Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Thursday, June 28, 2018 in Digital Humanities, HART, News, Technology, Vanderbilt University, VRC.

Tracy Miller, associate professor of history of art, and Betsey Robinson, associate professor of history of art, are among nine faculty participants in the Digital Cultural Heritage Research Cluster through a Vanderbilt Initiative Award provided by the 2018 transformational Trans-Institutional Programs (TIPs) initiative. Inspired by UNESCO’s mission to protect cultural heritage in danger of destruction, this program will harness expertise across multiple disciplines and schools at Vanderbilt to develop new digital methods for identifying, studying and preserving historic cultural expressions.

Miller and Lynn Ramey, professor of French, are the lead faculty for the project. Other faculty participants from the College of Arts & Science are John Janusek, associate professor of anthropology; Jane Landers, professor of history, and Ole Molvig, assistant professor of history. From the Blair School of Music is Joy Calico, Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair of Music Literature/History; from the Divinity School, David Michelson, assistant professor of the history of Christianity;  and from the School of Engineering, Robert Bodenheimer, associate professor of computer science.

Vanderbilt Initiative Awards provide seed funding to help faculty launch innovative ideas for discovery and learning with colleagues from diverse disciplines.

This project connects humanistic research with emergent digital technologies for the creation and manipulation of 3-D models, immersive digital environments and complex databases and data formats capable of modeling the heterogeneous and complex forms of humanistic data. These resources will support digital research and next-generation undergraduate and graduate education on cultural heritage. Faculty will unify traditional disciplinary-specific university infrastructures to foster and maximize the impact of Digital Cultural Heritage projects already underway, while fueling new initiatives.

*Photograph courtesy of the Digital Cultural Heritage Research Cluster