Blog 3: Presentation at the DH2024 Conference in Washington D.C.

On 7 August 2024, Giovanni Pala presented our ongoing research at the DH2024 conference in Washington D.C. This is the largest digital humanities conference in the world, bringing together scholars and practitioners to share recent developments in the field and foster knowledge exchange.

The presentation, titled “A Novel Digital Methodology for the Study of Historical Sailing Performance,” introduced the overall approach developed by the project and presented the first stages of the technical pipeline. The project develops a novel digital methodology for studying the sailing performance of eighteenth-century Navy ships, a period when naval innovation was central to European competition. Since few ships from this period survive, the research turns to accurate contemporary scale models of these vessels. These models are captured via 3D scans and then tested using computational fluid dynamics (finite element methods and hydrodynamics analysis) to assess their design performance. A major difficulty with these scans is that many are not “watertight,” which creates problems when running them through computational fluid dynamics software. This paper presented the software developed to automatically “close” the models and render them ready for simulation. This work shows how digital tools can breathe new life into naval and maritime history, allowing us to study ships that no longer exist.

The abstract of this paper can be read here: https://dh24-abstracts.netlify.app/assets/pala_giovanni_maria_a_novel_digital_methodology_for_the_stud