Review: Digital Hadrian’s Villa Project, by Bernard Frischer and John Fillwalk

Abstract

Bernard Frischer and John Fillwalk Digital Hadrian’s Villa Project Indiana University and Ball State University http://vwhl.clas.virginia.edu/villa Over the past twenty years, advances in information technologies have transformed how we navigate daily life, in ways too radical and comprehensive to summarize here. The same tools that have revolutionized personal communications, public records, and the myriad machinations of commerce have arguably also changed the practice of scholarship: we can now download PDFs of academic articles from anywhere in the world. Conference presentations can now take place remotely via live streaming, and social media tools have augmented the dissemination and assessment of research in ways that have broadened and accelerated prior paradigms of academic discourse. Despite all these changes, such innovations in scholarly practice pale next to the existing potential of digital tools in common use and those on the cusp of ubiquity. Today, the same Internet browser that enables us to locate books held in libraries across the globe also has the intrinsic capacity to scrutinize the contents of every page in every book. The emergence of Big Data, developed in part to facilitate the secure transfer of trillions in financial transactions daily, could also be put to use analyzing millions of archival artifacts in the same twenty-four-hour period. The same computational forces harnessed …