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…?

 

HEIR tonic

Finally back in the saddle after a month exploring the delights of Memphis and Locombia, I spent an extremely enjoyable day at the HEIRNET Data Sans Frontières conference and it raised a few points worth blogging about.

The first is that it felt as though there is increasing acceptance that standalone data provision websites – i.e. those that attempt to provide the data they hold in a strictly defined and limited fashion – are failing to attain their potential because you cannot second-guess the user. The result is unnecessarily large overheads and dissatisfied customers (whoever they may be). The only solution is to separate your data model from its representation so that others can find new ways to repurpose and ‘mash-up’ your information. It’s generally these green shoots of innovation that make the internet the all-things-to-all-people powertool that it is today.

So warm, fluffy feelings all round then? Well maybe – but there’s a long way to go yet. Perhaps illustrative of some of the things left to be done was the response to a question I asked as to whether the new data access websites offered by English Heritage and the SWISH Partnership (representing Scotland & Wales) were built upon publicly accessible web services so that other websites could use their data. SWISH seemed to be on the ball – not yet, was the answer, but it’s very much on our agenda. About EH’s HeritageGateway, however, there was considerably more conferring. And then came the thunderbolt, in the friendly form of Crispin Flower of Exegesis who’s been working on the system (I paraphrase considerably):
‘Yes – the HeritageGateway site does build upon web services offered by contributing data providers.’

And are they public?

‘Well, that all depends on the resource provider because they generally host their own data and maintain rights over it.’

So in other words, all that, e.g., Middleshire County Council now have to do to make their HER available for computational use is push the big red button marked “toggle public web service” and away we go?

‘Metaphorically, yes.’

Well I’ll be damned. OK – so it’s not quiiiite that simple, because the HeritageGateway can’t yet cover all counties (there are still a number of councils out there who’s IT budget only runs to fixing the toaster), and those web services there are aren’t fully documented yet, but most of all it’s up to us, all of us, to persuade those data providers that can to push that big red button. So I shall start by personally offering to buy a round for the entire IT team of the first council to do it.

The other thing the conference brought up, in conjunction with a later conversation I had with my friend Gabby Bodard, of the Digital Classicist, is that community fever seems to be spreading. Now this is undeniably a Good Thing. Antiquist, Dijklas, DigiMed, IOSA, Methods Network, EPOCH, FISH, the HEIRNET discussion forum, and so on, all provide important services and fora for thought and collaboration. But there is currently a danger that in our unquestionable desire to be relevant and useful, we build the same fences and suffer the same mission creep as the standalone websites we criticize. My open question to all those groups (and any I’ve inevitably missed out) is: how can we build an ecosystem of communties that directly interact with, and support, the services and resources provided by others?

Answers by WebFeed please.

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.

CA(A) Part I

Well, this has taken a lot longer than it should but it’s probably time to pull my finger out and write up some thoughts on CAA and CA as promised. Fortunately Kayt has done much of the hard work of describing the sophisticated cut and thrust of post-prandial Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology conversation at exclusive eateries such as the Tadjiki Tearoom, 12 Apostel, and a variety of sausage stands. ArchCamp Drei has also been reported in some detail, so that just leaves me to cover the light-hearted frippery of the conference proper Following that, a small update on the Friday of the Classical Association’s annual bash at Birmingham University. The fact I’m trying to fit this in with a half-a-dozen other things before my jaunt to Colombia means I’m going to have to write it over two posts. Don’t you just love a cliff-hanger?

As with most conferences of CAA’s size, the hardest part of being a participant is choosing which sessions to attend. This year there were 8 parallel tracks (occasionally on similar subjects, which cost me half my audience whilst presenting Crossbones :-/). Although many of the papers were interesting there wasn’t a great deal that felt groundbreaking. Nonetheless, two sessions in particular left me with lots to reflect on, viz. ‘Intelligent Knowledge Retrieval’ (chaired by Elisabeth Jerem), and ‘Asking Questions – Setting Standards’ (chaired by David Wheatley). I’ll cover each session in its own section in Part I, followed by some of the choicer tidbits from other ones and CA in Part II.

Intelligent Knowledge Retrieval

Having got the feeling feeling that Archaeology is still somewhat behind the curve when it come to data storage, with Object databases (or should that be Associative DBs?) implemented relationally, and RDF still an esoteric whisper, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this session. It turned out to be a terrific mix of projects which seemed both to break new ground whilst being disarmingly honest about their limitations.

First out the gate was HyperRecord, a REST-based data network put together by the Capitoline Museums, Bibliotheca Hertziana and a variety of other partners. The premise was relatively simple. Each data provider exposes all their records, be they text records, images, multimedia or whatever, as XML using Universal Resource Names (URNs). The record can also refer to other URNs, and so repositories can then send requests to other datastores for any other information they may hold with relevance to that URN. Because URNs don’t just refer to things, but concepts as well (such as ‘Minoan’, or ‘porcelain’), this can be a very powerful tool indeed. In fact the concern is that it could be a little too powerful. There could be some serious scalability issues if it ever becomes popular, but that wasn’t really what grabbed my attention. The great news is that the partners were putting all their stuff online in XML for free.

No, you didn’t misread that.

Online.

XML.

Free.

When we asked how they would get other organisations to do the same, Klaus Werner, presenting, was honest enough to give the expected answer – “we believe this is the way forward and we hope that others will see from it that openness is an advantage”. Let’s hope they do.

Second was an interesting content repository, TARCHNA, that combined CIDOC CRMed data with expert-written content, so that you could easily swing from factoid to overview and back again. This one specifically focussed on those wiley Etruscans but the model could be used with any reasonably focussed CH dataset. And the use of CRM suggests it might not be too hard to merge different projects to a certain degree. The biggest downside is probably the most over-laboured acronym I’ve heard since forever (Towards ARChaeological Heritage New Accessability? Give me a break…). It’s also designed to be standalone, so integration possibilities may not have been entirely thought through, but I wouldn’t want to judge that from here. Currently it looks very nice indeed.

Third, was Hans ‘Paai’ Paijman’s really interesting work using Vector Space Modelling and Supervised Machine Learning to automatically markup semantically important words and phrases, like dates, out of Archaeological grey literature. And because it uses CRM categories, you can then search over approximately synonymous stuff (e.g. ‘Augustan’/'1 A.D’.) His stuff is specifically designed to work with documents in Dutch but again, the principle is applicable across the board. Using it to start exploring the vast back catalogue of data available in the UK could throw up some really fascinating results, including where we excavate and what time periods archaeologists tend to focus on.

Asking Questions – Setting Standards

Unfortunately I missed the first part of this session which was held on Thursday afternoon and only managed parts 2 & 3 on Friday Morning (by which time my constitution finally seemed to be adapting once again to hearty German fayre). All the papers presented were very interesting, but the following two seem particularly worthy of comment.

First of all, one of Sorin Hermon’s projects from the PIN stable got me all excited for the second time that week (the other project to be described later). The Archive Mapper for Archaeology (AMA) is a mapping tool that converts relational databases into CIDOC-CRM encoding on the fly. Sure, you’ve got to decide on the mapping yourself, but once it’s done you can handle the database in either way. This is really important because one of the biggest problems in CRM uptake is that it’s notoriously difficult for non-techies to get their head around. If you can have your cake and eat it, then things might really take off. There wasn’t a lot of fanfar around this, and there might be all sorts of problems around performance, etc. but, if it really does what it says it does, this would get my vote for the Paper-most-likely-be-a-success-and-retire-to-a-beach-house-in-Malibu.

Next, Karina Rodriguez-Echevarria rolled out another potential barnstormer. OK, so there was enough business jargon to kill even the most jaded of archaeological practitioners – but the message was in complete harmony with the Antiquist philosophy. Rather than working in isolation in the bizarre hope that our own research project/business model/heritage policy will bring us and our departments untold success (whilst making the same dumb mistakes and paying the same high price as everyone else), let’s sit down and chat once in a while. Y’know, kick around a few ideas maybe – even help each other (OK, so the last one’s crazy talk). The so-called Network of Excellence Centres (I did warn you about the jargon) are intended to do just that – bringing together CH practitioners within a regional context as well as to other local networks. Antiquist is currently in discussion to see how we we can mutually support our respective communities.

Stop Press

Whilst I was trawling through the accumulated flotsam and jetsam that had drifted into my blog-aggregator, a couple of pearls bobbed to the surface. You know, the kind of things that put an irrepressible smile on your face even after a 24-hour stint without your nicorette tabs. First was the following YouTubeVideo which Mia Ridge reported on. It’s some 3D magic done by one of the Max-Planck-Institutes (of which I’ve been a fan since I did some work with them on the Virtual Lightbox for Museums and Archives). Now if only I could find just a single decent photo of myself

Secondly, hats off to Steve White at Online-Archaeology for the most obvious/brilliant addition to an archaeological map I’ve seen anywhere so far. It’s Wikipedia in a Googlemap. Genius.

Irrational Exuberance

Labs vs. liberty

I got myself into a rather light-hearted dispute today when I posted on Antiquist about my unsuppressable excitement over Photosynth, one of Microsoft’s attempts to still seem happenin’ in the wake of the all-conquering Google Labs (note that MS now also have their own Microsoft Live Labs, no doubt to imply the presence of happy coders chuckling to each other over their organic tofu burgers as they invent blue-sky apps with no thought for the MS bottom line). In response to my exuberance, Sebastian Rahtz (who’s opinion I generally hold in high regard, I should add) commented, with a hint jocularity (I hope), that I was ‘no better than the BBC’. He wasn’t referring to the Auntie Beeb of Hutton Inquiry fame, however, fighting tooth-and-nail for truth and justice against the mandarins of Whitehall. No, it was the fawning and effeminate BBC that makes my toes curl every time I watch Click-Online (not often), and, as Chris pointed out to me the other day, thinks that ‘IT news’ means another product launch. And, of course, he had a point. There I was, gurgling like a baby about a software concept over which I can do nothing but click’n’tilt. No API, no roadmap, not even use of my own data. But boy, does it look good. Where I’m going with this is to ask what we should be getting excited about that we’re not, and whether I’m just working for the man when I start shouting Gatesy’s latest toys all around the place?

In answer to the first, there are some pretty cool OS toys out there: check out Project Looking Glass, for example, or Zimbra. Amarok kicked iTunes ass the firt time I used it: don’t have album art? – it’ll auto-download from Amazon. Want to know about the band? -it’ll ask Wikipedia for you. Simple, sure – but a really great use of open webservices (in fact I’m told the latest version of iTunes does something similar). And if Firefox were a woman I’d probably want to marry her. So why don’t we bang the drum about these things much more? Sometimes, it’s because they involve more setting up time than most people are willing to invest (like PLG and Zimbra). Sometimes it’s because they come pre-installed so you just kind of take them for granted (Amarok on KDE). And sometimes their true beauty only becomes clear after a while (it’s hard to show why I find Firefox preferable to IE7 in 2 minutes – it’s all about the plugins).

So what about the other side? On the one hand, it’s not only hard not to start jumping around when you have a ‘Google Earth’ moment (you remember your first time, don’t you? Of course you do) – it’s arguably inspirational. Would neogeography be what it is today without Googlemaps? Nope. Would even KDE be what it is without Windows? Nope (keep quiet in the back, Mac fans). Just because something is proprietary doesn’t mean it can’t stimulate the OS community to explore new directions and maybe even do them better. And hell, there’s nothing wrong with people making a few quid by out-thinking the competition. But, and there is a but, are we being taken in useful directions? Or are we simply being distracted by closed boxes – lovely looking baubles that will never play a truly constructive role in our web 2.0-inspired collaborative future?

I still don’t know.

Crossbones Goes Public

Crossbones

Finally(!) got Crossbones washed, brushed, dressed and in a state worthy of meeting the general public (I hope). As ever, the 20/80 rule applies, and suddenly I realised there was a whole bunch of manual writing (now in README.TXT), licensing (ditto) and general other gubbins (ditto again) to sort out, as well as making sure that the thing would actually run on linux OK, open in AutoCAD properly (without busting it in ArcScene), and so on, and so on. I’m too much of a coding purist to stick it on SF without sorting out the javadocing (yeah, I know I should do it while I’m coding) – and unit tests? let’s not even go there…

Still, it’s fun to sling stuff over the wall now and again. Let’s see what the lions make of it .

Moleskine is In

My current geeky pride and joy is my oh-so-analog Moleskine diary which I picked up for a song (a mere £10!) at Blackwells a couple of weeks back. I was first put onto them by Jo, who got one for her hipster PDA. I’d printed out myself a hipster a while back but the bulldog clip was beginning to etch a tattoo in my ass so an alternative binding method seemed called for. Well, the long and short of it is that my hipster now lurks in the special magic-pockety bit at the back, whereas the first 3 pages (covering January to June in itty-bitty 1-line-per-day mode) have now become The Three Most Important Pages In My Life. I’m still experimenting with the rest as a kind of to-do-list-cum-general-ponderances but haven’t quite settled on a proper methodology yet. Anyway, the reason I bring it up is that whilst brandishing it at ArchCamp 2 in a ‘check-out-my-sexy-new-Moleskine-diary’ sort of a way, it turned out that pretty much everyone else already had one (apart from Jo who has 3). So there you go. Moleskine appears to be In.

CAAtching up

After a bout of blogging lethargy I’ve been prompted by my friend and colleague Jo Cook to write something sensible, and perhaps even topical, after she was kind enough to link here in her blog. She’s actually done an excellent job of summarizing specific papers – which leaves me free to ruminate at arbitrary length on a few other things.

CAA UK 2007

The main things I picked up were

• There’s quite a feeling of optimism in the air at the moment, although it’s hard to say exactly why. It’s not so much that there are major new developments in archaeological IT as what might be called a growing spirit of collaboration, along with the realisation that the increasing prevalence of web 2.0-style services and Open Source tools may begin to mean that a bit of javascript/python/perl hackery may get us a lot further than it used to.
• Presenting our new X-Bones/Crossbones method (a schematic 3D skeleton writer I coded recently) was a real pleasure for two reasons. All right, it was nice that people found it interesting for a start, but I didn’t think I’d get such a kick out of saying ‘and it’s also Open Source so anyone can start using it as of next week’. Of course, the thing might sink without a trace once people actually do, but suddenly all sorts of projects came to light that may make use of it, so its future looks bright for the time being which is the thing that us humble programmers crave most The 2nd cool thing was demoing it at ArchCamp 2, because, once again in the spirit of collaboration, we got it rigged up to a 3D passive stereo screen – y’know, the ones with the funky glasses. Suddenly you actually start climbing around in data that used to be a flat 2D CAD plan. And that’s a good feeling.
• ArchCamp 2 worked out even better than I hoped btw. 3.5 straight hours of playing with cool tools, tips and websites. Then burgers and beer. Isn’t that how life is supposed to be?
• Kate Devlin gave some interesting insights into the nature of 3D. I’ve been engaged in a bit of debate recently as to where its going, but I get the impression that we may start moving away from ’superrealism’ which (counterintuitively) actually starts to look less real, towards things which trick our eye in other ways. A great example is the Textured Polynomial Maps done by CHI. They’re just a simple image, about twice the size (in bytes) of a jpeg but you can move a virtual lightsource around them in a spookily realistic fashion. Definitely worth checking out. There’s still room for gorgeous reconstructions though.  Check out Tom Goskar’s lost landscape.

Life in Jaywick

This has got to be my favourite blog at the moment. Kind of a cross between Meursault and Adrian Mole, only real (I think). Jacky, you’re a legend.

Hearth and Home

At last! After many years of arduous inquiry I have discovered the mythical ‘silver bullet‘ for productivity – and it turns out to be…the common or garden hangover. Yes, those who say that one must suffer for one’s art are by no means mistaken and I have the evidence to prove it. Consider the facts…

Case 1: A couple of weeks ago I somewhat rashly attended a postgraduate fresher’s cocktail party on a schoolnight. Disinclined to worry about work as most postgraduate freshers are, it was the wee small hours of the morning before your intrepid reporter was able to disentangle himself from the festivities and stumble home. Imagine his state of alarm when he awoke the next day to face the prospect of a full day of graft. And yet, by the end of the day he had written a rather nifty little regex scraper and accompanying java parser that mapped all our legacy documents in a GIS by hunting down National Grid References. OK – so it turns out that the Grid References are already held in a database somewhere, but that’s hardly the point now, is it?

Case 2: A not entirely unfamiliar melange of unattributable guilt, general misanthropy and toxic shock embraced me this morning in bear-like fashion after what I had previosuly assumed would be a fairly gentle gathering of pathologists. Do not trust people who drip things into baby rabbits’ eyes. Before you know it they’ll have you drinking Scrumpy Jack (apparently it’s the only guaranteed way to kill the superbugs they work with – and check this great review). But despite my impaired faculties I managed not only to get out of bed, but also to sort out my rather fancy new gaff, which I now invite you to gaze at, slack-jawed and green-eyed with envy, courtesy of the ever-obliging Flickr. Window seat, floorboards, fireplace, own bathroom, brass bedstead, Aga, conservatory (with fishpond!), you name it. It even has a rather nice pianoforte although I fear that my best musical years are behind me since that unfortunate incident with the woodchipper. And just 15 minutes trot along the Thames/Isis/Froggle Brook (depending on latitude) to Oxford Archaeology Towers.

So there you have it: cast-iron proof, were it ever needed, that drinking is both big and clever. I’m off to get sloshed.

Show and Tell

One of the best things about living in Oxford is the fact that it’s not short of people who want to tell you stuff. A work colleague sent me an email of seminar programmes related to archaeology the other week of which there appear to be at least 13. In other words I could go to two public lectures a day for the next eight weeks on topics as diverse as ‘The architecture and decoration of Umayyad mosques’, ‘Dakota Sioux Women’s Dress and its Cross-Cultural Development Throughout the Nineteenth Century’, and ‘Desiring Structures: Exhibiting the Dendritic Form’. I have never decorated an Umayyad mosque, worn a Sioux woman’s dress or exhibited my Dendritic Form, but should I ever wish to, I shall know whom to turn to for advice.

Alas, my heavy drinking schedule means that I am only able to attend a select few of the many seminars available. Last term one of the parallel multiverse Leifs (indeed, perhaps several of them) dipped a toe into the expansive water of the Philosophy of Physics. Not all of them made it back to shore. This term Ithought I’d go easy on the algebra and have a go at a course of lectures entitled ‘Pompeii and Ostia: a Tale of Two Cities’ and a one off event called Neuroscience and the Meditative Mind: Western Science meets Eastern Tradition.’

To start with the Roman stuff – I was kind of expecting the first lecture (by Janet DeLaine) to be a bit yada-yada, having read a lot on both cities, but was in fact treated to an interesting history of their of the excavation and recording. Or lack thereof. It turns out that the two sites have influenced one another’s interpretations in a remarkable, and often pernicious, fashion as the personalities involved attempt to demonstrate both their similarities and differences from one another – frequently leading to clear demonstrations of the old archaeological adage that ‘you find what you’re looking for’. Most depressing of all – I also discovered that the rather pleasing photo I took of the Theatre of Agrippa as Seen From the ‘Temple of Ceres’ (see my Flickr photos) comes mainly courtesy of Mussolini and his cultural apparatchiks. In fact, by the end of the talk I was beginning to wonder whether there was anything special about the preservation of Ostia at all or whether it was just more excavated (and reconstructed) than anywhere else.

The Neuroscience talk was an entirely different kettle of fish organized by a friend of mine who studies the Science of Consciousness. Essentially they got a guy who teaches Taoism, a philosopher of science, and my buddy, and then all (sort of) had a go at explaining their concepts of ‘mind’. It was quite enjoyable but somewhat short of illuminating. The Taoist guy came from Noo Yoik and was apparently gifted with ninja skills in his youth which enabled him to win numerous karate/kung fu/ju jitsu/whatever tournaments. Whilst visiting Japan however he was cut down to size by an elderly couple and their kidneys which apprently played a substantial role in their fighting prowess. Cue twenty years at the top of a mountain with an assortment of white-haired Ancient Masters learning the Five-Point-Palm Exploding Heart Technique. How this all related to the principles of Taoism or the mind was not entirely clear to me, but the fellow was fairly jocular and, despite being this side of car wreck which put paid to his Kane the Avenger lifestyle (I assume), he leavened the proceedings somewhat with his Big Apple attitude.

The philosopher, perhaps bearing in mind Favorinus’s remark that ‘he is most learned who has thirty legions’, chose not to pick a fight with the warrior-monk, but mumbled something politely about the gulf between Western philosophical tradition and Eastern practice.

My friend was the most interesting of the three but left me kind of depressed because, despite his assertion that the Science of Consciousness is actually attempting to achieve very little, it struck me after the discussion that it doesn’t even manage that.

To elucidate a little: SoC basically accepts that we can’t as yet find any kind of bridge between observations of physical states and observations of mental states. i.e. we appear to observe both but there isn’t a way to decribe one in terms of the other. Apparently, in an attempt to just at least get the ball rolling and keep the neuroscientists of the streets, it was decided to start recording Neural Correlates of Consciousness (or NCCs) which seemed to work reasonably well. In other words when people are happy, certain kinds of things happen in the brain, when they feel pain other kinds of things happen, and if we rig folks up to a big shiny machine then we can see those things happening and look for the correlations. And as we begin to get more sophisticated so at last we seem to be learning something. And when we discover that wiring Shaolin monks up to Brain Reading Devices (excuse the technical jargon) gives gamma ray readings that go off the scale then it seems that we really are learning something. And even the monks seem chuffed and stop breaking the furniture.

But hold on.

Problem no. 1: Prima facie, i think i know what it’s like to be happy, and so when i see correlations between my brain reading and my experience of happiness and your brain reading and your experience of happiness then we’re all good. But I don’t know what it’s like to be Shaolin monk in a moment of profound Zen enlightenment (as my juxtaposition of the two no doubt illustrates clearly to those who do). And that means that it’s not clear what i have actually learned other than that wiring monks up to machines gives a certain reading on the Big Beeping Machine. It certainly isn’t a quick path to enlightenment. In fact I haven’t learned anything new about consciousness whatsoever – not even a correlation.

Problem no. 2. But it’s even worse than that – because it’s not only the monk whose inner life I don’t know about, it’s you, and the other experimenters, and David Cameron (especially David Cameron), and of course everyone else in the whole wide world. All I know is their outward behaviour – the rest I just infer. So when I say that I’m correlating neural activity with mental states, I’m actually just correlating with behavioural states. i.e. activity in certain parts of the brain correlates nicely with people saying ‘I’m happy’ or ‘ouch!’. Well leaping lizards Dr. Science! Given the level of determinism observed in the physical world, that hardly comes as a surprise. So the only mental states we can actually tie it back to are those of the experimenter – and that’s hardly a correlation, it’s just behaviourism by the back door. To put it another way – the fact that we both look at the same blue object, say ‘i see a blue object’, and have the same brain activity, is very far from proving that that our inner experiences of blueness are the same. It just shows that our bodies have learned to respond in the same way.

So to return to my slight sense of depression – my friend’s PhD still seems cool to me (they get to program robots and everything) but calling it Science of Cnsciousness seems to be a complete misnomer because the one thing that has been categorically cut out of it is consciousness.

Maybe next week I’ll go and watch some stand up.

Midnight Rambler

Regular readers of this blog (yes, that means you, Christian) will no doubt be aware that I’ve been slacking of late. In fact, with just a single post to date, even a seemingly innocuous phrase like ‘regular reader’ could get us into all sorts of ontological difficuties. So what’s been going on? Well, all sorts of stuff.

To kick off with, the whole UK IT/archaeology community seems intent on forging a Faustian pact at the etymologically-kosher but phonetically-dubious http://www.antiquist.org. There’s been quite a bit of activity on the discussion list and talk of starting a collaborative project to store and disseminate archaeological data openly. It’s yet to be seen whether we can really get the ball rolling, but the willingness seems to be there which is, if nothing else, a good deal further onward then we were at the start of last week. Best of all, we’ve got a couple of BarCamps lined up to try and encourage more regular interaction. Sometimes it’s great to be a geek

Next up is a new Theory Group on Mapping the Past that I’m setting up with Stuart Dunn of Methods Network. We’re planning for it to lead to a couple of colloquia and maybe a publication, but for now, you’ll find the bare bones of a discussion here.

That, btw, is a spin off of the OSGeo Archaeology SIG, an all-new community pushing for Open geospatial software, standards and data within archaeology under the aegis of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). We’re also setting up a UK Chapter.

And, finally, for those of you less interested in my virtual shenanigans and rather more curious about my real ones, the biggest news is that I’ve moved to a lovely new house with some lovely new housemates. No pictures yet, but words like ‘fireplaces’, ‘conservatory’, ‘floorboards’, ‘window seat’, and ‘en-suite bathroom’ will rather handily conceal the fact that I don’t yet have a desk, chest of drawers, or enough bookshelves. Still, if you’re going to slum it, slum it in style.