Blogs

Upcoming Talk: Digital Preservation's Place in the Future of the Digital Humanities

Ensuring long term access to digital information sounds like a technical problem. It seems like digital preservation should be a computer science problem. Far from it. In this lecture Trevor Owens, a digital archivist at the Library of Congress argues that digital preservation is in fact a core problem and issue at the heart of the future of the digital humanities.

FlorenceFive Has Landed

After flights from Pitt to Detroit and Detroit to Amsterdam, our venture to Florence took a slight shift, landing us in Bologna around 1:00pm today. Foggy skies, a bustling airport, and a tiny rental Fiat in which to pack our luggage tight could not hold this team back from making our dinner reservation at Acquacotta for our first traditional Italian meal in Florence. Up early tomorrow to spend the day under S. Maria del Fiore and the Baptistery!

-The FlorenceFive

Correspondance Problems

My eyes were opened up today.  I never really understood what it was like compliling enough information to fill a text book, especially if someone was organizing this data for the first time.  Working with the source with which Drew provided us was very overwhelming, but not in a bad sense.  There is so much information.  The source contains letters from the director of the Academy of France in Rome, and as you can imagine, there were a lot of letters.

Looking for hay in a hay stack.

Today was about understanding the scope of data in humanities research. With science research, unless you are on the front edge of new and uncharted scientific ingenuity, there are specific data sets that have been made so small that you can see the entire scope easily. Humanities research is instead, a scope that includes human origins and every single act of humans since then. Because no human is an island, our interactions effect the entire world; life in general is one huge butterfly effect.

"The Nature of the High Line: A Jacobsian Perspective on New York's 'Park in the Sky'" by Julia Warren

Environmental philosopher Ingrid Stefanovic believes today’s cities fail to foster an awareness of the interconnection among humans, their settlements, and the natural world. She envisions a new city that preserves moments of spectacle capable of showing urbanites that their past and present routines and contributions are not isolated from, but an essential part of, the world’s ecology.   

"Tracey Emin's My Bed as Creative Space" by Kelsey Kresse

In the almost two decades since Tracey Emin premiered My Bed, it has largely been interpreted as being purely autobiographical (as has most of her work) and simply part of her “bad sex aesthetic.” This paper contends that upon closer examination, Emin’s work is more than bad sex and dirty sheets but can bee seen as a creative space for both Emin and other artists.

Kelsey Kresse

Kelsey Kresse is a Senior in the History of Art and Architecture Department writing her Senior Honors Thesis on Tracey Emin’s My Bed as a creative space and its ties to Ovid’s Pygmalion myth. In addition to her HAA major she is also a Theatrical Design and Italian minor. In the HAA Department she has worked with Dr.

"Representing Genetic Disease in Modernity: Rick Guidotti as the Contemporary Medical Photographer" by Elana Williams

Throughout the history of western society, there has been an underlying theme of objectivity in image making that has evolved with each new technological advancement.   The strictly objective nature of the medical profession has mirrored this argument surrounding objectivity in the field of scientific image making and stems from long standing conventional philosophies engrained into the teaching of medicine.  This approach to medical care is called biomedicine.  However, in modern times, philosophies are

"Circulation, Access, and Tourist Experience: Berlin's Center and Periphery as Case Study" by Grace Meloy

To access what was the main Soviet war memorial in East Berlin and more broadly in East Germany, the tourist in Berlin must make a conscious decision to leave the city’s center, which is saturated with the city’s main tourist and memorial sites, and move out into the periphery. By public transportation, one must take two S-bahn lines and then walk through one of the city’s large parks, Treptower Park, to finally reach the memorial.

"The Encounters Project: Teaching Art History Outside of The University" by Joanna Kemp

This spring we challenged a group of high school students from Pittsburgh Science and Technology Academy to create a public exhibition of original works. The History of Art and Architecture Department from the University of Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh Assistance Center for Educators and Students (PACES), joined forces to create the Encounters Project: Art in the City, to bring Art History out of the University setting and into the high school classroom.