Ethan Gruber

Web Applications Developer, University of Virginia Library

3d modeler, Pompeii Forum Project, University of Virginia

I am a web application developer for Digital Research and Scholarship, a division of the University of Virginia Library. I specialize in several XML standards common to libraries, such as EAD and TEI, as well as XSLT and design scripting such as CSS and Javascript. I am the principle project manager behind the University of Virginia Art Museum Numismatic Collection and advocate for the use of EAD for numismatic collections and, on the whole, museum collections. The code of the University of Virgina Numismatic Project has been released openly to the community through sourceforge with the Numishare project. Numishare has to date been adopted by one other institution.

In addition to technical skills, I am a scholar. I have a BA in History from the Pennsylvania State University, focusing primarily on Roman history. At the University of Virginia, I am taking classes within the classical art and archaeology program. I have worked with IATH on the Rome Reborn project to ensure the model is as topographically accurate as possible and made necessary changes to the model. I am skilled in 3D modeling with Autodesk Maya and often use it as a tool in my academic research. In this respect, I recently wrote a post on the Scholars Lab blog about the application of lighting simulation in observing ancient artwork in its historical context in Pompeii’s House of the Faun. I followed this up with another post about Illuminating Historical Architecture, which tackles the issue of reconstructing the 3rd century A.D. House of the Drinking Contest in Seleucia Pieria (the port city of Roman Antioch) and subsequent lighting simulation.