P.I.: Professor Chris Johanson – Associate Professor of Classics, UCLA
RomeLab is a multi-disciplinary research group whose work uses the physical and virtual city of Rome as a point of departure to study the interrelationship between historical phenomena and the spaces and places of the ancient city. It consists of arguments about Ancient Rome set in an interactive, 3D model of Rome. This virtual world offers a means to disseminate, interrogate, and refute arguments that are necessarily space-based.
The vast majority of my research work within Digital Humanities has been with the RomeLab project. Since joining the project in Summer 2015, I have worked in a variety of roles to aid and improve RomeLab. I have served as the programmer for the project, working to debug and add features to a C#/Unity codebase produced by Ball State University’s IDIA lab. Additionally, I have made use of digitized resources as a researcher for the project to ensure the virtual world’s accuracy and improve users’ understanding of what they are experiencing. In 2018-2019, I employed Python and D3.js to produce novel visualizations of the Roman funeral as part of UCLA’s DH Research Accelerator Program.
Specific contributions to different portions of RomeLab can be viewed below.
