Modeling the humanities

I’m at The Face of Text, a conference at McMaster University in Hamilton, near Toronto. Only half of the first day has passed, and already I could spend the rest of the day blogging my thoughts. Luckily, I’m taking careful notes, and plan to write more later on tonight, or this weekend (although the fun over here lasts through Sunday).

Meanwhile, a short comment on John Unsworth‘s keynote, titled Forms of Attention: Digital Humanities Beyond Representation. During the thought provoking, hour-long talk, he has mentioned what he sees as a problem with visualization of knowledge in the humanities. The prettier it gets (think QuickTime movies showing the reconstruction of a temple from blueprints or archeological data), the harder it is for the viewer to know what is actually known, and what is hypothesized. That’s a fair criticism, and it seems to me that the problem is easily remedied. More than that: there already exist a number of ways to remedy it.

The simplest is documentation. Humanities computing projects suffer from appallingly sparse documentation. Tell me what is known and what is hypothesized, before, during and/or after I view the pretty movie.

Then there’s the CAVE. These 3D modeling environments are gorgeous but hugely expensive to build and maintain. There are, I think, six publicly accessible CAVEs in Europe (one of them at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria). None of the several CAVEs in the States are publicly accessible. So, even though there are at least a couple of humanities projects being done there, for now there remains a problem of dissemination and real dialogue based on these projects.

At least one of them, however, addresses precisely the issue of what is known vs. what is hypothesized. The ARCHAVE, based on a temple excavation project in Petra, Jordan, takes as a central premise the idea of modeling as a way of making an argument. They’re excavating, they find a shard of pottery, and they reconstruct what the vessel must’ve looked like. Then they place that vessel in the same place, inside the virtual reconstruction of the temple, where the original shard was found. The idea is, when they’re done, to invite archeologist colleagues and encourage them to play around, pick up objects, contest their placement, etc. Modeling as argument at its best – at least it seems that way. We’ll see if it works.

Until CAVEs are at least as accessible as personal computers, there are ways (besides documentation) to make your pretty model transparent with regard to that crucial difference between what is known and what – debated. John kindly pointed me to a proof of concept they did at the University of Virginia: the Pompeii Forum Project. Apparently, it involves layers of images that make certainty differences more obvious. I’ll have to check it out later: the next session has already begun.