I am clearly losing my mind. I was walking across campus to HELL just now, marveling that it is already 71 degrees at 7:00 AM, which does not bode well for the rest of the day, Suddenly I had a vivid sensory memory of what Rome can be like very early in the morning when the traffic is just beginning to move along with the speed of the Colorado in flood stage, and people are beginning to head for cafes and cornetti and espresso before work. Why I should think of this when I am walking across a very green, quiet, mid-Western campus where the squirrels are being squirel-y, Physical Plant is collecting recycling, and the crows are waking up is unclear to me.

Office 98’s Word program is appallingly bad. I have always known this and only use it on my own computer when I want to amuse myself with the animated computer in the corner, but really, what bizarre persons created this version? The spell checker is using some form of English vocabulary and usage which neither Fowler nor Webster would ever recognize; it just tried to correct my very correct use of whom. And why in the world do you have to keep moving your hand from the keyboard to click on “change”? And when you decide to clear the formatting of a word or passage, say from bold and underlined to plain, the program wipes everything out and takes you back to the default font. On the other hand, the animated computer is adorable. Lesson learned, as if I needed to learn it again: whenever humanly possible, use 5.1a.

Anyway, this is the last day of the project. Or to be more precise, we expect to finish today all the work which can be best and most handily done while we are both on the same campus and indeed sitting in the same lab. We need to compress the huge picture files or people will be able to wash and wax their cars while they’re waiting for the pictures to load; and we will be heading out to test the site in the lab upstairs, the lab in Irvin, and on the department’s humble laptop. It’s one thing to look at the site on one of the speedy computers here. It’s something else entirely to try to use the site from an average modem on an average computer. I do worry that the site may not be as easy to load as we had originally hoped, but we’ll see.

I reread my original CELT proposal yesterday. Not surprisingly, I did not do everything I had planned, but I came close. We did three times the number of images either of us expected to do, and the range of the images should work well in class. I have learned how to scan images; I can use a good deal of Photoshop and now know what more I need to learn; I feel much more confident fooling with images and have finally overcome my Fetch phobia. I am much better prepared to build the Pantheon in the August VRoma MOO workshop because of this concentrated work with Photoshop. And I have learned from Eric all manner of things, not just about computers, Macs, and Donato’s pizza, but about Web design and about developing a site of this complexity.

In many ways the project has exceeded my expectations. The reactions of people who come into the lab which have convinced me that my original plan was a good one. I wanted to find a way to surprise viewers into understanding that the ancient world was not a bland one with Greeks and Romans walking around in white permanent sheets, living in white buildings, and admiring white statues. I wanted to start the process of re-education with visual images for two reasons: the powerful impact of the visual is sometimes more persuasive than any arguments you can present. The other reason is more connected to process; I want to start people thinking about how to analyze what they see. Of course, all those crummy movies about antiquity have taken their toll, from the made-for-TV Odyssey which was so unbearably dull I was actually glad to take calls from telemarketers during the time it was on TV to the recent Cleopatra, which was not all that bad, but nonetheless was unable to get too far away from representing her as an alluring sex kitten who only occasionally had fits of intelligence. So, I know that I have to counter the stereotypes and misrepesentation. Surely these images will help.

Our new Provost, Ron Crutcher, made time on Wednesday to stop by the lab to see our work, and in some ways his reactions were the most interesting since he has actually seen some of the pieces of sculpture we’ve been painting.

What I fear most: that we will finish this, Eric will leave, and the first comment we get back will point out that someone did precisely this kind of project three years ago and somehow, in all my searching the Web, I never found it.

What I dread nearly as much: that users of the site will miss the point of the project and will evaluate our artistic ability or lack thereof rather than tell us of ways they can use the site or their own reactions to seeing the images in color.

What I hope: that users of the site will include scholars who can tell us what they think the colors actually were like. That others who want to try the same kind of project will find our proposals helpful in writing for support, and will find our method a good start for their own efforts…and that they’ll tell us of their successes. I have always thought that one of the best features of VRoma is its insistence that our materials be readily available and as unhampered by copyright restrictions as possible. The inclusion of our proposals in the site follows that habit of providing as much information as possible so that someone else can replicate the project or, with any luck, move in a new direction on the foundation of our work.

Regrets:

- That so far we haven’t been able to find the time to paint all 41 shots of the Nike for another VR movie; but I’ll try to paint up 6 shots today so that Eric can stitch something together before we finish.

- That I am not a good artist and that some of my paint jobs are not better.

- That I cannot spend the rest of the summer doing this.

Future plans:

- Develop some line drawings to put on line so that people who want to try coloring but don’t do Photoshop can print out a statue and use crayons, pastels, etc. I’ll try this out with the ART 382 class.

- Somehow I have to resist turning this site into a tiny Perseus, but I can see all sorts of possibilities. Add primary sources; beef up the bibliography; put in maps and pictures of the sites where these statues were found. I’ll fold this into 382 as well, but I need to avoid trying to build a site which cannot and should not do what a database the size of Perseus’ can.

- I wonder how I can use the VRoma MOO not only to support the 382 class, but to make even more use of our site.

- Work with Guy to do our own Quick Time movie. Guy reports that laying out the degrees for shooting Washington may be easier than we expected because of how the floors have been finished, but I have no idea how we’ll be able to light the statue well enough to photograph it. If the weather is not impossible tomorrow, I’ll shoot a few preliminary pictures of “For Kepler” to see how much of the piece we can actually get into a frame without my having to stand directly in the middle of route 27. With any luck we can start on this next week.

I need to design a “method” section showing a few steps in doctoring one of the images. Maybe I’ll use Jeremy Walker’s lovely VRoma image from the Capitoline Museum, one of the most famous of the Flavian portraits. So far I have made her look suspiciously like Sophia Loren. Perhaps it’s the lips. Or maybe I should finally give in and do the Laocoon. Since painting the Apollo at Olympia has forced me to reconsider my traditional dislike of that figure, perhaps painting L and sons will have a similar influence. Besides, I could paint the snakes in lurid colors. Hmm.

So, I did start a method page, but I saved Jeremy’s Flavian woman as my alter ego; I have always wanted curly red hair:

http://www.muohio.edu/~delucej/Flavianwomanjw.jpg

Words of wisdom: forget Yahoo, Lycos, etc. – use Google.

One more meal of fairly fast food, a run-through of the site, and then finally we wrap up this show and go our separate ways for awhile. Dinner at 9 PM.

I feel like a kid who has to pack and wait for her folks to pick her up at summer camp, only she’s had so much fun riding and swimming and making friendship bracelets and telling ghost stories that she doesn’t want to go home.

It’s 12:15am, Saturday, July 17th. We’re finished.

14 hours after arriving in HELL

The fourteen and fifteen hour days are not the problem, considering the kind of days I put in during the regular school year, but today has been hard. Until now I have spent so much time painting, I’ve left the lab stiff but curiously alert. Today I’ve been engaged in that scholarly activity which I hate more than anything else…documenting, proofing, writing up a bibliography. Ugh. I keep whining to Eric that I want to paint something, and he reminds me appropriately but inexorably that we have one day left and there are things to be done, i.e., I do not get to paint today.

Lessons learned: never drink a large latte from the Main Street Gourmet anytime after 6 PM if you hope to get to sleep before 3 AM.

Anne and Jack Hershbel stopped by to say goodbye and see the site; as with others, their reactions were gratifying. Astonishment. Delight. This is infinitely more fun than seeing an article in print and knowing that the number of peoples who will actually read that article is very small indeed. Anyway, it certainly appears that what we were trying to do with the site has happened; users really are shocked to find that they react quite differently to these figures painted. I still think it has a lot to do with the eyes. I’ll have to go back and read the literature on sight and primates sometime soon.

I'm finally getting around to finishing the project web site. For the past few weeks we've been working exclusively on the sculptures with Photoshop. My only fear at this point is the suffering modem users will go through when navigating through this site. Sure, the layout is lightweight, but the content is extremely heavy. I'm pleased that the VR movies are ~1/3 of a meg, but some of these sculptures and their thumbnails are huge.

Things left to do: individual sculpture pages, site disclaimer, pdf versions of individual pages, backup site on a muohio.edu web server

Back to work...

Saturday, very early morning, and I head for HELL, drawn there by the prospect of painting all the snakes on the Etruscan Gorgon head. I wonder if there is a support group for Photoshop junkies.

Eric has left for Marietta and I am about to start documenting the images for the gallery. What began as an immodest proposal for a large gallery and was scaled down at the advice of friends who had used Photoshop, knew the sculpture, and despaired of our finishing the project in 10 weeks, has now grown back to the original plan. We will have fifteen pieces, four of which are also part of a Quick Time VR section. I think the range is pretty good, allowing for the limitations imposed by my desire to avoid violating copyright laws.

I need to find a way to describe this project...its original intention (to support my Greek and Roman sculpture course and to aid all of us who need to convince our classes that ancient sculpture was painted) and the attendant intention to allow Eric and me to learn how to create such a gallery with Photoshop.

I had originally intended to do heavy duty scholarship in support of the site, so that anyone wanting to use it would not only have state-of-the-art (a pun perhaps?) images, and exact instructions covering how Eric did the most technical parts of the project, but there would also be full bibliographies of best sources on each piece, and detailed discussions of each piece. And of course, our lofty plans included trying to use colors as accurate as possible in light of what we think we know from ancient sources.

But upon reflection, it seemed to me that the most significant things we could provide in our gallery were 1) sufficient images to suggest the range of ancient sculpture, Greek and Roman, and its colorful impact on the viewer; 2) to provide a few images in Quick Time VR to convey a sense of the volume and image of sculpture which is, after all, meant to be seen form at least a few sides; and 3) to provide a way to do this for anyone else who wanted to create a similar gallery. And to do all of this using images which friends or I had shot, or which were available via VRoma, AICT, or sources unprotected by copyright.

So now I need to write concise descriptions of the project and the results, to issue disclaimers about Eric's and my uneven artistic ability, justify our interpretation of colors and some details of the statues, and make clearer my rationale behind including these particular pieces.

Miscellaneous unexpected observations: using Photoshop for 7 hours at a shot is like grading AP Latin exams; it is exhausting at the same time that it is curiously refreshing. The intense concentration, the constant, exceedingly small hand motions with the mouse, the intimate contact with a digitized image of a familiar work of art, clears my mind of ideas, problems, extraneous to the matter at hand. So while I have walked out of HELL stiff from sitting almost perfectly still for two hours, the exhaustion is physical, not mental. And I find that I have become resentful of errands and too many distractions which keep me out of the lab.

Moments of amusement:
-- the HELL jokes: Each morning I say to Carolyn Seals, our secretary, "I'm going to HELL." Joe Simpson came by yesterday and upon seeing me in the lab remarked "I thought de Luce had gone to HELL long ago." Surprised callers on the lab phone are greeted with "HELL, Eric speaking." Well, maybe you have to be there to appreciate such humor.

-- "The moment of truth." When you have painted the entire flesh of a statue and start adjusting the opacity option to see if enough shadows from the original show through to give the figure texture. Of course, you can also spray paint the flesh with a feathered effect and get a preview of what it will look like, or you can adjust the opacity level before you start painting, but then you miss that one ghastly but thrilling moment when you adjust the opacity and see what you've done.

If I have to trash the hair of the Apollo of Veii one more time I am going to give the guy a buzz cut and have done with it.

I chose white, I chose the size paint brush I wanted to use, and the result was black. Why?

Well, Eric may be able to use Steve Gentle's technique of outlining and then dumping paint, but except for trying the technique on the eye of the Parthenon horse, I seem to do a little better drawing free-hand.

Several people...technology staff, faculty...have wandered into the lab for some reason and stayed to look at the site. To a person they react the same way; they are stunned to see these pieces in bright colors. In fact, I suspect some of our colors are a little bland and that some of our figures are nearly too "pretty" to be accurate, but it is gratifying to have people who have no particular knowledge of ancient sculpture react so strongly.

Someday we really need to paint an entire VR piece, but I suspect Steve and Eric are right that we don't have the time right now. Guy dreamed up a plan to get Sherry and Steve and himself, along with Eric and me, to paint the 40 individual shots of the Nike. It's an intriguing idea and perhaps if we have time at week's end we could try it. In the meantime we'll paint two shots of her and settle for that.

I have just written an abstract for the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education proposing to show how Photoshop can be used to enhance a class in aging by manipulating images of elders and discussing the appearances of old age. I will try this in the spring in the old age course: take the famous sculptures of the "drunken" old woman and the woman with the bucket. The class will work together on the images (I'll do the Photoshop unless people in class are familiar with it and want to try), reducing the wrinkles, changing the facial expressions, etc., so that at each stage we can talk about how to distinguish among those factors which influence the appearance of old age in the two women: gender, age, poverty, nutrition, etc. We could of course do it with pieces of paper and copies of the statues, but using Photoshop would give the exercise a dynamism not possible with paper. Of course, the risk would be substantial since Sweeney's law is the rule of the technology universe: Sweeney's law says that Murphy was an optimist. So trying to use Photoshop "live" would be even chancier than using a live connection in 115 Shideler in front of 200 myth students. But if it worked it would be great fun.

An offshoot of the gallery project: Guy and I are planning to make two Quick Time VR movies of the George Washington statue and of di Suvero's "For Kepler", though how we will manage to light George and get far enough away to do the steel structure of "For Kepler" remains to be seen. Clearly one of the pluses of working in HELL is the contact with Guy and others who drop by with bright ideas which extend the collaboration on this project beyond Eric and me. I used to think I only wanted to do this kind of work in the privacy of my own office, but not any more. This is very much like the collaboration and community which exists within the VRoma project where our training in workshops and our continued contact in the MOO and through the list serve breaks down the isolation we often experience as teachers, and especially as teachers of classics.

It's been a while since I've made a journal entry... I have 2 weeks left here in Oxford before heading off to MacWorld, then the beach, then Apple HQ for Student Rep training. There's no doubt in my mind that we'll be done in time. I think we'll even be done early, giving us time to beta test this site on non techie computer people.

Recent site updates:

Outtakes
Sculptures page content!

After spending some time scanning images, I returned to the kore. Without that opacity option I would go mad. Lessons learned: two ways to paint a surface and not lose the shadows from the photo: 1) opacity option and 2) airbrush the section. I took two more hours to finish the kore, but she does look great. The dress needs some work, alas, since I can't tell from the original photo what happens around the stump of her right arm. I rather like working with the photos I've taken myself, though I certainly never expected to be able to change the originals this way. But then, I never expected to teach a Latin class in a virtual reality environment either.

I must resist painting up the Laocoon. Since I have cordially hated that piece from the first time I saw it, I have been thinking that I might like it better in color. But I really do need to attend to our project as we first conceived it. Maybe after Eric leaves I can tackle L and sons. Meanwhile, we have two weeks to finish the gallery.

I can't stand it. I think I've learned to handle images; I think I am on my way to being able to do something reasonably respectable in Photoshop, and then this morning I sit down in the office to add my Apollo head to the Summer Orientation page I've been using, and I cannot get at the image. And back in HELL (whose name is beginning to acquire real significance for me), it was as if I had not learned anything at all yesterday. I do realize that my learning style, reluctance to read manuals, and the utterly inexplicable style of most manuals does not help when I am trying to learn something new, but why do I find some of this so hard?

This morning we photographed the Nike and Augustus. The effect of spinning the Nike is uncanny; it almost looks as if she is either alighting or taking off. In fact, seeing the Quick Time version of her confirmed my suspicions about the impact of the composition of this particular piece. That is, that the wings are so constructed that they tend to lift the figure, giving the still figure the appearance of motion.

It seems to me that we actually need two galleries: one the painted one, where our primary goal is to convey some impression of what these figures would have looked like in color. That second, one relying on Quick Time VR, in which we would include a few pieces to study and understand pieces of sculpture in the round (as opposed to relief pieces or paintings.)

Guy has suggested we might try fading in from the unpainted Apollo head to a painted one. Another distraction from the original point of the gallery? Or a very useful addition?

I have got to decide what pieces to use in the current gallery. We are having a great time playing around as we learn to manipulate the images, but we are facing copyright restrictions in some cases, and we do not have a representative collection yet. The trick is to avoid copyright restrictions, have a sufficiently wide range of examples, and choose pieces which will not drive us crazy in the coloring.

Eric tackled Augustus' head while I tried my hand at the kore. The color problem is really becoming an issue. That is, even granting our need to use Web-safe colors, just what were the ancient colors like? Pliny may describe something as "red", but just what kind of red is it? Dull? Luminous? Is it cherry, fire engine, blood, scarlet? The Kore with the "red boots" really does wear bright red shoes, but has that color deteriorated over time? Our options seem to be: try to learn something from what paint we have left: the kore's red boots, the green on the kore I'm painting, the eyes of the Delphi charioteer, and of course the wall paintings. The white ground lekythoi also help. But my question always remains: to what extent have the colors we can still see weathered?

Back in HELL with Eric, and Sherry. Sherry showed us all manner of useful things with Photoshop, but the most useful is the opacity option, which allows you to paint something (like the Gaul's hair) and then fiddle with it until you can see the details of the curls under the color. And the "burn" option does amazing things to the color and appearance of texture, even to the point of making colors look metallic. I will definitely have to re-do the Gaul. Eric has done a superb job at painting up the trophy goods in a scene from the column of Trajan.

I worked with Sherry on the head of Apollo from the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. I am going to have to reconsider all those unkind things I have said about this piece. I used to recite the words of some scholar (I cannot remember now where I read this) who insisted that early Classical sculptures look "as if they had never had a thought a day in their lives." The head is beautifully proportioned, but I have always found its expression chilly and unmoving. Years ago when I was with the American School summer program in Athens, I actually saw the head up close. When we visited Olympia, the pediment figures had been taken to a workroom where scholars were dismantling them. The head had been separated from the body along the old break; someone had placed it on a black velvet pillow. So in the midst of an enormous workroom filled with marble body parts, the head lay in some isolation. I stood right beside it, and I have to admit that at close range it really is lovely. But of course, no one going to the finished temple would have ever gotten close to the head. And how in the world could you have made out the figure without some paint to call attention to it?

So I took the head and sharpened it, then painted it layer after layer. Skin color was hard to do because none of the color choices seemed quite right. Following the convention in painting, in which men's skin is darker than women's, his should probably be a darker shade. At summer orientation I projected him onto the screen...it is one thing to look at him in a 4" x 4" shot on screen; it's quite another thing to see him4' x4' in a darkened room.What is most shocking, however, is looking at the face with the eyes painted in. Even without any other paint, the presence of eyes animates the face spectacularly.

Invaluable lessons: the "color burn" option remains an effective way to change the texture of a color easily. The opacity option is the single most useful thing I have learned in the past two days: you paint a section flat, then adjust the opacity, and the shadows underneath show through. No having to paint in the shadows yourself.

But what is a "path"? I've been making them, but do I really need them?

Eric and I dove into Photoshop 5 in HELL today. Oh, to have Steve Gentle around! But we did learn to do some things, and I got carried away giving the Dying Gaul hair and a mustache and painting up his torque. Lessons learned: this is much harder than it looks. Use layers, lots of layers. Map out the paint job before you start or you can end up trashing many layers because you didn't plan the project out carefully enough. If you paint over the shadows in the original photograph, then you have to paint in texture and shadows yourself. The mouse does not always give me enough control when I'm drawing freehand.

And drawing freehand is hard. Hard to believe that I once considered going to art school.

At the summer institute of the American Classical League. I have been talking to many friends who teach Classics on every level. They are uniformly interested in the gallery project; some have offered to serve as quality control and critics when we are ready to put up some pictures.

As the VRoma workshop winds down. Even using Photoshop 4, I can see that the possibilities are endless. Would that I could take the Craft Summer Photoshop class, but I have yet to figure out how to clone myself.

Look what I did yesterday during a quiet moment at the VRoma workshop! It's not high art, and my first attempt was much better (hair, eyes, lips, etc. except that I did too much to it and it went from disturbingly effective to just plain unpleasant), but I learned some valuable lessons about fooling with PhotoShop... such as, never forget that in version 4.0 you basically have one chance to "undo" what you've done; AND if you get too creative with the "artistic" filter and don't "undo" as you experiment, you end up with some monstrous-looking figures; AND less really is often more. Clearly, I need to remember to paint in layers, so that if I make a mistake or don't like what I've done, I can eliminate a small part without having to trash the entire figure and start from scratch again. Even with this one small addition to the figure, the effect is startling. This is the wounded warrior from the Temple of Aphaia on Aegina. He is a pedimental figure, so you would have been standing well below looking up at him and any addition of paint would have made him much more visible as well as effective within the context of the entire pediment. Then think of the impact of a painted temple, with painted figures picking up some of the colors of the temple itself!

PhotoShop is entirely too much fun, but for this rank beginner, it is also immensely time-consuming. So much for my arrogant and nasty comments about people doing "art" in PhotoShop...the process requires as much planning, reflection, creativity, and care as any medium I've tried in the past. At this stage it is in fact harder for me than anything I've done expect water colors. I am beginning to think that our gallery will have to be smaller than we originally planned or we'll never get it done before Eric heads off for Luxembourg for the fall semester. So, today we will go through my slides and the VRoma archives to find pictures unprotected by copyright restrictions.

A participant in the VRoma workshop, Michael Posey, has found a site which is a model for the kind of "u-paint" interactive page I had in mind. I'm about to go on line to find it. I cannot imagine what the page source is going to look like for this one. We need to list him as a contributor of a bright idea.

Calico is finally finished. I can't believe I'm still awake, but sometimes I just get on a roll with this web stuff and I can't stop. Besides, I don't have to wake up for anything tomorrow! Perhaps I'll make a page on the site dedicated to my Calico experience (which was wonderful).

Throughout this past week I've been brainstorming about this site and what we could do with it. After all, I've never actually produced a web site with _real_ content! I had way too many ideas, so I pulled up everybody's favorite text editor, BBEdit, and got to work. What resulted was a "To-Do" list for the site, which I have put online for everyone to see. As I complete items on it I delete them. Check it out here.

My huge web site accomplishment for the day was the addition of the web counters at the bottom of each page of this site. I bet you didn't even notice them! Good. That's the idea. Some sites like to brag about how many hits they get each day, while others have counters but publish them to private pages so only their administrators can see hit counts.

(Warning- boring lengthy geek stuff ahead!)

I decided to take the middle route, which still publishes hit counts but doesn't display them with fanfare and pizazze. The numbers aren't too accurate, as they increase each time _anyone_ hits the page, but they should provide us with a general idea of how active our site is. To see how this works, hit reload a few times and watch the numbers grow. Sure, it skews results, but we're not worried about precise numbers. If we need them, my ISP, Dreamhost, provides extensive weblogs.

Have you noticed that the pages of this site aren't named "xxxxx.html" anymore, but rather "xxxxx.shtml"??? You may have seen these mysterious .shtml pages on other web sites, too. The "s" means that the offending web page uses Server Side Includes, a way of giving otherwise static web pages dynamic capabilities. Dynamic in this case means that the selected data you see has been generated upon your loading the page, rather than you seeing a page that has been sitting on the server, waiting to be accessed.

In my case, the dynamic data is slightly boring- a text-based web counter. Dreamhost offers its own web counters, which tally each visitor to a page, but they are all graphic-based and stand out way too much for my purposes. For those of us with adventerous spirits, Dreamhost links to Matt's Script Archive, an archive of free scripts for webmasters to use. The specific one I used was "TextCounter," which does the same thing as Dreamhost's counters except in straight text, NOT in images.

Each time one of my .shtml pages is accessed, a little script called "counter.cgi" is called from the html code of the web page. This script looks at a data file for that specific page, finds the current number of hits the page has had, adds 1 to that number, than outputs the new number to a designated place on the web page. In this case, it's in the bottom right of each of my pages after the word "access."

What excites me about this whole process is that I had to do more than just copy and paste some code into my html. I had to edit counter.cgi to do what I wanted. Thanks to Matt (the guy who runs the script archive), I had great instructions for doing that. I had to tell the script where perl was located on Dreamhost's server, which Dreamhost kindly listed on a help page. I had to change access privileges for counter.cgi and the directory where the data files would be stored, which Matt also explained. To do these things I had to telnet into Dreamhost's Debian Linux server and use the CLI, or command line interface. This is like DOS, for you Windows users, only much, MUCH more powerful. I had to use commands like "pwd" and "chmod," none of which I had ever used before!

This was my first experience with SSIs (server side includes) and it went extremely well. The counters on each page did exactly what they were supposed to do when I visited each of them! There's still plenty of time left to play with more dynamic web stuff on this site, and I can't wait to dig into more of it!

It's bed time! [2:47am as I type... :-) ]

I'm making this journal entry from the computer lab in 163 Upham Hall. The Calico conference is happening right now and I'm providing tech support for a measly $5.15/hour. More important than the cash though are the contacts I'm making with conference attendees. Yesterday the folks here in 163 did a workshop about speech recognition software. Wearing my "Yum!" t-shirt turned out to be a good idea as I met a British college professor attending the conference from Singapore (where he teaches). He's a quicktime expert, especially QTVR, so I'll be in touch with him for help with this project. I'll put his URL up here later on.

The workshop today is titled Quicktime 101, so I'm not learning anything new, but it's still cool.

Steve and I still haven't met, but we're planning on a 6:30pm session in HELL tomorrow evening. Provided that I'm done with Calico by then...

Judith and I met this morning at 9am and got a lot accomplished web site-wise, as you (hopefully) can see. She liked the design I came up with last Thursday, so we decided what items would be on the navigation bar at the left.

She might add her own journal entries at some point, so I'm now putting the poster (name and email address) of the journal entry next to the date it was posted. Perhaps we can get Steve to comment on his scholarly Photoshopping of the Priestess of Isis? :-)

We have yet to decide which specific sculptures we'll be doing, but in the meantime there's a bust of Athena over in the Classics Department's seminar room that I'll be doing for practice. I'm also still waiting on Quicktime VR, which should arrive tomorrow, and still learning Photoshop. Steve and I should be meeting tonight to work on that if he's free for an hour or two.

I'm in the process of switching web hosts, but when the transfer is complete this site will be taking advantage of some cool things like a guestbook and custom feedback forms. Yippee!

This is my first journal entry for this project, even though I've been moved in here in Hahne Hall for almost 2 weeks. My first week wasn't too productive project-wise, as Judith was in the process of moving from Cincinnati to Oxford. I did, however, get necessary software ordered: Adobe Photoshop 5.0 and Apple's Quicktime VR Authoring Studio.

Photoshop arrived on 5/24 and I've been sifting through its tutorials throughout the week. What an amazing piece of software! Steve Gentle has done some quick and dirty sculpture painting with Photoshop already, so I'm going to meet with him on Monday evening to learn more about it. The Apple software just shipped yesterday, so it should be here soon.

Once things get into full swing, I'll either be scanning sculptures in HELL or over in Classics. I can probably do most of the Photoshop work from here in my room.

Hopefully I'll have the project web site up soon (as well as a redesign of my own site!). We still need to decide on a name for the project and come up with a summary of what we're doing that's easy to understand. To see what we'll be doing, go to Apple's iMac Theater page. Be sure to have the Quicktime plugin installed in your web browser though. For you modem users, it might take a little while to load, as the iMac movie is 500k in size.

Click on the iMac, hold down the mouse button and drag the mouse around. See how it spins? You can also zoom in and out. We'll be doing this with Roman and Greek sculptures, rather than iMacs.

Now go to Steve Gentle's Painted Priestess of Isis page. Normally, you would see a boring white marble statue of this Priestess, but Steve has painted her in full color. In fact, most (if not all) statues were in full, vibrant colors back when they were first created and displayed. Over the centuries though, the paint has worn off. One of our goals with this project is to raise awareness of this fact. The other purpose is to create a virtual gallery of painted sculptures for Judith's Sculpture course next semester.

Back to work!