Code outline generated for CAMP prototype. April 2009
MITH announces the receipt of an NEH Level 2 Digital Humanities Startup Grant for CAMP. March 2009
This archive is a collaboratively edited, peer reviewed, online database of historic theatre architecture from the Minoan “theatrical areas” on the island of Crete, to the last theatre built before 1815.
The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and the Theatre Department at the University of Maryland in College Park want to set up CAMP, a Collaborative, Ajax-Based, Modeling Platform. As the name suggests, this tool is an open source, collaborative, 3d modeler that will allow users with very little experience to generate a 3-dimensional model in their web browser which they can then allow other users to both view and edit. The tool will initially be used to construct an international database of pre-19th century theater buildings, but will be intentionally generic so that scholars interested in structures of any sort can easily port it into their own projects.
CAMP is innovative in its web-based, collaborative approach to 3d modeling, a difficult activity for which there are few tools in or outside of the digital humanities. Until about ten years ago, the average home computer could only process multimedia files relatively slowly, and file sizes and bandwidth speeds prevented the web from being a feasible platform for working with anything other than text and small images. These technical constraints have now largely vanished, however, but work in the digital humanities has yet to catch up with the technical possibilities. The digital humanities remain a largely text-centric field in which most of the largest and best-funded projects in are still those for which a text, usually a significant literary or historical text, is paramount. We hope that CAMP will join the handful of recent NEH-funded startups in multimedial and multidisciplinary areas. Download the full project proposal.
The beta version of CAMP will be available for download in 2010.