Our next speaker is James Tice,
professor of architecture
at the University of Oregon.
He has had
a distinguished career
as an architect, urban designer,
scholar, teacher, and pioneer
in digital art history.
He has authored and co-authored
numerous books in publication,
including the 2010 exhibition
catalog, Giuseppe Vasi's Rome:
Lasting Impressions from the Age
of the Grand Tour.
His book, Courtyard Housing
in Los Angeles, published in '82
was revised in '92
and published in Japanese
in '96.
He has a book on Frank Lloyd
Wright, Between Principle
and Form, and a text, Principles
in Architectural Design,
for which he has received
a citation of merit
for the AIA Architectural
Education Initiative.
Professor Tice also served
as editor
for the American housing section
for the book, The Socially
Responsible Environment:
USA/USSR 1980 to 1990.
Among his numerous awards
and honors for achievements
in architectural design
and history, Professor Tice will
deliver the 2015 Presidential
Research Lecture this spring.
Professor Tice is a specialist
in cartography and urban history
of Rome.
He's on the board of the Studium
Urbis research center in Rome
concerned with that city's
urban development
and other Italian cities.
He shares his passion
for that great city
through interactive online maps.
Two previous websites that he
co-created are the award winning
interactive Nolli map
and Giuseppe Vasi's Grand Tour
of Rome.
Today we will hear
about his newest online map,
the GIS Forma Urbis Romae
Project.
Professor Tice.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you very
much for that introduction.
I'm very pleased to be here
today and would like to thank
the organizers of the conference
for inviting me.
What I would like to talk about
today is the project just
mentioned, the GIS Forma Urbis
Romae project, but before I talk
about that project, I would like
to review very briefly some
of the other work that was just
mentioned to give you
some background
to the current work.
To start with I
would like to say
that the big question that we
have,
which is perhaps overly
ambitious,
is the question that follows.
What are the continuities,
discontinuities,
and transformations that have
characterized the city of Rome
over its 3,000 years of history?
Quite a task.
In other words,
what is the spatial history
of Rome,
and how can digital technology
facilitate these questions?
The projects that I've done
with collaborators
in other disciplines
include archaeology, art
and architectural history,
geography, and landscape
architecture to name a few.
We've been working together
on this team
from distant vantage points,
where, in fact,
digital technology has been
important simply to communicate
with one another.
And this has involved
my colleagues in Stanford
University, Erik Steiner,
Studium Urbis, Allan Ceen,
and Professor Nicola Camerlenghi
at Dartmouth College,
as well as Giovanni Svevo,
an Italian archaeologist.
Let's see.
This doesn't seem to be working.
Am I doing something wrong?
Next slide, please.
The three projects that have
preceded the one we're currently
working on I'll
talk about in turn, but just
a quick overview.
You see them here.
One is the interactive Nolli map
from 2005.
The other is the 2007
interactive website, Giuseppe
Vasi's Grand Tour of Rome,
a traveling exhibition
between the University of Oregon
and the Princeton University Art
Museum 2010 to 2011.
Giuseppe Vasi's Rome Lasting
Impressions From the Age
of the Grand Tour.
There we go.
Thank you.
To map the city of Rome
might seem
like an impossibility,
and to use a two dimensional
surface to do so given the three
dimensional reality of the city
might seem preposterous.
And yet, the city of Rome
has been mapped by cartographers
from the third century AD
to the present in a variety
of means that are really nothing
short of astonishing,
and here are a few examples
that I'll be talking
about in turn.
We believe, our group,
that exacting
a nuanced cartography understood
is the art and science
of depicting
broad physical and cultural
landscapes, enable the rendering
of a city's multiple portraits.
Maps assist with wayfinding,
but beyond this mundane and very
useful purpose, they provide
a window by which we can imagine
streets, buildings, and people.
And in fact, a great map can
elevate our knowledge of place
and stimulate our imagination
to such a degree
that we can legitimately call it
a portrait of a city, which
makes me think about what Paul
said about maps, and no maps are
absolutely correct.
A great quote by Reif Larson's
character, T.S. Spivet,
says all maps are wrong,
but some maps are useful.
[LAUGHTER]
And to that I would add
some maps are beautiful.
A quick history.
I'm sorry if I give you
a history lesson here
about maps, but maybe that's
inevitable given my passion
for maps and Roman maps,
in particular.
The early practice of rendering
maps in Rome-- late medieval,
early Renaissance maps are
perhaps best epitomized by this
one by Pietro del Massaio from
1469, where the images
of the city--
where the image of the buildings
in the city
are shown as individual almost
caricatures, very charming
caricatures, but nonetheless
caricatures of great buildings
like the Colosseum, where that
looks like a spool of thread,
or the River Tiber that looks
like the thread unraveling
from the spool of thread.
A more nuanced and, in fact,
very beautiful
map is this from Mantova
from 1538.
Showing the city now in context,
which I think is very critical,
shown with its seven hills,
the flat plain of the campus
marshes
on the right,
the isolated, beautiful,
wonderful ruins of antiquity
highlighted on the left hand
side in the Disabitato--
but also notice now that,
instead of having buildings
isolated--
standing free, as if they were
objects, so many pieces of chess
on the table are now embedded
in the texture of the city.
And that change of showing
individual objects to showing
the building and the texture
is a very important change that
happens, and it helps reveal
the fact that a city, in fact,
is not just made of objects
of wonderful monuments,
but actually it's the texture
in which these monuments
that are embedded
that constitutes the city.
Our visualization techniques
that we've used over the years
have helped us make this clearer
and also helped elucidate simple
things like making some sense
of this very, very interesting
map by Alessandro Strozzi
by doing an analytical diagram
showing how each
of these elements
on the left hand side
actually are real places,
are identified in our key
on the right hand side.
So in our work, we always try
to attempt to help
through a visualization process
in, let's say, harvesting
the embedded information
in the map.
We also, in using historic maps
of Rome, are able to capitalize
on the great wealth and history
of Roman maps.
This is a detail from Falda's
map in 1676 showing the slope,
the muddy hillside that was
to become
the famous Spanish Steps.
Because there are five editions
of Falda's map
from 1676 to 1756,
we can actually show what that
looks like by simply doing
a series of overlays.
So this idea-- why I show these
is to demonstrate, hopefully,
that the maps themselves provide
a load of information
that either in concert
with other maps, later editions,
or by us using our trained eye,
or to use Paul Klee's term,
to use the thinking eye,
we can make clearer events,
transformations that are
occurring in the city.
This is the larger map by Falda
from 1676, an absolutely
magnificent map,
and I like to show it
next to an earlier map
by Bufalini that is also a very
interesting map.
Why it's interesting to look
at these two maps in tandem--
and here I substitute
Nolli's map on the right hand
side instead of Bufalini's--
is to simply make a point
about two
cartographic traditions in Rome,
and I think this is very
important in sizing up
typologically cartographic
methods.
On the left is Falda showing
Saint Peter's and the piazza
in front of San Pietro.
On the right hand
side is Nolli's map
of the same view.
These two are amazingly
similar to one another,
and actually each is quite
accurate, but obviously
on the left hand side,
it's a pictorial view.
It's a three dimensional view.
On the right hand side
is the ichnographic plan, a term
used to describe the simple
flat, two dimensional,
orthographic projection.
And I think all of us involved
in mapping projects
have experienced, I think--
and know the pros and cons
of each of these.
So for example,
Nolli on the right hand side
shows us the obelisk
as that little square dot, which
could be anything.
It could be three feet high
or it could be 90 meters high.
So Falda shows us the obelisk
in its true form.
Likewise Falda also shows us
the voluminous magnificence
of Saint Peter's, where Nolli
does not, but Nolli shows us
the plan of Saint Peter's and he
shows us the plan of Saint
Peter's so accurately that we
can look at each chapel and size
up scientifically with true
measurements each pier that was
holding up the cupola, whereas
in Falda's we cannot do that,
or we cannot do it easily.
So each map, I think-- each map
type, the pictorial
or the ichnographic--
has a place, has a value.
Neither one by itself we might
say can tell the full story.
The earliest example
of the ichnographic map
is the early third century
forma urbis, a fragment of which
you see here.
This is the fragment shown
in Piranesi's rendition
of the fragments
from the 18th century,
and here we see it again framing
a map of Rome, ancient Rome,
based on Nolli's map
that we just looked at.
So Piranesi simply copied
Nolli's map and framed it
with these various fragments.
So the forma urbis was
this huge map located
in the center of the city,
the ancient city,
next to the forum,
and it was the earliest
ichnographic map that exists
of the city, the earliest map
period that exists of the city--
and inspired 18th century
cartographers like Nolli, who,
with his own math,
the magnificent Pianta Grande
shown here, rendered the city
with such extreme accuracy
that it was still used
by the city of Rome
up until about 1960.
The map is extremely accurate.
We verified this
by georectifying it
with satellite imaging
and more about that
in a few minutes.
The map is huge.
Gives you some relative idea
of how big that map is.
Notice the license plate.
And it also has
incredible detail.
So here, again, we're back
at the Spanish Steps,
and you can count the stairs
leading up to the Church of San
Trinita.
You can see the buildings
obviously, a fountain.
This little guy right here
is a street drain, and so on.
So it's a microscopic view
of the city.
That's really quite astounding.
The website that we developed
that focuses on the Nolli map
was led by myself and Erik
Steiner with our collaborators
Allan Ceen
and a graduate student, Mark
Brenneman.
An important aspect
of visualizing the city of Rome
through Nolli's eyes
is to simply notice the way he
represented the city as a series
of solids and voids.
In other words, the buildings
were black, dark, hatched
in gray,
whereas the wide open space,
the squares and streets,
were shown white.
So I use this is well known
image type of the vase
and the faces to make the point
that it's not just the vase,
In other words, that makes
this composition comprehensible.
It's also the faces.
In other words, the white is not
simply left over, but actually
a protagonist
in the composition.
So this is a view of the Nolli
map showing just the streets
and the blocks.
So this has been transformed
a bit by my colleague, Michael
Dennis,
to make a point
about the thoroughness
through which Nolli shows
the map.
This is now the map
showing the block streets
and courtyards, and finally
we're looking at the streets.
We're looking at courtyards,
and we're looking
at important buildings,
the interiors
of these buildings,
so that one can begin to see
the connection
between public space
and semi public space.
Also, you'll notice
that the Piazza Navona as a void
carved out of the city
is as much a protagonist as any
of the buildings
so that the buildings
and spaces, the face, the vase
are
both important
in the composition.
Nolli created this map
over a period of 12 years.
He uses these putti
on the corner of his map
to illustrate how they're busily
mapping.
One putto is looking, busily
working on the astrolabe,
a device for sighting
and measuring the city,
surveying techniques.
One has a surveyor's rod,
et cetera.
So it's kind of a work yard
of his helpers
angelically moving ahead
with the project.
The map consists of 12 plates,
which you see here.
Printing technology limited
the size of any given plate
so that it required these 12
pieces, which is always
a problem, because this is what
those of us who would tried
to stitch it together
had to confront.
And the maps never quite
aligned, and there were
difficulties with the printing
process,
some slight inaccuracies that
also caused this as a problem
to make those transitions.
But we were able to do
this courtesy of Mark Brenneman,
who had a background
in digital gaming
before he came to the University
of Oregon.
So he was able to help
facilitate that.
So why is the map important?
Why would we want to spend so
much time looking at this map?
Maybe the map as a rather inert
fact is enough, but actually
we've been able to learn
a lot more about the city
by georectifying it--
that is, rubber sheeting it
with contemporary satellite
imaging, which you see here.
The other issue about the Nolli
map is that there are 1,320
sites, and there are about 700
textural names, as well.
And so how does one make
the connection between the two?
Well, using ArcGIS,
it was possible to methodically
locate all of those, each item
on the legend
and tie it in with its place
on the map
so that one could easily relate
one with the other.
It was also
possible to digitally--
that is, through vectorized
drawings or shapefiles--
look at the city in such a way
that we could begin to analyze
it and look at its morphology
in closer detail.
So one of the nice things
about this kind
of digital technology
is that you can zoom in and get
incredible detail, as well.
So this is just showing
the built up portion
of the city.
This shows the surrounding
gardens, vineyards, orchards
that are also part of the map.
Each one of those green sections
is identified by Nolli,
and it's also possible then
to look
at the administrative structure,
its 14 Rioni,
look at pathways
through to the city.
The orange line traces
the papal way,
the processional route
that the pope would take
upon being elevated
to the papacy from the Vatican
in the upper left hand
corner to the Lateran end
in the lower right corner.
It was also
possible to interpolate--
and part of this
is hypothetical--
to look at the walls of Rome
using the Nolli map
as a geodatabase so that here
we can see how the several walls
of Rome from the Roma quadrata,
to the Severan Wall,
to the Aurelian Wall
with other additions
in the Middle Ages
and later Renaissance form
a pattern more or less
like onion rings
surrounding the heart
of the city.
I'll talk about this in just
a few seconds.
This is locating some views by
vedutisti of the city.
It's also possible to look
at other sources
and reference them on top of--
georeference them on top
of the Nolli map.
So this is from Paul-Marie
Letarouilly's Edifices de Rome
Moderne, his really beautiful
set of three volumes of hundreds
of building plans layered
into the Nolli map.
And this is simply looking
at one of the districts
in the city, the Pina district
with showing the details
and showing how these buildings
that Letarouilly presents
in his volumes
actually are located
within this particular rione
and how,
in fact, the mystery
of their organizational
structure--
so for example, the Palazzo
Venezia has this funny kind
of double diagonally configured
building.
Well, it's configured that way
once we get it into the map
because simply there are
piazzas on either side.
That determines
this configuration.
So one can move
from the building
into its context,
and as an architect,
I'm very much interested
in that relationship
between the building
and the city-- this kind
of microubanism,
as one might call it.
So the next project actually
that sprung from the Nolli map
was that involving Giuseppe
Vasi, the great vedutista
from the 18th century,
a colleague of Nolli who did
a wonderful set of views
of the city, and these are
some other Vedutisti.
His predecessors, Vanvitelli
on the top.
Piranesi, his rival
and former student--
showing views
and making it
possible through the diagram
on the right to show where
those views were taken,
and even though each of them
varies, each of them
were, in fact, taken
from approximately
the same station point,
and so the Nolli map is used
on the right
to help illustrate that fact.
That idea also brings us back
to the pictorial
and the ichnographic map,
and so this project
as a question was trying to see
if one could marry
the pictorial way of looking
at the city with the plan
view of the city, the plan view
represented by, of course,
Nolli on the right hand side
and Vasi on the left hand side
with his 238 views of the city
that we'll be looking
at in a second.
But I wanted to make
an important point,
and that is that, for Vasi,
the city was composed of events
and important buildings,
like Santa Maria della Pace,
was always shown in context.
So in his 238 views of the city,
each of them
is shown in the context
of the city, so one always
understands the relationship
between building and space.
The beautiful photograph
on the right hand side,
carefully cropped,
is by Alinari,
and I'd say
that the traditional art
historical view
of the important buildings
in the city
tends toward the right hand
side, where they look at objects
detached
from their urban environment
that actually gives the meaning.
So one is trying to build
on the idea of events, places
in Rome
being both about architecture
and about urbanism.
So this is just a small sampling
of the enormous views
of the city that he provides.
In the book Magnificenze di Roma
Antica e Moderne, Vasi talks
about his overriding goal
was to provide a Roma visuale,
a visual Rome, a visual picture
of the city,
which he does street by street.
And these are the places
for his views,
covering every corner
of the city.
They're sort of
like the yellow taxi.
They go everywhere.
Piranesi doesn't do that.
He just looks
at a few concentrated spots.
So Vasi goes everywhere
in this city,
and in the process, he provides,
in fact, we might say
a capillary view, a three
dimensional view of the city
piece by piece, which again you
see here on our website
coordinated
with digital imagery.
The viewsheds are shown here,
and then by clicking on any one
of them or searching for them
independently--
here we're looking, of course,
at the Pantheon, the Piazza
della Rotonda.
A view shown on the right side,
annotations by Allan Ceen,
the contemporary views, and then
feature details about each one
of the features.
There are about five features
per image by Vasi,
so that brings it up to about
1,500 separate pieces
of information
that we've located here.
And the verisimilitude in some
of these is really remarkable.
You have to imagine this
transitioning itself
from the 18th century view
to contemporary view, which you
see here.
That project resulted
in a traveling exhibition that
was co-curated by myself
and James Harper
of the University of Oregon.
This project was funded by the--
oh, I'm sorry.
This project was actually funded
not by the J. Paul Getty
Foundation, but by Samuel H.
Kress Foundation.
Excuse me for that error.
I know we have representatives
from both so I don't want
to cause any fisticuffs.
[LAUGHTER]
The part of the exhibition
that I found particularly
engaging was the way in which we
could bring digital technology
into the museum environment
without upstaging
the original works of art,
the precious works of art
that we're there to enjoy.
So the digital portion of this
was trying very much
to be respectful of that fact.
Erik Steiner, my colleague,
designed
a beautiful installation
that you see here that looks
specifically at one aspect
of Vasi's work,
and that is the eight day
itineraries.
There's a little guide book
that you saw there, a kind
of predecessor
to the Michelin Guide,
and that was tied
to his magnificent il perspecto
of the city, which you see here.
This is about the real size,
by the way.
It's a huge magnificent portrait
of the city.
And what we did is we identified
each of the 390 places
on that map so you can
key it back into the legend
at the base,
and then we also keyed
in the itineraries, which it's
very easy to see what they are
reading this book,
and project them
onto our ubiquitous Nolli
map, which you see here.
So it's color coded by day.
This is day one, which takes you
from the Ponte Milvio, which
is off the map, to the Lateran,
and by the way,
in these eight days
I think Vasi expects us to be
running the entire time.
[LAUGHTER]
There's a lot to cover,
and in our exhibition
and with Erik's help
we were able to show how the
views that we've looked
at elsewhere--
how they
key into the itineraries, which
you see here.
Going back to now to the entry
room into the city of Rome
itself, Piazza del Popolo.
So the GIS Forma Urbis Romae
Project: Creating a Layered
History of Rome, is in many ways
learning
from those previous exercises.
As the inset on the right hand
side suggests,
it's a cartographic study
and one involving layering
a number of important key maps
together so that we can begin
to better understand
important aspects of the city.
So here is the map itself.
It's a huge map.
It measures 17 feet by 24 feet,
and just to give you an idea
of that.
[LAUGHTER]
I was hesitant to show
that image in this town,
but I was told it would be OK.
[LAUGHTER]
And that map by Lanciani
is a marvelous map from 1901,
and he used the Nolli map
as a base for his map.
And here we're looking at it
in a composite
of digital imaging--
the Lanciani map and the Nolli
map-- and each of those
agrees amazingly well with one
another.
And we're using now a really
quite amazing map, I must say,
of Rome-- one that I've come
to appreciate only recently--
and this
is the photogrammetric plan
of Rome by S.A.R.A. Nistri.
So photogrammetric maps
of this type
are taken from low flying
airplanes in multiple passes
over the subject.
They're much more
accurate than satellite imaging
because the nadir,
or the vertical plane,
remains truer vertical,
and it's possible to measure
that in quite a bit of detail.
So this is a detail of that
showing the Piazza della
Minerva.
So for Minerva with all those
little numbers are the elevation
points.
So it actually gives you a three
dimensional view of the city.
So the maps then include
the Bing satellite image
on the top, the S.A.R.A. Nistri
modified digitally by our team,
the Nolli map, the Forma Urbis
Romae.
That is the marble map of Rome,
and then and then two other maps
that show our digital version
of the Lanciani map
and then a corrected or amended
version at the bottom.
This is one of those images that
are made to really,
I guess, more impress
than inform, but what you're
looking at here is a composite
using ArcGIS technology that
is looking at all of those maps
I just showed layered one on top
of another.
And they are georectifed--
that is, they're all rubber
sheeted together, so they
correspond to one another,
but even more importantly,
they are now
relatable
to actual geographic space,
real geographic space
so that one can locate--
one can use this data out
in the field using GPS to locate
oneself and coordinate it
with the map proper.
This is an image based
on the one you just saw
that that shows--
those little dots show
the correspondence
between the Lanciani map
and the S.A.R.A. Nistri map,
which is the sort
of gold standard of maps
in terms of its accuracy.
The green shows where they
correspond directly.
The red shows where there is
some discrepancy.
So even though they are
georectified with one another
in the end, one can see what
the differences are
between the two
called residuals.
So we have not only
a good picture
of a georectified map,
but we also know where
the previous errors had been
and how they're corrected.
So these are the layers
in the map,
so just to make it clear what
we've done
is we've made shapefiles of each
of the layers.
These are not rasterized images,
but they're shapefiles, which
means that any one
of those layers
can be taken out and studied.
There are several hundred layers
involved in the map,
and we're using basically 35
to talk about the various epochs
in the city, as did Lanciani--
color coded.
So this is the ancient buildings
with the Tiber.
These are ancient buildings
and streets.
These are baroque Renaissance
buildings with streets.
This is topography.
This is the textual information
that's part of the map, more
contextual information,
so you can see how that's
building up in density
and giving us a view of the city
that actually allows us to move
in in some detail here.
OK, well, looking just
at a small section--
I'll run through this very
quickly--
are buildings that have been
identified as part
of early Christian Rome
and ending up now
with this detail showing
those multiple layers
that Lanciani had defined.
Black being ancient.
Red being Renaissance
and Baroque, and blue, which you
can't see here off in the newer
portions of the city,
is the modern layer.
We color coded this to show
in purple and green corrections
that we've already begun making
to the Lanciani map,
and although a much daunting
task, our goal is to update
the map, which I realize
is a mammoth task,
but that at the very least,
we're hoping to correct some
of the more egregious mistakes
that Lanciani made back in 1901.
By the way, I should mention
that archaeologists today still
use the Lanciani map, warts
and all.
There had been no changes
in over 100 years, and yet this
is still the most important
archaeological map of Rome that
exists in terms of how
comprehensive it is.
This is just a snapshot
of a project
that Nicola Camerlenghi
from Dartmouth
is following up on, mapping
medieval Rome.
So there are various ways
in which this information can be
interpreted,
and looking
at the medieval city, which
is not very well known, are
cartographically described
is one of our tasks.
This is simply a detail
of that project that is ongoing.
I also wanted to make a point
about the map in terms
of the embedded information
so that not only is it
cartographically rich,
it is texturally rich, as well.
So this is just two pages
from Lanciani's Storia delgia
Scavi.
There seven volumes that are
each recorded, pinpointed
on this map,
and so one of our tasks
that Giovanni Svevo is working
on is coordinating
that information from text
to map so you can click on one
and reveal the other.
This is the elevation point that
was done by a research student
of mine, Kelly Mabry,
so that, based on both Lanciani
and S.A.R.A. Nistri,
the entire city can be mapped
in terms of its elevation
above sea level, which renders
then a three dimensional
view of the city.
That can also
be interesting in terms
of studying flood patterns
from the city, as well.
I'll just finish up
with some quick images
about another research project
that Allan Ceen and I have been
doing, working on together,
looking at the Vatican
and its transformations
during the fascist period.
So I think I'll--
well, it's not quite the end.
I guess that's the end.
I think I'm going over time,
so I think I'll stop right
there.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
Do we have any questions
or comments?
Thank you so much for this talk.
You've put together all
of these map layers,
and I must admit I find even one
of them quite overwhelming,
although that's rather
accurate
about the interpretation of Rome
itself.
I'm curious about strategies
for interpreting and actually
communicating
these interpretations when it
comes
to these digital present formats
on the online website,
so the interaction even
within the exhibition gallery.
How has your team helped
to facilitate navigating
this wealth
of digital information
that you've assembled?
That's a very good question.
I think that my background is
that of an architect,
and one of the things that I've
always done as an architect
and in teaching
is try to communicate visually
whenever possible.
That's a world that I'm much
more comfortable in, in fact--
in a textual world.
And so whenever possible,
we use visual techniques to do
that, and maybe that speaks
for itself.
I'm not sure.
Whenever there's a question
or problem that arises, I always
ask myself how would I render it
three dimensionally.
Edward Tufte, who's written
some very beautiful books
on envisioning information,
for example, the visual display
of quantitative information,
I think makes the point
about how facts come alive when
we can give them
some kind of visual reality,
some kind of visual substance.
I think digitally-- using
digital technology allows us
to do almost the impossible.
Freud talks about the city
of Rome and makes a parallel
between the city of Rome
and a kind
of psychic archaeology,
and he concludes this little--
it's a really wonderful couple
pages in Civilization
and Its Discontents.
He concludes by saying,
well, you know, of course we
can't put two things
in the same place
at the same time, but you know?
Now we can.
[LAUGHTER]
Just to make your project more
complicated--
I love also this idea
of layering,
but it's interesting
how the layering maintains
the focus on the building
as the object of study,
and so have you thought
about other layers?
Social patterns?
Elements of economic patterns?
Other kinds of information?
Absolutely.
I must say-- and not to make
excuses for my presentation,
but I think it would be more
fair to our team
had I included that kind
of information
that you just mentioned.
So for example, Nick is very
interested in some
of the social patterns that
emerged in the Middle Ages.
For example, there are districts
controlled
by the important families
in the city and warring
factions, and we can map that
with some degree of accuracy,
some legitimacy.
We can look at, in other words,
how water sources were used,
wells were used in the city.
We can look at the population
changes that have happened
in the city.
Saverio Muratori, who's done
wonderful work in Venice,
has done a map of Rome
and also done a time capsule,
a kind of timeline I should say,
of Rome from 753 to 1870, where
he shows the shifting patterns
of population in the city going
from the time of Constantine,
one million, down to 20,000
people
by the time Martin V comes back
to Rome in the 15th century.
And that kind of expansion
and contraction, identifying
important medieval neighborhoods
that still existed even
in the darkest days--
because it's very interesting
to see.
My colleague, Allan Ceen,
has made a special study
of pathways
in the city, and his point,
his argument is
that in the Middle Ages
the city of Rome
became a series of linear cities
with nodes to be sure,
but the streets are what bred
life into the city.
Not so much even important
buildings,
but these linear pathways that
gave life to the city.
So absolutely.
I think those aspects
of the project
are very, very important to us.
I think Peter has one,
and then we have two more here.
Hi, I'm working on a mapping
project of Rome myself,
and I really appreciate
the important path breaking work
that you and your team
have been doing.
I wanted to ask you specifically
now with the layering
of the maps that you've chosen--
and one of the problems that we
face is we're using almost
all scenographic maps where
you're calling pictorial maps
of Rome.
Is the impossibility
of georectification--
and I always feel like when I
use that word I have to talk
to my gastroenterologist
or something--
[LAUGHTER]
but the impossibility of making
the maps lineup--
and if I understand you
correctly, you are correcting
the mistakes in the earlier
maps.
And the other possibility would
be to stretch maps.
Have you found any other way
to deal
with these inherent distortions
when you try to put them down
against a modern day map?
My colleague, Allan Ceen,
did a hand drawn--
beautiful hand drawn--
georectification of the Bufalini
map from the mid 16th century,
and that was a painstaking
year--
perhaps a couple years
it took him to do that.
It's possible to go from one
planometric map
to another with a great deal
of care, especially if there's
a lot of distortion involved.
To go from a pictorial map
to an ichnographic map
I think you'd need
a third party.
You'd need to connect
the pictorial map to a close--
perhaps in terms of time, a map
that was done approximately
at the same time
to make that connection.
That's why I suppose that maybe
as an architect--
I can't say prefer, because I
love the pictorial maps, too,
but the ichnographic map
is certainly much more useful.
It has a certain utility factor
that the pictorial maps don't
have.
I like the idea, whenever
possible, to look at them side
by side,
to look at a really accurate
ichnographic map
next to a pictorial map
of the same subject
so that one can begin
to at least interpolate
between the two.
And I think that a trained eye
with a certain amount
of experience--
you could probably do that OK.
I don't think it's ever going
to be just a mechanical process,
and although I may have made
it seem entirely
scientific in what we're doing,
I wouldn't call it guesswork.
I would call it--
there's
some intelligent guesswork
involved, a kind of informed
guesswork about some
of those discrepancies
and how they might be brought
into alignment with one another,
but the pictorial
to ichnographic
really is a challenge.
We have Anne, and then back
there.
So Anne first.
We have to move quickly, though.
I'm sorry.
I took way too much time.
No, that's all right.
Thank you so much.
It's obviously very
fascinating to all of us
what you're doing.
I wondered if you might be
able to take a moment to address
the dynamics of collaboration
with your team.
You've obviously done
an extraordinary job of lacing
together many points of view,
and I wondered if you could just
reflect a moment on the nature
of that collaboration, how
the project has been managed,
how compromises have been
reached, new discoveries, and so
forth through the collaboration.
Well, I walked
into the geography department
at the University of Oregon
about 10 years ago
and said I have this map.
Is there anyone here that
is interested in working with me
on this map?
And I thought maybe 12 people
in the country
might be interested in the Nolli
map,
and I learned that cartographers
are interested in maps
at a larger scale,
but the principle involved
in using maps, cartography,
to uncover information
is something that we have
in common with one another.
So my colleague, Erik Steiner,
is a cartographer who thinks
like an architect,
and he says that I'm
an architect who thinks
like a cartographer.
So there's some kind of shared
vision that we have.
I think that we're all
interested
in the spatial history
of things, the kind
of spatial logic of things.
We're all
interested in visualizations
and how visualizing information
can be made more
poignant than reading
about the information,
which of course, we're not going
to replace that.
We're hopefully going to enhance
that.
So I think that's the kind
of common bond that exists.
Besides that, we Skype a lot,
hang out, and meet even face
to face occasionally.
You had a question?
Right in the middle.
I think the question
of discrepancy
brings up a really interesting
point because things don't line
up.
A lot of times
modern cartography--
Can you hear him?
Modern map makers put mistakes
in maps on purpose, so that,
if someone were to copy
their map and didn't take out
the mistakes, they can verify
in court that this street
doesn't exist.
This alley doesn't exist.
In New York City, there's
a street that I drive
by every day
that I still see in Google Maps.
This alley does not exist,
but it still clearly shows it.
So I wonder if you see
some evidence of that
in the maps of the past
and in the maps that you study,
because if things don't line up,
maybe
it's because it was put there
on purpose as a marker.
Well, we were thinking
on our Nolli map
to actually put the arrow
showing the direction
of the Tiber
going the wrong direction,
so that if anyone copied our map
we could see it, but we decided
not to do that.
I'm not
aware
of purposeful miscommunication
in the maps that we use.
Sometimes Lanciani, who did
a marvelous map in 1901,
used the Nolli map as a base,
and he must have had a team
of people working with him.
And some of those plates
of the 46 plates are not done as
well as other plates,
and so we found some really
blatant errors in the way
that he represented his map.
I don't trust satellite imaging.
There's a well known text that I
won't mention the name of which
of Rome has photographs
and drawings of the city, which
is really quite a wonderful text
in many ways,
but when the people were doing
the drawings of the map,
instead of tracing
the buildings,
they traced the shadows
of the buildings,
giving one a completely
distorted view of the city
that way.
So it requires, I think,
an experienced hand
and I think a great deal
of care.
I don't know of anyone
intentionally making mistakes,
but that would certainly
be an interesting topic
about missing alleys
or inserted monsters on the side
of the map, which sometimes
happens.
We're going to have
another chance this afternoon
to talk more with all
the speakers, but we have one
more quick question.
You had your hand
up for a while.
It's two slightly different,
but related items.
One, at the research level,
has any work to your knowledge
been done with birth and death
records
and mapping those
against the city?
Number two, at the presentation
layer, have you done any work
with extrusion, such as managing
the transitional views, which
are good for teaching,
from your ichnometric views
up to the actual presentation
types?
You mean to the three
dimensional visualization?
Yes, graphic extrusion
of the building sort of rising
out of the plan.
Well, there are some very
important studies that have been
done.
To answer your second question
first, Rome Reborn
is a wonderful website done by--
I think it's now at--
I want to say UCLA,
but I know they were at Virginia
for a long time.
Bernard Frischer was one
of the individuals involved
in that project.
So the three dimensional idea,
and visualization, and the kind
of understanding that gives
is certainly something very
valuable--
we have tended to shy away
from that.
We've left that, in a way,
to others.
I'd like to think that what
we're doing--
the basis for doing
that, in the end, is a plan--
is a good solid plan that's
accurate,
and that's what we're doing,
I think.
And so that we gladly bequeath
to those who have that interest
and ability to do that well.
I did show a three dimensional
view of the city,
you may recall, and that was
a kind
of rough volumetric drawing
that, at that scale, is--
I would say it's quite accurate,
but it does approximate.
It averages the heights
of buildings
and takes some other liberties,
which are probably not
sufficient for the kind of thing
that you're talking about.
The idea of doing an animation
through history I find extremely
interesting.
That can be done
either ichnographically
or pictorially, and Muratori,
who I mentioned to you,
does this by hand.
He has about 30 frames of this--
I'm sorry.
I should have shown them
to you--
that really constitute, I think,
a wonderful way of over time
seeing the development
of the city.
And that's one part
of our project
that I'm personally really
excited about doing
and would like to incorporate
that into our work.
The other question we can save
for later.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
