The Piero Project, from the very beginning, was a partnership between an art historian (Marilyn Aronberg Lavin) and a technical team (I and two others), each seeking to explore some fundamental problems in their respective disciplines. I have been the leader of the developers throughout, yet I also have an art history background, and a strong interest in improving art history with technology. I will review briefly what this project is about and what makes it relevant to the "Magic Classroom," and then describe what we tried to "institutionalize" and, finally, how well we succeeded.
Our main motivation for developing the Piero Project was to try to solve art historical problems in new ways. We wanted to put works of art back into their architectural context and try teaching with digitized material. Our goal was to present a series of historical and intellectual relationships which exist on both the visual (or physical) and the verbal (or factual) level. The challenge was to represent in the computer the richness and ambiguity of art historical relationships and to allow students to discover them for themselves in the context of classroom dialogue.
Focusing on the career of Piero della Francesco and his great fresco cycle in Arezzo in particular, we succeeded in displaying and navigating through three-dimensional space while retaining instant access to the spatial context, detailed images, and all relevant factual evidence. We provided sufficient information on-line to cover all the topics of the course. Note that this conception was developed before anyone had heard of the World Wide Web, Netscape, or VRML (the Web 3-D modeling language). We set our sights ambitiously high from the word go, and we must admit it paid off!
Dialogues between Marilyn and my team produced a method for deconstructing art historical material so that it could be entered into the computer. The result was a framework structured around four main categories in art history, namely: artifacts, people, content, and context, plus all the intricate relationships among them. We call this framework "The Electronic Compendium of Images and Text" or ECIT for short. Into the ECIT framework we poured information concerning some 1000 works of art, about 500 still images, and nearly 5000 relationships or links.
We constructed several three-D computer models, mapped scanned images of the appropriate paintings onto their proper architectural places, and programmed a special viewer to navigate through the virtual 3-D space. The final contribution was our technique for exploring the paintings in their spatial context while simultaneously searching on the same screen for pertinent factual information. We then used the facility for teaching a monographic course on Piero in a classroom where all students had access to Silicon Graphics workstations fully loaded with the Piero version of ECIT.
The learning results were nothing less than overwhelming. The students quickly mastered the technology and found themselves making critical and intellectual judgements about the material they had been empowered to find for themselves. By teaching them to interact with the database throughout each class, the traditional hierarchy of slide-lecturer/recipient-student dissolved, and what took its place was a continuous and meaningful dialogue between student/machine, student/student, and student/teacher. It seems we generated a real break-through in the teaching process with the techniques of stimulation, exploration, and problem solving.
These innovations in turn led to reinterpretation of student assignments, term papers, and examinations. Working singly or in groups, the students were given topics to test their skills in art historical research along with their use of the electronic compendium. They succeeded in making computer analyses and reconstructions of works of art or of art historical arguments. They exhibited their skills in scanning and manipulating images on the computer screen, recreating fresco cycles in 3-D models, and driving through the models in three dimensions to study the paintings. They learned to identify and analyze facts and images, and present them on-line using the compendium, and many surprised even themselves by coming to new, imaginative conclusions and insights.
The issue that remains is to institutionalize, that is make available to others the ECIT tools, which we'll see consist not only of the database structure or framework but also the WWW interface scripts, and 3D viewers.
This project was a large-scale endeavor that covered more than two years in development. At the beginning, we enjoyed grants-in-aid from the U.S. Department of Education, and technical staff and computer resources provided by Princeton University. The budget covered a half-time art historian and the equivalent of a full-time programmer; but many people (especially Marilyn) gave many more hours than were paid for! The magnitude of the effort and the need to learn many very new technical skills had a major impact of the overall design.
As manager of the project, it was clear to me that the size of the investment demanded assured longevity in the form of future projects and technical flexibility. In this light we followed three basic design principles:
I want to emphasize that a project like ours can only be accomplished
through a true partnership of professional art historians and
technical staff; tight association is
fundamental to success. The combination of talents produces
results that are stimulating and challenging, as well as
intellectually demanding to both sides. The application of
technology and technical support to the humanities
should not be thought of as an
attempt to save energy or costs, but as a leveraging of the
creativity and commitment to teaching and learning by all
parties.
Enough time has now passed for us to evaluate some of the project's long range design goals. In fact, because of its inherent flexibility, we have been able to build seemingly unrelated new projects on the shoulders of the original. Moreover, accommodating major changes in technology has benefited both the Piero Project and the later flowerings. The complete conversion of the Motif application to the use of HTML Frames within a common world wide web browser is one important example:
I will demonstrate these points with two new efforts specific to Princeton that have reused or extended parts of Piero Project design. The Mappamundi Project, a compendium of basic medieval information used in a survey class, took the simple concept of a slide database and extended it with a glossary and numerous hyperlinks between the slide data sheets and the glossary items.
Another project was carried out in honor of the Princeton University's 250th anniversary: The Evolution of the Princeton University Campus extends the Piero database idea to tracking the evolution of campus buildings or multiple three- dimensional objects, over time, with the added ability to search and hyperlink significant text documents, visualize the chronology, and manage more elaborate data relationships.
Currently I am working with John Pinto, architectural historian, on a project involving Renaissance Rome. We are building a database of monuments, linking their exploration to the Nolli Plan of Rome of 1748.
Clearly, none of these additional projects would have come into being without the lessons learned from the Piero Project. Individually they represent a broad range of techniques covering long periods of time, each in turn suggesting new, additional derivatives. Together they are beginning to form the links in a chain of efforts and ideas that could be extended for many years to come.
The magic we boldly claim for the Piero Project emanates from:
It should be evident that the institutionalization of the Piero Project and its children has been both exhilarating and frustrating for us: exciting to see tangible change and results; maddening because we have not been supported enough to prepare documentation or to teach other teachers (although the framework is still available for the asking.) Yet Marilyn and I and the rest of the team are convinced we were right to have set our sights on the stars and to have started at the top and most complex level. After all, we are trying to demonstrate a way of thinking that will serve students now as well as five/ten/15 years from now. If we do no more than emulate what already exists, without presenting a glimpse of what is possible, how can we expect young scholars to go on to ask even newer, more inventive questions? The current state of the WWW in the classroom is not the final solution to old teaching problems, but it is the first step towards a style of teaching and thinking that incorporates untapped parts of the spectrum of our capacities.