"Rome Reborn: Ars Antiquaria Meets Ars Electronica"

The study of the physical remains of ancient Rome is the oldest branch of European archaeology. In this talk, Bernard Frischer will trace the history of how different media have been used to communicate the results reached by leading scholars of the subject from the fifteenth through twenty-first century. The media used have ranged from manuscripts and printed books, engravings, and maps to physical and digital models. Throughout the centuries, there has been a dichotomy between textual and graphical media. Dr. Frischer will argue that the medium of Virtual Reality is ideally suited to communicating the results of Roman archaeologists by integrating texts and images into a seamless experience that facilitates both education and scientific discovery.
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Bernard Frischer is a digital archaeologist who writes about virtual heritage, Classics, and the survival of the Classical world. He received his B.A. in Classics from Wesleyan University (CT) in 1971 and his Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Heidelberg in 1975. From 1974 to 1976, he had a two-year Prix de Rome fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, where he studied Roman topography and archaeology, worked in the Fototeca Unione as a photographer and topographer and served two summers as assistant professor in the Academy's summer program on Roman topography. He taught Classics at UCLA from 1976 until 2004. In the fall of 2004, he moved to the University of Virginia, where he directed a digital humanities research center and was Professor of Art History and Classics. In 2013, he joined the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University, where he started the doctoral track in Virtual Heritage. Virtual Heritage is a new field studying ways of applying the new 3D technologies to research and instruction in fields such as anthropology, art and architectural history, and conservation science. Frischer founded Flyover Zone, Inc. in 2022. The company's mission is to virtualize and democratize world heritage sites and monuments. For more information, see: https://indiana.academia.edu/BernardFrischer | www.flyoverzone.com