Proposer: John Lee, 504420, J.Lee@ed.ac.uk
Self-Proposed: No
Supervisor: John Lee, 504420, J.Lee@ed.ac.uk
Other Suggested Supervisors: Ian Gunn (Architecture, 508020); Mark Wright (EdVEC, 504972)
Subject Areas: Computer Graphics/Machine Vision/Visualisation, Human-Computer Interaction,
Suitable for the following degrees: BSc in Computer Science,
Principal goal of the project: The aim of this project is to investigate and/or create tools for the modelling of movements of various elements through time and space.
Description of the project:
The 1904 Dublin of James Joyce's novel Ulysses is populated by numerous characters and objects who go about their own personal odysseys throughout the city. Joyce often stated that if Dublin where to be destroyed it could be rebuilt from his book. The central chapter "Wandering Rocks" depicts the movements of a diverse range of characters throughout the streets of Dublin over the period of an hour. This action has been plotted to the minute into a table by Professor Clive Hart of Essex and led to the reenacting of the action on the streets of Dublin in 1982 for Joyce's centenary.
There has been an increasing trend to apply external data and introduce new techniques and approaches from other disciplines to the study of literary works. The application of graphic and cartographic techniques to the structure of Joyce's "virtual Dublin" would provide new models and perspectives to the approaching and understanding of the form and design of Joyce's Ulysses.
Time-Geography and the attempts to model spatial and temporal action came to the fore in the mid-1970s, resulting in current GIS (Geographical Information Systems), which however are expensive, complex and not fully adapted for the display of temporal data. For the present proposal, a simpler approach should suffice; and a simple calibrating and plotting engine would hve other uses in a number of disciplines. What is desired is a simple tool that would take a bitmap image and calibrate the bitmap to a desired scale on the X, Y plane. Then X, Y, coordinate data would be entered along with temporal information for individual elements and these would be plotted spatially in 2D and vertically in time. Ideally this would be replayable both as a 2D flat plan and as a 3D model where slices of the action could then be determined. Such a tool would allow callibration of diverse bitmap substrates to an x y coordinate system enabling the plotting of lines and areas as vector paths both horizontally and into a vertical axis. The vertical axis could be used not just to plot temporal data but any quantative value, giving rise to other uses.
This sort of visualisation should be fairly easy to generate using a visualisation toolkit such as VTK. We will seek to generate a number of alternative visualisations of the data, and then design and conduct a study comparing these for usability and value with respect to various particular tasks that literary or other researchers might have. The study will be facilitated by direct access to the community of Joyce scholars.
Resources Required: Visualisation system, eg VTK (http://www.vtk.org/)
Degree of Difficulty: medium
Background Needed: Some familiarity with graphics programming and theory; interest/experience with HCI
References: