Scholarly Interaction

• Use IT Centers to enhance the effectiveness and visibility of the academic missions of UCLA units and of the campus as a whole.
• Promote exemplary centers of this kind as models for other campus units.
• Use IT Centers to attract a high-quality and diverse student body.

Related Projects
and Initiatives

Status of Projects and Initiatives are updated in January, May, and September.

Experiential Technologies Center/Visualization and Digital Media Program

UCLA’s Visualization and Digital Media program, which partners with the ETC, is designed to help researchers understand vast amounts of data (much of which is the result of simulation) and to create virtual reality models that are used within the arts and humanities.

In the past year, the Visualization and Digital Media Program, working through the Experiential Technologies Center (ETC), has promoted the use of new technologies for experiential research in diverse disciplines including architecture, the performing arts, classics, archaeology, foreign language studies, and education, and others. Projects at the center explore a wide range of phenomenological issues, including movement, sequencing, sonification, and visualization. The center is working on projects to accomplish the spatial modeling of comprehensive environments from natural and artificial landscapes, urban environments and other material culture, to the scientific visualization of surfaces and data. Comprehensive simulations of historical environments allow scholars to study various reconstruction issues and provide new spatial gateways into research and teaching about the broader cultural, social, economic, and political aspects of civilizations – both ancient and contemporary.
UCLA’s Experiential Technologies Center has been awarded one grant, is a partner on two other grant awards and will participate on a fourth grant in the next year. Formed less than a year ago, the ETC supports scholarly research, cross-disciplinary, collaborative research and educational work by faculty and students, fosters partnerships between UCLA and other colleges and universities, and provides a robust K-12 outreach program.

Digital Roman Forum Library Project

The Roman Forum Digital Library, funded through the National Science Foundation, was officially launched in January 2006. The purpose of the modeling project was to spatialize information and theories about how the Forum looked in late antiquity (about 400 A.D.), which was more or less the height of its development as Rome's civic and cultural center. The digital model includes more than twenty features (buildings and major monuments

The Forum model can be viewed on various hardware and software platforms. These range from simple static views that can be displayed on a computer monitor to dedicated visualization theaters costs hundreds of thousands of dollars or more.

National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute

The ETC is a partner on an NEH grant to hold a summer Institute for College and University Teachers in 2006. The two-week Institute is geared toward uncovering the potential of computer modeling to help scholars understand the Roman world.

Cotsen Class

Two ETC professors are using the Visualization Portal to teach a class in conjunction with the Cotsen Institute. This course focuses on the use of computer visualization in the exploration and analysis of natural and built environments (broad enough to include issues and methodologies of interest to architects, landscape architects, archaeologists and historians).

Technology Sandbox

The Technology Sandbox is a critical component in allowing UCLA to apply new technologies in support of the four areas of emphasis defined in the Campus IT vision. The Technology Sandbox has provided resources for projects such as the Grid, the Oracle Portal project and the Experiential Technologies Center. The Sandbox has led the campus collaborative Sakai Collaborative Learning Environment pilot project and has supported the development of the Dossier Action Tracking (DAT) system.

The 2006 action plan for the Sandbox has been created and includes several key milestones. The OIT plans to form a Technology Sandbox Advisory and to form several key internal partnerships with on-campus technology centers. The OIT also plans to form external partnerships with prominent technology research vendors