Spring 2015 Visual Media Workshop News

The Visual Media Workshop continues to advance several diverse collaborative projects.  The Decomposing Bodies team is actively cataloging thousands of identification cards collected during a January research trip to the Ohio History Connection in Columbus as well as actively brainstorming ideas for a future exhibition on the Bertillon criminal identification system. Scholars from all over the country convened at the University of Pittsburgh in late November for a workshop entitled, "Network Ontologies in the Early Modern Period," co-sponsored by a number of local and regional groups. The aim of this workshop was to share experiences implementing data ontologies in digital humanities projects, such as our own Itinera, and to develop a metadata structure that would then support the interoperability of these networks over the long term.  The lab also continues to mobilize a team of graduate and undergraduate students digitizing and cataloging images for the VMW Image Library, which provides an essential teaching and research tool for the department.