{"id":230592,"date":"2017-04-10T12:13:47","date_gmt":"2017-04-10T16:13:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=230592"},"modified":"2024-10-29T15:14:15","modified_gmt":"2024-10-29T19:14:15","slug":"a-new-way-to-teach-history-in-the-21st-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/a-new-way-to-teach-history-in-the-21st-century\/","title":{"rendered":"A new way to teach history in the 21st century"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"illustration<\/a><\/p>\n

Unlocking big data<\/h2>\n

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A Newscenter series on how Rochester is using data science to change how we research, how we learn, and how we understand our world.<\/h3>\n

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The \u201cOven Site\u201d that Mike Jarvis<\/a> and his students have been excavating the last five summers is 1,024 miles away in Bermuda\u2014protectively buried, at least until next summer\u2019s dig, under five feet of earth.<\/p>\n

But at any time, on any day, Jarvis, an associate professor of history at the URochester, can walk across campus to the Carlson Science and Engineering Library and instantly project a life-like 3-D rendering of the site\u2014just as it looks when fully excavated\u2014on a 20-foot-by-8-foot screen.<\/p>\n

The resolution is so fine that it\u2019s possible to measure post holes and other objects to within a centimeter. And if he needs to look at the excavation from another angle, he can. The rendering can be rotated in any direction\u2014even flipped upside down.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a graphic tour de force, and a great example of the data visualization capabilities of the University\u2019s VISTA (Visualization-Innovation-Science-Technology-Application) Collaboratory.<\/p>\n

Completed in 2014, the space features 24 individual displays arranged in a curved four-by-six matrix that can render massive data sets with 50-megapixel resolution\u2014approaching that of IMAX theaters. The displays have a direct high-speed fiber optic connection to the University\u2019s IBM BlueGene\/Q supercomputer, which has 16,384 processing cores, and to an IBM \u201cBluehive 2\u201d Linux supercomputer cluster, which can store two million gigabytes of data.<\/p>\n