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Tom Goskar 9:18 pm on 23 February, 2010 Permalink | Reply
Tags: analysis, Archaeology (13), illumination dome, imaging, PTM, RTI, surface detail

Polynomial Texture Mapping for Archaeologists

This month sees the publication of an article written by myself and Dr Graeme Earl from the University of Southampton’s Archaeological Computing Research Group entitled “Polynomial Texture Mapping for Archaeologists” in the March/April edition of British Archaeology magazine.

Polynomial Texture Mapping (PTM) is a technique that uses ordinary digital photography equipment alongside directional lighting. It produces images that can be lit from any direction, as if you had the real object in front of you. It is an excellent technique for analysing fine details on surfaces, something that has particular utility in archaeology.

The full text will be available online after the next edition of BA comes out.

The photo above is of the PTM illumination dome which I designed and built at Wessex Archaeology. You can see more details about the dome in my building a PTM illumination dome Flickr set. I have much more to say about PTM, so stay tuned.

Find out more about the Wessex Archaeology PTM rig and see interactive examples.

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Tom Goskar 2:55 pm on 22 April, 2009 Permalink | Reply
Tags: Archaeology (13), archaeopix, Creative Commons (2), photographs, Photography (3)
Archaeopix: a Creative Commons archaeology photo search tool

Alun Salt and I have been working on a new website to help simplify the process of finding archaeology and heritage-related photos that have a Creative Commons license attached to them.

Without further ado, introducing… Archaeopix!

The homepage features a photo of the day, which we hope to update daily. Clicking “Search” on the navigation bar takes you to the tool where you can look for CC licensed images which have been posted to a hand-picked series of groups and accounts on Flickr:

This is what Alun has to say about the search tool:

The clever bit is the search page.

Searching Flickr can be hit ‘n’ miss. Generally if you want to use a photo for a blog or educational handout and you need it quickly, it needs to be licensed under a creative commons licence. You can search on Flickr for cc-licensed photos, but a search for “Rome” will bring up everything with Rome in it. Groups are handy because they’re themed. So you could search the Archaeology group for Rome. The problem then is that you’ll find a lot of ©opyright photos. You really need a group which is all cc-licensed. Chiron is a good example of that. However Chiron’s strength is that it focuses on the classical world, which means you won’t find prehistoric Europe in it, or anything Mayan. This is where Archaeopix search comes in.

Head over to Alun’s Archaeoastronomy blog to read more about Archaeopix.

Link: Archaeopix
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Tehmina Goskar 9:14 pm on 16 March, 2009 Permalink | Reply
Tags: collections (2), collections trust, consultation, culture (2), digital britain, digital economy
Digital Britain and Collections

What role has Culture (capital C) in Digital Britain? And within Culture, what do digitised collections and content mean to the nation? Perhaps more importantly for the sectors involved in cultural provision (such as museums), can digital collections take part in the Digital Economy in a meaningful way? In January 2009, the UK Government produced an interim report setting out a kind of manifesto for placing UK Plc at the forefront of the “global digital economy.”

I would like to see the relationship develop more as that between supporter/donor and custodian, rather than just producer and consumer.

In response, Collections Trust made an interim response. And here is a summary my response to the interim response. I attempted to take the long view, looking back at my own experiences with digitised collections and other content. My full reply and Nick Poole’s (CEO Collections Trust) response can be read in the list archives of jiscmail’s Museum Computer Group list.
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Tom Goskar 3:29 pm on 4 March, 2009 Permalink | Reply
Tags: community, creative spaces (3), Galleries (2), improvements, Museums (4), suggestions, website (2)

Creative Spaces – some more thoughts

It’s been an interesting day so far on the Museums Computer Group email list. The debate on Creative Spaces has been fast-paced with passion, criticism and defence. I won’t reiterate exactly what has been said, as you could catch up on the threads in the list archive, but I have had some more thoughts that I wish to share.

Despite the criticism from some of the more vocal members of the museum technology community, I stand by my previous post in that I can’t help but like the idea of the Creative Spaces project.

Why will people like it?

I think people (i.e. ‘normal’ users, not museums professionals per se) will like it because:

It encourages users to interact with the museum spaces and objects within
It fosters a sense of connection with the museum, which, in my unscientific experience, people like
It is an online space endorsed by the museums and galleries themselves, so it’s ’safe’
You are free to do what you like on the site – sign up to groups, create notebooks about things you find interesting, comment on other notebooks and items within, etc.

It will, of course, only ‘work’ if a genuine community builds up around and within the website. Getting people to use it shouldn’t be a problem. I don’t know the exact visitor numbers for the nine museums involved with the pilot, but it’s certainly in the millions. Something as simplistic as a sign reading “Interact with this museum online. Share your experiences on Creative Spaces.”, displayed in prominent physical as well as virtual spaces ought to do the job. Maybe a place to have an experiment with QR codes too.

Homepage

Much of the criticism (e.g. Mike Ellis, New Curator) about Creative Spaces is that people have, when faced with the homepage for the first time, not known what to do, or how it will benefit them. This is generally true. It’s hard to design the perfect homepage (believe me, I know!), but I can suggest some improvements.

creative-spaces-welcome

Firstly, we need people to know immediately what the site is all about. Currently we have: “Connecting with your favourite Museums! Creative Spaces connects you with nine UK national museums and galleries allowing you to explore their collections, find like-minded people and create your own content.”

Maybe it could be ““Interact with museums and galleries. Upload your own experiences. Search the collections of 9 museums. Connect with like-minded people. Expand your visit online.” This explains why I might want to create an account and get involved – I don’t want to “create my own content”, I want to upload my stuff to share!

Those big buttons could do with a very short description (click to see a larger version):

(as I write this, Frankie has written echoed some of my ideas, and had some great new ones)

Should Notebooks be called Notebooks? They’re more like your own collection. Whichever way it is done, I do think that it could be a tad clearer.

URLs

However, on the sign, you would have to display a URL. It would make sense to make this a single, memorable URL. I confess to being somewhat confused as to why there are so many URLs – one for each participating insitution:

British Museum	http://bm.nmolp.org/creativespaces/
Imperial War Museum	http://iwm.nmolp.org/creativespaces/
National Portrait Gallery	http://npg.nmolp.org/creativespaces/
Natural History Museum	http://nhm.nmolp.org/creativespaces/
Royal Armouries	http://ram.nmolp.org/creativespaces/
Sir John Soane’s Museum	http://sjs.nmolp.org/creativespaces/
TATE	http://tate.nmolp.org/creativespaces/
The Wallace Collection	http://twc.nmolp.org/creativespaces/
V&A Museum	http://vna.nmolp.org/creativespaces/

The only difference I can see when looking at these sites is the “Popular collection items” display. Perhaps a gateway page with a single URL would be an option, say at creativespaces.info (which is available, and easy to remember)? You could select which museum you wanted to see popular items from. There are many ways of doing this – I hope the stakeholders explore some of them.

Search

As I have mentioned elsewhere, I did find the search facility to be somewhat lacking. It’s great for casually browsing objects by keyword, but like many people, once you can see the power of a cross-collection search that previously (to the best of my knowledge) didn’t exist, I want more.

I found it very hard to locate objects that have an Iron Age date, for example. If I was to use this in an educational context I’d like to see a few more options in the search, such as provenance, period, and location.

In the search results, clicking “View larger image” opens a new browser window showing the result from the institution’s own website, which in turn often requires another click to view a larger version. If this could be integrated in a better way, that would be great (but it’s a start). Maybe using a “lightbox” style effect (using jQuery, for example) to float the detail page over Creative Spaces might make it seem slightly better integrated?

RSS

I’d like to see personalised RSS feeds for notebooks and groups. This would allow me, as a slightly more tech-savvy user, to display my Creative Spaces content elsewhere, such as here on Past Thinking, or even in Facebook.

Beta & User Help Forums

If the site is going to be in “beta”, it ought to be described somewhere on the site what this means in layman’s terms. Frankie Roberto suggested needs to be some kind of help forum (like GetSatisfaction). This should be separate from the “Groups” (as it wouldn’t be about museum/gallery content, but about the website itself), that is looked after by the Creative Spaces staff. They can listen to suggestions, and inform people of forthcoming changes. Communication needs to work both ways if there is a community involved.

Conclusion

Creative Spaces is in beta. Things will change as more people use the service, and those who designed it learn how it is used, and where its limitations lie. Any amount of user testing is no match for thousands of people trying to actually use it. It’s the approach Flickr took, and some radical changes have occurred there too over the years (for good or for bad – you can’t please everybody). They listened to their users.

With a better homepage, I think this could really work. Once that is improved, and people can see straight away why they would want to use Creative Spaces, it will gain more users, and begin the evolution of the beta site into a strong, vibrant community of, as the BBC put it “Museum lovers”.

Here’s to its success!

[Update] Mike Ellis’s post on his Electronic Museum blog has a really good conversation going on in the comments. It’s really worth heading over there to catch up on who’s saying what.

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Pete NewCurator 4:01 pm on 4 March, 2009 Permalink

My criticism wasn’t that people wouldn’t know what to do, it’s that there’s nothing to it. You reasons for why people would like it could be done on the each of the museum’s own website and any bookmarking tool.

In fact, I think this could be knocked up in ning.com in an afternoon.

Alright, it’s still in Beta. But Beta is supposed to show a rough version with bugs to iron out. Not something so thin it’s not going to tell you where it’s going.

When something worth mentioning happens on Creative Spaces, I’ll talk about it. But think about the fanfare this has got. This has been released far too early.
Tom Goskar 4:17 pm on 4 March, 2009 Permalink

Hi Pete,

Thanks for your comment.

It’s true that each museum could do the same on their own sites, but that’s limiting when you want to view collections beyond the bounds of a single institution. Many people may also visit a number of museums in one day, or over time, and want to aggregate stuff together. Not just saving favourite objects, but photos, text, whatever. A more reflexive approach, as it where. That’s how I see it anyway.

True – much of the functionality could be created in Ning in a few hours. But who has control over that data? How safe would it be with Ning? How could you get data back out in a useable, controlled form? How can you control how well it will perform if the service gets very popular? You couldn’t do the federated search in Ning.

There are a lot of improvements to be made, that’s for sure. I’ve just uploaded some images into a Notebook and it looks rather ugly (especially how it shows the larger image). But I expect that kind of thing to change from user feedback. Or at least, I hope it will ;-)

I do think that it’s newsworthy, as it is a start. I haven’t seen anything directly museum/gallery-related like this before. I only hope that there is some of the £1.5m left to make improvements, and that some of the constructive criticism levied by members of the museum community (and indeed, early users) will be taken onboard.

We will have to, as they say, watch this Creative Space (har, har).
Mia 4:24 pm on 4 March, 2009 Permalink

I think it’s a tough gig for the staff on Creative Spaces – I suspect a lot of the criticism actually relates to the project structures they inherited, not the implementation choices open to them. But the people who write those project bids aren’t around in these museum tech spaces to hear the comments – so who’s left to take responsibility for them?

‘beta’ as final bug fixes is a slightly outdated idea that doesn’t allow for open iterations – having a beta like this is a step closer to an agile model that allows for deep change, not just a thin layer of beta testing that can only poke around on the surface or fix bugs.

I dunno, I’m still thinking through it all. Museum projects need to be more user-centred, and this is both a step forward (even if the geeks have trouble imagining it being useful for other people) and a step backwards (because it’s the same old top-heavy, old-fashioned project structure based around institutional needs).
Pete NewCurator 6:53 pm on 4 March, 2009 Permalink

“limiting when you want to view collections beyond the bounds of a single institution.”

As I proved, you could do it all on Google.

http://newcurator.com/2009/03/how-to-make-creative-spaces-in-5-minutes/
Andrew Larcombe 7:57 pm on 4 March, 2009 Permalink

‘fraid I’m with Pete on this one.

It doesn’t actually appear to *do* much apart from provide some social bookmarking features. Any ideas as to how this budget was spent? In terms of actual functionality, £150k seems generous for a site like this.
Frankie Roberto 11:25 pm on 4 March, 2009 Permalink

The URL thing is COMPLETELY baffling. I can only suspect that there is some insane political reason behind it, with the people making the decision having no idea as to how the web works.

I wonder which URL Google will consider the canonical one…
Tom Goskar 8:57 pm on 5 March, 2009 Permalink

There’s a lot of passion behind this debate, that’s for sure :-)

@Pete What have you proved? You’ve made a Google Co-op search for the 9 institutions websites (whole website, not specifically their collections). You’ve suggested people use disparate bookmarking tools to save them, or use disparate social networking sites to do the social bit? Sorry, try again :-)

@Andrew But the site does do something, surely? I don’t really want to always be on the defence of CS, and there’s so much to this debate! The site seems to do something for me. I like the idea of the notebooks – it’s like a Tumblr style app in a museum/gallery space. Ticks a box for me. I like the groups idea. Maybe that’s too fluffy for some, but I think it’s a good idea. I just wish there were feeds for everything (and of course, an API).

@Frankie Yes – the URLs are weird. I hope they sort that. It should be simple enough on a LAMP stack, but it looks Windows-ish to me.

Tom Goskar 2:40 pm on 7 August, 2007 Permalink | Reply
lamusediffuse – Libya and the social web

I was recently sent information about a project called “lamusediffuse“, an interesting project which aims to increase global awareness of Libyan museums and their collections via the web.

lamusediffuse proposes the use of Social Web tools for the inclusion of not-dominant cultural expressions in the scopes of culture diffusion on the Internet. Accordingly with this objective, the project “Museums in Libya” is focused on two starting facts, the first is the lack of information about Libyan museums available in the website of the International Council of African Museums (AFRICOM) and the second is the apparent lack of museum websites in this country.

Their approach seems pretty much spot on to me. Set up and carefully tend Flickr and del.icio.us accounts, blog (about the phenomenon of interacting with museums using the social web), have a wiki, publish presentations on Slideshare.

I hope that this approach works well for them – it will be an interesting experiment to see if they can lift their museums from relative obscurity. I’ll certainly try and keep up with their project – it’s exactly the kind of approach that I evangelise about.
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lamusediffuse is discussing. Toggle Comments
- lamusediffuse 12:46 pm on 8 December, 2007 Permalink
  
  Thank you so much for your support and nice words. We continue with the project "Museums in Libya 2.0" getting very good images and developing the information. Also we have started another project called Museum of Iraq 2.0 on Iraqi art, artifacts and cultural heritage disseminated in collections from all over the world trying to gather the art works which belonged to the looted National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad or are part of the Iraqi Heritage and currently belong to other museums’ collections.
  
  Your collaboration will be more than welcome!
Tom Goskar 10:13 am on 2 July, 2007 Permalink | Reply
Historyscape: new heritage mashup

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.
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Museum Blogging » Blog Archive » Percolations: Museums and Social Networking Sites, Part V, and Artinthepicture.com are discussing. Toggle Comments
- Artinthepicture.com 1:32 pm on 3 July, 2007 Permalink
  
  Thx, should be an interesting feed.
Tom Goskar 1:03 pm on 2 May, 2007 Permalink | Reply
Museum of London Online

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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Jeremy, and Bright Meadow » Sunday Roast: ok, at this point you’re abusing sarcasm are discussing. Toggle Comments
- Jeremy 12:37 pm on 24 October, 2007 Permalink
  
  Hi Tom, thanks for this, sorry I didn’t spot it until now! I just saw from the Feedburner stats that the events feed you consume here had brought a couple of people to our site so I thought I’d investigate. You’re very kind about us, we try to do some slightly innovative things but I’m only too aware of where we fall short in some of the basics. Look out for the microformats, too, and stuff like embedded google calendar buttons on events pages, or links to FindInALibrary on the MoLAS publications pages (as soon as they get around to signing it off).
  You set the bar for archaeology, though, keep it up. And tell Ken Lymer to get some work done (assuming he’s started now?)
Tom Goskar 8:58 am on 15 February, 2007 Permalink | Reply
Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us

[UPDATE] John Battelle has posted an interview with Michael Wesch, who has agreed to answer questions in the blog’s comments section.

Tony Gill on the Museums Computer Group email list, pointed out a video that covers the major issues that come under the ‘Web 2.0′ umbrella. It puts a lot of today’s issues in context by providing a short history of semantics on the web, and was put created by Michael Wesch, of Kansas State University. Interestingly, he is an assistant professor of anthropology, as opposed to a computer scientist, which is why I think that his interpretation is quite unique.

It is a thought provoking video, accompanied by some suitably electronic music, and well worth the 5 minutes that it lasts.

And when you have finished watching the video, head over to Wesch’s Digital Ethnography website to see some of the reactions, and even video responses. This is a fascinating project to watch.
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The Machine is Us/ing Us « Pastxting is discussing. Toggle Comments
Tom Goskar 2:00 pm on 22 January, 2007 Permalink | Reply
Tags: Geotagging (3), maps (2), tagmap, yahoo (2)
Yahoo Tag Maps

Yahoo have just released a service called TagMaps, allowing you to display a tag cloud of the most interesting terms attached to geotagged Flickr photos on an interactive map.

TagMaps are a new way to visualize text on geographic maps. TagMaps can be used to communicate key characteristics of location-based data in an easy-to-understand way.

A TagMap can be embedded into into your website (for non-commercial use):

It’s not as useful as it might first appear though. The only tags that show are the most “interesting” (often just the most tags for an area), hence the above example for Salisbury shows “cathedral, Old Sarum, and Salisbury” and nothing more granular than that. And you have to click the “View on World Explorer” text at the top to actually see the photos. The tag “cathedral” actually disappears when you zoom in closer, for example. There’s some work to go, it seems.

I like the idea though – it could have some useful heritage applications, which could be especially useful as satellite and aerial photography is improved on the service. Imagine looking at the Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape – a big area indeed. Seeing words like “tin” or “copper” or “engine house” etc etc could enable you to explore some photos and narrow down where to go and visit according to your interest.

One to watch as it develops.

Link: Yahoo TagMaps
Seen on: O’Reilly Radar: World Explorer, Explore Your Town With Flickr
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Mor, Russell Hancock, and Tijl are discussing. Toggle Comments
- Tijl 3:26 pm on 22 January, 2007 Permalink
  
  this might be useful for creating a TagMap: there’s a little application to get GeoRSS feeds for Flickr photos @ http://geothings.ning.com/flicked.php
- Russell Hancock 5:09 pm on 22 January, 2007 Permalink
  
  There is a “google earth” feed that lists some of the thousands of mines avaliable on the site http://www.russellhancock.co.uk. A similar idea?
- Mor 6:44 pm on 22 January, 2007 Permalink
  
  Thanks for the post – and the deficiencies you point out are absolutely on the mark. The problem is not in the application, though, but in the data (always blame the data…). When more photos are available (more and more people upload and geotag their photos on Flickr), finer details will emerge in higher and higher resolutions all around the world. So, the tagmap that you show on this page might actually be a lot better next time we update our servers.
Tom Goskar 4:23 pm on 16 November, 2006 Permalink | Reply
What was here?

This week sees the launch of wherewashere.com:

whatwasHere.com wants to revolutionise how history is written. Its pilot website in Liverpool tells history like it’s never been told before: by everyone. It doesn’t only tell the capital H history of Liverpool, but the everything-interesting-that-ever-happened-to-the-people-who-actually-live-there history of Liverpool. It’s oral history for the My Space era.

Based around Google maps, the site lets people instantly publish the stories that matter to them on the spot where they happened, discuss other people’s stories, use the Timeline to go back in time, make connections between big events and small across the map. If you know something that happened in Liverpool, put it on!

whatwasHere.com’s aim is to get everyone – yes everyone – writing history.

You can follow the project blog at http://blog.whatwashere.com/

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Tom Goskar 9:18 pm on 23 February, 2010 Permalink | Reply Tags: analysis, Archaeology (13), illumination dome, imaging, PTM, RTI, surface detail

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Tom Goskar 2:55 pm on 22 April, 2009 Permalink | Reply Tags: Archaeology (13), archaeopix, Creative Commons (2), photographs, Photography (3)

Tehmina Goskar 9:14 pm on 16 March, 2009 Permalink | Reply Tags: collections (2), collections trust, consultation, culture (2), digital britain, digital economy

Tom Goskar 3:29 pm on 4 March, 2009 Permalink | Reply Tags: community, creative spaces (3), Galleries (2), improvements, Museums (4), suggestions, website (2)

Why will people like it?

Homepage

URLs

Search

RSS

Beta & User Help Forums

Conclusion

Pete NewCurator 4:01 pm on 4 March, 2009 Permalink

Tom Goskar 4:17 pm on 4 March, 2009 Permalink

Mia 4:24 pm on 4 March, 2009 Permalink

Pete NewCurator 6:53 pm on 4 March, 2009 Permalink

Andrew Larcombe 7:57 pm on 4 March, 2009 Permalink

Frankie Roberto 11:25 pm on 4 March, 2009 Permalink

Tom Goskar 8:57 pm on 5 March, 2009 Permalink

Tom Goskar 2:40 pm on 7 August, 2007 Permalink | Reply

lamusediffuse 12:46 pm on 8 December, 2007 Permalink

Tom Goskar 10:13 am on 2 July, 2007 Permalink | Reply

Artinthepicture.com 1:32 pm on 3 July, 2007 Permalink

Tom Goskar 1:03 pm on 2 May, 2007 Permalink | Reply

Jeremy 12:37 pm on 24 October, 2007 Permalink

Tom Goskar 8:58 am on 15 February, 2007 Permalink | Reply

Tom Goskar 2:00 pm on 22 January, 2007 Permalink | Reply Tags: Geotagging (3), maps (2), tagmap, yahoo (2)

Tijl 3:26 pm on 22 January, 2007 Permalink

Russell Hancock 5:09 pm on 22 January, 2007 Permalink

Mor 6:44 pm on 22 January, 2007 Permalink

Tom Goskar 4:23 pm on 16 November, 2006 Permalink | Reply

Tom Goskar 9:18 pm on 23 February, 2010 Permalink | Reply
Tags: analysis, Archaeology (13), illumination dome, imaging, PTM, RTI, surface detail

Tom Goskar 2:55 pm on 22 April, 2009 Permalink | Reply
Tags: Archaeology (13), archaeopix, Creative Commons (2), photographs, Photography (3)

Tehmina Goskar 9:14 pm on 16 March, 2009 Permalink | Reply
Tags: collections (2), collections trust, consultation, culture (2), digital britain, digital economy

Tom Goskar 3:29 pm on 4 March, 2009 Permalink | Reply
Tags: community, creative spaces (3), Galleries (2), improvements, Museums (4), suggestions, website (2)

Tom Goskar 2:00 pm on 22 January, 2007 Permalink | Reply
Tags: Geotagging (3), maps (2), tagmap, yahoo (2)