Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

As the title kind of gives away, it was the annual Computing Applications in Archaeology UK Chapter annual conference over the last few days. It was held in York this time, rather than Southampton, as it has been for the last few years, heralding, I hope, a plan to move around the country from now on.

Normally I like to blog daily from these conferences, whilst it’s all fresh in my mind, and because it’s easier to blog about one day’s papers than two, but guest houses with wifi in York are a little difficult to come by (gotta get me one of those mobile broadband thangs).

Soooo… where to start…

Duh, with the thanks and acknowledgements of course! So, thanks to the ADS and the University of York for hosting the conference at the gorgeous King’s Manor, arranging lots of yummy food, a great visit to Dig (the only musuem about actually doing archaeology, as far as I know) and a conference meal at possibly the largest and grandest pizza restaurant in the world.

Friday kicked off with sessions on collaboration- mainly heritage agencies getting together to put their data on the web and provide better access to their sites and collections. Leif, however, threw us all a googly with a great talk on assessing the veracity of different historical maps in an empirical and logical manner, and figuring out whether they are suitable for the job you want them to do (in a geospatial sense, mostly). Really, this is just a way of formalising a process we should all go through when choosing datasets to use, but we rarely do. For example, is the map complete or incomplete, are the boundaries of the entities fuzzy or hard (eg formalised boundaries or best guesses), does it represent a period of time (like the Roman empire), or a snapshot, are the entities markers (like point data, mostly) or an accurate depiction of a location, is the map observed or derived (like a model). Then , what happens when you combine two maps? Which of the above are incompatible? I thought about this for a while afterwards, and got to wondering a few things- mainly that definitions of completeness depend entirely on what the user of the map needs it to do- in fact every map is incomplete up to a point (because it can’t depict everything) but if it contains all the entities you need then that’s fine. I am hoping Leif is going to post his powerpoint (hint, hint) to make it all a bit clearer to follow (and so that you don’t miss the great map at the end and Leif’s description of its genesis).

Other sessions attempted to address an issue that has been bubbling under for a while now- how to address issues of uncertain in virtual reconstructions. How do you separate what is real from what is conjecture without adding artificial intrusions into the image? Previous discussions have suggested varying levels of transparency, whereas the ideas suggested here were to create different models for each of your conjectures, or to embed links to images, discussion, interpretation within the model.

The afternoon sessions on day one were varied, but mostly pretty techy. In particular I loved the final paper, on the archaeology of Jodrell Bank, complete with archive recordings of 1950’s astronomers bouncing echoes of their voices off the moon. Like last year, the idea of acoustic modelling came up. Can acoustic modelling help us interpret buildings or spaces? The answer seems to be yes, but I don’t think we’ve yet addressed how you add the large crowds of people into your model and what effect they might have.

Saturday’s sessions included work on predictive modelling and other statistical models for discovering patterns in archaeological data. This is quite controversial in archaeology because it tends to assume that all human activity is environmentally determined rather than socially. This is mainly because the social effects are so hard to model. It is also prey to issues arising from flawed or incomplete datasets (back to Leif’s talk) and biases in the data collection strategy. However, I thought today’s talks tried to address some of these issues, or at least acknowledge that there was a problem. I’m all for using the technique myself, but as one element in the model, not the whole thing.

I should give Joseph a plug- he talked about Oxford’s One Laptop per Archaeologist plan (actually it’s now one openmoko smartphone per archaeologist, but who’s being picky) and our over-arching plans for openness- open data, open access and open standards. It made me quite glad to be working there!

Props in the final session must go to Nicola Schiavottiello for his “Magic Tour”, using clever little hand-helds and tablet pcs to superimpose 3D models of objects over the actual scene in front of you. Nicola sees it as being used for historic tours, showing you what a place was really like and I think it’s a fantastic idea!

Finally the Antiquist crowd got together for a “show and tell” about what cool things we’re all working on or need help with. I should say that if you’re doing archaeological computing of any sort and want help, or just to bounce ideas off people then it’s a good place to go.

Throw in some biting cold, some strong winds, a little snow, a large church building, and there you have it. Roll on next year…

After CAA 2007 I blogged about the talks that I had found most interesting and though-provoking, and one of those was from Mia Ridge at the Museum of London. She has now put this talk online, so I thoroughly recommend taking a look.

Day Two of CAA 2007, and some more very interesting talks. A common theme today was the use of 3D modelling in archaeology, but approached from very different perspectives, and for differing uses. First up we had a talk about using 3D modelling as one of a barrage of techniques used to examine the visibility, or visual consumption of interior wall paintings in the ancient Greek settlement of Acrotiri. 3D modelling was used here alongside crowd-modelling techniques at both a macro- and meso-scale to highlight that the paintings would have been visible from a particular pinch-point in people’s movement through a street network. The modelling and advanced analysis here have added a new level of understanding about a site that would have been impossible previously.

On a simpler level, but nonetheless really useful, my colleague Leif demonstrated a program he has written to help record and analyse human skeletal remains, particularly when there is a large and complicated assemblage, such as in a burial pit. In the past it has been difficult, as commercial archaeologists with time and budgetary constraints, to record the position of the bones well enough to analyse them properly but Leif’s Crossbones package does just that. It’s a rare innovation that won’t take any longer to implement than the way things are currently done but it will improve the quality of the work no end. When he releases it (in a matter of weeks) it will be opensource and free as well! Hurrah!

Briefly, we also had talks on a 3D online catalogue of medieval timber building joints, and creating realistic 3D representations of past environments, including realistic lighting and particulates in the air (both vital to getting a proper impression of life inside a dark smoky hovel). Tom Goskar has been busy recreating the now submerged prehistoric landscape, complete with accurate representations of trees and animals, and another paper discussed whether we should include some measure of uncertainty in our reconstructions so that it is clear what is known and what is conjecture.

That actually leads me to discuss one of the other papers, as I think the idea of uncertainty is closely related to that of tagging and folksonomies. Mia Ridge discussed possible Web 2.0 uses in archaeology and cultural heritage, and one of the clear uses is allowing users to tag cultural objects, as you would photos in flickr or websites in del.icio.us. At first glance, this is a little scary as we like our standards and our proscribed ways of describing things. However, the world is messy, and there are multiple ways of describing most things, particularly archaeological monuments or artefacts where most of our knowledge is based on interpretation of incomplete evidence. Tagging allows people to acknowledge that uncertainty as well as allowing them to make more instinctive associations between things. Finally, I think we as archaeologists should acknowledge that what we do is quite specialised and a bit of a niche- which, as far as I know, makes us part of the Long Tail and we should exploit that.

Tomorrow we continue with ArchCamp 2- organised by Antiquist. It’s basically an opportunity for more archaeogeeky chat, and perhaps demos of some of the things we’ve all been working on. Best go back to work and get my demo sorted then…

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I’m in Southampton for the 2007 Computing Applications in Archaeology UK Chapter Conference. This is always a really interesting and often inspiring get together with a mix of commercial archaeologists such as myself and academic archaeologists (they normally have the best presentations).

There’s wifi available in my lovely salubrious Travelodge room, so I’ll aim to post some feedback on the first day’s talks tomorrow evening.
This post is also exciting for me, because I’m experimenting with the Geopress plugin for Wordpress. I first heard about it a few weeks ago but on my train journey today I read Andrew Turner’s great O’Reilly Shortcut book on Neogeography and that convinced me to give it a go…

I have to say that I really enjoyed Andrew’s book. He manages to cover the spectrum of “Neogeography” from the very basic intro to some reasonably high-end ideas such as microformats in a consistently easy and pleasant style. I learnt a lot from it, and there were certainly a few things I’m going to try (Geopress is the first).

Anyhow, here goes with the map:

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