VRA 2013 Digital Humanities, Taormina

Digital Technologies and the Visual Arts
Reconfiguring Knowledge in the Digital Age
John J. Taormina • Duke University
VRA 2013

Colloquium 2009-10, 2010-11
6 Original Co-conveners:
• Rachel Brady (computer science: visualization)
• Caroline Bruzelius (art and architectural history: medieval)
• Sheila Dillon (art history/archaeology: classical)
• Mark Olson (visual studies: new media)
• Raquel Salvatella de Prada (visual arts: computer graphics)
• John Taormina (visual resources: image management)

Colloquium 2009-10, 2010-11
Mission of Colloquium:
Expand and develop our collaborations, conversations, and
reflections on the implication of new technologies for the
field of material culture. The colloquium theme would focus
on rethinking teaching with new technologies in both
undergraduate and graduate programs.

Logistics
• Franklin Humanities Institute (FHI) Discussion Group Grants
• Group met every two weeks at lunchtime
• University faculty, staff, and students were often invited
• Outside speakers for public lectures and group discussions
• A number of themes for discussion were decided early on

Invited Guests
• Faculty and graduate students from Art, Art History & Visual
Studies and Classical Studies
• Deputy director of IT in Duke Libraries
• Fine arts librarian, GIS librarian
• Scholarly communication officer in Duke Libraries

Invited Guests
• University’s digital strategist
• Computer scientists from Visualization Technology Group
• Editor of Duke Press
• Faculty from University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, NC State
University, and NC Central University

Public Lectures
Maurizio Forte, University of California-Merced (now at Duke)
“Experiencing the Past: Cyber-Heritage, Research and Education”

Public Lectures
Arnie Flatten, Coastal Carolina University
“Pixels, Paint and Pylons: Integrating Teaching, Technology and
Training in Art History”

Spring 2009: Wired! New Representational Technologies for
Historical Materials
• Precipitated application
for FHI Discussion Group Grant
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Wired! Visualizing the Past
2009 Course Project: Classical (Instr: Sheila Dillon)
“Reconstructing the Past: The Statue Landscape of the Hadrianic
Baths at Aphrodisias”
—Elizabeth Baltes, Umberto Plaja, Akara Lee, Catherine Stanley

2009 Course Project: Medieval (Instr: Caroline Bruzelius)
“San Francesco a Folloni, Campania, Italy”
—Michal Kosinski and Rebecca Wood

Technologies + Humanities
• Training and assumptions about how knowledge is organized
and taught are being shattered by the possibilities of new
technologies
• The evolution of a site/building could be represented over time
• Topics could be taught in new and more effective ways
• Potential of new technologies to communicate scholarly
research

Technologies + Humanities
• Student acquire new technical skills while engaging with
primary research materials to create new interpretations of
the data
• By engaging in hands-on reconstructions of a site/building,
students become active rather than passive learners

Duke Visual Studies Initiative (2007-2012)
“Visual Studies at Duke operates at the interface of
science, social sciences, and the humanities.”

Topics Considered for Discussion
• Digital literacy
• Pedagogical practices
• Spatial history (movement through time)
• Evidence and attribution
• Learning the technical tools
• Participatory learning

Topics Considered for Discussion (continued)
• Public colloquia
• Entertainment vs. scholarship
• Collaborative teaching and research vs. single engagement
• Presentation of the product
• Scholarly validity and viability

Year 1: Final Topics for Discussion
• Digital literacy (fall)
• Pedagogy (winter)
• Scholarly viability (spring)

Digital Literacy
In attendance:
• Co-conveners
• Computer science faculty who teach in Information Science +
Information Studies (ISIS) Program
• Deputy director of IT in Duke Libraries

Digital Literacy (continued)
• What level of competence and/or understanding of theories
behind the tools is required?
• Is there a specific set of skills we can identify that we want
students to have?

Digital Literacy (continued)
• Mapping: Google Maps, Google Earth
• Timeline: Flash, Final Cut, AfterEffect
• 2D: layer-based software, Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch-Up,
coloring and modeling softare
• 3D: SecondLife, Croquet, VirTour, Sketch-Up, Maya, AutoCad,
Foto-3D

Pedagogy
In attendance:
• Co-conveners
• Faculty and students from Art, Art History & Visual Studies and
Classical Studies
• Scholarly communication officer from Libraries
• Fine arts librarian

Pedagogy (continued)
• The “transparency of digital constructions”
• What is the evidence? How can it be displayed?
• What are the aesthetic issues?
• Citation and the nature of evidence and display
• Spatial history and archaeography: transparent, documented, and
scholarly viable new medium
• Building in interactivity and its implications

Working with different media requires different tools:
• Sculpture, in situ or displaced (placement, modeling, coloration)
• Architecture (reconstruction, depicting change over time)
• Painting (in situ frescoes, altarpieces)
• Cities/urbanism/urban spaces (mapping)

• How to solve training issues:
—Baseline set of IT skills and literacy
—Build an online repository of discipline-specific tutorials that
integrate with other training modules such as Lynda.com
—Public workshops
• Equilibrium between traditional learning (chronology, style, theory)
and what is possible with new media technologies

Scholarly Viability
In attendance:
• Co-conveners
• Other faculty and students (from Duke, UNC-CH, NCSU, NCCU)
• University’s digital strategist
• Editor of Duke Press
• Scholarly communication officer from Libraries

Scholarly Viability (continued)
• Can digital projects be considered for tenure and promotion?
• Is there an expectation that they are ancillary to the written
document?
• What is a “good” product?
• Issues around “collaborative work” for tenure and promotion
• Scholarly communication and new media journals

2013: Wired! Visualizing the Past
www.dukewired.org
Original Wired! Group:
Rachel Brady, Caroline Bruzelius, Sheila
Dillon, Raquel Salvatella de Prada, Mark
Olson

“On with Their Heads: Creation, Destruction and
Recontextualization”
—Iara Dundas, Elizabeth Narkin, Tim Prizer

The Wired! Group is committed to engaging digital
technologies in courses and long-term research
initiatives, training students at all levels in order to ask
research questions about material culture in the man-made
environment. Our courses fuse technologies with the study
of sculpture, architecture, urbanism, and painting in order to
prepare our students for the 21st century.

Wired! is also committed to communicating research
knowledge to a broad public. Our integration of
visualization technologies into the regular curriculum
represents structural and systemic change in the way
knowledge is interrogated in teaching and research.

Wired! projects fuse questions in the Humanities (as
traditionally construed) with social, economic, and political
issues. Our work engages the viewer in novel ways that
revolutionize the role of learning in relation to the
public. We are committed to making scholarship available
and engaging to a broad audience.

The Wired! Lab
• Half million dollar grant from the
Office of the Provost
• Lab, hardware and software,
one IT support staff person
• Opened November 2011

The Wired! Lab

VRA 2013 Digital Humanities, Taormina

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