Access & Antiquist

I’m delighted to announce that we recently opened up the Antiquist Google Group archive. It’s something that we really ought to have done a while back but, as so often happens, we made the original decision with an intention to review it and then never got round to it. Fortunately, Tom Elliott and Dan Pett kept us on our toes and the mailing list is now open to everyone (though you’ll still need to sign up to post).

To those not acquainted with Antiquist, it’s an international online community for IT practitioners in Cultural Heritage. As well as electronic correspondence we also meet up at occassional ArchCamps and even run postgraduate workshops. If you’re in that field, come and join us!

WAC on War update

I indicated to Yannis and Umberto that I would be happy to display or link to any information they provided on this blog and Umberto has requested that I post an email (which is similar to one on the – closed – WAC mailing list) that he sent to me. The full text is below. He also feels that the vote was not as close as I suggested in my blog to which I have replied that it is simply my recollection, as someone with a view of about 2/3 of the chamber. I am willing to be corrected by any independent authority on this matter. I am still concerned that no effort has been made to correct the misinterpretations of those in the press and blogosphere that read the earlier Press Release and continue to encourage Yannis and Umberto to do so.

Dear Leif,

Many thanks for your email. I’ll let Yannis deal with most of the issues you
raise as I believe he is in a more appropriate position to do so, but I would
like to clarify the point in which you call me into cause. In fact it is a
point that seems to have generated some really unnecessary confusion and which
I have already clarified more than once with Claire – sorry Claire you are now
going to hear this one again! – and I have also sent a message to the WAC list
about this (that for some strange reason not all members seem to have received
- a technical itch)

You mention that there were amendments made at the plenary, in fact made by
myself. I would like to clarify that there were no amendments whatsoever made
either by myself or anybody else. What happened at the plenary is that the
chairman (assuming an authority that he really should have not had) decided to
split the resolution into two. The two separate parts of the resolution were
both carried by the plenary. The resolution was split to allow separate votes,
and since the two votes generated the same result, in terms of the opinion of
the plenary it makes absolute sense to reestablish the resolution to its
original format.
Concerning the advice passed to the assembly (and eventually to the executive)
the only obvious slight rewording that became necessary was that by divorcing
the second paragraph from the first the reference to Iran had gone. I made this
absolutely clear at the plenary: the resolution only concerned Iran and not
just any relationship with the military. It is very unfortunate that despite my
clarification and despite what I believe should have been obvious the second
part of the resolution was not discussed by the executive – I assume in totally
good faith – for what it was but it was rather taken to mean any relationship
with the military. This mistake has become clear from the information provided
by Claire including the justifications why the executive decided not to follow
the advice of the plenary on the second paragraph. The splitting of the
original resolution has therefore created unncessary confusion and Yannis has
been right in reestablishing it to its orginal format. I hope you will consider
this clarification and what I am telling you now in the information you will
provide in your blog. I am confident that we are both keen to present the
evidence honestly and clearly, independently from our potential differences of
opinion. If there are still grey areas, please do get back in touch.

Cheers,
Umberto

British Archaeology

And now some good news:

The full text of a feature article I wrote in British Archaeology Magazine with Tom Goskar and Paul Cripps is now available online (although sadly without all the images due to copyright restriction).

WAC on War

Having not posted in an eternity, I thought I’d let a personal gripe motivate me into re-entering the blogosphere. I’m afraid it’s a little bit long but I think it’s important. In a nutshell, I’m concerned that the World Archaeological Congress’s voice with regard to archaeological ethics in conflict situations has been undermined by those whose task it is to support it.

The Issue

Two weeks ago I was at the 6th World Archaeological Congress in Dublin, Ireland and it was a pretty inspirational affair. For those not acquainted with it, it is both a large non-profit NGO with (paid) membership and a four-yearly conference that “seeks to promote interest in the past in all countries, to encourage the development of regionally-based histories and to foster international academic interaction”. This was my first attendance as a delegate and I found it both stimulating and challenging in equal measure. At the end of each conference an open ‘business plenary’ is held where motions can be voted on as advisories, before being submitted to an elected Council and Executive (constituted by a representatives from various global regions and indigenous communities) which will decide whether to accept it as a resolution. The plenary was attended by, in my estimation, about 500 or so of the 1,800 delegates. I was present at the plenary (held on the afternoon of July 4th) in order to support a motion setting up a WAC Internet and Global Communications (IGC) Taskforce. I was not present for the Council and Executive meetings (held later that evening).

One of the motions presented addressed an issue that had been vigorously debated at the conference, viz. the role of archaeologists in conflict situations. Roughly speaking, there are two camps: those (who we might call ‘objectors’) who believe that any collaboration with a military organisation provides tacit support for its aims, and those (who we might call ‘pragmatists’) who feel that, qua archaeologists, we have a duty to support the Hague Convention which specifically calls for the military to solicit expert advice in order to mitigate damage to cultural heritage in their operations. The motion, proposed by Yannis Hamilakis (Uni. Southampton, UK) and seconded by Umberto Albarella (Uni. Sheffield, UK), was in two sections. The first called for WAC to oppose any attack by the US on Iran. The second called for all archaeologists to resist any calls for advice or assistance by any military. As these are very different issues the chair requested the motion be split into two which was accepted by the seconder (the proposer having had to leave to catch a flight). The first motion passed almost unanimously, whereas (perhaps unsurprisingly) the second motion was debated heavily until the seconder requested that it be prefixed with (IIRC) “In specific regard to the motion addressing Iran above:”. The motion passed, but only narrowly, with approximately a third voting both for and against and a further third abstaining. The motions were then passed on to the Council and Executive for a formal decision.

I was therefore surprised to read in Sebastian Heath’s blog the following week that the entire motion in its original form had been passed as a resolution. The same day I came across a New Scientist article reporting the same thing. I contacted Sebastian to ask how he had been informed and he pointed me to Larry Rothfield’s blog which gave the text in full. Larry Rothfield told me that he had picked up on it from the iraqcrisis mailing list on July 9th. This had been posted by Chuck Jones who told me that he had seen it on several listserves, including RAD-ARCH-FORUM, that day and thus forwarded it on to iraqcrisis. The original poster was Yannis.

PRESS RELEASE
Archaeologists urged not to become part of the war planning against Iran

More than a thousand archaeologists from all over the world gathered in Dublin at the end of June to attend the 6th World Archaeological Congress (WAC). WAC is the only archaeological organisation with global elected representation, and one which places particular emphasis on archaeological ethics. (www.worldarchaeologicalcongress.org).

In the final plenary session on Friday 4 July 2008, the delegates passed a resolution which not only opposes any military attack on Iran, but also urges archaeologists not to offer any advice to the military on archaeological issues during the planning of such attack. In the recent past, archaeologists in the USA were approached by the military and were asked to provide expertise and advice on Iranian archaeological sites. The Congress felt that to provide such information at this stage is to offer “cultural credibility and respectability to the military action”. In 2003, prior to the invasion of Iraq, some archaeologists both in the USA and the UK were asked to provide (or volunteered) information on sites “to be spared”. Their actions attracted considerably criticism from many of their colleagues.

The text of the resolution is as follows:

“The 6th World Archaeological Congress expresses its strong opposition to any unilateral and unprovoked, covert or overt military action (including air strikes) against Iran by the US government, or by any other government. Such action will have catastrophic consequences for millions of people and will seriously endanger the cultural heritage of Iran and of the Middle East in general. Any differences with Iran (as with any other country) should be resolved through peaceful and diplomatic means.

The Congress also urges its members, all archaeologists and heritage professionals to resist any attempts by the military and governments to be co-opted in any planned military operation, for example by providing advice and expertise to the military on archaeological and cultural heritage matters. Such advice would provide cultural credibility and respectability to the military action. Archaeologists should continue emphasising instead the detrimental consequences of such actions for the people and the heritage of the area, for the past and the present alike. A universal refusal by archaeologists and others would send the message that such a plan is hugely unpopular amongst cultural professionals as well as the wider public”.

CONTACT: Dr Yannis Hamilakis, University of Southampton, co-ordinator, WAC “Archaeologist and War Task Force” (y.hamilakis@soton.ac.uk).

Dr Umberto Albarella, University of Sheffield, (u.albarella@sheffield.ac.uk)

As this was clearly not the text endorsed by the plenary let alone the Council Executive and there was no press release on the WAC website, I contacted the WAC committee on July 15th to ask if the original motion had indeed been formally passed. I received the following response from Claire Smith, President of WAC, cc’d to Yannis and Umberto:

Dear Leif,

The press release is not from WAC.

I can confirm, however, that Yannis Hamiliakis is Chair of the WAC Task Force on Archaeologists and War, and that both Yannis and Umberto are members of WAC.

This resolution was put forward to the Plenary session of WAC-6 and was passed to WAC on for consideration as policy, but was not adopted in full.

The WAC press release is below.  This was an issue of much debate, and I think the WAC press release provides fair coverage of this.

Regards,

Claire Smith, President

The Press Release, dated as July 14th, has since been posted on the WAC website. For reasons of space, I direct you to the website, but the key passage is

A resolution suggesting that no archaeologists or cultural heritage specialists assist the military in planning to protect the cultural heritage was passed by the Plenary session of the WAC-6 Congress for consideration by the World Archaeological Congress Assembly, Council and Executive but was not approved as a formal statement of the position of the organisation as a whole.

Jon Price, of the WAC Exec, also posted a comment on Larry Rothfield’s blog on the 15th to the same effect (i.e. that the original press release did not reflect WAC policy). The official release seemed (to me) to present a fair description both of the issues and what had happened and I replied with my opinion (also cc’ing Yannis and Umberto) that either WAC or the ‘Archaeologists and War’ Task Force should publish a clarification given that the earlier ‘Press Release’ was being widely cited in the press and blogosphere. Yannis has since responded, arguing that a clarification is not necessary as it was released before the results of the Council and Executive had been released and he implies that the distinction between WAC and the plenary are clear. He also noted that despite the negative sentiments expressed in the blogs mentioned above, it had been received favourably by “about a dozen, mostly anti-war blogs.” The New Scientist article was apparently written by a reporter who attended the meeting. If so, she took no note of the plenary/WAC distinction either from the session chair or from Yannis who claims to have told her. (I have offered to post the full text of this email if he desires.)

Is it really such a big deal?

It so happens that I have no particular axe to grind on the military question one way or the other. I personally believe that all archaeologists (like anyone else) must work within the dictates of their own conscience. This can only be done by applying their own ethical framework to the specific context in which they are working. As such, I am certain that the great majority of both objectors and pragmatists are trying to find what can only ever be an imperfect solution to a very difficult set of circumstances. I also believe that WAC is the perfect conference to express strongly held opinions and try to persuade others of their validity and importance. There are, however, a number of reasons why I consider misleading information such as that above to be a very important issue for those who believe in both freedom of discussion and freedom of conscience in archaeology.

• The first is that WAC is a uniquely multivocal forum in archaeology. It goes out of its way to enable everyone to have a voice, even if that voice runs counter to dominant ethical contexts (cf. the desire by some indigenous communities to restrict traditional knowledge on grounds of age or gender). The WAC congress is important specifically because it does not impose specific political or ideological agendas upon its membership, be they leftist, rightist, western, indigenous, or otherwise. Moves to do so seriously undermine WAC’s function and stymie open debate.

• WAC is a (non-profit) membership body. It has fee-paying members and thus pronouncements made by WAC can legitimately been seen to represent them. It is extremely important therefore that a) due process is followed in order to reach resolutions, b) that they are properly publicised and c) that WAC’s name is not misappropriated.

• The internet is notorious for false reporting and establishing the truth is frequently difficult. It is also vastly more powerful as a broadcasting mechanism than any other medium. It is therefore vital to rectify erroneous information as soon as possible.

• Documents liable to misinterpretation are counterproductive even for those it is intended to help because the inevitable comparison with more verifiable sources (such as the WAC website) is apt to lead to accusations of disingenuousness which may taint the legitimate arguments of others.

• WAC, as the original Press Release points out, “places particular emphasis on archaeological ethics.” It is critical that its own committees and Task Forces are not seen to be compromised by apparently unethical behaviour.
• And even though this is not a numbers game, for those who think they are important a ‘yes’ vote of 200 people in room of 500 random attendees from a conference with 1,800 delegates is not by any stretch of the imagination the people’s voice.

Have I just misunderstood?

I would very much like to think that there has been some kind of misunderstanding and that the original emails were simply taken out of context and misinterpreted by others. There is indeed no logical discrepancy between

In the final plenary session on Friday 4 July 2008, the delegates passed a resolution which not only opposes any military attack on Iran, but also urges archaeologists not to offer any advice to the military on archaeological issues during the planning of such attack

and

A resolution suggesting that no archaeologists or cultural heritage specialists assist the military in planning to protect the cultural heritage was passed by the Plenary session of the WAC-6 Congress for consideration by the World Archaeological Congress Assembly, Council and Executive but was not approved as a formal statement of the position of the organisation as a whole.

But i) citation of the original (unamended) motion implying that it was that text that was passed by the open plenary, ii) failure to disambiguate between the plenary and WAC as an organisation, iii) further failure to mention that it had not been approved by the Council and Executive (some 5 days after they had met), and iv) entitling it ‘PRESS RELEASE” and sending it to multiple public mailing lists seems prima facie to be willful misrepresentation. It is of even greater concern that this was posted by the Chair of the WAC ‘Archaeologists and War’ Task Force which, according to the official Press Release, has “an explicit remit to investigate the ethics implications of working with the military”.
WAC is now aware that the earlier Press Release has, at the very least, led to interpretations by the wider media that are totally at odds with WAC’s position and may have undermined it. I very much hope that they (or its issuers) will take steps to rectify that situation in which case I will be delighted to post a link (or the full text) of such clarification as an update to this post. If not, I fear that the WAC 2010 Inter-congress on “Archaeologists, Ethics and Armed Conflict” will be considered by little more than a sham.

Yorkie Talkie

I was at the CAA conference/ArchCamp 4 in York last week and, as ever, my tardiness in reporting has been shown up by masterblogger Jo and wikiwunderkind Kayt. There was some nice stuff as ever although admittedly much of it was incremental rather than revolutionary. It was mainly a great opportunity to see where everyone’s at these days. I particularly liked Chris Green’s work on a temporal GIS – it gives you a variety of options for showing the likelihood of elements occuring within a given timeframe – so I’m keen to try it out when he makes the code available.

The paper I gave was pretty well received so the main reason for this post is to upload an older version of it that I gave at the Methods Network Workshop on Geospatial Computing last year. There’s a bit more gubbins in this about Ptolemy’s Geography which is increasingly becoming a personal obsession of mine, but from about halfway through it more or less follows the same track as the CAA paper. I should add that I’ve changed my views on a couple of things since then – I wouldn’t include ‘imprecision’ as one of the facets as all maps are imprecise to some degree; I might include ‘Oriented & Non-Oriented’ as new facet – but I think it still makes an interesting discussion piece. My biggest concern with it is that I don’t have enough knowledge of GI Science to know whether this kind of thing has all been done before, so any feedback, positive or negative is greatly welcome.

Ptolemy’s Error: Truths and falsehoods in heterogeneous spatial data

Ptolemy’s Error Powerpoint

No Logo

With all the ruthless efficiency of a John West trawler, Southampton University has purged its new website of the much-beloved Dolphin logo. Although it also raises some catering-related quandaries as to how to replace the yet-more-beloved dolphin biscuits, I’m mainly concerned that it leaves our corporate image with no sense of porpoise.

Open Archaeology

I just wrote this article for with my colleagues Jo and Chris for Oxford Archaeology’s in-house newsletter. The idea was to write a reasonably light-hearted intro to our policy of Open Archaeology for non-techies. I’ve no idea whether it will interest anyone else but for what it’s worth, here it is:

Open Archaeology

Leif Isaksen, Jo Cook & Chris Puttick

‘Open Archaeology’ is a phrase that tends to get bandied about quite a lot in certain circles these days. But what exactly does it mean? Ultimately it stems from the view that the value of archaeology, like many other knowledge industries, lies in two related but distinct concepts. The first is that the information must in some way be accurate, either in describing the world or in reflecting the opinions of those who describe it. This is something that archaeologists, in general, do fairly well. The second is that the information must be available to others so that it can enrich their understanding as well. As a discipline, this is something that we tend to do rather badly. Open Archaeology is about the social, methodological and technical dynamics that will allow us to do it better, and hence make our work mean more to the people we’re doing it for (which hopefully isn’t just ourselves).

So what does that mean for you and me? First of all we need to think through our place in the whole lifecycle of archaeological exploration. Whether you’re writing reports over a hot desk at the Storey Institute or at the business end of a shovel, the work we do is just part of a long chain that ultimately ends up…where? We’d probably like to think that it wasn’t in a basement filing cabinet bearing a ‘beware of the leopard’ sign, but far too frequently that’s exactly the case. We preserve by record and then preserve our records in administrative formaldehyde. Then we wonder why nobody but archaeologists ever seems to give a hoot about our latest groundbreaking discovery. Which is a shame, because we certainly don’t do this for the money. But can we do anything about it?

The answer is yes. We live in an information age in which you no longer have to go to the Bodleian library to find out who scored the German goals in the 1966 World Cup Final. In the era of Wikipedia and Facebook, it’s possible for us to find out what we want, when we want, and how we want (as well as who said so). For example, our databases and grey literature contain information about several thousand projects including where and when they happened, who did them, and what they found there. It would be great if every time we did a new excavation we could get an instant report on what we had done nearby. It would be even greater if we could immediately find out what everyone had done nearby. And the NMR, and the SMR, and who we hired plant from, etc., etc., etc. Life would be easier, costs would be lower (and thus wages higher), our significant others would think we did something useful for a change and, most of all, archaeology would be a more valuable resource for archaeologists and non-archaeologists alike. So much for the dream, what’s the reality?

Successful information sharing is based on three principles: Open Data, Open Standards, and Open Technologies (that’s why we call it Open Archaeology). Open Data means that we are willing to share our data so that others can use it as well. Partly because it makes them more likely to share theirs with us, and partly because it was never ours to begin with. Archaeology is not the domain of archaeologists, it the shared heritage of a nation (of humanity, even). Open Standards are the rules by which we share it. There are many ways to tell people your ideas, from MIDAS-compliant web-feeds to sketches on the back of a cigarette packet. Both have their place, but Open Standards like the former make life much quicker and cheaper in the long (and medium) run. And cigarettes are so expensive these days. Open Technologies mean that I don’t have to pay through the nose just so I can see the trench CAD plan you just sent me. ‘Open Source’ software (to use the jargon) also means that I don’t have to be content to use my computer just as it is. I, or my geeky pals in the IT department, can change it to fit my needs.

‘OK, sounds reasonable enough I suppose. So what’s Oxford Archaeology doing about it then?’ Well, we’ve got a lot of work to do. Some of it is technical, but most of it is about all of us contributing to making our stuff more available. Amongst the specific projects we are committed to are:

• seeking funding to digitise our legacy data (approximately 1.7m items!)

• providing access to our data as soon as we are able, including the raw data in the form of context sheets, site photographs and images of key artefacts

• IT tools for everyone’s use (established and experimental) such as wikis to facilitate discussion, and project teams blogs to help record the process of discovery, interpretation and re-interpretation.

• a content management system that will enable us to visibly credit people for all the work they do – internally and externally.

At the end of the day, Open Archaeology isn’t really anything new after all. It’s just what ‘Archaeology’ ought to be.

Heavy Petting

One of the remarkable things about the emergent Mashup Culture is that you never quite know when you’re going to find yourself repurposed. Whilst doing a little a blog admin this evening (OK, I admit it, I wanted to check my stats) I was intrigued to note that my last post had been linked to by

http://petcommunity.net/6-pet-community-june-21-2007-729-pm

Now, seeing as my entire pet inventory runs to two dead cats (and an affection for icanhascheezburger.com) a little further investigation seemed in order. Much to my bewilderment, there on the petcommunity newsfeed was a snippet of my post nestled between other feeds, either mourning the untimely demise of ‘Snuggles’ and asking about “good value gerbil insurance”, or informing readers of new fish in stock at Skipton Pet Centre (better than old fish in the skip at Stockton Pet Centre, I guess), or headlining with – the rather alarmist – “Trouble in Puppy Paradise”. It was only after starting to read about one unfortunate young lady’s troubles in coming out to the lesbian community that I began to realise that both us seemed to be attending the wrong party (as it were). In fact it appears that we had been aggregated on the basis of our posts containing the word ‘pet’ (as in ‘pet projects’) and ‘community’ (as in ‘community driven’).

So there you go, folks. Be careful what you post about because you might just wind up there. Or thereabouts. Right, I’m off to buy some gerbil insurance.

PS If you’ve turned up hoping for something interesting/relevant to read then I can do no better than redirect you to Mia’s latest post.

News from the Ouse

 

 

On Tuesday I headed off for an interesting day in York and a bit of a natter with the ADS gang. The idea was to bounce around some ideas for collaboration with Antiquist, as well as get their angle on the future of archaeological data repositories and much else besides. The thoughts below are my take on some topics arising from the discussion (mainly with Stuart Jeffrey and Julian Richards, though with fleeting conversations with most of the rest of the team as well).

Data Sharing

 

 

 

One of the things that most people seem agreed upon these days is that a distributed model for data sharing is a Good Thing, but that it’s not so easy to accomplish in practice. Whilst an important debate as to the legal and ethical aspects of making this data available continues to unfold, one of the other pieces of the jigsaw revolves around agreeing on data standards, and what ought to be done if organisations can’t (or won’t) comply with them. A few developments seem to be taking this closer to reality however, and the view from ADS is that we may be closer than we think. The first factor, which I touched on in my last post, is that a number of repositories are beginning to expose their data as web services, albeit privately, and these may begin to emerge as de facto standards. This is not a fact that will please everyone. Legitimate concerns about transparency need to be raised, and, prior to seeing the documentation which is currently lacking, it’s hard to know how viable they are for general uptake, although Stuart seems positive that they are generally based on standards advocated by e.g., FISH. Markup Languages like KML have also demonstrated that it is possible for useful standards to emerge from organisations who have developed them for their own needs. The real issue lies in whether those organisations will release them for open management by the community or whether they will want to maintain control of them.

This relates heavily to the second aspect of the problem – for a distributed network of repositories to function, they all have to sing from the same songsheet, and the idea of using HEIRNET as a registry of web services would be predicated on that fact. In some ways these next few months could be interesting as we begin to move away from a situation in which there are no immediate solutions to providing archaeological web services to one in in which there could be several potential candidates. As is frequently the case with such things, the one most likely to gain acceptance is the one which gains the most adherents early on. I, for one, will be voicing support for the most open and community-driven. With that in mind, I look forward to seeing a few more specifications popping up in the weeks ahead. Let battle commence.

Search Party

Stuart gave me a demo of the ArchaeoBrowser which I liked a lot (and a nod to Stewart Waller for the nice interface) but also provides a cautionary tale about using proprietary software solutions. Effectively it’s a browsing tool for archaeological entities across the entire UK drawn from a large number of HEIRs. He was at pains to point out that the dataset is not yet perfect, but it contains a million+ records and uses faceted classification in order to give an ultra-quick search result which can be done either spatially or semantically. The system has its drawbacks – the indexing has be done on the entire aggregated dataset so effectively it has to copy their data and hold it centrally. The final results ultimately point the user back to a URL hosted at the original HEIR, there is potential for broken links and there’s no live updating (a problem I’m familiar with from the VLMA). On the other hand, the ability to cross search and retrieve heterogeneous data in a common format using a common schema is really cool. But there’s a final twist. ADUIRI, the company who created the groovy but proprietary indexing software have ceased to exist. That means there’s some serious work to be done before any new information can be introduced to the system, if at all.

 

 

York have also just received a grant from the recent AHRC-JISC-EPSRC funding round to undertake their Archaeotools project which will look at further methods for data mining an ever increasing mountain of material. By using Natural Language Processing to harvest data from grey literature, it could revolutionise our understanding of what’s ‘out there’. And I’m glad to hear they’re committed to using OS solutions this time round

The Great Antiquist Jamboree/CodeCamp/SwapShop/Thing

 

One of the ideas we knocked about was something I’ve also discussed with Mark Lake, Dave Wheatley & Graeme Earl – namely to get the Antiquist CodeCamp (OK, so we do really need a new name for it) off the ground. The plan as such is to have an annual event over several days in which Master’s students from the various Arch/IT courses can attend workshops run by professional practitioners and tackle pet projects with help from their peers. As well as providing skills which would be of immediate benefit to the students, it would also be a practical exercise in collaboration and a great opportunity for them to network. There may be some work to do in getting the university beancounters to see the benefit in all this, but if the students get on board as well then the logistical problems will hopefully take care of themselves (yes, I know that’s naïve, but sometimes you just have to think positive).

Internet Archaeology

Lastly, one comment from Judith Winters, the editor of Internet Archaeology, really fired my imagination. Mike Charno gave us a demo of an integrated IA article and ADS dataset which were an examplar of the LEAP project at CAA UK earlier this year. I found the ability to have an article which actually has the complete supporting data embedded within it revolutionary, so I was delighted to hear that once the practicalities of this kind of integration have been ironed out they hope to start partnering with folks outside York/ADS on similar projects (cf. StORe).

Now where did I put that Crossbones report…?

 

CA(A) Part II

Welcome back to Part II of the CompAppArch and ClassAssoc executive summaries. If you missed all the calorific goodness of Part I you can find it here. This installment is something of a lucky dip, focussing on, well, whatever else my capricious little mind has found absorbing in the past couple of weeks. It’ll start off with a few random papers and conversations from CAA followed by some general musings on CA in Birmingham.

CAA (cont.)

First, as promised in Part I, comes mention of Sorin Hermon (PIN, Florence) and Joanna Nikodem (University of Bielsko-Biala, Poland)’s work on a ‘3D Modelling Pipeline’. Those of you who have heard my Crossbones shpiel will know that I’m quite in favour of ‘ugly’ 3D. Call it the bare bones if you will (and I have), but I’m talking about the kind of stuff that enables you to do serious analysis, even if you wouldn’t bring it home to meet your mother. Sorin and Joanna have created an application that pipes a MySQL database together with the marvellous OS 3D software Blender in order to autoconstruct building hypotheses. The DB enables the user to manipulate variables associated with confidence and the like, whilst a model of the building itself is automatically constructed by Blender using template components. The result is that different possible alternatives can be explored with ease whilst being transparent about the source data. I haven’t checked out the Blender API yet, but I played with the tool itself a while back and, and at least to non-3dsmaxers like myself, it looks pretty darn cool.

Some 3D underwater projects that seem worth checking out are one using Multi-beam Sonar Data, and another one looking at the submarine H. L. Hunley. This was the first submarine to successfully attack and sink another warvessel, but catastrophe struck shortly afterwards and it sunk killing all 9 men on board (their victims were somewhat more fortunate, being able to cling to the rigging of their ship as it lay in the shallow waters of Charleston Harbour). The wreck was found recently, raised in 2000 and a major project is now underway to excavate it. Besides its remarkable condition, I was amazed by the fact that it was single skinned and just 4′ high by 3.5′ feet wide.

The GRASS workshop held by Ben Ducke finally gave me the opportunity to play around with the GRASS/Paraview/QGIS dreamteam that gets talked about so much these days. And the verdict is: IBTFAD (which leaves me a dollar up ). I’ve already been working with QGIS for a pet project on Ptolemy’s Geography, and it’s a nice tool for hauling data in from every-which-where. It doesn’t have a lot of bite when it comes to any kind of geoprocessing though so they’ve built a nice cuddly frontend to the GRASS toolbox that let’s you do things in a relatively painfree fashion. Paraview, on the other hand, is seriously hardcore 3d visualization technology. Ben (or one of his buddies) has stuck the whole lot, along with portable UNIX into a pendrive-friendly 600MB directory so that you can run it all from USB. It’s a neat trick and works pretty well, but you still need to know the basics of UNIX if those all important first few hours aren’t going to make your brain bleed. That’s where things began to get interesting…

…After the workshop I had a chat with Ben and several others, including Scott Madry, Robert Hecht and Martijn van Leusen, to figure out how we might make OS GIS a more viable alternative to the huge wedges of cash we voluntarily hand out for multiple licenses of proprietary software. That’s not to say that ArcGIS might not have its place, rather that it still seems to be standard practice to pay first and ask questions later. The outcome is our intention to create a consortium of archaeologists commited to:

a) identifying what critical features may still be lacking in OS GIS for archaeologists (e.g. essential cartographical tools)

b) implementing them

c) (most importantly) documenting the whole lot

I’ll blog about this further once we’ve got a website up – possibly over at OSGeo:Archaeology?

CA

It’s probably not the done thing to say, but Birmingham University always reminds me a little of st custard’s. I vaguely recall being told by someone that it was built by a madman, but that may have been idle speculation on their part. In any case, I didn’t get to see a lot of it as the conference was held in the Crowne Plaza Hotel which has a rather fetching view of Queensway. That’s actually quite a shame as I think the Birmingham cityscape is about as close as modern Brits can get to experiencing ancient Rome. It’s almost as if a sort of mania took over and people just kept building impossibly large buildings on top of one another in a kind of giant’s playground. No particular sense of function or propriety, just sodding big buildings. I love it.

I was there to give a paper on a panel with some chums of mine from the Digital Classicist. For those of you unacquainted this sterling institution, they’re an online community/hub/resource centre for, well, classicists working digitally I guess. Their focus is frequently more textual than us archae-types so I was presenting on the use of Network Analysis as an approach to understanding ancient conceptions of space. I fear that the 5.00am start needed to get me there for 8.00 may have taken my edge off my performance somewhat but the conversations afterwards were great – especially with Melissa Terras, who’s PhD work on auto-text recognition of the Vindolanda Tablets was ridiculously impressive. Although I hang around Arundel House (home of DC and Methods Network) whenever I can, it seems there’s a lot more potential for collaborative work than currently takes place and not enough folks at both CAA and DRH/A.

The rest of the proceedings were enjoyable enough – some interesting papers on pedagogy and porticoes in Rome, but most fascinating (not to mention frustrating) was the plenary lecture given by Prof. Margaret Mullett on ‘History and Truth, Lies and Fiction: Byzantium and the Classical Tradition 25 Years on’. The reason for this was that the Classical Association conference and 40th Byzantine Studies Spring Symposium fell together so it was an address to both. As a classicist I hasten to add that I understood barely any of it, but my byzantinist sources inform me that they didn’t fare much better. Having said that, I did learn that

a) the 1140s were one of the most dynamic decades for literature in all of European history, and

b) there’s a Byzantine play (called ‘the Virgin’s Voice’?) set over the crucifixion and resurrection, in which Mary’s dialogue is taken principally from Euripides’ Medea.

Now that’s got to be worth reading.