Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Two projects in the Department of History of Art have received grants from the new Digital Humanities at Berkeley Initiative


Professor Lisa Trever submitted a successful proposal to integrate digital components into her fall 2015 course "Mural Painting and the Ancient Americas." This seminar will explore the traditions of palace, temple, and tomb painting in ancient and pre-Hispanic Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, and the American Southwest, as well as modern and contemporary legacies of mural painting in Latin America and the United States. The Course Development Grant will allow the class to experiment with digital technologies for rendering digital models of ancient murals and for capturing site visits to murals in the Bay Area. This project is supported through the collaboration of digital curators and research specialists in the department's Visual Resources Center and the Archaeological Research Facility.

In addition, Professor Elizabeth Honig and the VRC have received Collaborative Research funds from the Digital Humanities initiative to create a repurposable platform that can be used to catalog the works of any visual artist. Built using Drupal, this platform will be made freely available to other scholars interested in building and sharing online catalogues raisonnĂ©s, which are among the critical research products/tools of art historians, typically including descriptions and images of all of the known works of a given artist. This grant will be an extension of Dr. Honig’s project janbrueghel.net, which is also a collaboration with colleagues from the Duke University Math department and is funded by the National Science Foundation, the UC Humanities Research Institute, and the following UC Berkeley funders: CITRIS, URAP, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities.