A third “affiliated” course was adapted from an advanced undergraduate lecture on Roman spectacular entertainments (offered by Christopher Johanson, a classicist). Rather than integrate digital production throughout the course, the first seven weeks focused instead on detailed historical and chronological study of Roman spectacle. Opening with a clear theoretical approach to the Roman notion of spectacula—events that offered opportunities to see and be seen—the course began with an examination of the aristocratic funeral of the Roman republic, which amassed many of the key components of early spectacular stagecraft, and progressed to the apex of Roman imperial shows, staged in purpose-built complexes, attended by thousands. Lectures surveyed ad hoc, ephemeral spectacle of the city of Rome, power dynamics on display during planned events, the visual competition of symbolic capital, the role of the gladiator and the martyr in Roman society, and practical matters of staging such significant, spectacular entertainments.
The first segment of the course followed a fairly traditional, lecture and discussion program, save that born-digital material served as the foundation for presentations. Each week’s readings were framed within digital “tinker-toy models”9 representing monumental spaces of the urban environment of ancient Rome (Figure 8). Rather than receive an unmediated presentation of these reconstructed spaces, students were first given a short critical introduction to epistemological issues related to studying hypothetical—and often controversial—representations of an ancient city and its historical events.10 Students examined different experimental attempts to describe daily life in the city, which ranged from standard encyclopedic entries to historical-fictional attempts to study the experience of Roman daily life. They interrogated digital reconstructions, not as attempts to reproduce a past reality, but as hermeneutical tools and
9 On “tinker-toy models,” see Willard McCarty, “Modeling: A Study in Words and Meanings,” in A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), 254–70. As applied to historical reconstructions, see Christopher Johanson, “Visualizing History: Modeling in the Eternal City,” Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation 25, no. 4 (2009):
403-18.
10 Diane Favro, “In the Eye of the Beholder: Virtual Reality Re-Creations and Academia,”
Journal of Roman Archaeology, Supplementary Series 61 (2006): 321–34.
5. Teaching Digital Humanities through Digital Cultural Mapping 139 experimental laboratories. Each subsequent week’s lecture was steeped in representations of ancient spectacle. Each study built on the last, laying the foundation in the Roman Forum, the heart of large-scale public spectacle, then moving through the narrow surrounding arteries to examine Roman street theater, and then fast-forwarding through time to situate discussions within digital representations of the Flavian Amphitheater and Circus Maximus coupled with filmic depictions of the two. The midterm exam asked students to demonstrate their broad command of the overall historical development of spectacle, discuss the definition of spectacle at Rome, and show specific knowledge of core concepts and key technical terminology.
Figure 8. A digital “tinker-toy” model of the Roman Forum of the Middle Republic.
The students’ role in the course shifted dramatically from that of content consumers to producers after week seven, when the parameters of the final project were fully revealed. Asked to synthesize work from the first section of the course, they would develop a narrative that discussed the transformation of spectacular entertainment and stagecraft in the Roman world by examining three distinct time periods. Their digital project—a fusion of two-dimensional mapping and three-dimensional world building—illustrated, augmented and enhanced a paper-based narrative.
They were, on the one hand, tasked with illustrating their own work with their own digital creations, but also, more importantly, encouraged to develop arguments that could only be made by using space-based argumentation.
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Though some students were motivated to become three-dimensional modelers, many had little experience working with three-dimensional content. Rather than start from scratch, students were given pre-built content to develop the three-dimensional lab. By using digital reconstructions developed in earlier projects at the UCLA Cultural VR Lab (http://www.
cvrlab.org/) and the UCLA Experiential Technologies Center, students had a pre-built set of three-dimensional iconography to be used in their mapping exercises. Of course, they could (and did) manipulate the pieces and populate them with their own representations of crowds or performers.
Nearly half the twenty-four students in the class presented arguments that had equally compelling visual and textual components. One project interrogated large-scale entertainment venues to contend that imperial power manifest itself through an overt control of the spectacular spaces (Figure 9). Another traced the lineage of funerary image manipulation, situating the use of the bloody clothes of Caesar at his funeral within the larger context of visual storytelling at the Roman funeral (Figure 10).
Another focused on the transformation of monumental billboards, beginning with the political sponsorship of Roman games, transitioning to the permanent, named spaces that would honor their dedicator during the staging of each event, and culminating with the development of pure propaganda such as that illustrated in the Imperial, triumphal arch. A final example compared the changing nature of audience participation at the theater in Rome to that of the nineteenth-century United States (Figure 11).
Figure 9. An experimental representation of the natural depression where early circus games might have been held in Rome.
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Figure 10. Caesar’s bloody clothing used as a prop during the eulogy said on his behalf.
Figure 11. The cavea of the Theater of Marcellus filled with spectators whose clothing clearly indicate a seating system defined by social class.
The evaluation process was critical to the success of the course. The raw digital material was not evaluated for craft or technique. Instead, students were asked to transform their visual, interactive argument into a short six-minute performance given during finals week. Therefore, preparation and ideas could be evaluated independently of the digital ability of the student, and each successful presentation focused first on the humanistic problem rather than digital fireworks.
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