Monthly Archives: February 2015

Mellon Digital Humanities Seminar: Clifford Wulfman (4-7:30 PM, Thursday, April 2, 2015) @ Dickinson College, Carlisle PA

DHAC PRESENTS

“Thinking Big: Five Steps to Successful Digital Project Development”

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Clifford Wulfman is the Coordinator of Library Digital Initiatives at Princeton University and co-founder of Princeton’s new Center for Digital Humanities. He has been involved with the Perseus Digital Library, the Modernist Journals Project, and is currently the Director of the Blue Mountain Project, an NEH-funded initiative digitizing European art periodicals. In April, Dr. Wulfman will be on the campus of Dickinson College to talk about his work and training, digital libraries, and the future of digital humanities.

Mellon DH Fund supports the creation and development of Eighteenth-Century Poets Connect

by Jacob Sider Jost (assistant professor, English)

In the fall of 2014 I applied for a semester-long grant to pay a student assistant, Mary Naydan, to complete a spreadsheet listing the works of 133 English poets active during the years 1730-1740.  This was a continuation of a project begun by Mary and me using a Dickinson summer student-faculty collaborative research grant in the summer of 2012.  Over the course of the fall, Mary logged 64 hours of research, gleaning bibliographical and biographical information about poets from a range of online sources (particularly the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the English Short Title Catalogue, and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online).  Although not able to complete the full roster of poets in the time funded by the grant, she did complete approximately half of them—an impressive one poet an hour.

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I am confident that as with our work in the summer after her sophomore year, this experience will stand Mary in good stead as she looks ahead to graduate study in English or an allied field.  While Mary was in the digital archive researching eighteenth-century poets, our digital humanities postdoc Patrick Belk took the lead on organizing the data in a way that would be not only useful but publicly accessible, building a Drupal database to hold the data stored in our spreadsheets.

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This database is accessible at http://dh.dickinson.edu/18cpc/.

            Thanks to Patrick and Mary, my goal of documenting, visualizing, and analyzing networks of print and patronage for eighteenth-century poetry has moved significantly closer to realization—with the unexpected benefit that thanks to Dr. Belk’s implementation of Drupal the project, while still in progress, is available to me and other researchers online.

Booksellers Network Viz3_2

18cpc

With that said, further research work and technical tinkering remain to be done.  My current timetable is as follows: this semester, Dr. Belk will smooth out the remaining problems with our data, not all of which imported successfully from our Excel spreadsheets into the online database.  Over the summer, I will finish entering the biographical and bibliographical data from the 60 or so poets who remain undocumented.  By the end of summer 2015, Eighteenth-Century Poets Connect will be complete as a publicly accessible online database documenting the poetic culture of Britain in the 1730s.  In the fall of 2015, Dr. Belk and I will work together to find the visualizations and other tools of analysis that make this data most useful, and it will be the work of the following year, 2015-16, for me to write an article for peer-reviewed publication discussing my findings.

Jacob Sider Jost

Mycenae Lower Town Excavations and 3-D Reconstruction

Prof. Christofilis Maggidis sends along this report on his work documenting the Lower Town at Mycenae. The 3-D scanning and reconstruction work was partly funded by Dickinson Digital Humanities grants over the summers of 2013 and 2014.

The archaeological investigation of the Lower Town of Mycenae (2001-to date) aims to reveal the relationship between the citadel/palace of Mycenae and the surrounding settlement, and to show land development and public works (fortification walls, roads, bridges, dams, irrigation, terracing). The Geometric settlement (houses, workshops, silos, graves) dates to the 9th-8th century BC; these Geometric ruins are the first and only ones discovered so far at Mycenae since Schliemann’s excavations in 1874, and establish the cultural continuity of the site in the transition from the end of the Bronze Age, after the collapse of the Mycenaean world, to the historical period of the Early Iron Age. The underlying Late Mycenaean urban settlement (fortification walls, gates, houses, storerooms, dams, etc) dates to the 13th century BC, This is the first time that the very existence of the Lower Town is archaeologically established.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIEE7i8C_nE&feature=youtu.be”]

The Mycenae GIS database built by the Dickinson team includes geology, terrain and topography (based on digitized Hellenic Military Geographical Service topographic maps, geological maps, satellite photos, and Total Station points), geophysical survey (subsurface architectural features detected by remote sensing), architectural remains, archaeological contexts, features, and finds (embedded and catalogued by date, accession number, material number, layer/context number, geodetic coordinates, grid-square and locus, photos and drawings).

The G.I.S. geodatabase further integrates a 3-D digital reconstruction of the Lower Town. . This comprehensive 3-D digital model of the site will constitute an interactive learning tool, but also a pioneer and dynamic digital publication platform with a powerful database, incorporating and illustrating the architectural development of the buildings with all successive construction or modification phases, their finds, and their surroundings.

The site scanner shoots millions of georeferenced points from many different angles and locations to compose a highly accurate (5mm) georectified ground plan

The site scanner shoots millions of georeferenced points from many different angles and locations to compose a highly accurate (5mm) georectified ground plan

This past summer, all excavated architectural structures of the palatial workshops at Mycenae, including buildings, walls, floors, deposits, gates, and roads were scanned with a 3-D Terrestrial Laser Scanner, which was leased for a period of three weeks from the Demokritos University of Thrace (Prof. Nikolaos Lianos). The site scanner shoots millions of georeferenced points from many different angles and locations to compose a highly accurate (5mm) georectified ground plan, thousands of cross-sections of orthogonal axial tomography (like a Cat-scan), and a ‘walk-through’ rotating 3-D model of the site, which forms the basis for the 3-D digital reconstruction of the workshops. Next year, the plan is to scan and photograph from the air the whole valley of the Lower Town and the cyclopean walls of the citadel in the backdrop using a videocamera-equipped drone in order to digitally recreate the precise terrain and background for the 3-D town/citadel model which will then form the basis for the georeferenced 3-D digital model of the ancient landscape.

For more information about the Mycenae Lower Town Excavations, see here and here.