Digital Projects

Mapping the Premodern Woman: A Digital Map of Women’s Lives and Patronage in the Global Premodern Era, Project Lead

Initiated by Hamilton and Mariah Proctor-Tiffany at the Kress Institute on Digital Mapping and Art History, Middlebury College, using ArcGIS and Adobe Illustrator. With the support of the Digital Scholarship and Spatial Analysis Labs at the University of Richmond, we expanded the digital visualizations of our data to include Neatline and Carto, with Palladio as our most recent tool. Initial funding of the project awarded to Hamilton through the Mellon Fellowship in the Digital Humanities at the Villa I Tatti, Florence, Italy. This digital visualization will play an integral part in the scholarly work that draws attention to the crucial contributions women brought to medieval and early modern global geo-politics through the inherent spatiality of their systems of patronage, gift giving, and exchange. I have begun to realize this project by mapping and networking the dataset and material record of the women on whom my research has focused, drawing on the fact that many of their objects came from distant sources including Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka, Africa, and the Middle East, and that their personal networks were both local and international. The goal of this site is to create an open database for scholars worldwide to input their own contributions into a free online tool that is intuitive enough for the general user yet sophisticated enough to advance scholarly research from undergraduates to advanced scholars. With support, this image and text-rich map will grow thematically, geographically, and temporally to document the local and international connections between these women and their peers, showing women’s true impact on the geo-political stage of the global Premodern era.

Mapping the Medieval Woman (A Case Study in 14th-century Paris)

Histories of the architecture and urban landscape of medieval Paris have often concentrated on the impressive works of patronage of male rulers, for example Louis IX (1214–1270) and Charles V (1338–1380). But the paradigms we inherit are inflected with centuries of male-focused policies, histories, and social conceptions, often leading scholars to overlook or even erase women’s important contributions to the cityscape of Paris. This project seeks to undo this erasure and demonstrate that women, their bodies, their commissions, and their interactions were not only there, but were simply everywhere. It was not at all exceptional to see their marks on the urban landscape, their presence in work spaces, their bodies in processions in the streets, their tombs in the chapels of ecclesiastical spaces, and their generosity on display throughout the city. By mapping these sites, the many women patrons, workers, residents, and monastics come into view together.

Premodern Women Artists and Patrons: A Global Bibliography, digital consultant and contributor

A bibliography on women artists and patrons, with sections on Asia, the Americas, Islamic Cultures, and Europe from antiquity–c. 1700, individual women, topics like “Textiles and Needlework,” and online and teaching resources. Additions, corrections, and feedback on its structure (from new entries to Sub-Saharan Africa) are welcome via Comments on the Google Doc. Originally compiled by Pat Simons (University of Michigan) and transferred to a Google Doc by Tracy Chapman Hamilton in May 2020, the bibliography is using crowdsourcing to expand the outreach, content, and scope of its material. In addition to traditional publications, it is recording as many digital resources as possible, and also incorporates public history and teaching resources.

VCUarts Virtual Anderson: Increasing Inclusive Access to the Exhibition during COVID-19 and Beyond, digital art history consultant

In direct response to the COVID-19 public health emergency and the cancellation of its BFA Senior Show, Virginia Commonwealth University’s Anderson Gallery is constructing a groundbreaking virtual exhibition platform. The “Virtual Anderson” will be realized as a fully navigable 3D model of the original with interactive virtual exhibition programming. Just as important as the feelings of resilience and optimism produced within our community by the short-term “uncancellation” of this exhibition is the long-range capacity of the Anderson to disseminate future events and output far more widely to the highly diverse populations of VCU, the city of Richmond, and the larger nation and world. Finally, the Virtual Anderson will serve as a model and inspiration for other institutions adopting similar designs. We have applied for an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (June 30, 2020) and will do so for additional support for continued development. My paper submission to the CAA 2021 session on Museums Managing Crisis in a Virtual World was accepted for presentation.

Race in Medieval Richmond

Ongoing digital map of the intersections of Medieval Revival architecture and the African-American/Black communities of Richmond, Virginia. First created in the spring of 2018 with graduate students enrolled in my Digital Art History seminar. Conference presentations and publications, as well as further developments of this map (now in Neatline, but possibly in additional platforms in the future) continue to grow this project.  

Examining the Resources and Revenues of Premodern European Royal Women, consultant

   An international collaborative project to bring together scholars and postgraduate students researching the revenue and expenditure of royal women in premodern Europe (c. 1000-1800 CE). The universally acknowledged connection between money and power works in both directions—financial means are a vital basis for gaining and maintaining authority while access to power can also bring enhanced access to financial resources. Yet while the financial element of the queen’s role is central to her exercise of power and authority, the economic aspect of queenship and royal studies more broadly is understudied. This project aims to address this lacuna to bring together an international group of researchers, from senior scholars to postgraduate and early career researchers, for discussions that will enable them to share the results of their investigations on the resources and revenues of royal women. By joining together individual studies, often focused on the resources of one particular figure or a small cluster of queens in a particular realm, we will be able to gain a wider understanding of the economic agency of royal women by comparing their revenues over the whole of the premodern period across Europe. This research will not only shed light on queenship, the gendered exercise of authority and management of crown finances, but it also gives us a greater understanding of rulership and the wider mechanisms of monarchy.

Course Digital Projects (see additional pages on website. More coming soon.)

Spatial Exploration Project (VR with Google Earth/Maps/StreetView); Augmented Reality (digitally augmenting the museum); Spatio-Temporal Mapping (digital mapping and timelines, as well as networking); App Production, Soundscape Production, Virtual Exhibitions (Esri’s StoryMap, ArtSteps, Thinglink, Google Art and Culture, Artsy, Neatline/Omeka); 3-D animation/Virtual Reality/Photogrammetry (Tilt Brush, Google Sketch-Up, Stitching images and displaying 3-D models in SketchFab)