Archaeology in Second Life
There’s the beginnings of an interesting discussion here and here about using archaeological data in Second Life, or using Second Life as a teaching resource. I’m more interested in the first idea, of publishing your excavation as an “experience” rather than as some data and a report. I hadn’t even realised that you could link to external datasources in Second Life, but apparently you can, and people are already using this to release their own GIS projects.
I can see some conceptual issues here, as archaeological sites are part of a landscape rather than a single entity with no relation to it’s surroundings, and I don’t see how you could reproduce that in Second Life without turning it into a sort of Google Earth. However, skirting around that issue, it’s certainly a novel way of displaying data, and of leveraging a “virtual-reality”-like interface without needing to spend lots of time and money in developing it. Bring it on!
Hi - if you read the discussion at electricarchaeologist.wordpress.com/2007/06/archaeological-clutter-dumpster-diving
we touched on some ideas about landscape, archaeology, and second life…
But i take your point about landscape. However, what I’m trying to do at the moment is not recreate an excavation from the real world, divorced from its landscape, but a simple, artificial excavation as you might find at an open day at a museum. But since I can create the world (or at least, our little corner of it) I am also trying to make it fit into the landscape that we are in the process of creating (I’ve been building and wrecking structures all week to see what happens…
Oh, btw check out what the Berkeley people did for Catalhoyuk on Okapi Island in SL as another example of an archaeological approach…
[...] archaeology. It seems to have had some resonance with other archaeo-bloggers (see ClioAudio, and ArchaeoGeek). ArchaeoGeek noted some fascinating work attempting to link GIS-type capabilities in Second Life. [...]
Hi Shawn,
Thanks for stopping by! Checking out your link led to a good half an hour of online meanderings after I read some of the other posts on your blog. This archaeology in Second Life thing is obviously far more established than I realised, and I am really impressed with what I’ve seen so far. Time to get exploring in there myself I think… I also appreciated the link to the history of archaeological blogging article- very interesting reading (and of course lots of blogs to add to my reading list!)
Cheers
Jo