The Getty Foundation
has awarded $1 million in grants to support virtual preservation of cultural
locations worldwide.
Sarah Rose Sharp
User interface mockup for extracting geospatial information from a
photograph by Georges Leuzinger (1813-1892), Largo do Paço and Chafariz do
Mestre Valentim, c. 1865. Image courtesy Gilberto Ferrez Collection, Instituto
Moreira Salles
On the heels of last
year’s grantmaking in support of languishing works of historic Modernist
architecture, this week the Getty Foundation announced four new grants
concerned with the digital mapping of cultural heritage sites in Italy, Brazil,
and Turkey. All four grants are being made to universities, and each of the four
projects will create or expand a GIS (Geographic Information System) platform
to synthesize geographic, cultural, and archival data.
Two of the projects
are based in Italy: one by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in
collaboration with the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York
University, to complete a three-year project titled the Pompeii Artistic
Landscape Project (PALP); the other is a two-year project by the University of
Exeter that will “integrate elements of three existing platforms to construct a
layered and interactive view of the art and architecture of Renaissance
Florence.” These programs have received grants in the amounts of $245K and
$230K, respectively.
Meanwhile, Stanford
University is set to receive $220K for the digital mapping project Living
Archive of Çatalhöyük, which seeks to consolidate 25 years worth of
archeological excavations led by the university at the UNESCO World Heritage
Site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey, “a large Neolithic settlement that flourished around
7000 BC.” In addition to presenting the data collected over two decades as a
GIS web application and database for archeologists, art historians, and the
general public to explore, the university intends to release the web
application source code as open access software.
Finally, the
Humanities Research Center (HRC) at Rice University will collaborate with the
Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS) in Rio de Janeiro on a two-year project with
$216K in grant funding, to digitally integrate historical photography and
cartography into a platform that charts changes in the city’s landscape and
topography over time. The project, titled imagineRio, will digitize and
incorporate 4,000 photographic views of Rio de Janeiro from the 19th and 20th
centuries. According to the press release, “the project contributes to the
understanding of the evolution of Rio de Janeiro and its built environment, and
by extension other cities, through the integration of their photographic and
cartographic heritage.” The project will also develop new models to generate a
3D version of imagineRio from archival data and digitized historical
photographs.
Virtual 3D reconstruction of San Pier Maggiore, by Donal Cooper in
collaboration with The National Gallery and to be incorporated in Immersive Florence,
supported by the Getty Foundation as part of its Digital Art History
initiative. Image courtesy Faculty of Architecture and History of Art,
University of Cambridge, Miguel Santa Clara and National Gallery, London.
With almost $1
million in grant funding earmarked for these digital mapping projects, Getty
Foundation demonstrates its commitment to preserving cultural heritage through
the strengthening of both physical and virtual infrastructure. By seeking to
incorporate digital reconstructions in the form of three-dimensional models and
augmented reality, several of the projects intend to create models that will
“provide an enhanced understanding of the historical fabric of spaces,
structures and artworks.”
“Technology is truly
an area that benefits from collaboration, so we’ve brought this approach to our
grantmaking,” said Joan Weinstein, acting director of the Getty Foundation,
quoted in their press release. “Funding scholars who work together in a common
area, in this case digital mapping, can help them learn from one another and
push the whole field forward.”
UNESCO currently
lists 1,092 locations as World Heritage sites, 845 of which are classified as
“cultural.”
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