Worth Noting
C-Level View :: January 10, 2007
Worth Noting
Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities
Our Cultural Commonwealth
A recent report, Our Cultural Commonwealth, from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences details the need for a comprehensive online infrastructure for the humanities and social sciences, the design of which should be informed by experts from those disciplines.
John Unsworth, Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and chair of ACLS’s Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences notes, “The humanities and social sciences have expertise in the many ways that human beings interact with information, and that expertise is key to getting this new digital infrastructure right.” Pauline Yu, president of ACLS adds, “Cyberinfrastructure is a key to the continued advancement of humanistic studies, and Our Cultural Commonwealth should serve as the guide to realizing that future.”
Supercharging the Ancients
The University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) is developing a real-time 3D rendering model of the City of Rome in AD400, for use in the classroom and for research in the institute’s new 3D theater.
Digital model showing the Interior of the Basilica of Maxentius at Rome, property of UCLA
The model employs IBM’s Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/ B.E.), a technology that speeds up compute-intensive applications such as image processing, simulations, and gaming. UVa was one of 10 academic institutions to receive an IBM Shared University Research Award (SUR) to support research projects with Cell/B.E. Greg Humphreys, an assistant professor of computer science in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at UVa comments, “The Cell processor represents the state of the art in modern computer architecture. We’re incredibly excited to explore the potential of the new directions in high performance computing and visualization enabled by its design.”