Workshops
Marguerite Ragnow: unique map collections
Thursday, June 17th, 2010 | News, Workshops | 2 Comments
On the afternoon of May 21st we walked to the James Ford Bell Library where curator Marguerite Ragnow was waiting for us for a presentation of the LIbrary’s wolrd-known collection of historical maps. The collection is arguably best known for being home to three rare portolan maps. As Lloyd Brown explains in his 1949 “The Story of Maps”, portolan charts “were much more than an aid to navigation; they were, in effect, the key to empire, the way to wealth”. This could well explain the rarity of these maps. One other factor is that these maps were made of vellum, which was expensive.
Ragnow is now planning the exhibition that will display - starting Sept. 15 - the most recent acquisition of the Library: the first map showing North America and China together on the same map, by Matteo Ricci. The exhibition will be entitled “Matteo Ricci and the Jesuits in China” and will likely generate a series of programs at UMN in relation to this piece. Still, and in the midst of the preparation to receive this rarity, Ragnow found the time to offer us a very informative tour of the Library’s historical maps. Pictured is one of the maps we saw: a beautiful plan of Istanbul published in a Jesuit Relation, Paris, 1668.
So you may want to plan a visit to UMN this Fall as starting in September, the already impressive James Ford Bell library collection will have Ricci’s new map, which may not be as valuable as the three portolan charts (valued at 3 to 10 million dollars, depending on the current market) but is unique in its meaning. Of the new historical map, James Bell said: “There couldn’t be any more iconic purchase for the library than the Ricci map”.
Marguerite Ragnow is the editor of TERRA INCOGNITAE a journal, published by the Society for the History of Discoveries.
Nina Ergin: all the senses
Tuesday, June 15th, 2010 | Workshops | 1 Comment
For this Istanbul/Constantinople workshop, Nina Ergin traveled all the way from Koc University in Turkey back to UMN where she had attended her grad school. Ergin’s presentation focused on the olfactory, and audio aspects of the Ottoman Mosque Architecture, touching even on some taste elements of such spaces.
Her presentation stressed how a multi-sensorial portrait of the Ottomanist period is at the same time a multi-layered history of the built environment of that period.
_Surname-i Hümayun (Imperial Book of Processions)_, 1582, Topkapı Palace Library, H. 1344.
In the particular case of smell, the smellScape of sixteenth-century Ottoman mosques can be partially reconstructed based on documents such as charters about the administration and upkeep of the mosque complexes, which can be found in several archives in Turkey. These charters often document the employment of buhurcus or buhuris, who perfumed the mosque on holy days. The odors that worshippers sensed in the mosques included lamps fueled by olive oil and wooden Qur’an chests.
Ergin made a very interesting comment on the risk of losing sight of the urban quality of these architectural spaces in the (often shiny and perfect) spatial representation enabled by 3D software and architectural software. She noted that graffiti for example, was a urban element of such period, which is largely absent from 3D digital reproductions of these spaces.
By Ana Boa-Ventura
Mary Griep: using mixed media to beautifully re-create
Sunday, June 6th, 2010 | Workshops | No Comments
In the afternoon of Friday May 26, we had a treat waiting for us during lunch at the Alumni center. Mary Griep, a professor at the Art & Art History Department at St Olaf College, did a presentation on her “Sacred Spaces” project.
Griep’s work is part of collections throughout the United States. She was Field Supervisor for St. Olaf’s Term in Asia in 2000 and 2003. In 2004 she returned from a leave of absence in Chiang Mai, Thailand where she completed a series of large scale Southeast Asian temple drawings.
Watch this video to listen to Griep talk about her work (click on image; not on text links).
As the author says, her drawings ”are not purely descriptive. I feel that they start [...] with an accurate description of the place and then I think about what’s happened to those buildings over the years. Drawings can deal with space in terms of illusion but how does drawing deal with time?”
In her presentation during the workshop, Griep included beautiful drawings of:
- the Mosque Series (begun in 2007 as a study of the Ulu Camii (Great Mosque) of Divrigi, Turkey) ,
- the Southeast Asia series - works completed 2000 - 2004 while an artist-in-residence at The Center for the Study of Religion and Culture, Payap University, Chiang Mai, Thailand
- the Mayan Series - 2005 - 10 - Late Classic Mayan sites from the Yucatan, Mexico
Brandon Schapekahm: serious games
Friday, May 21st, 2010 | Workshops | 1 Comment
Brandon Schapekahm is part of the Johnson Center for Simulation (JCS), which is part of the Pine Technical College in Pine City, Minnesota. JCS was founded as part of a regional project to extend East Central Minnesota’s technology infrastructure and services and their projects include scenario and procedural training applications, military immersive simulations, and game development.
For this session, Schapekahm chose some good examples of serious games that JCS has developed. An interesting discussion ensued, on comparing what Second Life and other 3D game engines such as UDK and Ogre can offer the historical reconstruction of historical sites. We saw some example of the kind of detailed textures allowed by UDL and discussed the pertinence of this vis-a-vis the social aspect of a (proprietary) platform such as Second Life.
I argued that there are always negotiations that need to be made: factors to be considered include the graphic resolution allowed , the accessibility, the proprietary/open sources aspects and the social aspect. I brought up Mark Skwarek and Joseph Hocking’s CHildren of Arcadia project where a 3d game engine much like Ogre was used to create a baroque environment reproducing Manhattan financial district. the environment can be modified by parameters from fed through the Internet such as the status of the stock market. This is something the IC project may be interested in looking into: rather than stock market we can have virtually any type of social media live ‘feeding’ the game environment, which would therefore be an organic entity in constant change.
This discussion triggered the idea that it would very useful to have the same historical site reconstructed using a number of engines (and approaches) so that the team can effectively evaluate the direction to pursue. We discussed the possibility of an award to be announced to both the social/serious games and the scholarly communities.
By Ana Boa-Ventura
Bissera Pentcheva: the aesthetics of the sea
Friday, May 21st, 2010 | Workshops | No Comments
The morning of the second day, Bissera Pentcheva (Stanford) made a wonderful and poetic presentation on ‘Hagia Sophia and the Asthetics of the Sea’, where she stressed the importance for the Byzantines of the integration of aural and visual experiences. Pentcheva stressed how central this interconnection of sound and sight needs to be in any modern attempt to experientially reproduce Hagia Sophia’s space.
She referred us to the texts by Deborah Howard on the importance of the interconnection of senses when considering the modern reproduction of sites.
William Phillips: “making the world available”
Friday, May 21st, 2010 | Workshops | No Comments
(from left to righ: Bissera Pentcheva, Susan Noakes, Rachel Gibson, Mary Griep, and Marguerite Ragnow.)
William Phillips, representing the SCGMA advisory board, gave a very autobiographic account of his interest in this project and community, with which he has been involved since the 1st workshop in 2007. He told us about his initial interests as a scholar in the Iberian Peninsula turned to a focus on trade and travel across the silk road in the Mongol times.
By then it was clear to him that there was the need for a global re-contextualization of the Middle Ages. It was around that time that Phillips first heard of the project through Geraldine Heng’s paper published on the Medieval Academy of America newsletter. Visiting the University of Texas at Austin, he had the opportunity of meeting and talking to some of the faculty members who had co-taught the course with Heng and participated in that unique experience.
Phillips stressed how current technologies, which can be easily applied to this project , such as GoogleEarth are accounts of the present and very incomplete and inaccurate (or even non-existing) accounts of the past.
On the other hand, examples that integrate this diachronic aspect of ‘places’ – such as the UCLA resconstrucion of Santiago de Compostela require large computing centers and that one actually is at UCLA to experience ‘being in Santiago’.
Phillips believes that one fundamental aspect of SCGMA will be to bring the global Middle Ages to anyone accessing from any laptop: “making the world available from our own computer units”.
By Ana Boa-Ventura
SCGMA: the Istanbul/Constantinople project kicks off!
Thursday, May 20th, 2010 | News, Workshops | 1 Comment
(Left to right: Brandon Schapekahm and Susan Noakes)
This week I am honored to be part of a meeting taking place at the Universiy of Minnesota. A small group of scholars is discussing the Istanbul/Constantinople project, part of a larger group and community: SCGMA.
SCGMA stands for the Scholarly Community for the Globalization of the Middle Ages, a multi-campus, international group of scholars from various disciplines including Anthropology, Archeology, History and Information Library Science and dedicated to the study of the Middle Ages.
The meeting is taking place at the University of Minnesota from May 19 thru the 23rd, and is the initial planning workshop for the SCGMA members working in the Istanbul/Constantinople project.
Susan Noakes is hosting this workshop. Unfortunately, Geraldine Heng cannot be present due to family reasons.
From Noakes’ introductory comments for the seminar, which I try to document next, I will stress two for those who cannot read this whole posting:
- The importance of friendship in academic collaboration and in the very genesis of a research project;
- SCGMA is a project with a 20 year timeline.
The genesis of a project
On Wednesday and kicking-off the workshop, Dr. Noakes made what Dr. William Phillips called the most detailed account of SCGMA genesis he had heard so far. It was also a very auto-biographic account of how Noakes met Geraldine Heng after reading her 2004 article entitled “Global Interconnections: Imagining the World, 500–1500″, reporting the experience of designing and teaching a course in global middle ages at the University of Texas in Austin.
A friendship developed between the two, as well as a wish to repeat that, which today would be called a very expensive curriculum! In fact, in spite of its size UT Austin did not have 6 scholars ready to teach this course. So, three scholars traveled from other parts of the country to teach their sections of the course. Given the cost of the curriculum, the College has not been able to afford to repeat this experience, which several students have referred to as a ‘life-changing experience’.
As Noakes stressed, the idea of studying the middle ages globally rather than European really started when Heng stated her course at the University of Texas at Austin. Heng wanted to begin pushing the borders of medieval studies and re-contextualize them.
Around the time that Heng conducted the course, Noakes became director of the Center for Medieval Studies at UMN. She invited Heng to UMN and both met with James Parente, Dean of Col. Of Liberal Arts. Lee Gayle DUbro, who headed the Graduate school UMN was able to fund a seminar that Heng conducted.
A 20 year timeline
During their meeting at UMN, Heng and Noakes thought that it would be good to have an initial focus on travel, trade, city planning; also the history of science as practiced outside the western as well as within the western world.
After the UMN seminar, both Heng and Noakes identified who was interested and who would have enough a commitment to this large project. This project will involve the massive digitalization of collections using methods that are not always recognized in this field’s scholarship. Only a focus on research could draw the commitment to the project by young faculty and doctoral students.
As Noakes noted though, archeologists, anthropologists of acoustics… are not used to working together. So these groups need to develop modes of collaboration and etiquette by developing ways of sharing, attribution, etc… in sum by investing in a commitment to work through and around those issues!
For all these reasons, this will be a project that will need to count on the continued commitment from a body of scholars, probably traversing several generations.
I will stop here - Susan Noakes offered a truly insightful recount of how SCGMA came to be. There could be so much more to say.
For this week, the short term goal for this SCGMA planning workshop is to get the Istambul/Constantinople project off the ground. One of the reasons to start with this are is that not many medievalists are up-to-date in the Byzantium.
One point I would like to leave my reader with is that both Noakes and Heng are adamant about ensuring the full participation from scholars originating from the areas being studied. As a rule of thumb, the decision was made right from the start that at least one third of participants should be from the part of the world being studied.
By Ana Boa-Ventura
SCGMA & Early Ottoman Workshop
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010 | News, Workshops | No Comments
The initial planning workshop for the Constantinople / Istanbul project (part of the Scholarly Community for the Globalization of the Middle Ages) will take place at the University of Minnesota from May 19 to May 23.
We will be blogging the workshop as it takes place!
Location:
- History Department conference Center | 1210 Heller Hall | University of Minnesota
Dates:
- May 19 - 23, 2010
Digital Humanities Observatory - Dublin, June 2010
Friday, February 19th, 2010 | Resources, Workshops | No Comments
If you happen to be in Europe this Summer you may consider attending the Digital Humanities Observatory Summer School in Dublin.
This year, like last year, the Summer School happens in conjunction with NINEs and the EpiDoc Collaborative… And this year a novelty are mid-week, and one-day workshops.
A number of subsidised places are available for attendees at HSIS institutions. For more information about these places, please contact the DHO Consultative Committee representative at your institution. Names of representatives can be found at: http://dho.ie/committee
Full details of the workshop strands, lectures and guest speakers can be found on the Summer School website at: www.dho.ie/ss2010
One word on the EpiDoc collaborative on the next post!
Posted by: Ana Boa-Ventura
Visiting SDSC!
Friday, May 22nd, 2009 | Resources, Workshops | No Comments
…baby and teddy bear included!:)
Left to right: Astrid Ogilvie (U of Colorado), GH, Stephennie Mulder with baby Daniela (U of Texas), William Phillips (U of Minnesota), Benjamin Liu (U of California, Riverside), and Roger Hart (U of Texas).
Photos by Alan Craig
SCGMA scholars in Pittsburgh!
Friday, May 8th, 2009 | Workshops | No Comments
Photo by Alan Craig
SCGMA scholars return from Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center workshop (left to right: Anne Zimo, David Crane, Susan Noakes, Gabriela Ilnitchi Currie). Not pictured: Herbert Kessler. The group spent two days learning about TeraGrid and the possibilities it offers for research on the Global Middle Ages, especially tracing through iconography the migration of musical instruments westward through Western Asia and the Balkans and the mapping of Mediterranean trade and communications. Professor Kessler, President of the Medieval Academy of America, discussed prospects for connecting medievalists working in digital technology with TeraGrid.
Posted by Susan Noakes