IATH NEWS
World of Dante makes EDSITEment's List
September 2008
IATH Fellow Deborah Parker's World
of Dante project has been added to EDSITEment's list of peer-reviewed recommended educational web sites and lesson plans. EDSITEment, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Verizon Foundation, and the National Trust for the Humanities, receives several hundred nominations each year. Of this list, several dozen finalists are reviewed for intellectual quality and website design and impact. EDSITEment-linked sites cover a range of humanities subjects and are judged by humanities specialists to be of high intellectual quality and useful to parents, teachers, and students.
Other IATH sites that appear on the EDSITEment list are Salem Witch Trials, Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture,The William Blake Archive, and The Pompeii Forum Project. The Walt Whitman Archive, which began at IATH and is now housed at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, was also recently added.
See EDSITEment for a full list of educational web sites.
Rome Reborn debuts at SIGGRAPH
August 2008
Rome Reborn, a 3D virtual reality project centered around the city of ancient Rome, released version 2.0 at SIGGRAPH 2008 in August in Los Angeles. The project was one of several cutting-edge New Tech Demos, intended to demonstrate how research into the past invigorates the future of computer graphics and interactive techniques. It is one of the largest virtual reconstruction, cultural heritage, and digital archaeology project to date, and relies on an international collaboration designed to create an interactive 3D digital model that illustrates the urban development of ancient Rome. Bernard Frischer, director of IATH, is the project director.
Version 2.0 allowed visitors to the exhibit to explore the ancient city landscape and its numerous buildings and immerse themselves in the reconstructed 3D models of ancient Roman architecture in real-time over an internet connection.
Read more about Rome Reborn: VFXWorld News article | Siggraph 2008 Rome Reborn Demo Video
IATH Fellow Deborah Parker has been awarded the NEH Daniels Family Distinguished Teaching Professorship, 2008-2011
April 2008
The
IATH Fellow Deborah Parker has been awarded the NEH Daniels Family Distinguished Teaching Professorship, 2008-2011. This is a three-year endowed chair, given to senior humanities faculty at the University of Virginia. It recognizes and rewards excellence in teaching and encourages development of projects that share unique faculty knowledge and expertise.
During the term of the fellowship, Prof. Parker will undertake a number activities related to her IATH project, the World of Dante. She will assess the effectiveness of the teaching materials generated by the November 2007 World of Dante Workshop in conjunction with a group teachers working in different disciplines at UVA and other institutions; identify ways in which visual material enhances reading comprehension; create new materials to clarify the astronomical allusions in the Comedy; and at the end of the grant period she will organize a symposium for the group of teachers who have used the site, each of whom will give presentations on their use of The World of Dante.
The program is funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities Special Challenge Grant and is run by the University of Virginia Teaching Resource Center. Visit their site for more information on the NEH Distinguished Teaching Professorship at the University of Virginia.
American Society of Architectural Illustrators Award of Excellence Goes to Chad Keller
February 5, 2008
The
American Society of Architectural Illustrators (www.asai.org)
announced that IATH 3D Modeler Chad Keller has won the Society's Award
of Excellence for his work in creating a 3D computer model illustrating
the late eighteenth-century phase of the Douglass Theater in Williamsburg,
Virginia. The theater was torn down by 1780 and was reconstructed digitally
by a team of archaeologists, architectural historians and 3D modelers
from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (www.history.org)
and IATH. Chad was the project coordinator for IATH and was responsible
for converting the ideas of the team into a 3D digital model, which was
made using 3D Studio Max software. Chad's entry in this international
competition was selected from over 500 works submitted by illustrators
from around the world. [Click the image left: to view of the interior
of Chad Keller's award-winning 3D model of the eighteenth-century Douglass
Theater in Williamsburg, Virginia.] Read More
IATH Associate Director Invited to Join National Archive and Records Administration Advisory Committee
January 2008; [See UVa Today article April 2008]
Allen Weinstein, Archivist of the United States, has invited Daniel Pitti, Associate Director for the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH), to serve on the National Archives and Records Administration’s (NARA) Advisory Committee on the Electronic Records Archives (ACERA). The membership of the committee is drawn from a mix of private companies, government groups, and universities
ACERA is charged with advising the Archivist of the United States on technical, mission, and service issues related to the Electronic Records Archive (ERA) system. This includes, but is not limited to, advising and making recommendations on issues related to the development, implementation, and use of the ERA system. “The digital age presents daunting challenges to the access and preservation of the records of the U.S. Government,” Pitti commented. “The purpose of a national archive in democratic societies is to preserve for use the records that are legally and historically vital to transparent and accountable governance. The advent of digital communication and electronic records has created technical, social, legal, and ethical challenges to fulfilling this mandated mission.”
The electronic records challenge is formidable, Weinstein says, but as an agency, NARA is committed to addressing this challenge head-on. “NARA's vision is to create a system that will authentically preserve and provide access to any kind of electronic record, free from dependency on any specific hardware or software, enabling NARA to carry out its mission into the future.”
IATH was established in 1992 to revolutionize the role of technology in humanities research and humanities education. Its mission is to explore ways that information technologies and digital media can be integrated into humanities scholarship. IATH has achieved an international reputation as a leader in the field of humanities computing, and its fellows have won several prestigious awards, including the first Lincoln Award for Electronic Media; the Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award; and the Richard W. Lyman Award from the National Humanities Center. For more on IATH, visit its web site at http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/.