from the private sector.
SAA Awards The Walt Whitman Archive
May 2006
The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities is pleased to announce The
Walt Whitman Archive has been selected as the recipient of the Society
of American Archivists’ 2006 C.F. W. Coker Award. The
Walt Whitman Archive provides searchable, browse-able, and comprehensible guide using Encoded Archival Description for item-level description of cross-institutional manuscripts of this significant American poet. The guide may serve as a model for future scholar-librarian-archivist collaborations developing finding aids of cross-institutional holdings.
The Coker Award recognizes finding aids, finding aid systems, projects that involve innovative development in archival description, or descriptive tools that enable archivists to produce more effective finding aids. To merit consideration for the award, nominees must in some significant way, set national standards, represent a model for archival description, or otherwise have a substantial impact on national descriptive practice.
The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities sponsored a few lectures on various innovations and practices in digital humanities. The subjects range from digital panoramic photography to developing tools for humanist scholars. Check out the full list of IATH Lectures.
Best Practices to Digital Panoramic Photography: QTVR and related
technologies
May 12-13, 2006
IATH,
with support from ARTstor and the Society of Architectural Historians,
held a workshop for developing a Best Practices guide for using digital
panorama photography in documenting cultural heritage sites.The workshop
was the organizing event for writing a comprehensive guide for scholars,
photographers, and students who want to use QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR)
and other panorama technologies.
[More on this talk]
Spherical Photography and Cultural Heritage Sites
April 28, 2006
Visiting Fellows Michael and Barry Gross presented their work using QuickTime
VR (QTVR) to to document architecturally and historically important sites
in Europe and the US. Michael is the Technical Director of the Williams
College Virtual Architecture Project. They are currently collaborating
with IATH and UCLA on various projects, including the digital documentation
of the Roman Forum in Rome, Italy and the St. Gallen plan and models
in St. Gallen and Zurich, Switzerland. [Read more about it]
Elizabeth Jerem: Archaelogical
Parks in Hungary
April 25, 2006
Prof.
Elizabeth Jerem, Senior Research Fellow, Archaeological Institute of
the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary Associate Professor,
Department of Ancient History and Archaeology, Faculty of Arts, University
of Miskolc, Hungary Executive Direktor of Archaeolingua Foundation, Editor
of the Publication Series ARCHAEOLINGUA. Professor's Jerem
presentation provided an overview on the history
of Hungarian archaeological presentation sites and parks, by going
through the various open-air museums in terms of their chronology and
function. [More on Professor Jerem's talk]
Ian Johnson: Building a Collaborative Knowledge Space for Humanist Scholars
April 11, 2006
Ian
Johnson, Director Archaeological Computing Laboratory & TimeMap Project
Senior Research Fellow, Archaeology University of Sydney, visited IATH
to present,
Building a Collaborative Knowledge Space for Humanist
Scholars. His talk
covered two tools for Humanist scholars - Heurist and T1000 - which we
have been developing as part of a Collaborative KnowledgeSpace (CKS)
project for the Sydney Humanities and Social Sciences e-Research Initiative
(SHSSERI). [More information] on this
interesting talk.
Bernard Frischer Receives Pioneer Award from VSMM in Belgium
Bernard
Frischer, Director of IATH, receives the first Pioneer Award of the International
Society of Virtual Systems and Multimedia from Neil Silberman, Director
of the Ename Center for Public Archaeology and Heritage Presentation. Ghent,
Belgium, October 6, 2005
[Full
Story]
Live of Saints:
Modern tools bring medieval literature to researchers
October 2005
The Lives of Saints :
The Medieval French Hagiography Project is
featured in Oscar ... "Amy
Ogden is on a quest, searching for stories from the middle ages, sagas
written in old French on parchment — some
illuminated with gold, gorgeous manuscripts that would cost a herd of
sheep to produce, others more utilitarian, rough volumes copied by individuals
who were nearly illiterate but deeply devoted to God. Ogden is looking
for Lives of saints."
Read the whole story Photo
by Jack Mellott.
NEH awards Aquae Urbis Romae
National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded both Prof. Bernie Frischer
and Katherine Rinne a Collaborative Research Grant for the Aquae
Urbis Romae: The Waters of the City of Rome project. The grant
will allow the project to begin adding GIS data and expanding a freely
accessible and fully interactive inventory of Roman hydraulic infrastructure
from the early modern period.
Aquae Urbis Romae: The Waters of the City of Rome addresses issues related
to the history of Roman water infrastructure and urban development over a 2,700-year
period. It is a truly interdisciplinary interactive, web-based cartographic
archive of original research and historic materials that brings together data
from archaeology, urban history, geography, classics, and the history of technology
in order to address specific questions about Rome’s urban development
and more wide-ranging issues about water and urban development. The project
systematically incorporates archeological, archival, literary, and epigraphic
evidence in original chronological and thematic topographic maps of Rome.
Arapesh Grammar and Digital Language Archive
Thanks
to a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities,
IATH resources will now be applied to a new area of humanistic concern:
documenting and preserving the world’s endangered languages. IATH
technical staff will support the Arapesh Grammar and Digital Language
Archive project directed by Lise Dobrin of UVA’s Department
of Anthropology, along with UVA digital media expert English Professor
David Golumbia and IATH text encoding specialist Daniel Pitti. The project
will create a rich digital repository of sound recordings, text, and
grammatical information about the endangered Arapesh family of languages,
which are known to linguistic science for their unusual sound-based
noun classification and agreement systems. Traditionally spoken by people
living along the New Guinea north coast, in many villages Arapesh is
no longer being learned by children, who grow up speaking the local
lingua franca Tok Pisin instead. In addition to ensuring that Arapesh
is preserved in a robust form for future generations, the Digital
Language Archive will serve as a research tool for the other part
of Dobrin’s project, producing a written grammar of Arapesh focusing
on the Cemaun dialect. A multilingual, multimedia web site will also
be developed to provide the public with an accessible resource on this
remarkable group of languages.
Click
image for closer view and to hear sound recording.
[Image: Some of the Cemaun Arapesh people Dobrin worked with in Wautogik village
(East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea): Abahinem clan leader Clemen Hayin
and his wife Lusia (left), and Arnold Watiem and his wife Margaret (right)]
Whitman Archive in the News
The Walt Whitman
Archive is celebrating the 150 year anniversary of
the publication of “Leaves
of Grass” by sharing 
the
exciting works of the archive with the world. The May 30 issue of Newsweek,
in "Time
to Celebrate," recommends the Walt Whitman Archive to its readers
(p.78). See
the Newsweek article online.
The celebration continued on July 4th, interviews
with Archive editors Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price were featured in two
separate NPR programs, Talk of the Nation and Day to Day. Both are available
online.
The first story is entitled "Celebrating
Walt Whitman and 'Leaves of
Grass' " and the second is 'Leaves
of Grass' Published 150 Years
Ago."
In the July/August (vol.
26, no. 4) issue of Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment
for the Humanities includes "Whitman's
Lifelong Endeavor: Leaves of Grass at 150," a feature story
by Geoffrey Saunders Schramm on the Archive's poetry-editing project.
The Archive's integrated EAD finding aid project is the subject of "Whitman
Speaks to a New Generation," an article written for the IMLS web
site, available at http://www.imls.gov/closer/hlt_c0705.htm
Blake Archive Approved by MLA
The William
Blake Archive has been designated an Approved Edition by
the Modern Language Association. This 
is
the first time the organization has awarded its “seal” to
an electronic edition. The MLA’s
Committee on Scholarly Editions has been fostering rigorous editorial
standards for printed editions since 1976. David V. Erdman’s Complete
Poetry and Prose of William Blake received
the MLA seal in 1981. The Committee’s guidelines for electronic
editions were first published in 2004 as part of a major revision of
the Committee’s
editorial guidelines (http://www.mla.org/cse_guidelines;
see also Burnard, O’Keefe, and Unsworth, Electronic
Textual Editing,
MLA/TEI, forthcoming 2006). Previously, the Archive was the 2002-2003
recipient of the MLA’s Prize for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition.
The Digital St. Gall Monastic Plan Project
The
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has given IATH and its partner, the UCLA
Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, a three-year grant of over
$1 million to create an online resource for the study of the famous Monastic
Building Plan of St. Gall. The plan, drawn on five pieces of vellum stitched
together, dates to the 820s AD and is the oldest architectural plan surviving
in Europe. The monastery laid out in the manuscript contained over
50 individual buildings and features as well as 342 explanatory
inscriptions, partly in prose and partly in verse. The purpose of
the project is to make the Plan and scholarship about it more accessible
to students and scholars. Principal investigator is UCLA History
Professor Patrick Geary; co-principal investigator is IATH Director
Bernard Frischer. The project will be advised by a distinguished
international team of scholars from the University of Vienna, the
Courtauld Institute in London, the University of Southern California,
and the Monastic Library of St. Gall in Switzerland.
Click image
for larger view. [Image: Atrium,
Tower and Western Part of Church] The Plan of St. Gall. University
of California Press, Berkeley, 1979]
International
Workshop on Leonardo da Vinci and His Treatise on Painting
September 2005
IATH
and the Carl H. and Martha S. Lindner Center for Art History are conducting
an International
Workshop October 10 and 11th for leading experts on Leonardo Da Vinci
to review plans for development of an electronic archive of Leonardo's
Treatise on Painting. Directed by Art History Professor Francesca Fiorani,
the project will be the first, systematic study of the many manuscripts
of the Treatise, which was crucial for disseminating Leonardo's theory
of art. The goal of the workshop is to present the project to a select
group of major scholars for their review and evaluation, and to encourage
their active collaboration and support of the project. The resulting
report will be used to refine plans and solicit funds for the complete
development of the virtual archive.
This workshop will also enable the Leonardo Project to define the terms of
a working relationship with the famous Elmer Belt Library of Vinciana at UCLA
(www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/arts/collections/belt.htm).
The Belt Library is one of the world’s leading repositories of materials
useful for the study of the works associated with Leonardo, including the Treatise
on Painting.
The first day of the workshop will feature presentations from the Leonardo
scholars, and the general university community is invited to attend. It will
be held at the Harrison Institute, Byrd Seminar Room 318.
Summit on Digital Tools for the Humanities
September 28-30, 2005
University of Virginia
Summit Objective: Digital tools and the underlying cyber
infrastructure expand the opportunities for humanistic scholarship and
education. They enable new and innovative approaches to humanistic scholarship.
They provide scholars and students deeper and more sophisticated access
to cultural materials, thus changing how material can be taught and experienced.
They facilitate new forms of collaboration of all those who touch the
digital representation of the human record.
For more information See "Summit
on Digital Tools for the Humanities". Or
download summit announcement [Word Doc] | [PDF]
Bernie Frischer featured in The Chronicle
Soaring Through Ancient Rome, Virtually: A compact version of existing technology
lets archaeologists and art historians revisit the past The
Chronicle of Higher Education, July 2005
Virginia Digital Collaboratorium
February 2005
In February, 2005 the Institute
for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) announced
creation of the Virginia Digital Collaboratorium, which will open its
doors in late 2005. The Collaboratorium will be located in the Emerging
Technology Building at the University's North Fork Research Park in
over 2,700 square feet of new office space. "The Collaboratorium
will not only be an attractive space in which to work, it will also
be an attractor of new industry to the Charlottesville area and a vehicle
for strengthening ties between the University and the IT community
already based in central Virginia," stated IATH Director Bernard
Frischer. Anselmo
Canfora, Assistant Professor of Architecture, will assist in efforts
to design the furniture and layouts for the work areas in the Virginia
Digital Collaboratorium.
Digital Tibet Joining cultures and scholars online
Arts & Sciences Online January 2004
Charlottesville
and Tibet are more than 7,500 miles apart. Politically and socially,
the figurative distance is even greater. Yet Charlottesville is home
to a world-renowned center of learning about Tibetan language, religion,
history and culture: the University’s Tibetan Studies program.
The program is among the oldest and biggest of its kind in the nation.
It is arguably the most technologically advanced, with a remarkable online
project-the Tibetan
and Himalayan Digital Library (THDL) that is knitting
together the diverse international community of Tibetan scholars and
fast becoming a voluminous repository for Tibet-related knowledge. "From
an outside perspective, it’s a very well-balanced program," said
Jose I. Cabezon, the 14th Dalai Lama Professor of Tibetan Buddhism and
Cultural Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. [Full
Article]
U.Va Online Project examines History of Gender Roles in China
UVA Top News Daily January 2004
Jiang,
the wife of the king, was alone on the terrace when the river began to
rise. The king sent one of his men to take her to a safer place, but the
aide forgot to bring his official seal signifying the king’s approval.
So Jiang chose to stay and drown rather than break palace rules and leave
dishonorably. Such models of chaste and obedient behavior by women, a
key element in Chinese cultural history, are portrayed in a famous textbook
for female education in early China — “Traditions
of Exemplary Women” (Leinü zhuan)
by Liu Xiang — that influenced the status of women there for some 2,000
years. Soon, scholars and students interested in China and comparative
women’s
studies will be able to explore more closely the forces that shaped gender
roles, politics and culture there as part of a University of Virginia
project, “Traditions
of Exemplary Women: A Digital Research Collection,” that focuses on the
book’s neglected history. Directed by Anne Behnke Kinney, professor of Chinese
and director of U.Va.’s
East Asia Center, the bilingual project now under development is the
first large-scale study of women in early China and the first of such
size to employ state-of-the-art information technology to study Chinese
history. The Web project will present electronic versions of rare Chinese
texts and an authoritative new translation by Kinney of “Traditions,” as
well as important early sources, extensive annotations, essays, maps
and images. [Full
Article]
The Circus comes to Charlottesville
Explorations: Research & Public Service, Spring 2004
LaVahn Hoh’s first encounter with the circus was momentous. “It made such an
impression on me that I can still describe what I saw that day,” he recalls.
Fifty years later, Hoh is as passionate about the circus as ever—but
now he knows more about it than all but a handful of people. Hoh, a professor
of drama and an expert in technical theater and special effects, could never
get the sawdust out of his veins. As an adult, he continued to go to circuses
every chance he could, visiting such shrines for circus lovers as the Circus
World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin, and the Ringling Museum of the Circus in
Sarasota, Florida. [Full Article]
Ben Ray's Salem Mass., hysteria
Oscar September 2004
On September 18, 1692, Giles Cory was "pressed to death" after being accused
of witchcraft. While all the other men and women who died in the Salem Witch
Trials were hanged, Cory refused a trial by jury and thus got the dreaded sentence
of peine forte et dure, which calls for rocks to be piled on top of the accused
until he expires under the load. In Cory’s case, it took two days. He was obstinate
to the end; his last words were, "More weight!" [Full
Article]
IATH Selects New Fellows for 2004
The University's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities
(IATH) has awarded its 2004-2006 Fellowship to Francesca Fiorani, Assistant
Professor of Art History, based on the strength of her proposed project, "Leonardo
Da Vinci and his Treatise on Painting." With the resources provided
through the IATH Fellowship, including IATH staff, space and computers,
Professor Fiorani will create a thematic collection of digital materials
derived from the various editions of Leonardo's Treatise. From the mid-sixteenth
to the late eighteenth centuries these editions were the primary source
for Leonardo's artistic theories. The resulting thematic collection will
provide a foundation for comparative studies among these editions. One
of the technical challenges of the project will be to design the information
structures to allow access to the complex interrelationships between
text, image and artistic process that are required by Leonardo's exposition
of his theories.
Daniel Pitti, of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities
at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, was named a Fellow of
the Society of American Archivists on Aug. 6, 2004, during SAA's 68 th
Annual Meeting in Boston. Established in 1957 and conferred annually,
the distinction of Fellow is the highest honor bestowed on individuals
by SAA and is awarded for outstanding contributions to the archival profession.
Pitti joins 148 current members honored as Fellows out of a membership
of more than 3,900. [