Graffiti in Ancient Rome

This work-in-progress seeks to explore the relationships of the graffiti in ancient Rome, specifically in Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Our goals are

• to explore the relationships between inscriptions on a variety of scales (within a house, a city-block, the city)
• to improve visualization of the inscriptions, including location of inscriptions, to help researchers find new stories to tell about the people of ancient Rome

A team of students enrolled in CSCI335: Software Engineering via Web Applications worked on a prototype implementation of the application using insula I.8 in Pompeii. We are currently refining the requirements and goals of this project and working on collecting the data to be used by the application.

This digital humanities project allows computer science students to work in collaboration with an actual client, actual users, and learn advanced software development techniques and web applications. The Web Application Testing Lab can then use the developed application as a subject in evaluating new testing techniques.