Procedural Shape Modeling in Digital Humanities: Potentials and Issues

Procedural modeling is a technology that has great potential to make the abundant variety of shapes that have to be dealt with in Digital Humanities accessible and understandable. There is a gap, however, between technology on the one hand and the needs and requirements of the users in the Humanities community. In this paper we analyze the reasons for the limited uptake of procedural modeling and sketch possible ways to circumvent the problem. The key insight is that we have to find matching concepts in both fields, which are on the one hand grounded in the way shape is explained, e.g., in art history, but which can also be formalized to make them accessible to digital computers.