http://hvwc.cdh.ucla.edu/funerals-rostra (Note: this is an offline version, so the “Connecting” message can be ignored.)
As part of UCLA’s DH Research Accelerator Program, I have been working since Summer 2018 to produce visualizations of the Roman funeral. It is known that actors were hired for the funerals of Roman patricians during the Republican period to play the part of the deceased’s male ancestors. They would wear garments representing the highest political roles attained by these ancestors. The result of this is that Roman funerals of this time period constituted a spectacle that lends itself well to examination in the RomeLab virtual world.
Under the guidance of Professor Chris Johanson, I have pulled data about known Roman figures from the database on the RDF server of the Digital Prosopography of the Roman Republic project. After cleaning the .csv files obtained from the database, I produced graphs depicting the lineage of Roman families with a Python script. Due to uncertainty and gaps in the data, the script produces three graphs with different levels of certainty, algorithmically attempting to fill in the gaps. These graphs are then traversed to produce three types of visualizations.
Two of these visualizations take place immediately within the virtual world and so are programmed in C# within Unity. One allows users to examine all funerals that can be reconstructed from the data as a graph, showing how many funerals occurred in each 25 year period while still providing details on each individual funeral. The other allows users to examine each funeral as it may have looked on the Rostra, the public speaking platform within the Roman Forum. In each of these models, the three models can be cycled between with a single click in the Drupal site that houses the Unity environment. Further, each figure in a funeral can be clicked to open the DPRR page for the Roman that the figure represents.
The third visualization consists of a series of files produced through D3.js, automatically generated by a Python script. Each of these files depicts a family tree inferred from the graphs mentioned above. Each figure is represented by the color garments by which they would be represented in a funeral. Mousing over a figure provides key details about them, including name, birth/death dates, and the highest political position they acquired. Clicking on a figure opens the corresponding DPRR page for more information.
Skills: Unity, 3D World Integration, Drupal, Programming (C#, Python, Javascript, Algorithms), Employing Databases, Data Visualization (D3.js and independently-made)