The Summer Research Students

August 5, 2021

Good Morning from the research Students!

Did you miss us? As our summers start to wrap up, we wanted to give everyone an update on what we’ve been doing this whole time!

Ava – This summer I’ve been doing a lot of work in ARCGIS and Cyclone! I finished up a model of Orsanmichele that we sent to the monastery, and that should be available on our website soon. Speaking of the website, I’ve designed a few new pages and cleaned up some of our coding for the layouts. I’ve also cleaned up and added data and widgets to our interactive map, and created a database of our artworks and buildings – thanks Ellie for collecting a lot of the information! I’m still working through S. Maria Novella, and I’ve been updating the blog and Twitter – you should definitely follow us (@florenceasitwas)!

Ellie – This summer has been a ton of data entry, and trying to consolidate all of our information from different sources. I’ve gotten good at maintaining the website, and cleaned up a ton of broken links leftover from website updates. Also on the website, I updated our encyclopedia with some new pages – and its still growing! I practiced my photogrammetry, and worked through a bunch of artworks in our Sketchfab collection. I’m currently working on editing the model of S. Lorenzo, and getting ready to take Prof. Bent’s class on the Medici family in the fall!

Elyssa – So far I've added objects and sites in Florence to our database, researched objects we could reasonably drive to from Lexington to create photogrammetry models of them and added those we’ll certainly do this summer to the database, learned the entire process of photogrammetry from beginning to end to use on those objects, wrote annotations for the models and about the artists that will be added soon, did some website management with the Potree models, and started the process of my senior thesis which will involve analysis of Florentine liturgical manuscript illuminations from the 1370s using artificial intelligence.

And, what I’m sure you all came to this post for, a list of the other things we’ve done this summer:

• - Walk Prof. Bent’s dogs
• - Reread the entirety of the Harry Potter series
• - Worked in a law clinic
• - Finished the soccer summer workout packet
• - Got really good at paddle boarding
• - Visited Hawaii
• - Sung Karaoke
• - Founds out I was really good at open water swimming
• - Found out I was really bad at open water swimming (two different students)
• - Plenty of hiking
• - Visited Iceland
• - Attended a Mets game
• - About 100,0000 games of Codenames and Categories
• - Took a data science course
• - Rock Climbing
• - Discovered new Soundcloud artists
• - Hiking in the Pacific Northwest (Did not see a bear – very disappointing)

Thanks y'all! Can't wait to keep working on this project, hopefully with more work complete in the fall!

The LexVegas Summer Students