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    Devon Elliott

    • PhD student, University of Western Ontario
    • Twitter: @devonelliott

    I'm a PhD student in the history department at the University of Western Ontario. I also work with Bill Turkel at his Lab for Humanistic Fabrication making things for my research interests, as well as experimenting with 3D printing technologies applied to the humanities.

    My Posts

    Humanities in 3D

    Thursday, April 21st, 2011 | devonelliott

    I’d like to talk with others about how we can digitize and re-materialize things. I’ve been working with 3D printing and rapid prototyping technologies to make tangible things from plans and blueprints of the past. In particular, I’m interested in the experiences humans had and have with those things, and what we can learn from exploring those interactions.

    More generally, in what other ways could those technologies be applied in the humanities? What about related technologies, like 3D scanning, that are also becoming more accessible? How do we go about collecting, curating, and communicating digital 3D models? Online communities that share 3D models and make them publicly available are growing, but those efforts have run into ambiguous areas of intellectual property law and curation.

    I’m interested in talking with others about specific technologies (software and hardware), or discussing some of the broader concerns over such practices. How can making inform our research? What can we learn from playing with things? What happens when we try to make things from our research?