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About the Project

The Visionary Cross  project is an international collaboration directed by, in alphabetical order, Catherine Karkov (Leeds), Daniel Paul O’Donnell (Lethbridge), and Roberto Rosselli Del Turco (Torino and Pisa). Collaborating Researchers include James Graham (Lethbridge) and Wendy Osborn (Lethbridge), Dot Porter (Indiana) and the team at the CNR-ISTI (especially Marco Callieri and Matteo Dellepiane).  Graduate students working on the project have included Heather Hobma (Lethbridge).

Digital Humanities aspects of the project are being overseen by O’Donnell, Graham, Osborn and Rosselli Del Turco with the cooperation of Karkov. Karkov is leading research in traditional humanities disciplines on the larger project together with O’Donnell and Rosselli Del Turco.

The project has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (O’Donnell, PI), the University of Lethbridge CREDO (O’Donnell, PI), the University of Leeds (Karkov, PI), and the Universita’ degli studi di Torino (Rosselli Del Turco, PI).

Biographies
 

• Catherine E. Karkov
  Catherine E. Karkov is Professor of Art History, University of Leeds.
  She is an art historian who has published and lectured on both the Ruthwell and Bewcastle crosses. Karkov will be directing exhibition, preservation and art historical/historical research aspects of the project with Ian Woods. She has just completed a multi-year international project on the Cross in Anglo-Saxon England and is currently working on a book on Anglo-Saxon art.

 

• Daniel Paul O’Donnell
  Daniel Paul O’Donnell is co-president of the Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs former Chair and CEO of the Text Encoding Initiative, founding Director of the Digital Medievalist Project, and Professor of English at the University of Lethbridge (Alberta, Canada). He is founding director of the University of Lethbridge journal incubator, co-editor of the journal Digital Studies/Le champs numérique, associate editor (and founding editor) of the journal Digital Medievalist. He is also editor of Cædmon’s Hymn: A multimedia study, edition, and archive (Boydell and Brewer/Medieval Academy of America, 2005). He is a specialist in humanities computing and Anglo-Saxon textual studies and is responsible with Rosselli Del Turco for oversight of Humanities Computing and textual/literary-critical aspects of this project.

 

• Roberto Rosselli del Turco
  Roberto Rosselli Del Turco is an Assistant Professor at the Universita’ degli studi di Torino, where he teaches Germanic Philology and Old English language and literature. He is director of the Digital Vercelli Book, an independent project which will supply images of the folios containing the Dream of the Rood poem and related bibliography. In collaboration with O’Donnell, Rosselli Del Turco will supply TEI compliant XML transcriptions of the poem, and will direct work on extensibility. Rosselli Del Turco is a founding Board member of the Digital Medievalist Project.

 

• James Graham
  James Graham is an Associate Professor in the Department of New Media at the University of Lethbridge (Alberta, Canada). He is a digital 3D specialist who is experienced with scientific visualization and professional video games production methods. He will be responsible for assisting with the laser scans of the Ruthwell and Bewcastle Crosses and developing methods for real-time navigation, visualization and interactivity using technologies borrowed from next-generation video game production.

 

• Wendy Osborn
  Wendy Osborn is Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Lethbridge (Alberta). She is a computer scientist, director of the Southern Alberta Digital Library (SADL), and a specialist in digital library technology and content-based indexing of multimedia objects. Osborn will have particular responsibility for development of the search and retrieval engine.

 

• Dot Porter
  Dot Porter is the Associate Director for Digital Library Content & Services at the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries. Dot holds Master’s degrees in medieval studies and library science and started her career working on image-based digital editions of medieval manuscripts. She has worked on a variety of projects, focusing on materials as diverse as ancient texts and Russian religious folklore, providing both technical support and scholarly expertise. Since 2010 she has been in her current position in the Digital Library Program at the IU Bloomington Libraries, where she leads the creation of new services to support librarians and faculty in the creation of digital projects. Dot contributes metadata expertise to the Visionary Cross project.