Viz

HIST 206: The Eternal City in Time: Urban Structure and Change

Instructor: Victoria Morse
History
Spring 2012

Course Description
This course will explore the lived experience of the city of Rome in the 12th-16th centuries. We will study buildings, urban forms, surviving artifacts, and textual and other visual evidence to understand how politics, power, and religion mapped onto city spaces, how daily life was shaped by urban challenges and opportunities, how the urban and rural environments interacted. Students will work on projects closely tied to the city fabric, in addition to completing reading and writing assignments and participating in discussions.

Since this is an off-campus studies (OCS) course, the course goals will emphasize experiential learning in the city. How do we as historians interpret monuments and the city itself as historical evidence? What can we learn and what can't we learn from what remains of the built environment? How can the material evidence of buildings, streets, and spaces work with textual evidence and the visual evidence of painting, sculpture, and drawing to enhance our understanding of past lives? What skills and tools do we need to develop to make full use of all these types of evidence?

Assignments

Assignments in the course will encourage close observation, creating records of observations graphically, textually, and through photographs, and techniques for coordinating information from multiple sources in useable ways. In addition, students will continue to hone skills of historical analysis, writing, and oral presentation as they would at home in a Carleton classroom.

Assignments will include:

• The rioni project. Students will work in groups to explore, experience, and ultimately lead the rest of us on a tour of a given district in the old city of Rome. You will be asked to think about what made this a neighborhood, how it was transformed over time and how we can know about these transformations. What buildings, streets, open spaces, and other features shape this rione? Who lived here? What events happened here? How are these things significant for our understanding of the past of the city? Groups may present on site or virtually via a presentation or online mapping software, depending on preferences and the available time and technology. In all cases students will be asked to coordinate personal observation with all the types of evidence discussed above. Stages for this assignment are available on a separate handout
• The urban morphology project. This is a fancy name for the 'stuff' of the city. Each of you will choose one type of urban thing (fountains, steps, paving stones, doorways, city gates, bell towers, church pavements, and so on) and study it throughout our stay in Italy. You will collect examples through observations and written, graphic, and photographic descriptions of your object. You will collect some from places other than Rome for comparative purposes. Ideally your thing will have been around in the Middle Ages (so not recycling bins), but if you can make a good argument to me for working on something that doesn't obviously fit this requirement, I might say yes! You will read about your thing and ponder its place in the life of the city. You will present some of your images formally at one point during the term and write about their significance, but mostly you will be our group expert on that particular aspect of Italian cities. Be ready to help us all understand what we are looking at!
• The metadata project. As you collect images for yourself and for your other projects, please be aware of the necessity of recording basic information about your photographs and drawings (and written notes, for that matter). If you want your work to have relevance beyond your own mind and beyond the time of the trip, you will need to be able to know at a bare minimum what you were photographing, where it was, and what people were in the photo. Other users will need to know that you took or made the picture and whether you have given them permission to use it. These information is the 'metadata' about the photograph. This assignment has several parts designed to help you develop good habits of recording metadata, to teach you to attach metadata to your photographs, and to manage your photographs as your own intellectual property. Draft metadata project assignment (Microsoft Word 30kB Jan3 13).
• The Carleton Rome database. As an outcome of some or all of these projects, we will begin building a database about Rome for the use of students who can't travel to Rome. You will submit 3-5 carefully selected images to the database at the end of the program with complete metadata. More detailed criteria are forthcoming but this is your chance to go beyond the classic tourist views of Rome to communicate something more specific, more historical, and more meaningful about the city and about your knowledge of it. When we return to Carleton in Fall 2012, we will mount a group exhibition of these photographs in the Weitz Center white spaces in order to share our work with the campus community.