This week I have been fortunate to be involved in my 4th digital archaeology European summer school funded through the Archaeolandscapes Europe Program based in lovely Poznan. This year the theme is lidar data and as with the hyperspectral school in 2012, designing and delivering the program was a collaborative effort between the tutors with me taking a bit of an organisational lead to tie it all together.
On Monday we plunged the students straight in at the deep end with a day of lidar processing in LAStools by Martin Isenburg. I am a huge fan of this software which I began using during my PhD and after years of email communications it was great to finally get to meet Martin in person, and we were especially grateful that he could fit us in to his busy international schedule (next stop Kuala Lumpa via Vienna).
With the full emphasis on lidar processing in this year’s school, I have taken the opportunity to expand my QGIS GRASS tutorials to include more advanced processing techniques that could not be fitted easily into the shorter tutorial slots of previous summer schools. Although the students are graduate level, they usually come from different backgrounds and so as a rule I don’t anticipate that they will have experience with GIS. Most of them seem to like the format of my tutorials which are provided as workbooks with commands and screen shots, I think partly because it allows each to work at their own speed, compensating a little for the language differences (five languages are represented here this year). All of the students exceeded my expectations in the speed with which they gained confidence with the tools and almost everyone was able to complete a very intense 5 hour GRASS tutorial yesterday that covered everything from the basics of setting up a location to the creation of more complex visualisations such as the PCA, SVF and LRM. This is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to teach advanced techniques in GRASS and I was really very pleased with how the tutorials turned out – thank you LIVT participants for being my guinea pigs! You can judge the tutorials for yourself here.
Although there is an emphasis on enabling the students to take control of the visualisation process, the summer school is about much more than technical know-how. With the aerial archaeology experience of Wlodek and Simon, the students were also being taught the skills to interpret the images as well as good practice for recording their observations. All these skills were tested at the end of the week through project work culminating in the presentation of evidence to the group.
In addition to teaching and having finally escaped the land of Mac worship, I also had the opportunity to try out the beta Ralf Hesse’s lidar visualisation toolbox (LiVT) which was released back in March for Windows. On first impression this toolkit looks great, although it currently only handles ENVI .bil format files and initially we had some trouble transferring to this format from the .asc test files but with a bit of LASTools wizardry we were able to establish a workflow which is recorded in this tutorial. While from a methodological and intellectual viewpoint I think there is great value in undertaking each step of the processing of visualisations such as the Local Relief Model, I am probably in the minority for this particular type of geomatical sadomasochism. LiVT provides a simple, user-friendly interface to the creation of a number of visualisations, bringing the processing steps together in one tool without the requirement for specialist GIS knowledge. The tool is still under active development so while the LITA students didn’t run into too many bugs, the full functionality of the toolkit is yet to be achieved. This said is well worth heading over to the Archaeolandscapes website taking a look.
As with my previous three stays in Poznan we have had the pleasure of sampling some of the fine food and beer that the city has to offer, including pierogi and pancakes and Proletaryat, the Communist themed vodka bar with large portraits of all the key figures of the Red world looking down on you as you sip your cherry vodka. I keep promising to bring my better half here for a short break (the wealth of meat-based deliciousness will be right up his street) to ensure more time to explore the city. With cheap flights and a new buzz of tourism following the world cup last year, it won’t be long before Poznan becomes a destination to rival other European cities, so I’d better get back there quickly before everyone else discovers my summer retreat!