Professor Lisa Trever and some students in the seminar "Mural Painting and the Ancient Americas" arrive at the de Young Museum in San Francisco to study and photograph the fragments of ancient murals from Teotihuacan, Mexico on view there in the Harald Wagner collection. With the support of the Digital Humanities at Berkeley initiative and the staff of the Visual Resources Center of the Department of History of Art, the class used specialized equipment to take photographs for panoramic stitching and photogrammetry. Special thanks to Sue Grinols, Director of Photo Services and Imaging, and Dr. Matthew Robb, curator of the Art of the Americas at the de Young, for making this visit possible. Students enrolled in the seminar will use these photographs in the production of their final research projects. The surprisingly traffic-free trip from Berkeley to Golden Gate Park even allowed the group to stop for tea at the Japanese Tea Garden before beginning their photographic work! Left to right: Yessica Porras, Kat Huggins, Michaela Guerrera, Gabriella Nunez, Verónica Múnoz-Nájar, Nathan Kelleher, Lisa Trever, and Arianna Campiani. Photograph by Lynn Cunningham 

Two projects in the Department of History of Art have received grants from the new Digital Humanities at Berkeley initiative.

Professor Lisa Trever submitted a successful proposal to integrate digital components into her fall 2015 course "Mural Painting and the Ancient Americas." This seminar will explore the traditions of palace, temple, and tomb painting in ancient and pre-Hispanic Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, and the American Southwest, as well as modern and contemporary legacies of mural painting in Latin America and the United States. The Course Development Grant will allow the class to experiment with digital technologies for rendering digital models of ancient murals and for capturing site visits to murals in the Bay Area. This project is supported through the collaboration of digital curators and research specialists in the department's Visual Resources Center and the Archaeological Research Facility.

In addition, Professor Elizabeth Honig and the VRC have received funds from the Digital Humanities initiative to create a repurposable platform that can be used to catalog the works of any visual artist. Built using Drupal, this platform will be made freely available to other scholars. This grant w... [show more]

We are excited to offer a new course this summer, a "Digital Humanities Bootcamp" designed to introduce students to methods of digital imaging and computational visualization in the context of art historical investigation.  We will be exploring in a hands-on way different types of media that can be deployed to analyze visual historical phenomena.  Topics will include digital photography, modeling/rendering, and network visualization.  For more information, please contact the instructor, Justin Underhill.