This week has provided a couple of great experiences worth writing about, so despite being tired and a little sunstruck from an afternoon of stripping bikes at the co-op here I go…
On Friday I was invited to present to the combined masses of the Archaeology, Anthropology and Geography societies and departments at UNC Greensboro, by colleague Roy Stine. I was very honoured to be asked and even more so at the turn-out of over 60 people to hear me speak about my research to date and my forthcoming plans. Although we had some technical difficulties with images (which induced a brief cookie intermission at the half-way point while I switched versions), the talk was well-received with some really great questions afterwards from the engaged and enthusiastic cohort. I am so grateful to Roy and Linda and the others at UNCG for their hospitality, I hope to see you all again before I leave.
As the room was big and the screen a little small, I thought I’d make the slides available through slideshare. For those of you who have been wondering what on earth it is I have been up to these last four years well here’s the pocket guide:
The next coolest thing of note relates to a current project to examine the impact of 3D immersive and interactive environments when teaching students about landscape archaeology and remote sensing data. The data that I work with for my archaeological research are becoming increasingly widely available to archaeological professionals and as such I feel should be incorporated into classroom settings as often as possible. Although I and many others do this in a predominantly 2D form through some type of GIS, I have often wondered what the impact of exploring the full dimensionality of the data would have on student understanding of the data and landscape. While this started out as a seed of an idea, it has been facilitated by the move to Duke and the availability of the Duke immersive Virtual Environment (DiVE) (a 6-sided cave projection system) for implementing research in a fully interactive and 1:1 scale virtual environment.
In addition, I was struck by my student’s comments following our fieldtrip last month. In preparation for the fieldwork they each undertook a desk-based assessment of the aerial imagery, including lidar data and aerial photographs along with historic maps. This also include a de-briefing session where we discussed the findings of the DBA and plans for field assessment of the features uncovered. To all intents and purposes the students were as well-prepared and rehearsed as they could ever have been before encountering the landscape in person, yet in review of the experience one students summed up the difference in experience between the classroom and the moor as follows:
“Before arriving, I thought that I really understood what was happening in the pictures, the definition of the elements seemed to be clearly defined. However, standing in the midst of a speculated rectangular element and trying to discern where it intersected with a potential oval element was one of the more challenging elements of the fieldwork. It is more than difficult to understand the true effect of modern paths or plowing trails on archaeological evidence until you are standing in the midst of it.”
Nothing can ever replace the skills developed out in the field but here is the challenge: can we introduce and teach ARS and landscape analysis in a more intuitive way by leveraging the inherent 2.5D content of the lidar data to place the students in the landscape, in addition to the traditional GIS view from above it? I’m tackling this in two ways: through the development of an interactive lesson in the DiVE and via a web equivalent built on openGL. The work thus far has involved a lot of research and experimentation into software and data formats but this finally paid off when I was able to view my test landscape in the DiVE for the first time this week. Sadly getting good photography in the DiVE is a task for the experts and we didn’t have the time on this occasion but below is an image of the snippet of Salisbury Plain landscape we’re using for the beta version.
There is still a lot of work to do on this project over the coming months but the achievement of getting over the first (and arguably biggest) hurdle was fittingly celebrated by climbing a virtual Bronze Age barrow and surveying from this vantage point the familiar sight and site of my PhD adventures.