IATH NEWS
A Digital Humanities Approach to the Study of Urban Vernacular Architecture
November 3, 2015
Zachary J. Violette will speak on “Data, Design, and Diversity: A Digital Humanities Approach to the Study of Urban Vernacular Architecture” this Friday, November 6, at 12:30 in Exhibit C, Campbell Hall. This is part of the UVA School of Architecture's Faculty Research Dialogue Lecture series.
Dr. Violette recently received his Ph.D. from Boston University, and his dissertation, “Fantastic Shapes and Unfamiliar Profiles: The Decorated Tenement of Boston and New York, 1860-1920,” focused on speculative housing, ornament, and ethnicity in the American city at the turn of the 20th century. As part of this work, he studied the use of big data in both historic preservation and cultural landscape interpretation. His discussion will present a case study for the application of modern, web-based database technologies, and other digital humanities approaches to the study of the vernacular landscape.it will also look at the recent explosion and democratization of digital tools, especially those related to web databases, archives digitization, imaging capability, geographical tools, and data visualization, all of which provide unprecedented opportunities to look at more, and gain greater understanding, with less effort.
