On Saturday I was able to present one of the projects I am currently working on at Duke to a wider digital heritage audience for the first time Centre for Digital Heritage conference in York. The day was a great mix of speakers from across the heritage sector from museums to policy makers, higher education and research, field survey and media. Personal highlights including John Coburn’s presentation about the repurposing of collections at Tyne and Wear Museum for the Half Memory project, Marcus Abbott’s presentation on digital and community recording of the Rockley Furnace site and a neat project bringing one of my favourite cartographic and social history resources, the Charles Booth Maps, to a fresh and mobile audience via PhoneBooth. In all it was a diverse and stimulating meeting and a great opportunity to catch up with long-time colleagues and meet some new ones.
Although the poster session was a bit tucked away, I did get some really useful feedback and discussion of my project to assess the pedagogical impact of 2D vs. 3D interfaces for teaching archaeological remote sensing. This is very much a work in progress (you can download an A4 version of the poster here – be patient it takes a moment to load in the js viewer), but is designed to pit a traditional GIS, 3D web and immersive environment against each other in a battle to the death for archaeological understanding… OK well maybe not quite, but read the poster and you’ll get the idea! Having got IRB last month I’m looking to run the experiments in late August so comments (and volunteers for participation) welcome!