Archaeology as Installation: Jerusalem’s Temple Mount and the Davidson Center for Exhibition and Virtual Reconstruction. Lecture by Lisa Snyder (UCLA). November 24.
Lisa Snyder from the UCLA Institute for Digital Research and Education will be in Lethbridge to speak to my Digital Humanities class on Monday November 23, 2015. She has also agreed to give a second talk, “Archaeology as Installation: Jerusalem’s Temple Mount and the Davidson Center for Exhibition and Virtual Reconstruction.”
The talk will take place on Tuesday 24, 2015 10:50-12:05 in Room L1170a (Linc building).
At the heart of archaeology is interpretation, and one of the greatest challenges for an archaeologist is communicating the results of their excavations with both the general public and other researchers. In 1999, the Israel Antiquities Authority turned to the Urban Simulation Team at UCLA to address this challenge through a landmark installation for the Davidson Center in Jerusalem. Since the Center opened in 2001, visitors to the site have had the opportunity to take a virtual tour of the reconstruction model with an archaeologist guide in an interactive classroom before exploring the adjacent IAA excavations. The result is that visitors are better able to understand both the excavations and the archaeological process.
Lisa M. Snyder will discuss the installation, her work with archaeologists Ronny Reich and Yuval Baruch, the reconstruction process, and showcase both the first-century Herodian and eighth-century Islamic phases of the interactive model. She will also demonstrate prototype software supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities designed to facilitate educational use of three-dimensional computer models for teaching and learning about the built environment, and discuss the unprecedented opportunities the technology provides for research and pedagogy.
