Profiles

Robert Bodenheimer (Engineering) adds essential computer science expertise. He has been collaborating with Vanderbilt humanists for several years, culminating this year in a new University Course, Virtual Reality for Interdisciplinary Applications, that he co-teaches with Ole Molvig. He will continue this important educational component and will contribute to an online module in DCH techniques designed to attract the best graduate students to our programs.

Joy Calico (Blair) is co-teaching a graduate seminar with Clifford Anderson (Library) on Mapping Berlin in the Twentieth Century that develops sophisticated curated maps and a public searchable database of objects, texts, and media geo-referenced on layers of historic maps. After MEI training she will be our faculty liaison for library special collections of music manuscripts.

John Janusek (A&S) is directing an archeological and curatorial project on the study and curation of pre-Columbian stone sculptures in the Andean highlands of Bolivia. He will serve as a mentor to graduate and undergraduate students working on laser scanning and 3D modeling for his project.

Jane Landers (A&S) has years of expertise leading an international consortium that preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and African-descended peoples in slave societies. The Slave Societies Digital Archive contains the most extensive serial records for the history of Africans in the Atlantic World, and her work has been funded by Vanderbilt, the NEH, Mellon, ACLS, British Library, the Catholic Church, and the Harriet Tubman Institute.

David Michelson (Divinity), along with Clifford Anderson, works with the TEI/MEI postdoc and coordinate activities related to the preservation of manuscripts and their data. Michelson is the General Editor for Syriaca.org, a reference hub for ancient Syriac history, literature, and culture. This important project has been funded by the NEH, Mellon, Vanderbilt, Princeton, Texas A&M, Marquette, the International Balzan Foundation, and the Bollandist Society.

Tracy Miller (A&S), co-director of the DCH cluster with Lynn Ramey, plans to work with Michelson and Anderson to develop a portable historical gazetteer application that incorporates digital images of artifacts with spatial (GIS) and textual information (site-specific stele inscriptions). Miller is currently building a searchable database for analyzing and mapping pre-modern (pre-1400 CE) Chinese architecture. Her project, Architectura Sinica, includes a photo archive, GIS data, and tagging of key structural/stylistic features so that the user may map building types and particular structural elements over time and space.

Ole Molvig (VIDL and A&S) is a historian of modern science and technology. He and Bodenheimer are teaching a university course that connects student groups with faculty virtual reality projects. Molvig will continue to support and expand the educational component of the cluster with his expertise in virtual reality and digital learning.

Lynn Ramey (A&S), co-director of the DCH cluster with Miller, will organize the lecture series and oversee the budget for the cluster. Ramey has been working with student groups to edit, translate, and encode medieval manuscripts like Jean Bodel’s Congés. She is also working with colleagues and student groups to develop 3D immersive environments modeling medieval textual transmission around the Mediterranean, work that has been funded by Vanderbilt, the NEH, Mellon, and the University of Sydney.

Betsey Robinson (A&S) will be co-teaching a seminar on the Nashville Parthenon with Bernard Frischer of Indiana University, and their students will learn and apply drone-piloting, photogrammetry, 3D modeling, mapping, and rendering to explore our Parthenon as well as the ruined “original” in Athens, Greece. She brings expertise in legacy archaeology, the use of digital methods to revisit and improve upon results from older excavations.

Steven Wernke (A&S) directs the Spatial Analysis Research Lab, providing the group with extensive experience in GIS, Remote Sensing, and photogrammetric processing. His courses– GIS and Remote Sensing and Advanced Spatial Analysis– will train our undergraduate and graduate students in the methods of spatial humanities. He will serve as faculty mentor for postdoc and graduate student work in GIS and will also provide consulting for the development of the spatial capabilities of a shared, portable historical gazetteer.