This Saturday (25 February 2012) we'll be presenting the most recent work done with the Art of Making project at the Digital Humanities Symposium in York.
At the beginning of this month three members of the team - Will Wootton, Michele Pasin, and Ben Russell - flew out to Rome to meet with Peter Rockwell and begin the next set of interviews. After several fruitful meetings, and on Peter's advice, we have decided to make a few changes to our data entry system. These changes will enable us to model in a more useful way the relationship between detailed carving of decoration on monuments and what Peter calls the 'rhythm of construction', that is the process of actually erecting the structure. While most detailed ornamental carving in the Roman period was done only once the blocks of stone had been put up this was demonstrably not always the case - and it certainly was not always the case in later periods, as the famous facade of Orvieto cathedral demonstrates. Our new data entry system will also allow us to enter evidence for measuring, the laying-out of guidelines, and other activities such painting or the addition of metal inserts in the same way as we have already been entering toolmarks. This was also a good opportunity to look through Peter's extensive collection of tool stone-carving tools and explore his workshop a little further.
Very soon tools will be downed for the Christmas period. Over the past few weeks the data entry system has been completed by Michele Pasin and Ben Russell has begun the task of inputting the data collected during the research trip in September. At the moment we cannot add the images, simply because they have not been scanned, but the digitisation is in hand and will begin soon.