Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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were created after this time. A number of partners are <strong>in</strong>volved <strong>in</strong> the effort, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g the Institute for
Advanced Technology <strong>in</strong> the Humanities (IATH) of the University of Virg<strong>in</strong>ia and the CVRLab.
Concern<strong>in</strong>g the goals of the project, the website notes the follow<strong>in</strong>g:
The primary purpose of this phase of the project was to spatialize and present <strong>in</strong>formation and
theories about how the city looked at this moment <strong>in</strong> time, which was more or less the height of
its development as the capital of the Roman Empire. A secondary, but important, goal was to
create the cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure whereby the model could be updated, corrected, and augmented.
A large number of reconstruction stills can be viewed at the website. In November 2008 a version of
<strong>Rome</strong> Reborn 1.0 was published on the Internet through Google Earth. 268
Guidi et al. (2006) have reported on one of the most significant efforts <strong>in</strong> creat<strong>in</strong>g <strong>Rome</strong> Reborn,
namely, the digitiz<strong>in</strong>g of the Plastico di Roma Antica, a physical model of <strong>Rome</strong> that is owned by the
Museum of Roman Civilization and was designed by Italo Gismondi. The Plastico is a huge physical
model of imperial <strong>Rome</strong> with a high level of <strong>in</strong>tricate detail, and creat<strong>in</strong>g a digital model of it required
the development of a number of advanced-imag<strong>in</strong>g techniques and algorithms. Ultimately, the
digitized Plastico was used as the basis for a hybrid model of late antique <strong>Rome</strong> that was also based on
new, born-digital models created for specific build<strong>in</strong>gs and monuments <strong>in</strong> the city. The sheer size of
their project required utiliz<strong>in</strong>g such a model, for as the authors noted:
Model<strong>in</strong>g of an ancient build<strong>in</strong>g may start from the historical documentation, archeological
studies undertaken <strong>in</strong> the past and sometimes from a new survey of the area. These data are
then comb<strong>in</strong>ed <strong>in</strong> the creation of a digital three-dimensional (3D) synthesis that represents a
reasonable hypothesis of how the artifact once appeared. The construction of an entire city can
proceed by repeat<strong>in</strong>g this method as long as needed, but the process would of course be
extremely time-consum<strong>in</strong>g, assum<strong>in</strong>g it would be at all possible s<strong>in</strong>ce sometime (as <strong>in</strong> the case
discussed <strong>in</strong> this paper) all the archaeological data that would be needed are not known (Guidi
et al. 2006).
One <strong>in</strong>terest<strong>in</strong>g idea suggested by Guidi et al. was that the Plastico is but one physical model of a city.
Hundreds of such models have been developed s<strong>in</strong>ce the Renaissance, and the methodologies they
have used could easily be transferred to the development of digital models of other cities.
While smaller <strong>in</strong> scale than <strong>Rome</strong> Reborn, one of the longest-runn<strong>in</strong>g virtual reconstruction projects is
the Pompey Project, 269 which has developed an extensive website that <strong>in</strong>cludes a history of the theatre
of Pompey, an overview of classical theatre, details on historic and modern excavations at this site with
extensive images, and a series of 3-D visualizations of the Pompey theatre. Beacham and Denard
(2003) provide both a practical and theoretical overview on creat<strong>in</strong>g digital reconstructions of the
theatre of Pompey, and also exam<strong>in</strong>e some of the issues such reconstructions create for historical
study. One of the greatest advantages of virtual-model<strong>in</strong>g technology, they found, was its ability to
<strong>in</strong>tegrate “architectural, archaeological, pictorial and textual evidence” to create new 3-dimensional
“virtual performance spaces.” 270
The use of 3-D model<strong>in</strong>g, Beacham and Denard observed, allowed them to manipulate huge data sets
of different types of <strong>in</strong>formation, and this <strong>in</strong> particular supported better hypotheses <strong>in</strong> terms of
268 http://earth.google.com/rome/
269 http://www.pompey.cch.kcl.ac.uk/
270 Other recent work has gone even further and has tried to repopulate ancient theatre reconstructions with human avatars (Ciechomski et al. 2004).