The Global Middles Ages Project and Mappamundi

The Global Middle Ages Project (GMAP) is a collaborative, interdisciplinary initiative to show what a broader view of the Middle Ages through deep time looks like. It grew out of a course designed by Geraldine Heng at the University of Texas at Austin, which you can read about here. Some of the goals of the course read:

To bring medieval studies into an ever more complex, interdependent, and internationalized twenty-first century, we will teach an interconnected medieval world—a "global" Middle Ages—and the interrelationship of culture, ideas, technologies, religions, and movements across periods of time and geography. To teach the interconnected relationship of culture in its many forms—literature, music, art, cartography, politics, law, etc—team-taught seminars across disciplines will also be introduced in thematically organized units.

One goal of the new seminars is to inculcate practices of thinking across periods, cultures, territories, and disciplines, even as medieval studies at the University of Texas continues to emphasize the importance of intensive training in disciplinary knowledges and practices.

In 2007, the idea of this course expanded into GMAP through the work of Geraldine Heng, Susan Noakes at the University of Minnesota, and David Theo Goldberg at the University of California Humanities Research Institute (and also one of HASTAC’s co-founders). They organized a meeting in Minneapolis that lasted several days and featured a dizzying range of lectures by medievalists. Rather than hearing only about literature and history in medieval Europe (a common assumption when people hear about academic work on the Middle Ages), the talks ranged from Africa to Asia, from topography to trade routes, and from numismatics to new ways of visualing the period. After the presentations, which represented the interdisciplinary ideals of the project, we then began discussing how GMAP should organize and present itself. In particular, we spent a good amount of time talking about Mappamundi, the online presence of the project, which is still being planned and developed. Heng writes:

In collaboration with the Texas Advanced Computing Center, a super-computer institute, we aim to design Mappamundi to serve as a digital classroom, laboratory, virtual museum, archive, and meeting place: a virtual environment that draws together the diverse resources of existing online initiatives on the premodern world and connects learning communities from all parts of the globe.

You can read more about the original course in Heng, Geraldine. "An Experiment in Collaborative Humanities: Imagining the World, 500-1500 CE." ADFL Bullentin 38.3 and 39.1 (2007): 20-28.

Some of the ideas discussed at the first meeting were using supercomputing resources for digitization of medieval manuscripts and art objects, real-time modeling of topographical changes, and, perhaps most exciting, virtual environments called CAVEs (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment), which Ana Ventura blogged about recently; she also mentioned Mappamundi. Imagine if, rather than reading a description of and looking at drawings of a premodern building, you could enter into a simulation of it and explore the building as if you were inside it. Or, you could go into a CAVE then see and manipulate digital versions of vases, sculptures, or other objects that reside half way across the world.

Of course, one of the first steps toward bringing about any of these ideas is getting money. Happily, I-CHASS recently received a $250,000 NEH grant that will help fund the Scholarly Community for the Globalization of the "Middle Ages" (SCGMA) Group in 2008-2009. Though the name is slightly different, the SCGMA is another aspect of GMAP and Mappamundi. As the I-CHASS site states:

SCGMA has been working to create an online infrastructure to support the organization of, and research with, sources in multiple formats and languages available from multiple scholarly disciplines in order to organize large quantities of textual, visual, and aural resources. HPC will allow SCGMA to extend its current use of high-performance technologies to encompass a more elaborate technological model.

So, from a team-taught course at the University of Texas at Austin four years ago to a recent NEH grant, GMAP and Mappamundi move ahead. I have a few more posts about the project lined up, and some speculation about how we might use some of these technologies for outreach and pedagogy, but, for now, I thought I’d just provide an introduction to the project.