The Visual Media Workshop is a humanities lab focused on the investigation of material and visual culture—whether historical or contemporary—in an environment that encourages technological experimentation. This unique pedagogical workspace facilitates collaborative undergraduate, graduate, and faculty research, and is a forum for exploring real-world challenges in a digital milieu.
The work we do in the VMW is designed to be as self-reflexive as possible, using agile and iterative approaches to our humanities research in order to refine questions and respond productively to new findings and realizations. We also take the time to think about our tools, and to reveal the cultural and historical dimensions of the digital information practices we use on a daily basis. As a constantly-evolving laboratory, the VMW continues to challenge notions of isolated scholarship, and strives to mobilize a community of researchers committed to addressing pervasive conceptual concerns in the humanities.
We currently have three, large, lab-based research projects underway. They are each managed collaboratively, with graduate students from both the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Computing and Information taking the lead.
If you would like to learn more about the work of the VMW, or if you would like to see how you might become involved, please feel free to contact the Director, Alison Langmead, at adlangmead@pitt.edu.
Projects:
- Sustaining MedArt
The Sustaining MedArt project considers the socio-technical history of a scholarly website, “Images of Medieval Art & Architecture” (http://www.medart.pitt.edu), commonly known as “MedArt,” as part of a broader exploration of recordkeeping practices and preservation plans for digital projects. The site, launched in 1996 by Dr. Alison Stones at the University of Pittsburgh, has persisted for more than two decades despite significant change in the surrounding digital ecosystem. As the name implies, the Sustaining MedArt project is primarily concerned with tackling the complex issues of digital preservation and sustainability, and will culminate in the creation of a widely-applicable Socio-Technical Digital Preservation Roadmap.
As of January 2017, the project has entered its third phase of production and the lab team has expanded to incorporate two new graduate student researchers. These researchers, alongside Aisling Quigley (Project Manager) and Alison Langmead (Principal Investigator), are engaging in digital forensics of the MedArt site, performing a thorough environmental scan, and establishing the theoretical foundations of our work. By the end of last term, the team had conducted interviews with Dr. Alison Stones and Philip Maye, two major contributors to the site. This research comprises the socio-technical investigation of the site, and will lay the groundwork for the production of the digital preservation roadmap by August 2017.
- Decomposing Bodies
Decomposing Bodies is a project of the VMW focused on the creation, curation, and management of a data-rich digital collection of archival objects dealing with representations of human bodies and the history of identity, identification and incarceration in late 19th- early 20th-century America. Alphonse Bertillon, a French policeman, anthropologist and inventor, developed a system of criminal identification that sought to classify human beings on individual standardized cards, each containing a consistent set of biometric measurements and observations. This process, now known more familiarly as “Bertillonage,” was essentially a system that disassembled the visual forms of the human body into small pieces so that the police could individuate, and thus identify, a single human body from others.
A project that has been ongoing at the lab since 2014, Decomposing Bodies is a collection of the digital images of thousands of Bertillon cards, depicting prisoners at two Ohio institutions: the Ohio Penitentiary and the Ohio State Reformatory. Digital photos of these cards were created from the collection of the Ohio History Connection, in Columbus, Ohio. The project's focus for the coming year is on classifying these cards by type, and creating transcriptions of the measurements and descriptions written on them, as well as organizing and managing the huge amounts of data that this process creates, and working towards making that data accessible.
Decomposing Bodies is now being managed by S.E. Hackney, a doctoral student at the iSchool in Library and Information Science. The project's focus for the coming year will be in building a unified online collection and corresponding data set for the more than 12,500 Bertillon cards in the digitized collection, as well as beginning to consider the institutions, people, objects, and data that appear within it. This new phase of the project also seeks to ask engaging questions of this content, and present innovative arguments about the history of policing, prison and surveillance in America.
- Itinera
Itinera is a project of the VMW that visualizes the travels and social networks of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European intellectuals and artists, as well as the objects they made and encountered. Enabled by the interactivity of the interface, the user may toggle between agents, maps, and chronology, each of which visualizes the relationships each agent has with other agents and places at a given time. While taking care to map the well trodden sites of major capital cities, Itinera emphasizes the mobilty, object collection, and site documentation in less documented areas as well, including but not limited to South and Central America, Greece, Egypt, and the Near East. The visualizations offered through Itinera offer a platform through which contemporary scholars may engage with contemporary issues revolving around environment and space-making, mobility and exchange, and visualization of historical data.
Most recently, under project manager Lily Brewer and project directors Alison Langmead and Drew Armstrong, it has focused on the complexities of site specificity given the agent's historical data, as revealed by primary source material such as letters written during travel or secondary material documented in encyclopedias of travels. Emphasizing the critical importance of the integrity of historical scholarship, Itinera overlays historical research methods to map and theorize on 17th and 18th site-specificity and human mobility. The aims of Itinera are to visually demonstrate traditional data to aid in and in the aid of traditional methods of historical scholarship. In mapping agents, their objects, and sites, Itinera is designed to enable scholars to engage with cultural tourism through an interactive, digital environment in the hopes of generating new insights.
