Professor Caroline Bruzelius will be speaking at the 2014 Digital Art History Conference hosted by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Check the CASVA website for details.

UPDATE: The conference will be livestreamed here. Program available here.

ABSTRACT:

Modeling Time and Change in Venice: The Visualizing Venice Project

Visualization technologies are transforming the humanities and prompting new questions about the interpretation of historical documents. The Visualizing Venice initiative, which began in 2010, was prompted by the question of whether we could use visualization tools to model ongoing urban growth and change over time. We discovered that working with digital technologies prompted new kinds of questions about our archival data, stimulating different approaches to scholarly research. Visualizing Venice has become a public-facing digital humanities initiative that seeks to engage the public (residents, tourists, students) in ways that social, economic, religious, and technological changes (the railroad, for example) transform cities and their surrounding environments.

At the same time, and from the outset, Visualizing Venice has had a strong pedagogical component. We have created laboratories at Duke University and in Venice to train students to engage in scholarship through mapping and modeling technologies. We introduced courses and workshops from the undergraduate through the postdoctoral levels; at Duke the “”Wired!”” team has integrated visualization projects into introductory courses in art history and inaugurated a master’s program in cultural and historical visualization.