Good afternoon.
Welcome back.
It's a great pleasure to be here
moderating the second session.
We'll try to keep as much as we
can to the schedule
because we've got a lot to do,
including get to the workshop.
So without further ado,
I'd like to introduce
our first afternoon speaker, Ivo
van der Graaff.
Ivo is here at the Center
for Advanced Study in the Visual
Arts.
He is a research associate.
He got his PhD in art history
from the University of Texas
Austin, where he worked
on "The City Walls of Pompeii:
Perceptions and Expressions
of a Monumental Boundary."
He actually got a BA and MA
in Mediterranean archaeology
at University of Amsterdam,
and so he comes to us well
equipped
with that archaeological element
of working with a database
for quite some time.
He's also, most importantly,
the field director
of The Oplontis Project, which
he is going to talk about today.
He's been field director
since 2009.
He's had many publications
in relationship to The Oplontis
Project, including most recently
"The Recovered Tympanum
of Cubiculum 11 at Villa A,
Oplontis:
A New Document for the Study
of City Walls,"
which is appearing in Oplontis
Villa A (of "Poppaea")
at Torre Annunziata, Italy, 2:
Decorative Ensembles,
which is an ACLS humanities
e-publication coming out as we
speak.
He's also received many awards
for this project,
including a research
and dissertation fellowship
for the Center of Study
of Ancient Italy
in the University of Texas
at Austin, and today he'll
be talking about "Developing
Interactive Publication
Strategies: The Oplontis Project
and Digital Art History."
Ivo?
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you for the introduction,
Paul, and thank you for having
me present on our project today.
And I should say our project,
because it is very much
a project of a very large team
with all kinds of components.
So without further ado,
the objective of The Oplontis
Project is a publication
of Villa A, often called
the Villa of Poppaea,
and Villa B, sometimes called
the Villa of Lucius Crassius
Tertius at Torre Annunziata,
Italy.
Located just a few miles west
of ancient Pompeii, both villas
were buried under nine meters
of ash deposited
by Vesuvius in 79 CE.
Villa A, a UNESCO World Heritage
Site, is a luxury villa best
known for its frescoes,
whereas Villa B, in reality
a wine emporium,
languishes
in complete abandonment.
The recovery was part
of a project conducted
between the 1960s and 1990s
intended to create
an archaeological attraction
and boost the local economy.
Sadly, the money ran out,
and the two structures remained
largely unpublished.
Given the charge
from the Archaeological
Superintendency of Pompeii
to carry out the publishing work
with the maximum possible
efficacy, we have turned
to digital means
for publication,
interactive study,
and documentation of these two
complexes.
Today I'll primarily discuss
our work on Villa A,
began in 2006
and nearing completion,
and digress only slightly
into our work at Villa B, which
began in 2012.
We're all
familiar with the difficulties
of studying buildings
in traditional print formats.
Take, for example,
the German Hauser in Pompeji
series published
between the early 1980s
and 2000s.
This slide shows just how
big and hard
to handle these huge volumes
are.
Their aim is to document
Pompeiian houses to the fullest
possible extent--
architecture and construction
techniques, decorations,
including pavements, ceilings,
and frescoes,
statuary, small finds, and much
more.
Presentation
of such complex materials
is a problem.
In this slide,
you see illustrations
of the same wall that face
each other over the gutter
over a Hauser in Pompeji volume.
Draft persons actually traced
this wall on huge sheets
of transparent material
to arrive at this drawing.
They then redrew it, as you can
see on the left,
using various graphic devices
to make it legible.
Despite these laudable efforts,
the drawing remains schematic.
Reconstructions appear
in faint outlines.
The actual state of the fresco
represented on the right
in a black and white photograph
taken from an oblique angle
is hard to read.
We encounter similar problems
in smaller formats.
In this publication
of The Insula of the Menander
at Pompeii, the editor opted
for a long gate fold to show
the positioning
of the decorations
on the long wall of the atrium.
In order to save space
and paper, the illustration
on the far left next to it
comes from an entirely different
room.
A scholar wanting to study
the declaration of this wall
must first find it on the plan
at the back of the book,
then consult the catalog
description,
then find this fold out,
then go to a separate section
to find the color illustration,
and then go to yet
another section
to find
the black and white photos.
The scholar must also take
the scale markers seriously,
for the drawings are reproduced
at different sizes.
In light of these less
than ideal results obtained
by print publication,
including limitations
on the number of illustrations,
especially color plates,
the difficulties of navigation,
and the astronomical costs,
we began to research
digital publication.
In a market littered
with failed digital publication
ventures, the Humanities E-Book
series, or HEB, of the American
Council of Learned Societies
is an unqualified success.
The HEB is a self sustaining
online collection of over 4,300
books of major importance
in the humanities.
27 Learned Societies
and over 100 publishers
have contributed to this list
of fully searchable books.
The HEB also commissions
born-digital books that use all
the potential of new media,
including hyperlinks
to interactive databases,
archives, music files, and film.
The Oplontis Project volumes
proudly join the ranks
of these XML e-books.
The effectiveness
of the scholarly print volume
rests on the accuracy
and efficiency of the finding
tools--
the table of contents,
the index, figure call out
numbers, notes, and above all,
cross references.
Recasting these tools in a born
digital environment means faster
access to a much greater
quantity of information.
Ambitious e-books have
hyperlinks to a myriad
of electronic media,
such as archive repositories,
films, databases,
and other research tools.
The Oplontis Project database
has developed parallel
to the e-book.
Indeed, some contributors began
their chapters by building
their part of the database.
For this reason, it includes all
the categories of research
we are doing,
including the surface
decorations, the architecture,
excavation, objects,
archival material,
and photographs.
We constructed our template
using Microsoft Access.
Let's take a look at an example
from category
one, wall and ceiling
decorations.
Looking at the east wall
of the atrium, room five,
we can see the top part
of a long description written
by Regina Gee,
and at the lower right,
a thumbnail.
Her description forms the basis
of her descriptive catalog
of wall painting
in volume two of the e-book.
Clicking on the high-res button
beneath the thumbnail, we get
this screen--
the photograph taken by project
photographer Paul Bardagjy
of the wall's state in 2009.
From here, we can also access
scores of archival photographs,
including details of when it was
in a better shape.
If we go to the floor screen,
we can also explore
the paving system, where we
would find full descriptions
written by Lea Cline.
We can go from views
of the whole floor
to details that show the number
of tesserae.
Here's another example.
Let's say I want to see
the archival materials
for the atrium.
I click five, the room number,
and archival materials.
Many archival photos appear.
This photo is particularly
unsettling.
[LAUGHTER]
We see a work man hosing down
the wall painting
after its reconstruction.
That's not something
many conservators would be
happy with, I presume.
This other photo came
into our hands
from a local collector.
It shows what the atrium looked
like when Princess Margaret
of England
visited the villa in 1973, years
before it opened.
I'd like to call your attention
to all the fragments lying
on the floor.
Below on the left
is a photograph
from the Wilhelmina Jashemski
Archive
that shows what the wall
behind the royal group
looked like at the time
of excavation around 1968.
As you can see,
it was in a state of collapse.
On the right is our photograph
showing its state in 2009.
The red arrows mark the half
of the wall
that the construction company
has had to invent, rebuilding it
after it collapsed.
The wall paintings you see today
were literally salvaged
from the debris, consolidated,
and hung presumably
in the right position
on a wall made up
from modern materials.
In the detail of room 14
on the left,
you can see these guidelines
that restorers use to position
the fragments on the walls.
Unfortunately, many
of these fragments
were left in a heap of debris
when the money ran out in 1984.
We've been able to find homes
for many of them.
In the atrium, the workers
took a guess on the height
of the roof and suspended it
on reinforced concrete beams.
This image from the model
shows our reconstruction
of the ionic upper story
from leftover
fragments we found in storage.
Note how the concrete beams
supporting the modern roof are
about three meters too low
and cut through the ionic order.
When you visit the villas today,
half of what you see
is a fantasy cooked up to make
a spectacular tourist site.
All the more reason to create
a digital 3D model that not only
records their current state,
the prime requisite
of all archaeological
publications,
but that also proposes more
accurate reconstructions
than were possible in the 1970s
and '80s.
We had two options to create
the model.
The first was to laser scan
all 99 spaces to make a highly
accurate mesh model from point
cloud arrays, which could then
be texture mapped
with high resolution
photographs.
This priced well
beyond our budget.
We turned to our second option,
which was to build a model using
3D Studio Max software
from a digital plan created
for the Archaeological
Superintendency of Pompeii.
Our project architects, Jess
Galloway and Timothy Lidell
had to contend with inaccuracies
within this plan,
probably due to incorrect
joining points or reference
points.
We then engaged Paul Bardagjy,
an architectural photographer,
to record every surface
and then use his images
to texture map the model.
Post processing
of these high resolution TIFFs
was laborious since many
of the long walls like this 24
meter stretch
required extensive stitching.
We then shared our data
with the King's Visualization
Lab at King's College in London,
then directed by Professor
Emeritus Richard Beacham.
Speaking of gaming platforms,
although the 3D Max model
offered the highest accuracy
and resolution, it did not allow
users to navigate
through the building.
The search for an interface that
would allow navigation
and to directly import our 3D
Max geometry took some time.
There was a false start
with Second Life.
Finally we chose Unity,
a flexible gaming engine.
Drew Baker did the modeling,
and Martin Blazeby did
digital reconstructions.
There was about a year
of constant communication
and critique, including a study
season where Michael Thomas,
our co-director, and Timothy
Lidell compared every space
in the villa
with the model for errors.
The biggest problem was to make
the model accurate, yet fully
navigable.
Early versions split the villa
into parts to accommodate
the masses of data.
The beta version I will show you
is seamless, but not
without compromises.
The photographs used
in the texture mapping
are low resolution.
Simple services are
standardized patterns,
and some geometries,
like the convex edges,
are simplified--
all of this to make the model
less data heavy and therefore
more fluid.
But bear in mind
that every feature is linked
to the project database,
so that by pressing Q,
or the Query button,
a user can drill down in detail.
So let's have a look.
I'm actually going to go out
of the PowerPoint
and show you our model as it
stands right now.
So the model opens in the north
garden, as you can see here,
and as you can see,
if you're
familiar with these type
of games,
it is very
much in a first person shooter
kind of category.
[LAUGHTER]
Although there are no weapons
in this one.
That's for sure.
I'm actually going to walk down
to the atrium
since we've been discussing it
for a little while,
and I can say by a matter
of fact,
having walked down this corridor
many times,
every single stone that you see
is accurate.
So here we are in the atrium,
and once we're here,
we can actually start playing
around with all sorts of things.
So for example,
I can do very neat stuff
like pressing the R button,
and we get our reconstruction.
I can remove the map up here,
and I can go to our little menu
and start playing around
with light systems,
so we can see artificial light,
natural light.
I can change the time of day,
which is especially
important in structures
like this
to see how people may receive
various paintings.
I can toggle the mini map and so
forth.
I can also jump to various areas
if you don't feel like walking
around.
So one of my favorite ones
is actually room 23, which
is just around the corner,
and I have to get rid of the map
or the little thing again.
And here we are in room 23,
perhaps more famously known
for its basket of figs
over here,
featured in many textbooks.
And again, if you just press
the R button,
you get our reconstruction.
You may note that there's
a different roof.
We know about this roof because
of archival photographs, again,
of archival work
that we've done, which, again,
you can find in our database.
So by pressing Q,
the magic button, we actually
are taken out and back online
onto our project database, which
is housed at the University
of Texas.
Now, for reasons of time,
I'm not actually going to go
into the database.
So although I presume
that all archaeological projects
today use electronic databases,
its accessibility directly
from the model,
like the electronic searching
functions and e-books,
encourages new forms
of research.
Despite the completion
of the beta version in November
2011, ongoing work means
that the model remains
unfinished.
For example, these 1968
photographs and drawings
from garden viridarium 20
recently surfaced
from the Pompeii archives.
Our model still carries
the generic image you see
in the upper left.
Similarly, a study of diaeta 78
conducted by John Clarke, Simon
Barker, and Timothy Lidell
has led to a new reconstruction
of the room with a kind of wall
panelling wall revetment never
before attested.
In 2013, John Clarke happened
upon a group of fresco fragments
in the last corner
of the last storeroom
to be cleaned up.
He identified them as belonging
to oecus 15,
but to the west wall, never
excavated because it lies
beneath the modern street.
The fragments will make
an important addition
to our understanding
of the decorative system
of the room.
Other important tasks remain.
The easiest is to put
in our trenches--
24 in all-- so that users
can see photographs and drawings
of our profiles and plans,
read the field reports,
and access the catalog
descriptions of the finds
and each stratum.
A more imaginative task
is the recreation
of the ancient topography.
Today Villa A lies almost
a kilometer
from the modern coastline.
Its southern extremity has long
been gone, cut through
by Domenico Fontana in 1600
as he completed the Sarno Canal.
Thanks to the work
of our geologist, Giovanni Di
Maio, we now know that the villa
stood majestically on a 13 meter
cliff
over its own little harbor.
We want to make it
possible for a viewer to come
into that harbor by boat
and climb the stairway that we
have discovered using
resistivity and ground
penetrating radar surveys
and enter the villa.
We also need to elaborate
the contours of the garden,
today completely destroyed,
and put in the plant materials
and sculptures whose find spot
we know back in place.
They have languished in storage
for over 40 years.
With the work at Villa A drawing
to a close, we are shifting
our focus to Villa B.
This building is far removed
from its luxurious counterpart.
In fact, it likely wasn't
a villa at all, functioning
instead as a wine emporium
nestled
within a small settlement,
probably the ancient town
of Oplontis.
It was thriving at the time
of the eruption.
Excavators uncovered a two story
structure containing about 1,000
amphorae, strong boxes
with valuables,
and the skeletons of some 54
victims that sought shelter
in a storage area.
Although rebuilt in the '90s,
the complex remains largely
unrecorded and completely
unpublished.
We have taken it upon ourselves
to preserve its legacy.
To this end, we've commissioned
Marcus Abbott to laser
scan the building
and create another 3D model.
Using our database,
we have begun excavations
to clean up and record
the building
and recover its ancient history.
We've also begun residue
analysis on the content
of the amphorae and have started
cataloging the decorations
and numerous artifacts,
which have languished abandoned
for decades.
The excavations
of both buildings
aim to make them into living
museums.
This meant creating
new buildings that looked
ancient.
Walls and colonnades had to be
reconstructed to support
modern concrete beams
and new roofs.
In the process, the pieces
of the puzzle that didn't fit
were simply ignored.
Today, with digital means
we can put some of these pieces
back into the buildings.
Because the ACLS has graciously
offered to make our publications
open access, scholars
and lay persons worldwide will
have access to the work
of our 42 contributors
who represent disciplines as
diverse as chemistry and art
history.
The 3D model will go a step
further.
It will allow
us and future generations
to find material easily
by clicking on its find spot
and to access, and perhaps more
importantly, continue to add
to the information pertaining
to that material
in our database.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Ivo.
We have a few minutes
for questions.
So I'm very curious what kinds
of interpretive evolutions
or discoveries
may have come out of either
the process of modeling this
or the final product
of this model.
Well, there are a number
of things.
First and foremost, we now know
in many rooms what we see
actually isn't real.
For example, what we saw
in the atrium, we now know
that the frescoes were much
larger and much more complex.
We also know in the other room
that I showed you that it had
a very different type of roof.
You have to imagine that many
of the ceiling decorations
were suspended on what's called
incannucciata, which is sort
of a hay background of cannucce,
basically.
Do you mean canes?
Canes, yes, sorry.
They kind of escaped me.
Because they're so fragmentary,
a lot of these have never been
put back.
Very difficult to put back
together.
So although this model seems
very easy, you have to imagine
that the storage rooms were
enormous piles of fragments,
which we went through,
and I have to say very much John
went through.
Clean up every fragment,
and photographed every fragment,
and put into our database.
And then from those fragments,
we started to be able to put
these things back together,
and that work is by no means
done.
There still is a lot to do,
but this is the kind of work
that the database helps us do,
and the model, as well.
We're able to navigate
in different ways,
and see different things,
and just see it as it was
supposed to be,
which is a huge difference.
Yes, Anne.
I'm curious if you--
Microphone.
I'm curious if you
and your colleagues
ever had a discussion
about "good enough."
[LAUGHTER]
And I'm thinking about this
in relationship
to a colleague who was
attempting to use
the digital environment
to reconstruct an altarpiece
that have been disassembled
and had done it fairly
rudimentary fashion,
but sufficient for him
to make his argument,
but then when he presented it,
he got some push back
because people felt like, well,
the digital environment allows
you to do so much
more, particularly people
familiar
with gaming environments.
So why had he not taken
those additional steps?
And his response was it was
good enough to answer
my research questions, taking it
back to where Paul brought us
this morning.
So I'm wondering what kind
of discussions
you had amongst your team
about what constitutes
good enough
in this reconstruction.
Yeah, you have to imagine
that we actually have two
versions of the model.
We have the 3D Max, this 3D
Studio Max version, which
is highly accurate.
In fact, we're probably--
maybe, we're still deciding--
we'll probably use images,
and stills, and reconstructions
of it in the ebooks.
However, this was so massive
that it was
impossible to actually have
on the internet--
and the fact that it wasn't
navigable.
So we had to make
some critical decisions.
One of the main driving
forces to create
the navigable model initially
was to make it a didactic tool,
as well.
The idea is really of Second
Life-- was to have classrooms
meet virtually.
That didn't really work,
but the idea of the model
is also to have it
as an educational tool.
So you have to cut some corners
in order to make it work,
and we're now trying to get it
online for free, which has
its own issues.
We have to find a server that'll
host it, but even there
the model is so big that there's
problems on how we're going
to do that.
So good enough
has other parameters to it--
not only our own decisions
and saying, OK, we can't
reconstruct
every single fragment
because there's so many.
A lot of them are generic red,
or black, or white, so you don't
really know where they are.
So there's multiple branches
to this question.
Yes, sir?
To continue
with the good
enough in inverted commas
question,
sometimes the good enough can be
research limiting,
and I was wondering--
I'm going to complicate
some questions at this point.
If you consider, for example,
in the Temple of Apollo
at Bassae in Greece,
not only the lighting
for the day, but also
the seasonal lighting
became very significant
in the illumination of the naos.
The question is, do you have
or do you know of any software
that will enable you to actually
simulate--
linking
with the astronomical
information, to simulate
the angle of illumination such
that one doesn't have
to discover by accident things
like Bassae?
Very good question.
We have not really researched
that quite yet.
As I showed you,
you can simulate night and day,
and you can have it cycle
for you through the model.
Now, which day of the year
that is, that is kind of
arbitrary.
We don't have
the constellations.
In fact, the sky is kind
of cloudy.
[LAUGHTER]
For a reason, I should say,
because very often you see
things better, especially
in the Pompeii area,
when there is
no direct sunlight.
So that factor has kind of
played into why we actually put
that in, as well.
Speaking of environments,
ideally we put in the tunnel,
and you can turn around,
and you can stand on villa's
terrace,
and you can see the entire Bay
of Naples
and take in the whole notion
ocean and luxury, which is,
again--
the model could never
be finished, but the idea is now
to do the work we can,
and once the first volume comes
out, which should be
in the next year or so,
to actually have that done, as
well.
So we'll just have to see where
we stand.
Yes?
So your notion of a model that's
too large to load into servers
reminds me of Borges' story
about the person who's making
the map at one to one scale
to the world, et cetera.
[LAUGHTER]
But actually I had a question
here.
That is I went to a conference
a few weeks ago, and a person
on textile design
was using a computer program
of pattern analysis
to do very sophisticated studies
of silks
in order to understand
on an almost thread by thread
basis how patterns were
constructed.
And I'm wondering if you've used
anything like that to piece
together fragments of frescoes
or something.
I wonder
is that possible or have you
thought about that?
Well, most of the reconstruction
work has been done in AutoCAD,
so we haven't really gone
beyond that as far as using
other programs.
So we've also kind of limited
ourselves in that aspect.
One of the issues as well
is that we're also dealing
financially with constraints,
which won't allow us to do
everything.
Coming back
to the other question is--
that is also constraining,
and you have to imagine
that everyone that works
on this project pretty much
works on a voluntary basis.
So it is that eternal question,
especially in this day and age
about funding, and conservation,
and how do we keep these things
for the future, as well.
And as I'm sure you're well
aware of, as most people are
in this room, Pompeii has a lot
of problems.
And this is one way to actually
try to conserve things
in a digital fashion.
So I'd be very
interested in seeing and knowing
about this program,
and seeing if we can apply it.
I think it would be a very good
avenue to explore.
So thank you.
I'm going to use my prerogative
here then to keep us moving
through the afternoon,
although I have
a question about that gaming
program.
[LAUGHTER]
But I will save that.
So thank you, Ivo.
[APPLAUSE]
