Projects
Frischer's research career reflects his interest in interdisciplinary approaches and has included studies in the literature, philosophy, art history and archeology of Greece and Rome. He is the author, or co-author of five books, including Shifting Paradigms: New Approaches to Horace's Ars Poetica (1990), Allan Ramsay and the Search for Horace's Villa (2001), and The Sculpted Word: Epicureanism and Philosophical Recruitment (print edition, 1982; revised e-book, 2006). From 1997 to 2003, Frischer has directed the excavations of Horace's Villa, a project sponsored by the American Academy in Rome and the Archeological Superintendency for Lazio of the Italian Ministry of Culture. He co-edited and made major contributions to the two-volume final report, published by ArchaeoPress (Oxford) in 2007.
Current Research
St. Gall Monastery Plan:This web resource, created with generous support from the A.W. Mellon Foundation, will provide access to the results of our long-term project of creating an extensive collection of the Plan of St. Gall. In addition to a variety of digital representations of the plan itself, the collection will include detailed information on each element of the plan, its contemporary context and its impact on early medieval monastic architecture and culture. The resulting collection, as made available via this site, will have the breadth and depth of information that will enable substantive new scholarship. The Plan of St. Gall is the earliest preserved and most extraordinary visualization of a building complex produced in the Middle Ages. Ever since the Plan was created at the monastery of Reichenau sometime in the period 819-2 A.D., it has been preserved in the Monastic Library of St. Gall (Switzerland).
SAVE: This NSF-sponsored project, undertaken by IATH in partnership with the Department of Computer Science at UVA, foresees the creation of a database of 3D digital models of cultural heritage sites, monuments, and landscapes. SAVE (an acronym standing for "Serving and Archiving Virtual Environments") will offer creators of models an outlet for peer-reviewed scholarly publication, long-term preservation and maintenance, and secure distribution of their work to end-users. For users, SAVE will offer one-stop shopping for a wide range of scientifically produced and authenticated 3D models of the world's cultural heritage.
Virtual Williamsburg: Modern-day visitors to Colonial Williamsburg, the United States' largest outdoor living history museum, can experience a town of original and reconstructed colonial buildings. The reconstructed landscape, an amalgamation of structures spanning the eighteenth century and rebuilt primarily during the 1930s and 1940s, would be unrecognizable to anyone who resided in Virginia's colonial capital. Virtual Reality, however, offers the opportunity to recreate the town to specific moments in time, to help both the researcher and the visitor visualize the town's true eighteenth-century appearance. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation's Research Division and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia have begun a partnership to use digital technologies to model the entire town at different points during its history. The resulting models will allow researchers a way to visualize how the town changed from its establishment as the new capital of Virginia in 1699 to the American Revolution, when it took center stage. Ultimately, this undertaking will provide new research avenues; help to manage complex, disparate datasets; and eventually will test the integration of GIS and 3-D computer graphics. We propose to create a three-level model: the base or state model will recreate the town as it exists today; the research model will depict the town at a specific time and will be grounded in data by providing researchers direct access to interpretive and documentary evidence that went into creating the model; and the presentational model, based on the scholarship informing the research model, but serving as a highly-detailed virtual environment for the public.