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Wired! Students Receive Major Awards & Employment Opportunities

May 10, 2016

A number of the Wired! Lab’s graduate and undergraduate students have received external awards and employment opportunities. Here’s a little bit about what they’ll be doing this summer and post-Wired. Congratulations, all!

 

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Elizabeth Baltes is receiving her PhD in the History of Art. Her research focuses on the intersection of sculpture, politics, and space in the ancient world. Her work leverages digital visualization technologies, such as 3-D modeling and mapping softwares, not only as a means of representation, but also as a method of inquiry.

In August 2016, Elizabeth will begin a tenure-track appointment as Assistant Professor of Ancient Art History at Coastal Carolina University (Conway, SC). One of her duties will be spearheading the Ashes2Artinitiative, which transforms the undergraduate learning experience through on-site research and student-driven digital projects. Elizabeth’s training in the Wired! Lab—both in terms of her own research projects and working with undergraduate students—has prepared her well for leading this exciting digital program at CCU.

 

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Annie Haueter is a junior majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Art History and Economics.

For this coming summer, she has accepted a position with Apple at their headquarters in Cupertino, California. She will be working as a Frameworks Quality Assurance intern beginning early May until late August, and her work will consist of writing code for automation projects for OS X, the operating system for Mac. Being from the San Francisco area herself, she is extremely excited to return home to work with such an innovative company.

Wired! had a part to play in her being awarded this opportunity. Throughout the interviewing process, one aspect of her resume always came up—her research at the Wired! Lab. Annie’s interviewers were truly interested in what the lab is doing, and as a computer science major, it was refreshing to be able to discuss some aspect of technology that did not revolve around strict coding and syntax. Instead, she was able to share her experiences collaborating with a team of dynamic thinkers who approach topics from outside of the box. Her particular work from this past semester has also largely revolved around problem solving, and as a member of the Apple QA team, she knows these skills will be put to good use this summer. Annie has learned so much through Wired!, and it’s all thanks to the initial research opportunity she was offered by Dr. Kristin Huffman almost three years ago. Annie looks forward to her internship with Apple, but she also looks forward to returning to the lab in the Fall to continue working with such a wonderful group of people.

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Elisabeth Narkin is a candidate for the PhD in the History of Art and is currently writing her dissertation, which analyzes the manner in which the social life of the French court and royal family unfolded in the architectural spaces of châteaux located in and around Paris.

Elisabeth has been awarded a Carter Manny Research Fellowship from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, whose mission is “to foster the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society.” This year-long fellowship for academic year 2016-2017 provides support for her to continue working on her dissertation, “Rearing the Royals: Architecture and the Spatialization of Royal Childhood in France, 1499–1610.”

Working with Wired! over the years enabled her to ask different questions and to seek answers using digital technologies. She frequently use 3D modeling to understand the relative dimensions of royal apartments as well as to demonstrate how sixteenth-century residents moved between interior spaces. A chapter on the territoriality of the French royal children’s movements uses a series of ArcGIS maps to visualize over 2,500 days worth of travel records. These itineraries reveal that the royal family favored certain buildings under specific circumstances, each playing a distinct role in the network of residences. The corresponding interactive ArcGIS maps permit analysis of the frequency, range, and significance of the children’s travel, as well as changes over time.

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Joseph Williams is a Ph.D. candidate studying medieval architecture.

Joseph has been awarded a 2-year Pre-doctoral Rome Prize (Phyllis W. G. Gordan/Lily Auchincloss/Samuel H. Kress Foundation) starting in the fall of 2016, a fellowship that will allow him to work alongside a multidisciplinary community of artists, architects, and scholars at the American Academy in Rome. At the Academy, Joseph will continue his dissertation research on church architecture in 12th- and 13th-century Apulia, in southeast Italy, with a special focus on the circulation of specialized architectural knowledge during a period of growing trade and communications in the Mediterranean.

This project has benefitted in particular from two skills that Joseph developed through Wired! workshops and lab meetings. He will use photogrammetry–a technology that stitches together a three-dimensional point cloud from photographs of a space–to generate 3D and 2D drawings that accurately capture the variations in architectural knowledge brought to bear in the construction of churches, such as proportional geometry and stone-working techniques. Joseph will also create a Geographic Information System (GIS) to visualize the dissemination of building practices across time and space, and thereby better relate these patterns of circulation to environmental and historical conditions. Joseph will have the opportunity to hone his modeling and mapping skills by collaborating with architects, archaeologists, art historians, and social historians at the American Academy and at other international academies in the Eternal City.