Great digital modeling work being done on Karnak at UCLA by Dr. Elaine Sullivan

The UCLA Visualization Portal displays a 3D virtual reconstruction of Karnak.

Congratulations to Dr. Elaine Sullivan at UCLA, who was recently featured in the Harvard Gazette regarding her research on a 3D virtual reconstruction of “The Temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak: 2000 Years of Rituals and Renovations in 3-D.”

The Karnak model depicts the temple from its earliest hypothesized form in the Middle Kingdom, about 1950 B.C., through the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. It allows the viewer to trace the changes of the temple over time, considering how each new stage of construction was a response to the existing landscape, Sullivan said.

And Harvard’s Philip J. King Professor of Egyptology, Dr. Peter Der Manuelian, understands the power of virtual modeling ancient archaeological sites:

The 3-D models are “terrific tools for teaching and also terrific research tools, because you begin to ask questions that were not possible before.”

Kudos to Dr. Sullivan on her years of work on Digital Karnak, which can be viewed in detail at UCLA’s Digital Karnak website.

new digital humanities minor and grad certificate program at ucla

The UCLA Center for Digital Humanities Website (cdh.ucla.edu)

UCLA has approved a new undergraduate minor in Digital Humanities. The university has also approved a graduate certificate program in DH, which is akin to a minor within a graduate degree in a Humanities-related field.

In a Daily Bruin article entitled, Humanities Joins the Digital Age with New Minor, Cody Geib describes how the new minor focuses on the relationship between technology and society. The minor certifies the ever increasing need for knowledge about digital forms of Humanities instruction and research.

As one of the nation’s premier research universities, UCLA has become a world leader in the Digital Humanities and one of the only universities to offer both an undergrad minor and grad certificate in Digital Humanities. The minor and grad certificate add to UCLA’s existing DH presence, which include DH-related centers like the Center for Digital Humanities (CDH), Academic Technology Services (ATS), Experiential Technology Center (ETC), Common Collaboration and Learning Environment (CCLE), College Library Instructional Computing Commons (CLICC), Institute for Digital Research and Education: Humanities, Arts and Architecture, Social and Information Sciences (IDRE-HAASIS), Office of Instructional Development (OID), Office of Instructional Technology (OIT), as well as DH research projects like Digital Karnak, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology (UEE), Ancient Egyptian Architecture Online (AEGARON), Qumran Visualization Project (QVP), Hypercities, Sites of (re)Collection, Korean Folklore Online Archive, Digital Roman Forum, Far From Moscow, and many more.

Visit the CDH Website (cdh.ucla.edu) for more information about the DH minor and grad certificate program.