{ subscribe_url:'/share/sites/library-of-congress-blogs/geography-and-maps.php' }

John Hessler

I am the Curator of the Jay I. Kislak Collections of the Archaeology and History of the Early Americas. On the faculty of the Rare Book School of the University of Virginia I teach the history and structure of the Masoamerican Codex. Interested in the intersection of computation and cultural heritage preservation, I have also taught seminars in computer vision & computational morphometrics at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, Italy. I am the founder of the BIO-COMP Lab (BCL), where our philosophy is to apply advanced mathematics and computation to challenging problems in archaeology and cultural heritage preservation. Our research focuses on the application computer vision and machine learning to the reconstruction of ceramic assemblages from archaeological contexts, and to the extraction of Maya hieroglyphs from damaged inscriptions. The author of more than one hundred articles and books, including the New York Times bestseller, MAP: Exploring the World, my writing and work has been featured in many national media outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, Discover Magazine, WIRED, CITYLAB, the BBC, CBS News and most recently on NPR’s All Things Considered, Bloomberg News and MAPLAB.

Most Recent Posts