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This Episode:
We talk with Dr. Matthew Nicholls, Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Reading, and the creator of the Virtual Rome project. We discuss the difficulties of creating a 3-D, street-level map of Ancient Rome, as well as the upcoming massive open online course based upon it. (33min)
Dr. Nicholls' previous AMA on AskHistorians.
The next session of the online course of Rome: a Virtual Tour of the Ancient City will begin October 9th. You can learn more and sign up for free here.
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Thanks all!
Previous Episodes and Discussion
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I did my MA at Reading with Matthew - one of the nicest people I've ever met, and an excellent teacher. It's great to see his course getting to a wider audience :)
Special thanks to Eric Hacke, Will Raybould, Bill Rubin, Elm, Jonathan Wallace, Charles-Eric Lemelin, Mark Katerberg, William Ryan, Stuart Gorman, Daniel Schmidt, Rodney Norris, Alex Gidumal, Michael Moore, Collum Milne, Miles Stapleton, Grant Taylor, Vlad, and Max M. for their generous support of the podcast through the AskHistorians Patreon. And thanks to all our new supporters as well!
And a very big thank you to Dr. Nicholls for coming back to visit AskHistorians once again. I highly encourage everyone to go sign up for the Rome: a Virtual Tour of the Ancient City.
The course is phenomenal, both the reconstruction of Rome and all of the friendly tutelage from Dr. Nicholls and the other instructors.
Thank all of you for doing this episode!
Bit of a tangential question but I remember there was a college working on the The Forma Urbis Romae, but I haven't been able to find anything about how far along they've come have you used any of their data and is the map nearing completion?
I skimmed through the AMA so I apologize if these questions were answered there. I have a few questions that would be great if you could answer. If not, thank you for your time, I really appreciated this episode of the podcast.
You mentioned that you picked a 4th Century AD date. Obviously, that's quite a long time since the 1st Century BC time period that most think of with Rome. What major features, monuments, or neighborhoods would have changed over that time? Any sense of what was previously located in those areas? Were there any major architectural style changes? Finally, how did the size of the city vary between the two periods?