Digital Humanities Community of Practice – Virtual Rome

We would like to invite you to this term’s meeting of the Digital Humanities Community of Practice, which will be taking place online, on Tuesday 31 May (11:30-13:00). You are welcome to join the Community of Practice via our MS Teams channel. More information can be found on the Digital Humanities Hub portal.

The meeting will include a presentation by Matthew Nicholls (Senior Tutor at St John’s College, Oxford and Visiting Professor, UoR Classics) on his 3D model of Ancient Rome. An abstract of the presentation is below.

The meeting will be taking place online in order to ensure ongoing accessibility for those especially vulnerable to Covid-19. From the autumn term, we hope to hold a mixture of online and hybrid events so that colleagues can meet each other in person. The Outlook invite for this meeting, which you can add to your calendar, will be posted in the Teams channel.

Please click here to join the Community of Practice MS Teams channel. This link will take you to the Teams channel. If you are not already a member, you will be presented with a dialogue box that says ‘Join’. Click this to send a request, which will be approved if you are a member of the University of Reading. If you are already a member of the Team, this link just takes you directly to the ‘General’ channel.

If you have any questions please contact the Digital Humanities Academic Champion, Mara Oliva (m.oliva@reading.ac.uk).

Joining link for the meeting: Click here

More information about the event and the COP: Click here

Digital Humanities Community of Practice – 31/5/2022 11:30-13:00 – MS Teams

Programme:

11:30-11:40: Welcome and DH Hub news – Mara Oliva (Academic Champion)

11:40-11:45: Introduction to 3D visualisations

11:45-12:30: Presentation: 3D model of Ancient Rome – Matthew Nicholls

12:35-12:55: Q&A

12:55-13:00: Next COP and Close

Abstract

Matthew Nicholls’ large scale 3D model of ancient Rome will be familiar to some Reading colleagues, not least those who have cause to walk down the Classics corridor in the Morley Building. This project grew initially out of research on ancient Roman buildings, and developed as a teaching innovation. Its ongoing uses include a public-facing online course (MOOC) which has now been taken by over 62,000 people and has generated significant revenue and course applications at Reading; there are also research uses and ‘impactful’ licensing to television documentaries, software firms, games studios, and others. The model itself and a Part 3 module deriving from it won a Guardian/HEA teaching innovation award, and were the basis of a successful application for a National Teaching Fellowship and two REF impact case studies. It was largely created in free or low-cost consumer software, without specialist training.

This talk will look at the creation of the digital model: the software and processes used to create it, the challenges and benefits of 3D visualisation of the ancient past, and some of its uses and applications.