Maritime Landscapes and Structures

Ships sailed on landscapes. Their operations invariably start and end on a harbor, quay, pier, jetty, dock, or anchorage. Only their loss sometimes occurred on the sea, away from land, or on some inhospitable stretch of coast.

The data collected and analyzed under the label landscapes pertain to both the environments and the populations that inhabited them. We are interested in the history of the lands our ships touched, their populations, their cultures, their subsistence patterns, their ecological singularities, and all the human activities that impacted the construction, operation and loss of ships.

Our main focus is to discuss ways in which these data can be shared and used as thinking tools that explain the past and the present, and help us imagine the future.

Our questions are the main questions of Anthropology: Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? What can we know?

Center for the Study of Digital Libraries (CSDL)

Department of Visualization (VizLab)

J. Richard Steffy Ship Reconstruction Laboratory (ShipLAB).