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Abstract
Using Rome as its case study, this article explores the interrelationship between modeling, maps, representation, and digital reconstruction. Discussions of digital cultural heritage often devolve into questions surrounding realism and visual seduction. While worthy topics for serious thought, such a line of inquiry overlooks the fundamental strength of reconstructing in the digital world: the freedom to create models and bend representational boundaries. Reconstructions and endeavors that attempt to represent the past require design within constraints. Similar to the design of two‐dimensional maps, the creation of a three‐dimensional model demands the same choices of symbology. The task is not to represent every aspect of what might have been; rather it is to use representational techniques rooted in a geographic coordinate system to highlight only the most important information for the task at hand—to use design techniques to reduce the complexity of the ontological reality to create a working tinker‐toy model with which and within which one can experiment.
Notes
1 Richard Brilliant, “Prolegomena to a Very Long Book on the City of Rome,” in In Memoriam Otto J. Brendel: Essays in Archaeology and the Humanities, ed. Larissa Bonfante, Helga Heintze, and Carla Lord (Mainz: von Zabern, 1976), 255–61. Brilliant’s third dimension was time, whereas the proposed methodology uses three spatial dimensions and one temporal.
2 Greg Crane, “Classics and the Computer: An End of the History,” in A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Raymond George Siemens, and John Unsworth, Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2004), 46, “Many non‐classicists from academia and beyond still express surprise that classicists have been aggressively integrating computerized tools into their field for a generation. The study of Greco‐Roman antiquity is, however, a data‐intensive enterprise.”
3 Crane, “Classics and the Computer,” 46.
4 On a smaller scale, in map terminology, the online FASTI (http://www.fastionline.org/; accessed August 14, 2009), published by the Associazione Internazionale di Archeologia Classica, is an example of a simple, two‐dimensional Geographic Information System (GIS) aggregation tool for documenting current and future archaeological sites.
5 See Lothar Haselberger and John Humphrey, eds., “Imaging Ancient Rome: Documentation, Visualization, Imagination” (proceedings of the Third Williams Symposium on Classical Architecture, held at the American Academy in Rome, the British School at Rome, and the Deutsches Archaeologisches Institut, Rome, on 20–23 May 2004), Journal of Roman Archaeology, supplementary series no. 61 (2006) for a selection of recent examples.
6 This lack of definition might be strategic. Hype and excitement remain prerequisites for successful grant applications that employ “cutting‐edge” technologies.
7 Alessandro Viscogliosi et al., “L’uso delle ricostruzioni tridimensionali nella storia dell’architettura,” in “Imaging Ancient Rome” (see note 5), 208–19, and James E. Packer, “Digitizing Roman Imperial Architecture in the Early 21st Century: Purposes, Failures, and Prospects,” also in “Imaging Ancient Rome” (note 5), 309–20, esp. 309–12.
8 Bernard Frischer and Philip Stinson, “The Importance of Scientific Authentication and a Formal Visual Language in Virtual Models of Archeological Site: The Case of the House of Augustus and Villa of the Mysteries,” in Interpreting the Past: Heritage, New Technologies and Local Development (proceedings of the conference on Authenticity, Intellectual Integrity and Sustainable Development of the Public Presentation of Archaeological and Historical Sites and Landscapes, Ghent, East‐Flanders 11–13 September 2002), (Brussels, 2007), 49–83.
9 As a member of the now defunct UCLA CVRLab team, and later as associate director of the UCLA Experiential Technologies Center (ETC), I participated at various levels in the process of creating this digital reconstruction and many others.
10 See, for example, the promising work of the CyArk High Definition Heritage Network (http://archive.cyark.org; accessed August 14, 2009), sponsored by the Kacyra Family Foundation.
11 Ulrike Wulf and Alexandra Riedel, “Investigating Buildings Three‐Dimensionally: The ‘Domus Severiana’ on the Palatine,” in “Imaging Ancient Rome” (see note 5), 220–36.
12 Packer, “Digitizing Roman Imperial Architecture,” 320, notes that, “Over the next several decades, work of this kind, carried out by successive generations of scholars and talented technical crews…will re‐create something of the reality of ancient architecture.” Bernard Frischer, Dean Abernathy, Fulvio Cairoli Giuliani, Russell T. Scott, and Hauke Ziemssen, “A New Digital Model of the Roman Forum,” in “Imaging Ancient Rome” (see note 5), 164 write, “The model depicts the Forum as it might have appeared at 10:00 a.m. on June 21, A.D. 400… The time and date were chosen in order to maximize the play of light and shadows across the Forum.”
13 Frischer, et al., “A New Digital Model,” 163, and Packer, “Digitizing Roman Imperial Architecture,” 320; cf. Juan A. Barceló, Maurizio Forte, and Donald Hugo Sanders, eds., Virtual Reality in Archaeology, Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology supplementary volume, British Archaeological Reports, International Series S843 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2000), to see how far both practice and theory have advanced.
14 John Pollini, Lynn Swartz Dodd, Karen Kensek, and Nicholas Cippola, “Problematics of Making Ambiguity Explicit in Virtual Reconstructions: A Case Study of the Mausoleum of Augustus,” in Theory and Practice: CHArt Conference Proceedings (2005), vol. 8 (2007), ed. Anna Bentkowska, Trish Cashen, and Hazel Gardiner, online at http://www.chart.ac.uk/chart2005/papers/pollini.html/ (accessed 12 March 2009).
15 Nicholas D. Cahill and Philip T. Stinson, “Infinite Points,” in The City of Sardis: Approaches in Graphic Recording, ed. Crawford Greenewalt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 2003), 121, though apparently conflating Borges with Carroll when they note that the map could never be unfolded; cf. Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno (London: Macmillan and Co., 1893), 169: “‘Have you used it much?’ I enquired. ‘It has never been spread out, yet,’ said Mein Herr: ‘the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.’”
16 Translation is my own; for the text, see Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems, bilingual ed. (Penguin Classics, 2000), 138: “En aquel Imperio, el Arte de la Cartografía logró tal Perfección que el Mapa de una sola Provincia ocupaba toda una Ciudad, y el Mapa del Imperio, toda una Provincia. Con el tiempo, estos Mapas Desmesurados no satisficieron y los Colegios de Cartógrafos levantaron un Mapa del Imperio, que tenía el Tamaño del Imperio y coincidía puntualmente con él. Menos Adictas al Estudio de la Cartografía, las Generaciones Siguientes entendieron que ese dilatado Mapa era Inútil y no sin Impiedad lo entregaron a las Inclemencias del Sol y los Inviernos. En los Desiertos del Oeste perduran despedazadas Ruinas del Mapa, habitadas por Animales y por Mendigos; en todo el País no hay otra reliquia de las Disciplinas Geográficas.”
17 Jennifer Whyte, Virtual Reality and the Built Environment (Oxford: Architectural Press, 2002), 25, who also cites Borges.
18 Diane Favro, “In the Eyes of the Beholder: Virtual Reality Re‐Creations and Academia,” in “Imaging Ancient Rome” (see note 5), 326–27.
19 See Diane Favro, “The iconiCITY of Ancient Rome,” Urban History 33, no. 1 (2006): 20–38, esp. fig. 14, for an examination of the meaning of the illegibility of the Forma Urbis Romae when placed in its original monumental context.
20 Willard McCarty, “Modeling: A Study in Words and Meanings,” in A Companion to Digital Humanities (see note 2), 255.
21 McCarty, “Modeling,” 265.
22 Willard McCarty, “What’s Going On?” (paper presented at Countries, Cultures, Communication: Digital Innovation at UCLA, Institute for Digital Research and Education, University of California at Los Angeles, 10 May 2007), 10.
23 In a response to McCarty, Drucker writes, “Modelling the thinking process is the grail here…” Johanna Drucker, “Philosophy and Digital Humanities: A review of Willard McCarty, Humanities Computing (London and New York: Palgrave, 2005),” Digital Humanities Quarterly 1, no. 1: 4.
24 I quote in full the explanation of the nuanced “bridge” computing builds between the sciences and humanities found in McCarty, “What’s Going On?” 10: “This is a kinship computing strengthens further by forcing us to reduce our objects of study to digital proxies. These proxies (data being data) are indistinguishable from anything else in a computer, hence as much candidates for scientific reasoning as any other data. Thus we acquire access to a bridge (already under construction by historians and philosophers of science) into the scientific heartland. But the point I wish to emphasize is what allows this to happen: not physics envy but the computational ability to implement the conjectural, that is, to construct possible worlds and explore them.”
25 McCarty, “Modeling,” 265.
26 For example, see Christian Hülsen, Das Forum Romanum: seine Geschichte und seine Denkmäler (Rome: Loescher, 1905) and Giuseppe Lugli, Roma antica: il centro monumentale (Rome: G. Bardi, 1946).
27 Giuseppe Lugli, Monumenti minori del Foro Romano (Rome: G. Barbi, 1947).
28 For the seminal study, see Filippo Coarelli, “Il Comizio dalle origini alla fine della repubblica,” La parola del passato: rivista di studi antichi 32 (1977), 166–238.
29 Paolo Carafa, Il comizio di Roma dalle origini all’etá di Augusto (Rome: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider, 1998), passim.
30 For example, Timothy Pieter Wiseman, “Topography and Rhetoric: The Trial of Manlius,” Historia 28 (1979): 32–50, and “Conspicui postes tectaque digna deo: The Public Image of Aristocratic and Imperial Houses in the Late Republic and Early Empire,” in Historiography and Imagination: Eight Essays on Roman Culture. (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1994), 98–115.
31 Again, Wiseman, “Topography,” examines Livy 6.20, where Manlius’s exploitation of the sight line to the Capitoline from the Campus Martius led to a fast relocation of the trial by the tribunes.
32 Sander M. Goldberg, “Plautus on the Palatine,” The Journal of Roman Studies 88 (1998): 1–20.
33 Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1983), 51, here quoted in full.
34 For the image, see Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1997), 21.
35 For the story of this fictionalized Wellington, see Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, 1st ed. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), 361n7. Mathew H. Edney, “Mapping Parts of the World,” in Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, ed. James Akerman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 117, cites this passage and remarks, “In other words, maps are not records of what each part of the world actually is; regardless of historical and cultural contexts, maps are careful imaginings of what people have wanted the world to be.”
36 The current logo of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South exemplifies this problem. Little is known about the front approach of the Temple of Saturn, yet the use and reuse of one image from Lugli, Roma antica, creates a false sense of comfortable familiarity with the representation and a profession‐wide, tacit acceptance of its visual conclusions. For the figure and a discussion, see Lawrence Richardson, “The Approach to the Temple of Saturn in Rome,” American Journal of Archaeology 84, no. 1 (1980): 51–62, esp. 57, and fig. . Though modern reconstruction projects are fraught with technical issues, the nineteenth‐century student of Cicero would have benefitted from the most rudimentary and crude reconstruction of the Comitium from today; the most up‐to‐date maps of the time had moved it to the area near the Temple of Castor; e.g., W. Clarke, Plan of Ancient Rome (London: Baldwin & Cradock, 1830).
37 In practical terms, desktop GIS is both low in cost (free in many cases) and easy to use. Google’s pioneering efforts in distributable desktop GIS and open source data mark‐up have opened the floodgates.
38 Johanna Drucker and Bethany Nowviskie, “Speculative Computing: Aesthetic Provocations in Humanities Computing,” in A Companion to Digital Humanities (see note 2), 425.
39 Bettina Ann Bergmann, “Introduction: the Art of Ancient Spectacle,” in The Art of Ancient Spectacle, ed. Bettina Ann Bergmann and Christine Kondoleon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 9, with extensive bibliography on prior text‐centered studies of spectacle.
40 For example, Robert Morstein‐Marx, Mass Oratory and Political Power in the Late Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 104–6, whose magisterial work on Roman oratory describes the topographical picture of commemorative monuments by listing the related textual sources in nearly page‐length footnotes. The footnotes are necessary, but more so are three‐dimensional images.
41 Richard C. Beacham, Spectacle Entertainments of Early Imperial Rome (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 24.