Humanities Research Computing

Services | Contact | Sample Faculty Projects

Services

Research Computing assists faculty in the Division of the Humanities to find appropriate technological solutions for their research projects. To help faculty realize their research goals, we work and collaborate closely with our colleagues in Humanities Computing, the Visual Resources Center (VRC), the ARTFL Project, the Digital Library Development Center, NSIT Academic Technologies and other campus groups. We assist faculty with the technical components of grant applications, help find technical staff, conduct research on technical solutions, develop prototypes and provide project management. Humanities Research Computing also manages the Digital Media Archive (DMA). The DMA is a research archive in the Humanities Division with music & audio holdings in over 260 languages and dialects.

Contact

Peter Leonard, PhD
Associate Director for Research Computing
psleonar@uchicago.edu

Sample Faculty Projects

The goal of the Xiangtangshan 3-D Digital Caves Project is a digital reconstruction of the former appearance of the Buddhist cave temples of Xiangtangshan in Hebei province. 3D laser scanning technology is used to scan the caves and their missing sculptures and to reconstruct the caves in virtual reality. The project plans to make the digital reconstruction available to a broad audience through an art exhibition, publications, and conferences.

The Digital Scrolling Paintings Project is a database of Chinese handscroll paintings in a scrolling digital format. Digitized sections of handscrolls can be viewed as a continuous virtual image in the computer through which one can scroll, stop and look more closely, or go back, much as one would experience the actual painting.

Cinemetrics is an open-access, interactive website designed to supplement the traditional toolkit of film studies with a number of digital tools that enable researchers to collect, store, and process scholarly data about film editing. Any student of film interested in the way films are edited can use Cinemetrics tools to time a movie, submit the obtained time data, calculate and visualize data statistics, and comment on or make use of the data generated and collected by others.

Persepolis Fortification Archive. Investigating the use of Computed Tomography imaging, commonly known as CT scanning, to preserve and digitize texts written on cuneiform clay tablets. The tablets, which provide details of the inner workings of the administration of the ancient Persian Empire around 350 B.C., are among a group of tens of thousands of tablets and tablet fragments that were loaned to the University's Oriental Institute in 1937 and which are now in the process of being returned to the Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization. Project principal investigator is Matthew Stolper.

Moving Spaces and the Phoenix Hall: Visualizing Japanese Art and Architecture. This project represents an attempt to understand new aspects of one of the oldest and most important art forms in Japan and their context, that is, wall paintings and the complex relationships between wall paintings and the architectural spaces for which they were created. Project principal investigator is Hans Bjarne Thomsen.

Digital Media Archive. The Digital Media Archive (DMA) is a Humanities Division research facility with an archive library that holds predominantly audio recordings in over 180 languages and dialects. The archive, which also includes some music and video collections, has especially rich and deep holdings in Mesoamerican languages. Additional facilities in the DMA include a recording studio, portable audio equipment and an audio-transfer suite for digitizing analog media carriers from a wide range of legacy formats.

Montaigne Collection Project. The project is creating a wiki with photographs of covers and title pages of all editions of the Essais from 1580 to the end of the 19th century contributed by libraries and collectors worldwide.

Linguistica is a program designed to explore the unsupervised learning of natural language. Unsupervised learning refers to the computational task of making inferences (and therefore acquiring knowledge) about the structure that lies behind some set of data, without any direct access to that structure.

Mesoamerican Archive Preservation Project. Three-year preservation project which digitized over 1100 hours of recordings made by Chicago professors Manuel Andrade, Norman A. McQuown, and Paul Friedrich among others. The project covers over 200 collections in languages of Mesoamerica including Aguacateco, Central Nahuatl, Central Quiché, Imbabura Highland Quichua, Eastern Quiché, Chajul Ixil, Ixtatán Chuj, Oxchuc Tzeltal, Chamula Tzotzil, Huixtán Tzotzil, Venustiano Carranza Tzotzil, San Andrés Larrainzar Tzotzil, Chenalhó Tzotzil, Bachajón Tzeltal, Eastern Kanjobal, Eastern Pokomam, Yucatán Maya, Zapotec, Ixcatec, Kekchí, Northern Mam, Patla-Chicontla Totonac, Pipil, Tila Chol, Tojolabal, Western Pokomchí, Eastern Pokomchí, Veracruz Huastec, and Tumbalá Chol.

Kanji alive is a web-based tool to help beginning and intermediate level Japanese language learners to read and write kanji. Instead of providing information on kanji in fragments, Kanji alive aims to clearly and succinctly present all the information needed by a learner in a single, unified interface.