Open Student Projects

Open Projects 2023/2024

If you are interested in one of the projects, please email the primary supervisor (in bold) and cc Prof Sarah Kenderdine. We would appreciate it if you could include a CV and/or a portfolio when contacting us.

Swiss cultural history of the Middle Ages: Augmenting the Panorama of the Battle of Murten

Master projects (DH)

Supervisor: Jaquet Daniel Norbert and Sarah Kenderdine

Project description:

The Panorama of the Battle of Murten was painted in 1893 by a team of artists led by the military painter Louis Braun. This gigantic painting measures 10m by 100m (1000m2 of painting). It depicts the moment that Swiss Confederates gained the upper hand against the Duchy of Burgundy during its 1476 invasion, a turning point in European history. specialised in public entertainment with this main media of the end of the 19th century (an early form of immersive experiences before cinema in rotunda theatres in Zürich and Geneva). The EPFL project Diagram is currently imaging the painting as the largest dataset ever created for a single object – 1.600 terapixel (phase 1 2022-2023) and enters the phase of augmenting the painting for immersive experiences (phase 2 2023-2026).

As a DH master’s student, you will work with a team of researchers and data scientists to provide additional data for the augmentation of the digital twin. A range of options is available:

  • Production of narratives and metadata based on original archival documents;
  • Documentation and metadata based on iconographical representations of the battle, the objects, the weapons and the characters;
  • 3D models of preserved material culture (mainly late Medieval weapons);
  • 3D animations of reconstructions of fighting movements and costume patterns.

 

Prerequisite: A motivation to learn history through a late 19th-century representation of a 15th-century battle; Interest in objects and costumes of the Middle Ages, as well as in interactive immersive museum installations; [optional] Basic notions of Medieval History and Medievalism (contemporary reception of the Middle Ages); [optional] Notion of 3D modelling and 3D animation; [optional] Notion of semantic annotation.