Some years ago, when I was doing my MSc in archaeological computing, I heard about a curious project led by Alan Chalmers, then at the University of Bristol, that aimed to digitally recreate accurate simulations of different light sources. These would then be used to “light” 3D models to show more accurately they may have looked under certain conditions, such as goose fat tallow candlelight. The light absorption and reflectance properties of objects and walls etc was also taken into consideration.
It seems that Alan’s research is progressing well at Warwick University, and is currently featured on the BBC Technology website. Light is often forgotten when interpreting life in the past, along with the fact that it wasn’t always daylight in days of yore. I’m please to see this get some popular publicity!
At the time, Alan was using software called Radiance, but from looking at the site, I’m not sure if it’s still being developed, but it might be worth a look if you want to get started.
Alun Salt from ClioAudio has created a new service called Historyscape, which is an RSS feed that grabs user-submitted websites from Netscape which have been tagged with “Ancient”, “Ancient History”, “Archaeology” and “History”. The feed is ordered by the number of votes each item has received.
You can subscribe to Historyscape via this RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Historyscape
Alun is using Yahoo Pipes and Feedburner to create the service. Details about how he did it are also available.
This is a great example of why it is important for heritage organisations to make their data available via web services - you can get people doing amazing things with your data. The possibilities would be endless.
Open Objects reports that the London Archaeological Archive and Research Centre (LAARC) are conducting an excavation at the Michael Faraday School in Southwark, London, and are posting much of the information online, as events happen.
They have a wiki, a collection of photos on Flickr, and videos on YouTube, which are all updated throughout each day of the project.
All we need now is a live streaming webcam with IRC chatroom via ustream.tv :-)
It’s great to see this happen - to see archaeologists embracing these technologies to feed people’s interest in the past, and take advantage of the immediacy of the sense of discovery.
Regular readers of Past Thinking might have noticed that the previous post “Learn medieval Latin online” wasn’t written by me:
Without further ado, I’d like to introduce Tehmina Goskar as a new author on Past Thinking.
Tehmina is well known in the spheres of museums and medieval history, and is also the only person I know whose website comes up as the number 1 result in a Google search for just their first name..
Even more astute readers (if you don’t already know us) will spot that we share the same surname - that’s because we’re married :-)
As promised, here is a re-recording of the talk that I gave at the Museums Association Digital Dialogues conference. It is, of course, available as a podcast.
Feel free to comment here. If there’s interest, I’ll also post my presentation for people to download.
If you’d like to subscribe to this and future podcasts from Past Thinking, the feed URL is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/pastthinking
Podcasts: should museums listen? [18:21m]:
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Tomorrow, I’ll be giving a paper at the Digital Dialogues conference in the Victoria and Albert Museum. I may well re-record my talk and release it as a podcast here on Past Thinking, if people are interested.
I won’t be talking about how to podcast, there’s plenty of guides and forums for that, but rather introducing people to what it is, why do it, and who’s doing it, whilst touching briefly on video and vodcasting.
If you’re already going, I’ll see you there, and if you’re not, check back here soon and have a listen.
I urge you to try out the new Celtic Coin Index website. Dan Pett has built the website for this fabulous resource from scratch, and it’s packed with modern features such as Google Maps, RSS, GeoRSS, tag clouds, and even an API (coming soon).
The site is still in beta for the time being. Dan has had just one hour per day to work on this since March, and is pretty much self-taught.
I think you’ll agree, that this new site raises the bar for heritage websites in general.
Link: Celtic Coin Index (beta)
[Disclaimer: I work for Wessex Archaeology]
Wessex Archaeology have just announced that they will be using a Creative Commons license for the 600+ photos that they have on Flickr and in their gallery.
Let’s hope that other heritage organisations follow suit. The “All Rights Reserved” copyright model is very restrictive when you study and record the past, and want to share some of that work with others to aid and encourage further learning.
By adopting the Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0″ license, they are actively saying to people “we want you to use our photos”. Which for a heritage organisation, is fairly novel!
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The Museum of London have been doing some great stuff with their website recently, including an upcoming events RSS feed, and the Google Maps powered Map My London where you can record your own memories in London, and where they are of.
Mia has also pointed out that there is now a Museum of London Flickr group as the museum now permits photography. It’s great to see this happening - museums opening up, and encouraging interaction. The Museum’s ‘official’ Flickr account (MoL_Learning - “Molly“) is also well worth a look.
Latest 2 events at the Museum of London (live from their RSS feed):
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Thanks to Mia, I’ve just found out that Past Thinking has been misbehaving itself and displaying an error like a cat proudly presenting a dead mouse to its owner…
The problem was with the theme I have been using, so I’ve enabled an alternative as I won’t be able to fix the problem until Sunday. But people can now see then words, which is arguably much more important than the looks :-)