IATH
Institute for Advanced
Technology in the Humanities
University of Virginia
Chaco Digital Initiative
Though it has long been recognized as a sacred
place by indigenous peoples, Chaco Canyon’s
magnificence was recognized by later Anglo
explorers. Since the founding of the Chaco
Canyon National Monument in 1907, Chaco has
been at the forefront of the historic preservation
movement. The Chaco Digital Initiative is a
collaborative effort to create a digital archive that
integrates widely dispersed archaeological data
collected from Chaco Canyon in the late 1890s
and the first half of the 20th century.
URL: www.chacoarchive.org
The Circus in America: 1793-1940
Circus in America surveys the history of the American circus over a 150-year period. It promotes serious scholarly
research of the significant role the circus played in the growth of American society and popular culture. The site
contains artifacts from private collections, museums, archives, brought together for the first time for the use of
scholars and students of history, popular culture, technology, business, drama, sports, art, and advertising.
URL: www.circusinamerica.org
The William Blake Archive
An international public resource for the visual and literary works of William
Blake. Over the course of two centuries, respect for the prints, paintings,
and poems of William Blake (1757-1827) has increased to a degree that
would have astonished his contemporaries. The William Blake Archive is a
contemporary response to the needs of a dispersed and varied audience
of readers and viewers and to the corresponding needs of the collections
where Blake's original works are currently held. The archive’s
reproductions are more accurate in color, detail, and scale than the finest
commercially published photomechanical reproductions and texts that are
more faithful to Blake's own than any collected edition.
URL: www.blakearchive.org/blake/
Mapping the Dalai Lamas
URL: www.iath.virginia.edu/dalai_lamas/
A project to integrate digital copies of classical
Tibetan-language biographies with digital animated
maps, timelines, and images, so as to present
significant events in the lives of the Dalai Lamas. This
work will also search out previously unnoticed
connections
between
biographical
events,
geographic locations, social and historical context,
and literary and rhetorical expression.
IATH
Institute for Advanced
Technology in the Humanities
University of Virginia
The World of
Dante
The World of Dante is a multi-media research tool for reading,
studying, and teaching the Divine Comedy. It provides an
encoded Italian text which allows for structured searches and
analyses, an English translation, interactive maps, diagrams,
music, a database, timeline and gallery of illustrations.
URL: www.worldofdante.org
Monument and Dust:
The Culture of Victorian London
A 4-dimensional project that draws from journalism, literary works, paintings, census
data, maps, tracts, cartoons, sermons to create a complex visual, textual, and
statistical representation of Victorian London. The web site includes a 3D fly-through
model of the Crystal Palace from the 1851 Great Exhibition.
URL: www.iath.virginia.edu/london/
Leonardo da Vinci and His Treatise on Painting is an
electronic archive dedicated to the Treatise on Painting.
Renaissance artists and theorists did not have access to
the artist's original manuscripts and knew Leonardo's
artistic theory only through the so-called Treatise on
Painting, a text that they regarded as an original book by
Leonardo but that we know today was only a
disorganized, selective compilation of his precepts on
painting.
The archive gathers critical resource materials for arthistorical scholarship on the legacy and reception of
Leonardo's art theory from the mid-16th century through
the early 19th century. These materials are manuscript
copies of the Treatise on Painting, dating from the mid16th to the mid-17th century, and printed editions of the
text, from 1651 to the early 19th century. The archive
makes it possible to analyze these materials
systematically, comprehensively, and comparatively.
URL: www.iath.virginia.edu/leonardo/
Homer’s Trojan Theater
The battlefield sequences in Homer's Iliad present an exceptional challenge to a narrator. More than two
hundred warriors are killed or wounded, yet the poet is remarkable in his ability to keep his characters on
the battlefield straight. The action is visualized and described with such vividness that the audience can
easily picture the Trojan plain and the bloody action. How does the text help the narrator?
This project takes the text of the Iliad as its script, paying particular attention to spatial indications such
as for example “left” and “right,” and attempts to reconstruct the activity on the battlefield with the help
of digital technology. Translating the poem’s verbal account into a visual medium demonstrates not only
the coherence of its plan, but also reveals the role of spatial design in plotting its narrative.
URL: www.iath.virginia.edu/iliad/
IATH
Institute for Advanced
Technology in the Humanities
University of Virginia
The Piers Plowman
Electronic Archive
A multi-level, hypertextually linked
electronic archive of the
textual tradition of all
three versions of the
14th century allegorical
dream vision Piers
Plowman.
URL: www.iath.virginia.edu/seenet/piers/
Patterns of Reconstruction at Pompeii
An investigation into the reconstruction of a large market building on the Pompeii Forum following
and earthquake in 62 AD, seventeen years prior to the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius that buried the city.
The work is part of the Pompeii Forum Project, a multi-disciplinary study of the development of the
Forum as the civic center of Pompeii.
The study is approached from the perspective of a structural engineer, applying engineering principles
to interpret the currently visible areas of damage and repair, plus information available from historic
records. The study employs a variety of computer-based technologies in the inquiry, in particular
digital photogrammetry to document the geometry and construction of key areas of the building, plus
three dimensional modeling to depict the state of the building in various states of damage and repair.
URL: www.iath.virginia.edu/struct/pompeii/patterns/
Rome Reborn 1.0
From 1997 to 2007, the UCLA Cultural Virtual Reality Laboratory (CVRLab), the UCLA Experiential Technology
Center (ETC), the Reverse Engineering (INDACO) Lab at the Politecnico di Milano, and the Institute for
Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) of the University of Virginia collaborated on a project to create a
digital model of ancient Rome as it appeared in late antiquity.
URL: www.romereborn.virginia.edu
The Complete Writings and Pictures of
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
The Rossetti Archive is a
hypermedia archive of the complete
writings and pictures of Dante
Gabriel Rossetti. It provides
students and scholars with access
to all of Rossetti's pictorial and
textual works and to a large
contextual corpus of materials,
most drawn from the period when
Rossetti's work first appeared and
established its reputation
(approximately 1848-1920), but
some stretching back to the 14th
century sources of his Italian
translations. All documents are
encoded for structured search and
analysis.
URL: www.rossettiarchive.org
IATH
Institute for Advanced
Technology in the Humanities
University of Virginia
URL: www.frenchsaintslives.org
aints' Lives (known collectively as
"hagiography") are stories about
people been who have canonized
by the Catholic Church. The "Lives
of the Saints" Project will focus on
those Lives that were written in
French (including Anglo-Norman but
not Occitan), in verse or prose or
both between c. 880 and c. 1500 of
the Christian era. When complete,
the project will consist of two major
components: an interactive
database containing extensive
textual, historical and material
information about these works and
their manuscript contexts, and a
collection of hypertext editions and
translations of Lives with images of
their manuscripts.
Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and
Transcription Project
The Salem witchcraft episode began in late February 1692 and lasted through April, 1693. All told,
at least twenty-five people died: nineteen were executed by hanging, one was tortured to death,
and at least five died in jail due to harsh conditions. This project is an electronic collection of
primary source material, including a new transcription of court records, related to the Salem witch
trials, the aftermath, and the on-going efforts to clear the names of the condemned.
URL: www.salemwitchtrials.org
The Salisbury Project
The Salisbury Project is an archive of
color photographs designed for teachers,
students and scholars to supplement
visually books and articles published on
the cathedral and town of Salisbury,
England. The project consists of views of
the exterior and interior of the cathedral,
as well as of select buildings and sites in
and around the town of Salisbury.
Additional material includes a guide for
teachers and students, related texts and
essays, and an annotated bibliography.
URL: salisbury.art.virginia.edu
Silk Road: The Path
of Transmission of
Avalokiteśvara
A network of trade routes between east and
west, the Silk Road was also a channel for
ideas, technologies, art, and religion. A wide
variety of religious faiths, including
Nestorianism, Zoroastrianism, Manicheaism,
Islam, and Buddhism in particular, moved
through this network and had significant
influences in many countries.
This project uses the Silk Road as a spatial
template to create a digital presentation of the
transmission of one of the most important
Buddhist deities, Avalokiteśvara, the
Bodhisattva of Compassion.
URL: www.iath.virginia.edu/silkroad/
IATH
Institute for Advanced
Technology in the Humanities
University of Virginia
English Medieval Architecture:
A Model for Design Process Analysis
A look at the effect of existing physical structure on the development of
medieval architecture.
URL: www.medievalarchitecture.org
St. Gall Monastery Plan
The earliest preserved and most
extraordinary visualization of a
building complex produced in the
Middle Ages, it was created at the
monastery of Reichenau sometime
between 819-26 A.D. Ever since, it
has been preserved by the
Monastic Library of St. Gall
(Switzerland).
URL: www.stgallplan.org
The web site, created with the financial
assistance of the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation by scholars at the University
of California, Los Angeles and the
University of Virginia, presents the plan,
its origins, components, and notations,
as well as four centuries of scholarship
on the plan within the context of 9th
century material culture.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture
The Uncle Tom’s Cabin &
American Culture project
looks at the relationship
between Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin
and American culture
both before and after the
book’s publication. The
project provides digital
versions of several editions
of the book as well as 19th
and 20th century responses
to the book, in the form of
books, images, songs,
movies, poems, articles,
plays, games, and
commemorative objects.
URL: www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/
Aquae Urbis Romae:
The Waters of the City of Rome
An interactive cartographic history of the relationships between hydrological and
hydraulic systems and their impact on the urban development of Rome, Italy. The
study begins in 753 BC and will ultimately extend to the present day. Aquae Urbis
Romae examines the intersections between natural hydrological elements such
as springs, rain, streams, marshes, and the Tiber River, and constructed hydraulic
elements such as aqueducts, fountains, sewers, bridges, conduits, etc., that
together create the water infrastructure system of Rome.
URL: www.iath.virginia.edu/waters/
IATH
Institute for Advanced
Technology in the Humanities
University of Virginia
The Walt Whitman Archive
The Walt Whitman Archive is an electronic
research and teaching tool that sets out to
make Whitman's vast work, for the first time,
easily and conveniently accessible to scholars,
students, and general readers. Whitman,
America's most influential poet and one of the
four or five most innovative and significant
writers in United States history, is the most
challenging of all American authors in terms
of the textual difficulties his work presents.
URL: www.whitmanarchive.org
Virtual Williamsburg
A project to create a 3D model of the entire area of Colonial Williamsburg,
including the roads and public spaces and the exteriors, interiors, and furnishings
of the buildings. The model also aims to correct physical restorations made in the
20th century that architectural historians of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
now consider to be erroneous. Ultimately, the project will feature a temporal 3D
model showing how the town developed from its origins to the end of the 18th
century.
URL: research.history.org/DHC/VW.cfm
The World’s Fairs in Italy Project
This will be the first digital archive devoted to analyzing the phenomenon of World's Fairs in Italy. The project
will have three sections, corresponding to three distinctive phases of construction and beginning with the
"fabulous exposition" of Turin 1911. Each section will have a real-time simulation model of the fairgrounds
and an interactive database for materials and data related to that Fair. When finished, the World’s Fairs project
will be a rich digital collection preserving the ephemeral world of Universal Expositions.
URL: www.iath.virginia.edu/worldsfair/
Traditions of Exemplary Women: Liu Xiang’s Lienü Zhuan
This project focuses on the Lienü
zhuan (Traditions of Exemplary
Women) of Liu Xiang (77-6 B.C.), the
earliest extant book in the Chinese
tradition solely devoted to the moral
education of women. The book
consists of biographical accounts of
female role models in early China and
became the standard textbook for
women’s education for the next two
millennia. The Lienü zhuan offers
important insights into the culture,
politics, and social structure of early
China, as well as the representation of
women in various phases of China’s
history. This project includes a
translation of the text, a book-length
study, and a digital archive that will
serve as a publicly accessible tool for
scholarly exploration (in both English
and Chinese) of women’s social, legal,
and ritual status as represented in the
texts of specific periods in Chinese
history.
URL: www.iath.virginia.edu/xwomen/