William Phillips
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