Center for Cultural Analytics

Rita Lucarelli's Book of the Dead in 3D

Eqyptian coffins are inscribed with spells and images which stand in for spells. All function together as a machine to resurrect the deceased and to guide them safely through the next world. Given this function, its perhaps surprising that the texts from coffins are usually published completely divorced from their position on the coffin. Any additional meaning conferred on the texts by their placement on the surrogate body or relative to each other and the vignettes is lost. In order to understand a coffin as a magical machine, it's necessary to view the spells in 3D so that this relationship can be taken into account. The aim of this project is to explore the relationship between texts and their positioning on a magical object through building annotated 3D models of coffins displaying the texts and translations.

Danish Folklore

The folklore macroscope aims to provide tools for modeling the complex dynamics of informal cultural expressive forms as they circulate on and across social networks. Tens of thousands of stories collected from, in this case, the Danish rural populations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century provide insight into the manner in which people negotiate their relationship to ongoing changes in the economic, political, social and physical environments that surround them. A macroscopic approach allows us to discern patterns in the underlying corpus that often elude traditional methods, while allowing access to multiple scales of interrogation, from the very broad to the most detailed, with access to the multiple scales in between, thereby surfacing the interdependence of stories, storytellers and the myriad contexts in which they live.