Humanities Research Computing
Services | Contact | Sample Faculty Projects
Services
Research Computing assists faculty in the Division of the Humanities to find appropriate technological solutions for their research projects. To help faculty realize their research goals, we work and collaborate closely with the Director of Grants and Fellowships, the Visual Resources Collection (VRC), the ARTFL Project, the Digital Library Development Center, NSIT Academic Technologies and other campus groups. We assist faculty with the technical components of grant applications, help find technical staff, conduct research on technical solutions and provide hosting for research projects on our servers. Humanities Research Computing manages the Digital Media Archive (DMA), whose primary purpose is to digitize, edit, and preserve language audio and other research media. The DMA can assist faculty who wish to archive their research material in accordance with current archival standards and best practices.
Contact
Humanities Research Computing (773.834.8703) and the Digital Media Archive (DMA) (773.702.7045) are led by Lec Maj, Assistant Director for Research Computing (lec@uchicago.edu). Our office is located at 1126 East 59th Street, in the Social Science Research building, Rooms 005-008 (Lower Level), Chicago, IL 60637. We invite you to make an appointment to meet our staff.
Core Staff
Lec Maj, Assistant Director for Research Computing
Part-time Digital Media Archives Staff
Joe Toth, Language Archives Audio Archive Specialist
Sample Faculty Projects
The Xiangtangshan 3-D Digital Caves Project involves a digital reconstruction of the former appearance of the Buddhist cave temples of Xiangtangshan in Hebei province. New technology in three-dimensional digital imaging is used to scan the caves and their missing sculptures and to reconstruct the caves in virtual reality. The project plans to make the digital reconstruction available to a broad audience through an art exhibition, publications, and conferences. In the News: "Digital Reconstruction Could Resurrect Original Vision of Many Ancient Artists and Craftsmen," by Jennifer Carnig, The University of Chicago Chronicle, 31 March 2005
The Media HyperAtlas is a visualization program that maps data about media in a 3-D immersive environment. The use of immersive spaces for teaching and researching media theory has not yet been widely explored in the humanities. HyperAtlas holds great potential for media theory pedagogy, with special application to the media aesthetics core, where it can be used to prime discussions about how to define media, how they function, how to analyze them and to talk about the relationships amongst different kinds of media.
The Digital Scrolling Paintings Project is a database of Chinese handscroll paintings in a scrolling digital format. Digitized sections of handscrolls can be viewed as a continuous virtual image in the computer through which one can scroll, stop and look more closely, or go back, much as one would experience the actual painting. In the News: "Center for Art of East Asia leads project to create 3-D digital renderings of scrolls," by Jennifer Carnig, The University of Chicago Chronicle, 31 March 2005
Kanji alive is a web-based tool to help beginning and intermediate level Japanese language learners to read and write kanji. At their convenience, students can access this online learning tool to watch animated demonstrations of 1231 kanji being drawn stroke by stroke until they feel they have mastered them. In addition, Kanji alive gathers all of the relevant information about each character (such as meaning, pronunciation, radical, number of strokes etc.) is gathered in a single, unified interface. In the News: "Kanji alive' aids language learning"_ by Jenifer Carnig, The University of Chicago Chronicle, Dec 2nd, 2004
Linguistica is a program designed to explore the unsupervised learning of natural language. Unsupervised learning refers to the computational task of making inferences (and therefore acquiring knowledge) about the structure that lies behind some set of data, without any direct access to that structure. In the News:
"Graduate Student in Linguistics Receives Walsh Award for Cutting-Edge Project," by Seth Sanders, The University of Chicago Chronicle, 15 April 2004.
For a full list of current faculty projects supported by Research computing, please see the Humanities Computing wiki.