Digital and Non-Digital Cultural Methods For Mapping the World Around Us
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Digital and Non-Digital Cultural Methods For Mapping the World Around Us Malta workshop Knowledge maps and access to digital archives Erik Champion Curtin University @nzerik [email protected]
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Transcript of Digital and Non-Digital Cultural Methods For Mapping the World Around Us
Digital and Non-Digital Cultural Methods For Mapping the World Around Us Malta workshop Knowledge maps and access to digital archives
Erik Champion Curtin University @nzerik [email protected]
Outline
1. Spatial and experiential issues of digital/virtual archives
• VR equipment and projects are SILO’d
• Mapping is personalisable, filterable, cultural
• Architecture has some lessons for us
2. Archives of spatial objects and platial relationships
• Cultural Heritage+tools+archives not well integrated in Digital Humanities
• 3D and 4D objects not well integrated with 2D (literature, videos)
• Emergent projects at Curtin & elsewhere
http://i.imgur.com/olIvoIv.jpg
Presidio Modelo a panopticon prison built on Isla de la Juventud in Cuba
Digital Humanities & Future Archives: Collaboration• Digital history may narrow the gap between academic and
popular history, and increase cross-disciplinary and international collaboration.
• New digital tools have not yet changed most historians' research methods substantially but digital tools and methods should be included in history curriculum.
• Libraries, archives and universities see future digital preservation challenges similarly, which encourages further collaboration.
• Digitisation projects: work-intensive..require new skills and attitudes.
• Private-public partnerships in the culture heritage sector are in many ways controversial but may offer opportunities for collaboration.
http://www.finnish-institute.org.uk/en/articles/1011-new-report-digital-humanities-and-future-archives
Ltd Collaborative Tools: DHa2014
• Matt Munson, Leipzig/Göttingen
• Christof Schöch, Würzburg
• Erik Champion, Curtin
• Toma Tasovac, Serbia
http://erikchampion.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/the-tyranny-of-distance-panel-at-dha2014-perth-australia-2014/
Problem: Intangible & Material Culture Our experience with the material culture of situated heritage is typically embodied, personal and unique. Literary understanding of the past as developed through reading of scholarly texts is typically linear, monovocal, and aplatial. Our experience and our literary understanding are two modes of knowledge that seldom meet. (Exceptions: Orbis, Pelagious, Omeka/Neatline, HistoryPin).
h"p://pelagios-project.blogspot.co.uk/6
Lack of collaboration and shared feedback (isolation in HMDs, Minecraft, by contrast, offers collaboration)
What are the concerns of non-text?
http://webvr.info/ WebVR is an
experimental Javascript API that provides access to Virtual Reality devices,
such as the Oculus Rift or Google Cardboard, in
your browser.
BELOW image: Pisa Lab VR, Oculus Rift and finger tracking
Map ancestors• Sterelny: With the invention and elaboration
of pictorial representation, humans came to be makers of specialised epistemic artefacts’. As epistemic artefacts (‘tools for thinking’), that is, items that structure our knowledge outside of our minds, maps are ‘“portable” representational resources’.
• Even though maps are abstract, they are still part of the cultural process; we must learn to read them for the rules of abstraction are derived from cultural rules.
• Culturally specific and socially constrained, designed via social conventions for a specific audience, maps are abstracted to help people’s cognitive mapping.
• French Neolithic caves- Niaux in Ariège:’ In at least ten locations, drawings of horses, bison, and mammoths seem to match locations that focus, amplify, and transform the sounds of human voices and musical instruments.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2008/07/03/2293114.htm
OR webistem.com/acoustics2008/acoustics2008/cd1/data/articles/000892.pdf
Aboriginal art
Nearly all Aboriginal art can be related to landscape and some paintings and designs do represent explicitly the physical relationship between different features of the landscape. However, Aboriginal paintings should be seen primarily as maps of conceptual relationships that influence the way the landscape is seen and understood. When Aboriginal paintings do represent specific features of landscape, they show them in their mythical rather than their physical relationship to one another.
•Australian Aboriginal arten rock painting of Mimi spirits in the Anbangbang gallery at Nourlangieen in Kakadu National Parken.•Photo by and ©2002 Dustin M. Ramsey (Kralizec!) - My own photographic work.•This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.
Mapping and Navigation in Virtual Worlds
Maps are not just instrumental artefacts but also epistemic ones with a long history: they have helped organise our knowledge of the world for millennia.
Navigation in virtual worlds: Modjeska:“locomotion + wayfinding. Locomotion is the activity of moving from one location to another.”
Wayfinding is primarily a cognitive process, comprising three abilities: • cognitive mapping or information
generation to understand the environment • decision making to structure and plan
actions • decision execution to transform decisions
to behavioural actions.The Glass Brain is courtesy of Gazzaley Lab, UCSF: Swartz Center, USCD. Special thanks to Adam Gazzaley, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Neurology, Physiology and Psychiatry, Director, Neuroscience Imaging Center, Principal Investigator, Gazzaley Lab, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF); Sandler Neurosciences Center.
Maps and VR• Disorientation in virtual
environments is a frequent and troubling issue for many users, an issue noted by various writers, hence a map plays an important practical aid in Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) and motion tracking lack many orientating features of the real world (Vinson).
• Interactive, recordable, and dynamically personalizable, digital maps can gradually or contextually reveal the unknown, keep a personally relevant record of the past, or offer a shadowy gate to the future.
Navigation is a complex activity• Navigation: situating oneself in a world, creating an overview of the locality (often involving specific tools or
techniques).
• In “Contextualising Archaeological Information through Interactive Maps”, Johnson lists many possible uses of digital maps, for example, that they can act as cultural representations but concentrates exclusively on the ability of digital maps to interactively access and filter database-driven data.
• One must learn how to understand (overview) and move between landmarks, changes in time scale, and differing points of view (both socially, and in terms of what was recreated or otherwise envisaged).
• A foreteller of what lies ahead, or what is a worthwhile digression or quicker way around a yet to be seen obstacle, real world maps help ‘preview’ possible and optimal journeys. Yet digital maps used for previewing (wayfinding) can also be irectional and proxemic. As users progress through the virtual environment, a digital map could improve in local accuracy.
• Modjeska and Elvins: maps in VEs shouldn’t be just abstractions of reality. Navigation will be more usable if maps are similar to the way our spatial memory is created recalled and acted upon as part of a decision making process.
• Raubal & Egenhofer: distinction between ‘practical space (i.e., acting in space) & conceptual space (i.e., representing space)’.
• Johnson: wayfinding developed by habits and social practices, along with image schemata, ‘recurring mental patterns that help people to structure space so that they know what to do with it’.
interactive spatial cognitive map
Ramloll and Mowat created a virtual environment where participants could take in-scene snapshots of exit and entry points. They could retrieve these snapshots at any time and click on them to move to those specific locations. The writers reported that this function increased ease of navigation.
• Wayfinding in virtual environments using an interactive spatial cognitive map
Interstitial Archival Space by Sverre Fehn:Hamar Bispegård museum Oslo = 2 buildings
Architecture: Wayfinding + Spatial RelationshipsAalto, Jyväskylä
DPhototopia: Light And Slope Influence Wayfinding
NPS: Text and Model Amela Sadagic, PhD, Research Associate Professor, NPS, MOVES Institute
2005 Unreal Tournament: Mapping Systems
Mayan Calendar embedded as rotating minimal
Some partial VR solutionsWidescreen audience interaction
Archived books now in games but how do you find and link between them?
Markham Panorama car collections+archives
The Markham car collection heritage was entrusted with the Western Australia Museum in 1969. Subsequent events caused estrangement between the state’s motoring community and the museum, and forty-five years later still engender anger in motoring enthusiasts in Western Australia. Recollections of what actually happened are inconsistent; this paper investigates what happened and what went wrong. A qualitative research approach using interviews, archival records, car club magazines and newspaper clippings was employed. The interviews were conducted with selected representatives from the motoring community and the Markham brothers. The paper concludes with discussion on the lessons learnt from this controversial incident for the Markham family, motoring community and cultural institutions. Questions about trust and ethics with donors and depositors, including the role of cultural institutions as custodians of national heritage are posed.
Joseph, P. (Peer Review) Heritage of the Markham Car Collection: Estrangement with the West Australian Motoring Community. Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals.
Part II: Digital Heritage a Digital Archive?
• A digital archive is..a repository that stores one or more collections of digital information objects with the intention of providing long-term access to the information. A digital archives can be a sophisticated, multi-tiered storage system or simply a C:\ drive on someone's home computer.
• http://archivemati.ca/2005/11/08/digital-archives/ Nov 9, 2005.
You must walk around Buddhist description of universe-biggest book in the world- but aesthetic experience is being eroded Kuthodaw Paya Myanmar
Beyond Space and Time-Forbidden Palacehttp://www.geek.com/news/expore-the-virtual-forbidden-city-courtesy-of-ibm-593731/http://www.beyondspaceandtime.org/ Long story short, according to Mure Dickie writing in the October 10, 2008 Financial Times: "A virtual Forbidden City offering the kind of immersive and interactive online experience pioneered by multiplayer role-playing games such as Second Life."
http://www.kith.org/logos/things/VRML/handbook/
http://www.kith.org/logos/things/VRML/handbook/
“Digital heritage disappearing faster than the real heritage”
• “In the very near future some critical issues will need to be addressed; increased accessibility to (and sharing of) heritage data, consistent interface design for widespread public use and re-‐presentations of work, the formalization of a digital heritage database, establishment of a global infrastructure, institutionalized, archival standards for digital heritage and most importantly the on-‐going curation, of work forward in time as the technology evolves so that our current digital heritage projects will not be lost to future generations. We cannot afford to have our digital heritage disappearing faster than the real heritage or the sites it seeks to ‘preserve’ otherwise all of our technological advances, creative interpretations, visualizations and efforts will have been in vain."
• Thwaites, Harold. "Digital Heritage: What Happens When We Digitize Everything?" Visual Heritage in the Digital Age. Springer London, 2013. 327-‐348.
[oz] historic collections could be lost to ‘digital dinosaurs’
• Brunig: 2.5billion industry, 25% digitised, 629km of archives
• MUST shift to open access models and greater collaboration with the public
• Explore new approaches to copyright management that stimulate creativity and support creators
• Build on aggregation initiatives such as the Atlas of Living Australia
• Answer: exploiting the potential of Australia’s Academic and Research Network (AARNet) and the National Broadband Network (NBN) for collection and collaboration
• http://www.csiro.au/en/News/News-releases/2014/Australian-museums-risk-becoming-digital-dinosaurs OR https://theconversation.com/historic-collections-could-be-lost-to-digital-dinosaurs-31524
Format issues• Anyone who has worked in the field of
computer graphics for even a short time knows about the bewildering array of storage formats for graphical objects. It seems as though every programmer creates a new file format for nearly every new programming project.
• The way out of this morass of formats is to create a single file format that is both flexible enough to anticipate future needs and that is simple enough so as not to drive away potential users.
• http://paulbourke.net/dataformats/ply/
• WebGL: JavaScript API for rendering interactive 3D graphics and 2D graphics managed by the Khronos Group
• O3D: developed by Google (example)
• 3DMLW: 3D Markup Language for Web (Tallinn)
• COLLADA: interchange file format for interactive 3D applications, managed by the Khronos Group
• U3D: Ecma International standard ECMA-363
• VRML: precursor of X3D
• NB older:http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/advice/FileFormatTable
Options• Re-record everything (3D capture)
accurately or agree on labelling.
• Template or provide framework to support / record sites (from charter?)
• Immersive explanation of every 3D site.
• Policies to encourage use/re-use of 3D models.
• Collection and dissemination network.
• Store models, base components, paradata, or embed exes? See https://olivearchive.org/ “for long-term preservation of software, games, and other executable content.”
international efforts
• 3D Icons (3D HOP) in CIDOC CRM
• Europeana
• Smithsonian Institute X3D BETA
• Fraunhoefer (X3DOM ON GITHUB)
• Ariadne
• CARARE
• EU EPOCH
• V-MUST
• DARIAH, CLARIN, DASISH
UCLA VSim real-time exploration of highly detailed, 3D computer models
• Supports interaction with content generated in free modeling software (e.g., SketchUp andBlender) using the common COLLADA format.
• Mechanisms fto annotate their 3D work, embed & categorize comments about modeled environment
• Mechanism for embedding spatially aware links to URLs and primary and secondary resources
• Supporting the creation of academic arguments within the virtual environments either as a linear narrative or as a sequence of annotations encountered during user-driven exploration.
• Providing a mechanism to package the 3D environment, associated narratives, and embedded resources into a single file for distribution
• Accommodating citation of project content at model, narrative, node, & embedded resource levels.
https://idre.ucla.edu/research/active-research/vsim
Conclusion• VR equipment and projects are SILO’d
• We need to integrate collaboration and display equipment, webVR has promise
• Mapping is under-utilised beyond simple usability aids
• Architecture has some lessons for us
• Archives of spatial objects and platial relationships requires more research
• Cultural Heritage+tools+archives not well integrated in Digital Humanities
• 3D and 4D objects not well integrated with 2D (literature, videos)
referencesElvins, T.T. “Virtually lost in virtual worlds -- wayfinding without a cognitive map”. ACM Computer Graphics. 31.3 (1997): 15-17.
Johnson, J.“Contextualising Archaeological Information through Interactive Maps.” Internet Archaeology 12 (2002). 20 May 2005 <intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue12/johnson_index.html>.
Joseph, P. (2015). An exploration of community-based organisation’s information management challenges. Proceedings of ISIC: the Information Behaviour Conference, Leeds, 2-5 September, 2014: Part 2, (paper isicsp15), 20(1). Retrieved from: http://www.informationr.net/ir/20-1/isic2/isicsp15.html#.VRDGu-G6Rq0
Modjeska, D. “Navigation in Electronic Worlds: Research Review for Depth Oral Exam”. Department of Computer Science. 10 January 2005. <http://www.fis.utoronto.ca/faculty/modjeska/Pubs/lit_rvw.pdf
Ramloll, R, and D. Mowat. "Wayfinding in virtual environments using an interactive spatial cognitive map." Information Visualisation, 2001. Proceedings. Fifth International Conference on. IEEE, 2001.
Soini, K. “Exploring human dimensions of multifunctional landscapes through mapping and map-making.” Landscape and Urban Planning 57.3-4 (2001): 225-239, p. 229.
Thwaites, H. "Digital Heritage: What Happens When We Digitize Everything?" Visual Heritage in the Digital Age. Springer London, 2013. 327-‐348.
Wang, H. Johnson, T. and, Zhang, J. “The mind’s views of space.” Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference of Cognitive Science. Beijing: China (2001): 191-198.
other inspiration: http://dhcommons.org/; publicVR.org; An Ontology for 3D Visualization in Cultural Heritage, https://kcl.academia.edu/ValeriaVitale
alternative: low-cost or free software, templates and componentization: http://muse-opensource.org/ (part of Open GLAM); http://www.x3dom.org/; blender.org; http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/; www.mukurtuarchive.org/
