Slideshow Transcript

1. Slide 1: Space as an artefact Understanding past perceptions and uses of space with and without computers Stuart Dunn King’s College London Digital Classicist Work in Progress Seminar Senate House, London 10th August 2007
2. Slide 2: What is an an artefact?  ‘In archaeology, an artifact or artefact is any object made or modified by a human culture, and often one later recovered by some archaeological endeavour’ - Wikipedia  An artefact is not a tool … necessarily  The space around us is something we have created
3. Slide 3: Divide and rule Image from bbc.co.uk/news
4. Slide 4: Divide and rule  Myth and religion  Architecture
5. Slide 5: A Time and a Place for Everything ‘In a number of ways the methods of the geographer both at the hard (I.e. physcial) and softer (i.e. social or political) ends have already proved of great value to the archaeologist … [B]ut when the geographer seeks to look more closely at the role of human action in the past, he or she must set that action in a context that is more than simply spatial’ Colin Renfrew The Geographical Journal, Vol 149, No. 3, November 1983
6. Slide 6: Space and Time: Methods in Geospatial Computing for Mapping the Past (Edinburgh, 23rd-24th July 2007)  Scale  Heterogeneity  Standards and Metadata
7. Slide 7: Scale Metrics are not always enough Scale is not seamless  Issues of scaling time and space are epistemically similar  Agent based modelling - predictive abstraction at different scales  Scale of data - North Sea Paleolandscape Project
8. Slide 8: Scale - representation 686 727
9. Slide 9: Heterogeneity  Representation - ‘A seamless interface to a huge range of data, information, digital publication and so on’.  But this is distinct from ‘reconstruction’
10. Slide 10: Heterogeneity  Mashups - exploitation of the power of Web 2.0 [I]nnovation can come from without as well as within … In fact, its real skill lies in stitching together [original] ideas with technologies from outside and then wrapping the reults in elegant software and stylish design … [producing] new products © 2001, Sara Madry around the needs of the user, not the demands of technology’ - ‘Lessons from Apple’, The Economist, June 9th 2007
11. Slide 11: Heterogeneity  Mashups - exploitation of the power of Web 2.0  ‘Traditional’ 2D maps versus richer, 3D representations of space  Service Oriented Architecture © 2001, Sara Madry  Process of construction and representing data  Past, present and future
12. Slide 12: Heterogeneity - ‘Neogeography’  Folksonomies and ontologies  Rigid metadata approach - description of ‘objects’ as opposed to the relationships between different objects.  Semantics ‘We cannot take control of a disciplinary vocabulary and impose it on other researchers. We are are not all logicists. I am certainly not a logicist, and I never will be.’
13. Slide 13: Standards and Metadata  What are standards for? - Access - Interoperability  Documentation  “Scheduled Ancient Dataset”
14. Slide 14: Standards and Metadata  Documentation  Documentation of *process* as well as metadata for *objects* - ‘paradata’  But different communities need different modes of documentation  Documentation does not have to be textual. What *is* documentation?  Use of existing technologies and resources - e.g. timelines  Ontologies and mapping of methods
15. Slide 15: Standards and Metadata
16. Slide 16: ‘To establish … whether GIS technology might facilitate the location, retrieval and Standards and Metadata interrogation of e-resources made available through the Data Grid’
17. Slide 17: Conclusions - priorities  Integration of time  Maps, but not as we know them  Development of standards and processes for documentation for their creation  Development of Web 2.0 methods and technologies http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/772/ http://www.ahessc.ac.uk/theme