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• 1 media/About Background.jpg media/About Background.jpg 2018-02-04T20:56:52-08:00 About 47 The Digital Piranesi is a developing digital humanities project that aims to provide an enhanced digital edition of the works of Italian illustrator Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778). plain 2023-06-14T06:12:43-07:00 Giovanni Battista Piranesi was an innovative graphic artist most known for his architectural studies of Rome and imaginary prisons. “The Digital Piranesi” aims to make this rare material accessible in a complete digital collection and, in an interactive digital edition, to make it visible, legible, and searchable in ways that the original works are not. The scale and breadth of Piranesi’s works require innovative methods of presentation, discovery, and analysis. By digitally illuminating and enacting many of the graphic features of his designs, this project will provide new ways of seeing this rare and complex historical material. 
  
  The University of South Carolina is one of few institutions to hold a complete set of Piranesi’s posthumous Opere (1835-9), a set of twenty-nine elephant-folio volumes, housed in the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. This publication assembles nearly all of his individual works and images (such as Views of Rome and Imaginary Prisons). Alternatively historical and imaginative, Piranesi’s representations of ruins are exercises in rigorous archaeological investigation as much as they are fanciful experiments in urban imagination. “The Digital Piranesi” aspires to appeal to these two elements of Piranesi’s own works—the historical and the imaginative—and to explore the ways that Piranesi’s works seem to predict many elements of digital design. His illustrations of ruins and crypts are immersive, his architectural studies often consist of multiple layered images, and his maps and ruins include detailed alphabetic keys. His indexed maps, annotated architectural studies, immersive interiors, and multi-image views push the limits of the printed page. While his earliest works were individual engravings of Roman ruins marketed towards visitors on the grand tour, he quickly began producing increasingly larger images and adding not only textual keys but also indices, prefaces, and dissertations. Pushing against the limits not only of the printed page but also of the bound book, his multi-plate engravings become elaborate foldouts in bound volumes, and the references in his maps and indices direct users through unnumbered pages and between different publications. His works are rare—his complete works are exceedingly so—and they constitute a colossal corpus with expansive pedagogical and scholarly potential lacking in any comprehensive searchable index. “The Digital Piranesi” aims to make the content and connections in this rich body of work easily accessible and searchable.  
  
  In addition, this project aims to share and generate new scholarly discussions of Piranesi’s images. Collectively, his works have been the subject of substantial critical comment; individually, though, his etchings stand up to close analysis that goes beyond current scholarship. Beginning with his Views of Rome and, from Summer 2023 through Fall 2024, the first volume of his Roman Antiquities, essays on each of his images are being written by an interdisciplinary team of scholars listed below. 
   
  Authors
  Jeanne Britton
  Cosette Bruhns Alonso
  Sean Burrus
  Penny Combe
  Aria Dal Molin
  Mike Gavin
  Sofia Hernandez
  Anna House
  Zoe Langer
  Mireille Linck
  Carla Scagliosi
  
  Project Staff
  Mackenzie Anderson (2019-2020)
  Jessica Atkins, Magellan Scholar (2017-2019)
  Mallory Baskin (2017-2018)
  Constance Caddell (2017-2018)
  Diem Dao (2018-2019)
  T. Zachary Frazier (2018-2019)
  Avery Freeman (2019-2022)
  Erin Jones (2018)
  Adams Keefer (2022- )
  Alexis Kratzer (2018-2019)
  Harith Kumte (2019-2022)
  Clio Lang (2020-2022)
  Daniel Neath (2020-2021)
  Walt Pach (2021-2023)
  Adiv Sivakumar (2018)
  Aniruth Sivakumar (2019-2022)
  Chris Terry, Magellan Scholar (2017-2019)
  Nathalie Watson (2017-2018)
  Lindsay Wright (2019-2021)
  
  Advisory Board and Faculty Members
  Alexandre Bonafos, French, USC
  Kate Boyd, Digital Collections, USC
  Lydia Brandt, Art and Architectural History, USC
  Curtis Fletcher, Ahmanson Lab, Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Study, University of Southern California
  Hunter Gardner, Classics, USC
  Andrew Graciano, Art History, USC
  Carol Harrison, History, USC
  Anna House, Art History, USC
  Lawryn Henderson, Preservation Specialist, USC
  Evan Meaney, Media Arts, USC
  Heather Hyde Minor, Art History, University of Notre Dame
  Aria dal Molin, Italian, USC
  Megan Oliver, Digital Collections, USC (now University of Missouri, Kansas City)
  John Pinto, Princeton, History of Art and Archaeology, Emeritus, Princeton University
  Jason Porter, School of Journalism and Mass Communications, USC
  Rebecca Zorach, Art History, Northwestern University

   

  The Digital Piranesi has been generously supported by an NEH grant from the Division of Preservation and Access (2019-2023), a Digital Art History grant from the Kress Foundation (2022-2024) and, at the University of South Carolina, an ASPIRE II grant from the Office of the Vice President for Research (2017-2019 and 2021-2022), the Center for Digital Humanities, the Magellan Scholar Program, the Maners-Pappas Endowment, the Humanities Collaborative, and the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.