Call for Papers: Lost Museums Colloquium

On public humanities

In conjunction with the year-long exhibition project examining Brown University’s lost Jenks Museum, the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, and the John Carter Brown Library invite paper proposals for a colloquium on lost artifacts, collections and museums. The colloquium will be held at Brown University May 7 and 8, 2015. 

Museums, perhaps more than any other institutions, think in the very long term: collections are forever. But the history of museums is more complicated than that. Museums disappear for many reasons, from changing ideas about what’s worth saving to the devastation of war. Museum collections disappear: deaccessioned, traded away, repatriated, lost to changing interests and the ravages of time.

We are interested in this process of decline and decay, the taphonomy of institutions and collections, as a way of shedding light not only on the history of museums and libraries…

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Information Visualization MOOC

The class is over, but if you’d like to keep exploring: the Information Visualization Massively Open Online Course (IVMOOC), offered by the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science (CNS) Center at the School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University, is starting up. It runs this year from January 28 to April 14, 2014. Here’s a description:

The course provides an overview about the state of the art in information visualization, and teaches the process of producing effective visualizations that take the needs of users into account. The target audience is graduate students able to work three to six hours per week. Students will learn basic concepts, practical skills, and team project development. Everybody who registers gains instant free access to the Scholarly Database (26 million paper, patent and grant records) and the Sci2 Tool(180+ algorithms and tools).

More information here.

Reminder: No class today

You should all be finishing up work on your final papers/projects! Please contact Massimo, Jean, or me if you have any questions as you’re working on this. Looking forward to seeing your work on Friday, December 13th! 

And a note about course evaluation. We’re using Brown’s online course evaluation system. Please be sure to fill out the forms. The official language from the registrar: “As is the
case with all course evaluations, your comments will be completely confidential and will not be made available to me until January, well after the semester has ended and final course grades have been submitted. You can access the evaluation form for this class through your secure page in self-service Banner.”

Please include in your evaluation of the course any comments and advice on the labs; we’ll pass that along to Jean. 

 

Reminder, no class today. Presentations next week.

No class today, 11/25. Use the time to work on your papers and presentations. Please contact Massimo, Jean or me if you have questions as you work on these, or if you’d like to talk about your project.

Presentations next week. 10-15 minutes each. Talk about the project, your results so far, the questions you’re still working on. I’m looking forward to this.

Final papers/projects due December 13.

No class 11/25

Remember, no class next Monday. Lab Thursday in Jean’s office, for advice on individual projects. Work on your papers – come talk to Massimo or me about them if that would be useful. Presentations, 10-15 minutes, on 12/2 – we’ll continue the following week if we need to. Final papers/products due 12/13. Happy to look at drafts. 

3D scanning and printing

Not too bad a capture of the little lego scientist! (Click picture for the 3D version.) Take a look at the 123D site more generally and try out the capture and manipulation programs.

VInce Rossi’s and Adam Metallo’s presentation yesterday suggested some real possibilities for using 3D scans of art-historical artifacts. Laser scanning might be a tool that makes some of the ways of knowing of conservators open to a larger audience. (I’m thinking of the view of the cross-section of the Buddha, and the close examination of tool marks.) The opportunity to do an object tour provides some new ways to encourage close looking, or looking from different points of view. It makes me wonder what kinds of objects might be most usefully visualized in this way.

Upcoming talk: “The Lost Rome of Giovanni Battista Falda”

Please mark your calendars for this art history/digital humanities talk about Giovanni Battista Falda’s imaging of the urban fabric of 17th-century Rome by Professor Sarah McPhee, on Thursday, November 21, at 5:30, in List 110.

Sarah McPhee, an architectural historian, has worked with architects to build a virtual version of Falda’s 17th-century bird’s eye view, enriched with his many other views of the city, using a gaming platform that allows you to move through the city with a joystick discovering things about its urban makeup that one cannot sense from the map or prints alone.

Some 3-D visualizations

Some architectural and archaeological visualizations that might be useful examples:

The Theban Mapping Project is a quite remarkable project – underway for more than 30 years, it’s a map, a plan, an interactive space, and a visual/spatial index to photographs. Watch some of the videos and explore some of the spaces. Take a look at KV14, which provides a good tour that combines animation, photographs, and photographs-superimposed onto 3D images.

Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottoes at Dunhuang was a Smithsonian exhibit that provided a “360-degree panoramic projection theater that gives a true-to-life experience of being inside one of the caves. More here and here.

The plan of St. Gall, a famous medieval architectural plan, has been built into models at various times – not, as far as I know, a digital model. It’s interesting to compare the various models and see what assumptions they make.

–Steve

Readings for Thursday

I’ve added two readings for Thursday to the Canvas site:

We meet with John Cayley at the Cave (Studio 4 in the Granoff Center N330) at 1pm this Thursday.

‘Immersion’ from the Introduction to: Grau, Oliver. Virtual Art : From Illusion to Immersion. Leonardo. Rev. and expanded ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003, pp. 13-18.

 and

 ‘What’s Virtual about VR? “Reality” as Body-Brain Achievement’ a chapter of: Hansen, Mark B. N. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006, pp. 161-196.

–Steve

Re-presenting the past

The book, just out, is on the table in my office. Feel free to stop by to read it – but it’s a borrowed copy, and please don’t take it out of the building. 

Steve