Roughan, at the time in her first year of graduate work, enrolled in the course and chose as her project a virtual reconstruction of the Tower of the Winds, a Hellenistic-era octagonal monument in Athens well known for its sculpted personifications of winds that also had a sundial on each of its eight walls (Figure 14). In the spring of 2016, as the Time and Cosmos exhibition was in the planning stages, Heath taught the graduate seminar “Computational Photography and 3D Tools for the Ancient World.” An emphasis of the course was the use of open-source and free software and the potential for 3D animations to communicate visual aspects of scholarly work, including student initiated research (Heath 2015). Our collaboration is founded on interactions that occurred within our academic context. The authors of the current article are respectively a member of the faculty at ISAW, a member of the ISAW exhibitions staff, and an ISAW graduate student studying ancient science and its transmission in the Medieval and Early Modern periods. We believe these aspects of the work mean that our approach is repeatable in other institutional contexts. The exhibition Time and Cosmos drew on the expertise of many members of the ISAW community, and where possible we relied on open-source or free software and freely licensed content to create the digital resources that appeared in the galleries. We also hope that placing these digital resources within a discussion of our goals is itself a pedagogic and professional resource for anyone considering similar work. Anecdotal feedback from visitors suggests that the animations were compelling and we hope that this aspect of the work is apparent in the current presentation. Physical objects, the creation and use of their digital surrogates, and the interaction of visitors and guides with this material are the underlying focus throughout. The last section discusses the work to incorporate ancient sundials that could not be brought into the gallery because they are inscribed on a large building in Athens, Greece. After an introduction to the workings of the objects themselves, we discuss the role of this digital content in the visitor’s experience and as a museum education resource for docents. The purpose of the current article is to place these digital resources in the context of the collaborative environment that created them and to show how they are effective in communicating the sometimes complicated operation of ancient sundials. Additional animations allowed virtual incorporation of sundials that were not on display due to size or other practical constraints. Figure 1 (above) shows the close association of physical object with its digital surrogate and indicates that visitors were able to take in both as they moved through the gallery. We accomplished this in part by displaying digital animations that simulated the passage of light and shadow on the surfaces of three of the sundials that were on display. Among the many goals of this international loan exhibition was to communicate to general audiences how Greek and Roman sundials functioned and were read in antiquity. Twenty-seven lenders contributed more than one hundred objects ranging from sundials and calendars to ancient works of art that placed these time-tracking devices in their cultural context. Introductionįrom Octoto April 23, 2017, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) at New York University was the venue for the exhibition Time and Cosmos in Greco-Roman Antiquity (Jones 2016). The operation of this sundial is discussed and illustrated with animation in the text. Figure 1: Installation view of a visitor and the Roofed Spherical Sundial with Greek Inscription with an animation running at its side, 2016.
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