Category Archives: News

SIF news and exciting updates.

3D-Atlanta

  October 1, 2015

Old Decatur Street, home to the blues, rag-time juke joints and the old jail house. Sound familiar? Maybe not to you, but in the 1920’s Decatur St. was dubbed Atlanta’s Bourbon Street. A bustling African American red-light district, Decatur Street was synonymous with high crime, low fashion and good times. Today, students at GSU are using new technology to create an interactive experience that immerses users in the streets of this bygone era. 3D-Atlanta seeks to create a 3D gaming environment of a historically accurate 1920’s Atlanta city block. Beginning where Classroom South is today, 3D Atlanta is a completely immersive digital environment designed to work with the virtual reality display system, Oculus Rift. Because the project requires a combination of historical photographs, 3D renderings and researched facts, 3D Atlanta is a wholly unique educational endeavor. The project combines the disciplines of computer science, digital animation, graphic design, urban planning and historical research in new and exciting ways. Stepping out of Classroom South will never be the same. GSU’s Student Innovation Fellows invite you to travel back in time and visit 3D Atlanta.

SIF Digital Humanities Projects Highlighted at GSU Scientific Computing Day

  September 20, 2015 , , , , , ,

Last week, GSU held its first Scientific Computing Day, a one-day symposium to foster interactions and collaborations between researchers at Georgia State University. The event provides researchers on the frontiers of computation research to present their work and exchange views with a multidisciplinary audience. As one might imagine, SIF collaborators have much to contribute to such an event, and the SIF was well represented, particularly in the digital humanities section of the conference, which was dominated by SIF-affiliated projects. A panel, which included Brennan Collins, Joe Hurley, Robin Wharton and previous SIF fellow Robert Bryant, discussed “How Technology Will Shape the Future of Humanities Research.” The panel’s presentation drew heavily on SIF-funded projects, including 3D Atlanta, 3D Modelling, and a variety of mapping projects.  SIF’s also contributed to the day’s poster-session, where Sruthi Vuppala and Dylan Ruediger presented a poster on “Digital Critical Editions of Medieval Texts: the Hoccleve Archive and the Digital Humanities.”  

SIF Fellow Speaks at TEDx

  August 25, 2015

This summer, SIF Fellow Thomas Breideband presented his work on how things grow in the complex ecosystem of social media at TEDx Vicenza in Italy. Over 5000 people watched the event on a live stream, and a half million people were reached by it on Twitter. Thomas’ expertise on social media, developed through research for his dissertation, figures prominently in one of this years’ new SIF projects, the Nation Branding project, which uses facebook and twitter to study the effects of Latin American countries efforts to brand themselves as tourist destinations, a project on which Thomas serves as team lead.  

When Our Eyes are the Media

  August 25, 2015

SIF Fellow Ameer Muhammad recently took a trip to Turkey that completely changed his perspective about the country. His experience with Syrian refugees there is the subject of his new documentary film. Read more about his thoughts on the challenges of educating refugee populations here.