The Virtual Monastery: Re‐Presenting Time, Human Movement, and Uncertainty at Saint‐Jean‐des‐Vignes, Soissons

Abstract

The Wesleyan‐Brown Monastic Archaeology project (MonArch) integrates research results from standing remains, excavated material culture, and texts from the Augustinian abbey of Saint‐Jean‐des‐Vignes in northern France. The digital dimension of the MonArch project re‐presents the site through three‐dimensional reconstructions of its architecture, inventories of its material culture, and searchable encoded texts. The site employs a variety of strategies to engage the viewer/user in critiques of our knowledge representations. In this paper, we explore the ethical and analytic aspects of archaeological recording and present preliminary results of our work on representing time, human movement, and uncertainty.

Keywords:

• Digital Humanities
• Representation
• Archaeology
• Architecture
• Texts
• TEI
• Monastery
• Saint‐Jean‐des‐Vignes
• Soissons
• Uncertainty
• Visualization
• Ethics
• Analysis
• Access

Notes

1 English poet, literary critic, and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) coined the phrase to justify the use of nonrealistic elements in literature. See his Biographia Literaria, 1817, chap. XIV, 314, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

2 Harrison Eiteljorg, “Photorealistic Visualizations May Be Too Good,” Computer Technologies for Archaeologists & Architectural Historians (CSA) Newsletter XI, no. 2 (Fall 1998) at http://www.csanet.org/newsletter/fall98/nlf9804.html/ (accessed 15 May 2009).

3 Willard McCarty, Humanities Computing (London and New York: Palgrave, 2005).

4 Rome Reborn is a collaborative project to rebuild ancient Rome digitally. Since 1997, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) of the University of Virginia, the UCLA Cultural Virtual Reality Laboratory (CVRLab), the UCLA Experiential Technology Center (ETC), the Reverse Engineering (INDACO) Lab at the Politecnico di Milano, the Ausonius Institute of the CNRS and the Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux‐3, and the Université de Caen have collaborated on a project to create a digital model of ancient Rome as it appeared in late antiquity. The notional date of the model is 21 June 320 CE. Since November 2008 the project has been available on Google Earth at http://earth.google.com/rome/ (accessed 2 May 2009).

5 Originally accessed at Wesleyan from 1998, the site is now accessed through two portals: http://monarch.brown.edu and http://monarch.wesleyan.edu/.

6 The concept of “total representation” was advanced by Ian Hodder to respond to these concerns. See his Web site devoted to excavations at Çatalhöyük, http://www.catalhoyuk.com/ (accessed 3 May 2009). See also Ian Hodder, The Archaeological Process: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), esp. on reflexive process, 92–98, 120–27, 178–87.

7 On defining visual uncertainty in computer science terms, see Alex T. Pang, Craig Wittenbrock, and Suresh K. Lodha, “Applications to Uncertainty Visualization,” The Visual Computer 13, no. 8 (1997): 370–90 and at http://www.cs.utah.edu/~kpotter/library/uncertainVis/pang1997/pang1997.pdf/ (accessed 12 February 2009). On uncertainty applied to architectural reconstructions, see Iwona Dudek and Jean‐Yves Blaise, “Graphic Variables for Dynamic 2D/3D Documentation Visualisation in the Context of Historical Architecture” (paper presented at ICHIM 04: Digital Culture and Heritage, Berlin 30 August–2 September 2004) and at http://www.ichim.org/ (accessed 1 May 2009). See also Karen M. Kensek, “A Survey of Methods for Showing Missing Data, Multiple Alternatives and Uncertainty in Reconstructions,” CSA Newsletter XIX, no. 3 (Winter 2007), at http://www.csanet.org/newsletter/winter7/nlw0702.html/ (accessed 9 April 2009).

8 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).

9 For the extended history of this deserted medieval village and the phased plans that accompany its publication, see Maurice W. Beresford and John G. Hurst, Medieval Deserted Villages (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991). The earliest publication of multiple (sequential) phased plans for Wharram Percy may be M. W. Beresford and J. G. Hurst, “Wharram Percy: A Case Study in Micro‐Topography,” in Medieval Settlement, ed. P. H. Sawyer (London: Edward Arnold, 1976), 114–44; (plan, 132).

10 Sheila Bonde and Clark Maines, eds., Saint‐Jean‐des‐Vignes in Soissons: Approaches to its Architecture, Archaeology and History, Bibliotheca Victorina, 15 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003). See bibliography, pp. 506–10, for earlier literature on the site.

11 The QuickTime animation of the eleven phases can be viewed at http://monarch.brown.edu/phases.html/ and at http://monarch.wesleyan.edu/phases.html/.

12 On access analysis, see Bill Hillier and Julie Hanson, The Social Logic of Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

13 Sheila Bonde and Clark Maines, “‘Ne aliquis extraneus claustrum intret’: Entry and Access at the Augustinian Abbey of Saint‐Jean‐des‐Vignes, Soissons,” in Perspectives for an Architecture of Solitude: Essays on Cistercians, Art and Architecture in Honour of Peter Fergusson, ed. Terryl N. Kinder, Medieval Church Studies 11, Studia et Documenta 13, (Turnhout: Brepols/Cîteaux, 2004), 173–86.

14 Saint‐Jean’s customary survives in two copies. It is the fourteenth‐century recension of the customary that has come down to us in two sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century copies (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France [BnF], n.a.l. 713, and Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte‐Geneviève, MS 2973). The BnF manuscript preserves a copy of the Rule of Saint Augustine, copies of a number of important charters, and an obituary, as well as the abbey’s liturgical calendar, its customs, and other documents, all in a single volume. We therefore call this volume a “chapter book” rather than simply a customary. The Sainte‐Geneviève manuscript preserves only a copy of the customs as well as the procedures for the admission of novices. The Latin edition of the customary will soon be available in Constitutiones canonicarum regularium ad Galliam septentrionalem spectantes, ed. Luc Jocqué and Ludo Milis, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis, (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming).

15 Mark Grahame, “Public and Private in the Roman House: The Spatial Order of the Case del Fauno,” in Domestic Space in the Roman World: Pompeii and Beyond, ed. Ray Laurence and Andrew Wallace‐Hadrill, Journal of Roman Archaeology, Supplementary series 22 (Portsmouth, RI, 1997): 137–64; and Mark Grahame, Reading Space: Social Interaction and Identity in the Houses of Roman Pompeii: A Syntactical Approach to the Analysis and Interpretation of Built Space, British Archaeological Reports, International Series S886 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2000).

16 The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a consortium that collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. Its chief deliverable is a set of Guidelines that specify encoding methods for machine‐readable texts, chiefly in the humanities, social sciences, and linguistics. Since 1994 the TEI Guidelines have been widely used by libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars to present texts for online research, teaching, and preservation. See http://www.tei-c.org. On text encoding, see also Allen Renear, “Text Encoding,” in A Companion to Digital Humanities (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 218–39. TEI is discussed on pp. 232ff.

17 On the refectory and its ritual use, see “To Hunger for the Word of God: Dining and Community in the Gothic Refectory,” chap. 8, in Bonde and Maines, Saint‐Jean‐des‐Vignes in Soissons, 303–49.