GIS for Archaeology and CRM

During 2007 the ESRC, as part of the Historical Geographical Information
Systems Research Network, is sponsoring a number of free seminars on the
use of GIS to study the past. These will be led by Dr Ian Gregory, author
of A Place in History: A Guide to Using GIS in Historical Research.
Historical GIS is a rapidly growing field within historical research. A
Geographical Information System (GIS) is a form of database management
system within which every row of data is linked to a co-ordinate-based
location. By using GIS historians can structure, integrate, analyse and
visualise the geographies of the past.

The seminars will consist of a mixture of presentations and roundtable
discussions and will help attendees to make better use of GIS in their
research, by considering what exactly GIS has to offer historians, in what
ways historians make, or would like to make, use of GIS in their research
and what technological and methodological issues are faced. They are aimed
at a broad audience including established academics, members of the
heritage sector, junior researchers and post-graduates.

The first seminar will take place in York on 28 February 2007.  Places are
limited and booking forms need to be returned by 15 December 2006.
Further details of the seminar, including a downloadable booking form, can
be found at http://ahds.ac.uk/history/hgis/seminar-york.htm

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Whew!! 4 days to the wedding, Floyd Landis won the Tour De France, and I took second in my biggest race of the year!

Here is something interesting from the Geowanking list:

——————————————————————-
Call for papers - 2007 Association of American Geographers Annual Conference. 17-21 April 2007, San Francisco, California, USA. http://www.aag.org/annualmeetings/SF2007/

Google Earth as the ‘view from nowhere’: the spatial politics of high-resolution satellite imagery

Session organisers:
Chris Perkins and Martin Dodge
Geography, School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester

Context:
Google Earth, and various internet portals, offer ubiquitous high-resolution satellite imagery at unprecedented detail to a global audience through simple interfaces. The capabilities and technical beauty of Google Earth, in particular, has garnered wide spread praise and a rapidly growing fan-base. Given this impact, now is an apposite time for considered reflection on exactly what can been seen with satellite imagery and thinking through the spatial politics of newly accessible images of the world.

Pictures taken from satellites orbiting high above the Earth offer people a seductively objective view of the world below, termed by Thomas Nagel the ‘view from nowhere’. This mirror-like viewpoint over territory, has until recently, been for the most part the preserve of military forces and states have jealously guarded their visual power in the interest of national security. But recent technological and social change has led to increasing spatial and temporal data resolution becoming much more widely available, in large part because the ‘mirror’ is being commercialised, and significantly access through the internet portals seems to be offering a means of challenging the power of the formerly elite discourse.

We invite theoretically informed analysis that questions the ontological surety of satellite imagery.

Suggested themes:

# Explore the tensions between transparency and secrecy that percolate debates about access to high-resolution satellite imagery.

# Reflect on the potential for progressive use of imagery by non-state actors to challenge established power relations.

# Examine the politics of socio-technical infrastructures and corporate practices that underpin image dissemination, censorship and manipulation.

# Critique the naturalizing power of the interfaces to systems like Google Earth, particularly in relation to the military origins of these systems.

# Question the uneven spatial provision of imagery and the commercial logics of points of interest databases.

# Analyse growing mass media use of high-resolution satellite imagery.

# Evaluate alternative visualities from artists who employ the ‘view from nowhere’ to problematize relations between subject and object.

# Interrogate notions of satellite ethics, particularly relating to individual privacy and community rights.

# Situate the potential of progressive pedagogy employing high-resolution satellite imagery.

# Assess the cultural meanings attached the imagery and the nature of the new community of practices emerging (such as ‘black helicopter’ spotters).

—-
Proposed papers in the form of a title and short abstract (250 words
maximum) should be submitted to Martin Dodge (m.dodge@manchester.ac.uk) by 15th September 2006.

Further details on the paper requirements and registration for the AAG meeting are at http://www.aag.org/annualmeetings/SF2007/call4papers.cfm

—-

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From Space to Place

December 4-7, Rome Italy. The 2nd International Conference on Remote Sensing in Archaeology deadline for abstracts is just around the corner (May 30th). Along with the entitled topic of Remote Sensing, the issues covered by this conference run the gamut of technology used in Archaeology. Landscape, environment, ecosystem, image processing, virtual reality, 3D visualization, conservation, geophysics, photogrammetry, open source and Web-GIS are all topics fit for this conference.

“Sense of place is also sense of time, difference between space and place, between ‘global’ and ‘local’. The world process of globalization is removing places and multiplying spaces, reducing the cultural differences. In particular the dissemination of not-places, stations, hypermarkets, hotels, etc. risks to make uniform our perception, reducing what we perceive of the world to a few mental maps. Therefore we want to highlight one the fundamental tasks of remote sensing archaeology, namely, the capacity to use spatial technologies for recovering and identifying places and the sense of place in collaboration with the local communities.”

As described in this text from the conference abstract, the organizers intend to demonstrate how various technologies can be used to bring a sense of place back to archaeological data and interpretation. In my humble opinion, this is a fantastic goal and something that all archaeological technologists should be thinking about.

Being that a snow ball has a better chance in Death Valley than I do of making it to this conference; I hope that the proceedings will be offered online, as is the case with the 3D Imaging and Modeling conference in the previous post.

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Another enthralling day in Fargo, ND. There was an abundance of great papers today and plenty of thoughtful discussion to match.

With my chances for a free happy hour drink slipping away, I will just quickly cover some of the highlights.

Inductive vs. Deductive Predictive Models: Battle-Royal!!!
Will inductive models really send earth spiraling to hell in a handbasket? Or are deductive models the way to true enlightenment? Well, this ever present topic was brought up today in a great symposium on Archaeological Predictive Models.

After David Ebert, not to be confused with James Ebert, discussed the “7 deadly sins of inductive modeling”, two authors followed with papers, based on opposed theories, that produced very compatible results. Scott Madry of the University of North Carolina, presented a 7 county wide predictive model based on an inductive correlative model. Following this, Thomas Whitley, of Brockington and Associates, presented a deductive based behavioral model for a 2600 square mile (did I record the right?) study area in South Carolina. For my money, this battle of the Carolina’s was the pinnacle of the CAA so far. Okay, so no one was throwing chairs, but I sure did scribble some frantic notes.

Basically, the inductive model is criticized by distilling the vast diversity of the environment and archaeology to a series of correlations. Though, the end result is a quantitative, testable, and field verifiable model which fits very well with the requests of the Department of Transportation. Alternatively, the Deductive South Carolina model establishes both environmental and behavioral adaptations which are cross-correlated into a matrix of cost-benefit surfaces. These surfaces are composed into any number of formulas of settlement/subsistence & behavioral adaptations to make testable hypothesis to be modeled. The end result of this approach is a hypothesis testing framework of formulas. This is great for explanatory research, but not great of DOT review. In this case, Whitley combined all 46 testable formulas into a single surface which was encoded with a 1-10 rating of site “possibility”; I’m not really sure what the correct term for that metric would be.

All in all, it was a great demonstration of the application of both methodologies. I truly enjoyed both sides of the theoretical coin. Certainly in the future I will ramble on a bit more about the war waged between inductive and deductive models.

Okay… I would like to include a few words here about the papers on XML and DBs I saw today, but I happened to be out a little too late with a couple of good friends, so it will have to wait. Tomorrow (actually today!) will be the last full day of papers, so it should be exciting!

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Althought blogging etiqutte seems to be a taboo topic, there must be some rule against blogging after a night of free wine and beer. The folks of Fargo have certainly rolled out the red carpet for this conference; it has been a great time so far.

Since the wine flowed like, well, wine… I will have to confine myself to a quick recap of today’s events.

3D Data acquisition
3D data acquisition papers covered a few interesting topics. First, Mark Mudge and Carla Schroer at Cultural Heritage Imaging discussed their method of Reflection Transformation Imaging (RTI). This very cool 3D’ish data capture uses a fixed camera taking approximately 16 pictures with individual light sources set up at different coordinate locations. The output is a series of images that are synthesized into a single image where each 2D pixel encodes the 3D data in the form of illumination direction and lighting characteristics (normals). The RTI viewer displays the 2D image, but allows the user to control the location of the light source with the movement of the mouse. In essence, this displays the topography based on the surface normals. This technique works great for small and fragile objects. The team is working on extending the capabilities so that the RTI map can be applied to a passively collected 3D geometry and viewed with adjustable and accurate lighting with a very low file size. Also, the team had developed an open source, Java based viewer.

Secondly, there was a great 3D acquisition project from the folks at the Center for Advanced Spatial Technology (CAST) at the University of Arkansas. Briefly, this team used an optics long range, time of flight laser scanner to perform a High Density Survey of Machu Pichu, Peru and Tiwanaku, Bolivia. Basically, the research group conducted over 225 different scans which included over 150 million points in 13 days (non-consecutive). The resulting point clouds are downloadable, along with a free viewer from polyworks, at www.cast.uark.edu/invirmet
Check it out!

Agent Based Modeling
Agent Based Modeling (ABM) is a topic close to my heart and something I wish to talk about more. Today, I saw few papers on ABM, here is a quick overview of two different approaches. First, Luke Premo, from the University of Arizona, discussed an exploritory ABM for the Plio-Pleistocene of Africa. The intention of Premo’s model is not to create a realistic rendition of real world condition (topography, climate, soils, geology). Instead, his intention is to create a simple model to test (falsify) a contemporary hypothesis. The hypothesis is the Central Place Foraging (CPF) model as applied to early Hominids in East Africa. Premo created a model, entitled SHARE (Simulated Hominid Altruism Research Environment), that embeds rules of food consumption and hominid movement based on a patchwork grassland/forest environment. In the end, Premo replicates the general patterns of artifact distribution (called patches and scatters) that are currently attributed to CPF based on the location of the forest patches. At first glance, it seems obvious that the model would produce a patchwork distribution that corresponds to the patchwork of the forest, therefore making dubious results. But this is primarily what Premo is getting at. In the past, this pattern has been attributed soley to CPF as a consequence of modern ethnographic analogy. His simple model shows that CFP is not the only method that can lead to such an artifact distribution. Not that CFP is falsified, but the SHARE model shows that other things may be at work and that modern ethnographic analogs are not the only correlation. Interesting!

On the other side of the coin, John Murphy, also of the University of Arizona, detailed the Dynamic Interface Architecture System (DIAS). This system is a framework for the development of integrative ABM models that share data inputs and actions. The DIAS framework can take models of different systems and link them as modules into a large and more conclusive model. For instance, Murphy discussed the ENKIMDU model (a cultural based model of Mesopotamia) and showed how models of climate, soils, and cow herding behavior, which were create for different reasons, could be plugged in using the DIAS system, to the ENKIMDU model. This framework gives the power to take specialized models, created by experts in that field, and plug them in, seamlessly, to your model. According to Premo, this model would be included in the Emulation class of ABMs.

Mobile Applications
And finally, Claus Dam of the Danish Heritage Agency, Denmark, displayed the cell phone based locative technology they have developed. In short, this system, Nordic Handscape, is broken into two aspects. One part of this project is a system for tourists to retrieve museum data, while the other is for professionals and the public to retrieve data on archaeological sites based on their GPS location or their geocoded address. I do not want to see these projects short, but given the time, I will say that they did everything I could have asked them to do. It knows you location, and it will push you the location, data, and interpretation of archaeological sites within a given radius. The part that I find most appealing about his project is that it has a individual interpretation and data collecting aspect that nears social networking. Each user has their own website with their preferences on which the user can upload photos of sites and tell their own stories about these sites. At the end of the talk, there was a very interesting discussion based on this social aspect. One audience member asked what will happen when we allow lay people to edit out “professional” interpretations of archaeological sites? Other audience members jumped to the defense of the democratization of data and welcomed the wiki’esqu nature of the system. I agree with the wiki folks and would enjoy reading interpretations derived from non-archaeologists. The topic of democratized data has been an undertone.

I would love to delve deeper into the topic of what social networks and massively distributed archaeological interpretations could do for our discipline, but that is another day.

Way past my bedtime… Talk to you all tomorrow.

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I had some time this morning to walk around and check out the posters. Here is a quick recap of two interesting topics:

Google Earth, VRML, Native American Pit Houses

Secondly, A University of British Columbia team, composed of Michael Blake, Sue Formosa, Dana Lepofsky, and Dave Schaepe created a poster for a very cool and effective project along the Fraser River in BC. Working with the local native community, the Coast Salish, the UBC team used Surfer 8.0, Global Mapper, Google Earth, and a Cortona VRML viewer to efficiently and inexpensively disseminate archaeological data gathered from a Crast Salish pithouse village, to the interested parties.

The base data for this project is a high density laser transit survey of the site. Brought into Surfer and turned into a DEM, the depressions in the landscape that show the former location of Native American pit houses became very evident. From, Surfer, the DEM is exported to Global Mapper and saved as VRML for web viewing. Alternitvely, the data was also exported as a .jpg and imported into Google Earth, rectified, and exported as a KML. The end result is a highly detailed and realistic depiction of the pit house site which can be geogrpahically explored. This implementaion of geospatial technology is just the types of projects wich we should see more of in the neart future. The technology is cheap, if not free, the technical overhead is low, and the results are easily interpretable in a non-archaeoligcal context and accesible to anyone with a computer. (I realize the last requirement excludes 85% of the worlds population, but hopefully that will change one day.) The UBC team said they are working on a public site to share thier info.

Iowa Lithic Database

First, is a onteresting project run by the Office of State Archaeologist at the University of Iowa. They have created an electronic database of thier inhouse lithic samples which can be searched to help located the geologic source of your lithic artifacts. In the words of the authors:

“This assemblage is based on macroscopic identification elements including geological references, physical samples, mapped source locations, and a visual basic script program, all combined to form a GIS based system for comprehensive state-wide lithic identification and analysis.”

Check out thier site for more info and program download…

There should be some great papers presented today. I’ll provide an update this evening.

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The first day of the CAA 2006 conference has concluded. Before I head down to the hotel bar to… uh… “network”, I would like to share a bit about two interesting papers I saw today.

The first paper is a topic that was briefly covered in a previous post concerning the Tijl Vereenooghe’s Google maps based Flanders Archaeology Project “OpGraven”. After reviewing this project for the audience, Tijl unveiled a new project he has begun. “Erfgoed In Vlaanderen” is a Flickrmap (Flickr photo database tied to a Flash map) based project mapping and providing photos of the standing historic structures of the Flanders region. Please note that Tijl is not ready to release this site just yet, so improvements will be made. By using Flickrmap, erf-goed is able to handle a larger volume of data points as compared to Googlemaps and has the social network aspect of Flickr that will allow users to include their own photos of the mapped structures. After discussing these two projects, Tijl noted that he has had to spend very little time completing these projects with a total cost of $5. That raised the eyebrows of those not familiar with the technologies. The presentation can be found here.

The second paper of interest, centering upon the Digital Earth concept, was presented by Karl Grossner of the University of California, Sante Barbara. As a student of Michael Goodchild, Grossner’s work is centered on the creation of a true “digital earth system” base on the “Geolibrary” concept. The geolibrary concept, as evolved by Goodchild, is a georeferenced, searchable, index-able, library that is served through an interface that has the ability to open and process these data with GIS tools. Gossner uses this concept and builds upon it, by defining a “digital earth system” as geolibrary that interfaces with a virtual globe model with GIS tools to create, ultimately, a massively distributed GIS. Grossner’s paper spent time differentiating the digital earth system from today’s virtual globes (Google Earth, World Wind, etc…) Whereas contemporary virtual globes are not technically GISs and are primarily concerned with information with a location, the digital earth system will be more geared towards providing knowledge about places through distributed GIS databases, Knowledge Organization Systems (authority lists, domain ontologies, review & editing capabilities), UIs, querying, and clearing houses.

Certainly this is a lofty goal, but perhaps an idea that just needs it’s time. With developments in GE, World Wind, and the new capabilities of ArcExplorer, hopefully the buildings blocks of technology will find their place in Grossner’s schema. The technology will develop in that direction, but it will require a user movement to lead to a massively distributed GIS and a few good brains to keep the course steady. As stated by James Boxall [PDF] (2002; 12) “The real issue, in relation to the development of digital earth, is where the librarians will come from in order to help shape the geolibrary component of DE [Digital Earth].”

My synopsis here is limited, so luckily, Grossner revealed that this topic will be soon published as a journal article, but I will have to track him down to find out which.

Each of these papers was presented at symposium devoted to the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI). The ECAI “uses time and space to enhance understating and preservation of human culture.” Project such as TimeMap and the Silk Road Project are derived from the ECAI. Check them out…

Tomorrow’s agenda includes modeling pathways, 3D data capture, simulation, DBs, and GIS applications.

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Here I an in Fargo, North Dakota at the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology: CAA 2006 conference. Starting tomorrow, there will be 5 days of great presentations and workshops dealing with topics such as, but not limited to, 3D technologies, remote sensing, VR, and database theory as applied to archaeology and cultural heritage. I will try to cover some of the interesting topics I hear during the next few days. Hopefully this hotel internet connection will hold out long enough. Unfortunately, I am unable to upload any photos via FTP or HTTP, but I will do my best to let you know what is going on.

Stay tuned for updates!

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