The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) is pleased to announce that Marie Saldana, doctoral student in Architecture and Digital Humanities at the University of California, Los Angeles, has received the Paul Fortier prize awarded for the best paper presented by a young scholar at the 2014 Digital Humanities conference.
The Fortier Prize honours the memory of Paul Fortier, late University Distinguished Professor of French at the University of Manitoba, Canada. The award honors his long, active career in Humanities Computing and particularly remembers his kind encouragement and support for fledgling scholars in the field. The winner of the Fortier Prize receives a 500 GBP prize and a featured publication of the presentation in one of the ADHO publications.
Saldana won the prize for her presentation, “An Integrated Approach to the Procedural Modeling of Ancient Cities and Buildings,” which addresses issues of methodology for 3D modeling of Roman and Hellenistic architecture by arguing for a procedure in which polygons are generated based on “textual semantic description.” One Fortier Prize reviewer commends Saldana for her “[w]ell balanced interpretation with focus on the advances but also discussing the drawbacks of her method. (…) steps. Well presented, (…) and good replies to the interesting questions from the room”. The full version of Saldana’s presentation is available here.
Saldana’s presentation was selected from a group of finalists that included Anthony Durity & James O’Sullivan, “On Reusability and Electronic Literature”; Jérôme Jacquin & Xavier Gradoux, “IMPACT : un dispositif de transcription et de commentaire de l’oral, pour l’enseignement et la recherche”; and Jill Belli, “Unhappy? There’s an App for That: Digital Happiness, Data Mining, and Networks of Well-Being.”