The third-annual Immersive Technologies for Cultural Heritage (ITCH) Symposium on Friday, November 14, will showcase a selection of innovative digital humanities projects created by scholars from USC and UCLA.
The featured cultural heritage projects span archaeology, ecology, LGBTQ+ studies, and social histories in Los Angeles. Digital humanities scholars from each project will describe how they used immersive technologies to open new vantage points into archaeological digs at Pompeii; ancient Viking longhouses with turf walls for protection from the elements; the complex histories of L.A.’s Basque boarding houses; the storied downtown Los Angeles neighborhood of Bunker Hill; and bars, cafes, and businesses catering to LGBTQ+ Angelenos during the 1960s.
The digital humanities projects available for viewing at this year’s ITCH Symposium include:
- The Address Book Project by Robert Hernandez and Jinglin Jingan from the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and featuring Bob Damron’s Address Book from ONE Archives’ collections;
- Experience Pompeii I.14 on Apple Vision Pro by Kai Feng Wu of the USC School of Cinematic Arts Media Arts and Practice program;
- Reimagining Language and Memory: Immersive AI and the Basque Boarding House of Los Angeles by Jordan Galczynski and Iker Otaegui of UCLA;
- Multispecies Ethnography and Virtual Reality in Bhutanese Highland Ecosystems by Brian Young of the UCLA Department of Anthropology;
- Digital Turf Project by Alex Casteel, Doug Daniels, and Connor Lim of UCLA;
- and Bunker Hill Refrain by Meredith Reitan of the USC Graduate School and Mats Borges, Curtis Fletcher, Suzanne Noruschat, and Andy Rutkowski of the USC Libraries.
To attend the symposium and hear presentations by the digital humanities scholars who created these immersive projects, visit the registration page. The event takes place from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Ahmanson Lab on the third floor of USC's Leavey Library.
Co-presented by the USC Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Study, USC Dornsife College, and the UCLA XR Initiative, the ITCH symposium was launched in 2023 with support from the Mellon Foundation for USC’s Humanities in a Digital World initiative led by Peter Mancall and Amy Braden of USC Dornsife College.
