Category Archives: visualisation

Digital Heritage, Scholarly Making & Experiential Media

3D and game editors, Announcements, augmented reality, Biofeedback, design, digital heritage, game, heritage, HIVE, Presentation, Symposium, talks, tracking, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality, visualisation, , , , , , , ,

Our internal small grant (School of Media Culture and Creative Arts, Curtin University) was successful!

Here is a synopsis of the application (redacted):

Digital Heritage, Scholarly Making & Experiential Media

We propose

  • A one-day workshop [Friday 26 August 2016, HIVE] with 3D, Digital APIs, UNITY and Augmented Reality workshops.
  • We will present our projects at that workshop and a month later meet to review progress and each other’s publications and grants.
  • Then we will organize with the Library and other GLAM partners a cultural hackathon in Perth where programmers and other parties spend a day creating software prototypes based on our ideas from the workshop. The best project will win a prize but the IP will be open source and contestants may be invited into the research projects or related grant applications.
  • Equipment to build prototypes and showcases for future grants. Part of the money will also go into Virtual Reality headsets, and Augmented Reality equipment that can be loaned out from the MCCA store to postgraduates and students.

The above would help progress the below research projects:

  • Another need is to develop the maker-space and digital literacy skills in information studies and the Library Makerspace, to develop a research area in scholarly making.
  • Another project is to integrate archives and records with real-time visualisation such as in the area of digital humanities scholarship, software training in digital humanities, and hands on workshops and crafting projects at the Curtin University Library.
  • Another project is to explore how SCALAR can integrate 3D and Augmented Reality and create a framework for cloud-based media assets that could dynamically relate to an online scholarly publication and whether that journal in printed form, with augmented reality trackers and head mounted displays could create multimedia scholarly journals where the multimedia is dynamically downloaded from the Internet so can be continually updated. Can this work inform future developments of eSPACE and interest in ‘scholarly making’ and makerspaces?
  • There is potential to create an experiential media research cluster with the new staff of SODA, to explore immersive and interactive media that can capture emotions and affects of participants or players. This requires suitable equipment.

Book in preparation “Designing The ‘Place’ Of Virtual Space”

3D and game editors, Announcements, Book, Digital Humanities, visualisation, ,

Indiana University Press just approved the contract for the following book in their Spatial Humanities Series. The chapters may change slightly over the next half-year, and final publication is of course dependent on a full final academic review, but here is my plan for it (and I would appreciate suggestions, links, readings to add to the final product).

Title: Designing The ‘Place’ Of Virtual Space

Despite the many architects talking about virtual environments in the early 1990s (Novak, 2015, Novak and Novak, 2002, Packer and Jordan, 2002, Wiltshire, 2014), there is relatively little publicly accessible research on making, experiencing and critiquing virtual places is only in conference papers, book chapters and edited collections. These forms of academic literature are also more likely to be found in the computational sciences, and are not often or easily accessed by humanities scholars. So I have an overall purpose here: to communicate with humanities scholars the importance of understanding how digital and virtual places are designed, experienced and critiqued.

I suggest that technology is not the fundamental problem in designing virtual places. Are there specific needs or requirements of real places that prevent us from relying on digital media and ‘online worlds’ experts? Or is it not so much that the new tools are currently too cumbersome or unreliable, but instead it is our conventional understanding of place design and platially situated knowledge and information that needs to change?

Secondly, I will review concepts in various space and place-related disciplines, both historically and in terms of digital media, to examine where they converge or diverge, and which methods and tools are of relevance to digital (and especially virtual) place-making. Here I suggest the terms Place, Cultural Presence, Game and World are critically significant. Clearer definition of these terms would enrich clarify and reveal the importance of real-world place design but also for virtual world design in terms of interaction, immersion and meaning. I will then apply these terms and concepts to virtual worlds, virtual museums and online game-environments to see if the theories and predictions match what happened to the various digital environments.

Thirdly, I will describe recent development in neuroscience and how they may help our understanding of how people experience, store and recollect place-related experiences. Can these discoveries help our design of virtual places? The chapter on learning and especially place-learning will benefit from this survey of recent scientific research.

Fourth, this book will cover game mechanics, and how they can be used in virtual place design to make digital environments more engaging and the learning content more powerful and salient. The importance of interaction design is typically underplayed, under-reported and under-evaluated. We still have not truly grasped the native potential of interactive digital media as it may augment architecture, and that is why debate on the conceptual albeit thorny issues of the subject matter is still in its infancy. I believe that understanding game mechanics is of great relevance to virtual place designers and I will put forth an argument as to why, a clear definition of game mechanics and an explanation of different types of game mechanics suited to differing design purposes.

The fifth aim of this book is to give a brief introduction to new and emerging software and devices and explain how they help, hinder or replace our traditional means of designing and exploring places-is technology always an improvement here?

The last subject chapter will then explore evaluation methods (both traditional and recent), which address the complicated problem of understanding how people evaluate places, and whether this knowledge can be directly applied to the evaluation of virtual places.

Chapters

  1. Place Theory Applied to Virtual Environments
  2. How Mind Remembers Space, How Places are Meaningful and Evocative
  3. Dead or Dying Virtual Worlds
  4. Place Affordances of Virtual Environments Learnt From Affordances in Real Places
  5. Place Interaction and Mechanics
  6. Learning from Place
  7. Place-Making Devices, Place-Finding Devices
  8. Evaluation
  9. Conclusion

Counterfactual, Counterfictional, Counterfutural: Games of the Future Designed By Archaeologists (the book idea)

3D and game editors, archaeology, Conference, virtual heritage, visualisation, ,

Like Assassin’s Creed but upset over how it could have made history exciting without having to employ and manipulate central historical characters? Love Lara Croft: Tomb Raider if only the tombraiding (stealing) mechanics could be replaced by something more meaningful? Wish that the Total War Series allowed you to employ agent modelling to test competing archaeological theories of migration, colonisation and invasion or just to improve its historical accuracy? Dream you could use the  language, graphic vision and immersion of Far Cry Primal in the classroom to explain (through engaging interaction) the Mesolithic rather than primarily use it as a backstage to fight semi-believable creatures? Then this book is for you. Correction. This book is BY you.

Brief: Archaeologists and historians either take a game with an inspiring concept, technique or mechanic and extrapolate it to a game or simulation of the future OR they share their vision of a game or simulation that reveals, expresses or augments their own research.

1. This becomes an edited book. But wait…

The writers could meet at a workshop, bring their own designs, video cutscenes, and illustrations and media depicting what this new vision would look like or how it could be experienced or how it could be revealed. Or other writers or the public or even budding game designers could provide their own illustrations, walkthroughs, PLAYABLE DEMOS, diagrams or audio recordings of what the original author’s vision could be experienced as.

2. This becomes an online sensory experience mixed in with online chapters of the book. But wait..

3. There can also be a dynamically compiled new online game created from tagged elements of #2. The reader can either choose to read the book, to read and experience the multimedia book chapters online OR select their favourite mechanics, scenarios, techniques, illustrations etc from any or all of the chapters and then the online website automatically creates a multimedia collection to suit the tags of the chosen components..the reader has now designed, experimented, or played with a whole new potential game or scenario of archaeology, history and heritage in the future..

But wait…

4. The game designers who helped in the workshop are so inspired they help the archaeologists design these new ludic visions of the future..

3D models: Advanced challenges, UCLA

3D and game editors, archaeology, Architecture, augmented reality, Conference, digital heritage, heritage, infrastructure, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality, visualisation, ,

Daisy-O’lice I. Williams, University of Oregon, presents to the insitute on day 1, 20 June 2016, UCLA.

I was very fortunate to be invited to the NEH-funded Advanced Challenges in Theory and Practice in 3D Modeling of Cultural Heritage Sites Institute, hosted at University of Massachusetts in 2015 and University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) 20-23 June 2016.
Some points I noticed reoccurring over the four days (and which I also added to the #neh3D twitter stream) were:

  1. People are still inventing the wheel when it comes to interaction in virtual environments. But you all knew that anyway.
  2. There is still a gap between educators and libraries who just want to get projects made, students engaged, and assets saved and those who talk about the big metadata / ontology questions. Nobody apart from Piotr used CIDOC-CRM for example and as he and I agreed, there needs to be more useful examples for archaeologists and architects.
  3. We still need an open source augmented reality platform: Content providers will try to lock you in to their own devices (http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/602484/google-building-its-own-smartphone-report-says/) and AR software is commercial, risky and when the AR company disappears so does your augmented reality project! To add insult to injury many AR software apps store you models offline or in a secure cloud so you cannot directly access them even though you made them.[I have just heard of ARGON, will have to investigate].
  4. There is no suitable 3D model+scholarly journal, the editor in chief of Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, Bernard Frischer, admitted their 3D solution was not yet a fully usable solution plus Elsevier say they own the model. Actually, I think the ownership of the scholarly content is as much an issue as the lack of a suitable 3D viewer. Other journals that may offer similar issues but 3D model potential are http://intarch.ac.uk/ (“All our content is open access”) and ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH). However at the workshop one of the founders of SCALAR expressed interest in exploring 3D for SCALAR so hopefully something eventuates with this working party.

Many thanks to Alyson Gill (UMass) and Lisa Snyder (UCLA) for the opportunity to hear about US developments and the really cool CULTURAL HERITAGE MARKUP LANGUAGE CIDOC_CRM project that Piotr Kuroczyński (Herder Institute Germany) presented.

3D popups and scholarly books

archaeology, augmented reality, digital heritage, Presentation, publication, visualisation

Scholarly publishers want to produce quality longterm-durable books. I get that. But some of us young digital guerilla turks want to combine 3D and augmented technologies so 3D models can be shared and experimented (played) with.
And 3D models should be able to change over time, to link to different scholarly resources and models and links and linked resources should be able to be maintained and modified.

So how do we have stable print materials and changing, dynamic 3D models?

Easy peasy.
Consider the magic book. You put on these special see through glasses. Open a book. The camera recognises the augmented reality tracker (marker) on an open page and on your see-through glasses is projected a virtual 3D object. It can move, it can have animations. But typically the AR 3D object relates to a point on the page. Now I believe the original marker and related augmented 3D shape was stored on the magic book glasses/goggles.
But this won’t do for scholarly preservation.
Say you open a book, You hold your camera phone over a mark (tag, tracker) on the page of the book. On your phone lens appears a 3D playable object. But the phone does not natively hold the 3D virtual object.
Instead, the tracker/marker on the book induces the phone to search through an online library and retrieve the current 3D virtual object that links to that augmented reality tracker.marker/barcode on the book.
And downloads the most recent virtual model.
Why is this useful? The scholarly publisher only has to produce a normal book but with augmented reality markers (as an image).
The library or academic organisation supplies the links (perhaps the 3D virtual object has its own URI). The phone retrieves the most recent 3D AR object from a database (online) maintained by a library or scholarly community.
And as you open/read the book, augmented reality models dance/float/appear on your book (or iPad or Android tablet).
Perhaps the way you move the tablet/eReader changes the appearance or animation of the AR object (for example: lift it up and the model changes forwards in time,lower the tablet and earlier versions of the model appear)..
And theoretically the book will still be useful even 10 years from now if someone maintains the digital assets available at the URI that the book markers point to.

Still don’t understand? Perhaps I need a diagram!

NB below photos are not mine but from http://masters.donntu.org/2012/iii/akchurin/library/article9.htm in “Collaborative Augmented Reality” written by Mark Billinghurst, Hirokazu Kato, Communications of the ACM – How the virtual inspires the real, Volume 45 Issue 7, ACM New York, NY, USA – July 2002, p. 64–70.

3DH talk: notes from Geoffrey Rockwell

Digital Humanities, Virtual Reality, visualisation, , ,

After a wonderful conference in April at Leiden: Interactive Pasts   (and if you get the chance I recommend going to the next one), the very next day I gave a short presentation at the University of Hamburg for the first lecture of their new research group, 3DH:

3DH is a 3-year pilot project for the preparation of a larger research co-operation in a second phase. 3DH focuses on the dynamic visualization and exploration of Humanities data from a DH perspective, and with particular emphasis on 3D-visualizations. The major goals for the pilot phase are (a) to establish a methodological and theoretical orientation as well as to develop prototypes of visualization tools as demonstrators, and to (b) prepare and submit a funding appliaction for phase 2.

You can see notes of my talk, as recorded by Geoffrey Rockwell on their threedh blog here.
Mark Grimshaw gave a talk on Rethinking Sound, a few weeks later, notes for his talk are here. (Mark Grimshaw was editor of The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality, for which i wrote a History and Cultuarl Heritage in VE chapter).

NB Johanna Drucker, like Geoffrey, is another in-residence scholar for the project.

 

Proceedings of the Digital Humanities Congress 2014 NOW online

3D and game editors, digital heritage, Digital Humanities, Proceedings, virtual heritage, visualisation, , , , , ,

The Proceedings of 2014 are now live!! Finally!!

http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/openbook/book/dhc2014

My article:Ludic Literature: Evaluating Skyrim for Humanities Modding
Related slides of presentation are on slideshare.net

This article evaluates the practical limitations and dramatic possibilities of modding (which means modifying) the commercial role-playing game Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for the visualization and exploration of literature. The latest version of a 20 year-old game franchise, Skyrim has inspired various writings and musings on its relation to Digital Humanities. Digital Humanities has moved to a more immersive, participative, tool-making medium, a recent report on digital archives has proposed digital tools integrate with history curricula (Sampo, 2014) and that “digital history may narrow the gap between academic and popular history”. Can games also be used to promote traditional literary mediums as well as experiential and immersive archives?

EDIT: They have the wrong version uploaded on the Sheffield website. I will add the correct version here:

This is an open access publication with a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. As such, PDF versions can be deposited in institutional repositories. Our specific copyright statement is as follows:
“Copyright of all content is retained by the individual authors who are permitted to re-publish their work elsewhere. Likewise, other sites and media are permitted to re-use the works of authors on condition that they include a citation that references the content’s original publication by HRI OpenBook and an accurate attribution of the author’s IP and copyright.”
Finally, there is a new Call for Papers out for DHC2016, available here: http://hridigital.shef.ac.uk/dhc2016

Image Recognition / Search Applications

Conference, tracking, visualisation, , , ,

I was asked yesterday if there are applications that can recognise and catalogue images, particularly of buildings.

Years ago I proposed a simpler (ontology reductive) system for tourism so I have an interest in uses for this technology but I am not in this field.
Nevertheless, a quick search found these links. No guarantees but some of the tools look very interesting indeed:

Firstly, an overview:
List of 14+ Image Recognition APIs

Most famous applications that as far as I know only search (and don’t categorise) from your photograph to what may match on the Web:
Google Goggles

More details:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Goggles
Of course the way forward for entire scenes courtesy of Google + Stanford:
NB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bing_Vision does not appear suitable here

For general purposes this looks promising

If you wish the app to automatically sort and tag images (so that adatabase can automatically order them) do you have a developer?

Besides http://www.recognize.im/ you can also check out (and thanks to Quora):


NB Diego Jiménez-Badillo, Mario Canul Ku, Salvador Ruíz-Correa, Rogelio Hashimoto-Beltrán have created a 3D version: “A machine learning approach for 3D shape analysis and recognition of archaeological objects“

abstract for 2016 East-West Philosophers’ Conference, Hawaii

Presentation, virtual heritage, visualisation, ,

Conference website: http://hawaii.edu/phil/2016-east-west-philosophers-conference-update/

Paper Title: Philosophical Issues of Place and the Past in Virtual Reality

There are indisputably many good reasons for finding and restoring heritage sites and artefacts with the most impartial and accurate scientific methods and technological advances. Yet the ICOMOS Burra Charter defines cultural significance in terms of the value of a place as it helps people understand the past, as it enriches the present, and educates future generations, these values can be aesthetic, historic, social or spiritual, (and thus not just scientific). Therefore it does not necessarily follow that the best user-experience for members of the public is purely based on a rigorous scientific perspective, because such a perspective does not fully explain the cultural significance of a place as experienced by the originators of the locally situated culture.

On the other hand, evoking cultural significance may be helped by a philosophical consideration of how specific human experiences can be understood and conveyed. The Dictionary of Philosophy says (on p.464) phenomenology “is the attempt to describe our experience directly, as it is, separately from its origins and development, independently of the causal explanations that historians, sociologists or psychologists might give”. While hermeneutics, it says (on p.274-5), “explores the kind of existence had by beings who are able to understand meanings, and to whom the world is primarily an object of understanding (rather than, say, of sense-perceptions)”.

I wish to investigate whether an approach that would best utilise multimedia and the differing multimodal ways in which we learn and experience the outside world would be phenomenological and hermeneutical. In other words it would attempt to understand how the way individual societies experience the world, how they interpret the world to themselves and to each other, how their cultural signs are made, modified, and learnt. It would also attempt to discover how the horizons of current visitors could be nudged out of balance by being either overwhelmed by encounters with genuine alterity (that is, sense of otherness), or by gradually learning how to be accepted in this totally different phenomenological world.

A further pressing issue in the design of virtual places and especially in the design of virtual heritage environments is to avoid the ‘museumization’ and ‘Western’ viewpoint as forewarned by Ziauddin Sardar and others. Can this technology help provide an appropriate sense of alterity and an appropriate situated sense of place?

References

ICOMOS, (1999).‘The Burra Charter: The Australia ICOMOS charter for the conservation of places of cultural significance’, http://www.icomos.org/australia/burracharter.html.

Mautner, T. (2005). Dictionary of Philosophy (Penguin Reference, 2nd edition, Suffolk United Kingdom: Penguin, Books, p. 464 and p.275.

Sardar, Z. (1996). alt.civilizations.faq: Cyberspace as the Darker Side of the West. In Cyberfutures: culture and politics on the information superhighway, ed. Ziauddin Sardar and Jerome Ravetz, 14-41. London: Pluto Press.

If not DH what is it? (DH2015 presentation)

Digital Humanities, visualisation, ,

The below is the last slide from my Digital Humanities 2015 talk (“Seeing Is Revealing: A Critical Discussion on Visualisation And The Digital Humanities“) in Sydney
The paper is being reviewed for the Digital Scholarship in the Humanities Journal.

Slide 48
title: If not DH what is it?

  1. More emphasis has been on scientific visualisation, on non-interactive calculation + presentation of quantifiable data but DH Vis not only about data, also interactive. vague, questioning & rhetorical.
  2. Visualisation not only pretty, (refer Baldwin, S. 2013. The Idiocy of the Digital Literary..)
  3. Visualisation has to overcome ocularcentrism as Virtual Reality reflects not only sighted reality but non-sighted reality, visualisation is more than just the visual (explain using cave paintings!)
  4. Game design is not typically part of DH but an interesting vehicle for community feedback, cultural issues, critical reflection & medium-specific techniques (procedural rhetoric). Also huge issues, HCI, authenticity, develop scholarly arguments in collaboration, preserve etc.)
  5. It employs research in traditional humanities, converts IT people to humanities research (sometimes), preserves and communicates cultural heritage and cultural significance through alterity, cultural constraints and counterfactual imaginings.
  6. History / heritage is not always literature! DH audience not always literature-focused or interested in traditional forms of literacy.

Minecraft in Stereo and camera-adjusted for a curved screen

3D and game editors, game, visualisation, , ,

Problem: We have a Kinect+Minecraft prototype but no code to calibrate it for a curved or cylindrical screen.

If Java and Open GL the minecraft prototype might work to run it in stereo
https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/769009/3d-vision/minecraft-in-3d-vision-updated-to-1-8-x/

What is the current version of Minecraft? Java (OpenGL) or Minecraft Win10 (Pocket edition) Direct X 12?
I have just been told our version uses Java, One good bit of news for the day!
My hunch is the Open GL code from Charles Henden‘s project https://www.academia.edu/1003311/A_Surround_Display_Warp-Mesh_Utility_to_Enhance_Player_Engagement)
will allow us to run a Minecraft mod on a curved (or even asymmetrical) screen. But only in Open GL.
Combining that with stereo may pose more challenges but even reconfigurable surface warping would be a great start. However I have been reminded not to use the word warp for this, true, it is adjusting the camera for a half-cylindrical screen:

http://paulbourke.net/dome/

Decisions, decisions.
And there is still projection mapping to be considered! Like

Video:

Oh and maybe it is time to develop our own portable curved screen. Is stereo 3D necessary? Hmm…

MINECRAFT VR/3D/3D python programming tutorials

3D and game editors, AI, archaeology, Architecture, design, Virtual Reality, visualisation,

MODELS/TERRAIN

We are looking at creating a projected/tracked 3D environment of Perth and Curtin for Curtin Library’s makerspace using Digital Elevation Models (DEM) from sites like

  1. http://vterrain.org/Locations/au/ e.g. http://www.simmersionholdings.com/customers/stories/city-of-perth.html
  2. Then, import into minecraft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJf2_pQo0dQ
  3. Or from Google Earth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wha2m4_CPoo

Python

We are looking at creating Python for archaeologists & historians in Minecraft:

Minecraft in a high end game engine and vice versa

Minecraft projection

Minecraft & Oculus & gear

Minecraft in 3D?

https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/492117/3d-vision/minecraft-does-minecraft-work-in-3d-/

Game Engines and VR (CryEngine UDK/UE4 Blender & Unity)

3D and game editors, Virtual Reality, visualisation, , , , , ,

CRYENGINE (get it free here)

UnrealEngine4 (get the UDK here)

BLENDER (get it free here)

UNITY (get it free here)

nb Image above Unreal Tournament from downloadable model at http://publicvr.org/

Out soon: My book “Critical Gaming: Interactive History & Virtual Heritage”

3D and game editors, Architecture, design, Digital Humanities, game, virtual heritage, visualisation, , , ,

Review:

If you would like to review the book please check out this page for contact details: https://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=2253 …

Critical Gaming: Interactive History and Virtual Heritage

Purchase:

The book will be available via http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472422910

or Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Gaming-Interactive-Heritage-Humanities/dp/1472422929

This book explains how designing, playing and modifying computer games, and understanding the theory behind them, can strengthen the area of digital humanities. This book aims to help digital humanities scholars understand both the issues and also advantages of game design, as well as encouraging them to extend the field of computer game studies, particularly in their teaching and research in the field of virtual heritage.By looking at re-occurring issues in the design, playtesting and interface of serious games and game-based learning for cultural heritage and interactive history, this book highlights the importance of visualisation and self-learning in game studies and how this can intersect with digital humanities. It also asks whether such theoretical concepts can be applied to practical learning situations. It will be of particular interest to those who wish to investigate how games and virtual environments can be used in teaching and research to critique issues and topics in the humanities, particularly in virtual heritage and interactive history. Contents: Introduction; Digital humanities and the limits of text; Game-based learning and the digital humanities; Virtual reality; Game-based history and historical simulations; Virtual heritage and digital culture; Worlds, roles and rituals; Joysticks of death, violence and morality; Intelligent agents, drama and cinematic narrative; Biofeedback, space and place; Applying critical thinking and critical play; Index.

Advanced Challenges in Theory and Practice in 3D Modeling of Cultural Heritage Sites, Arkansas 2015 and Los Angeles 2016

Academic, Architecture, Conference, Digital Humanities, game, virtual heritage, visualisation, , , ,

The NEH Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, “Advanced Challenges in Theory and Practice in 3D Modeling of Cultural Heritage Sites,” was recommended for funding by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The principle investigators are Associate Professor Alyson Gil and Dr Lisa Snyder.
I will be a guest lecturer, the first 1 week workshop will be hosted at the Arkansas State University around 8-14 June 2015, the 2nd event, a 3 day symposium, will be hosted at UCLA, (Los Angeles), 6-9 June 2016.

Summary: A one week institute with a follow up workshop held over two summers, hosted by Arkansas State University and the University of California, Los Angeles, to consider the theoretical and ethical issues associated with three dimensional modeling of cultural heritage sites and objects.

Guest Lecturers include:
Diane Favro UCLA
Bernie Frischer Indiana University
Chris Johanson UCLA
Maurizio Forte Duke University
Ruth Hawkins Arkansas State University
Angel Nieves Hamilton College
John Clarke University of Texas at Austin
Erik Champion, Curtin University (am I the only one from outside of the States?)

 

UNESCO chair in Cultural Heritage and Visualisation

Academic, Digital Humanities, virtual heritage, visualisation

I am in the process of applying for the above chair.
If any one has had experience in applying for or running one, or has words of advice to offer, or wants to send me a letter of recommendation or support or wants to be involved, please let me know!

Here is a draft precis.

This proposal will consolidate and disseminate 3D models and virtual environments of world heritage sites, host virtual heritage examples, tutorials, tools and technologies so heritage groups and classrooms could learn to develop and maintain 3D models and virtual environments, and act as advisor on policy formulation for the use, evaluation and application of these 3D digital environments and digital models for use in the classroom and for wider visualisation principles.
We propose to create a Cultural Heritage and Visualisation network, we would use and advise on 3D models of World Heritage Sites, how 3D models can be employed in teaching and research, investigate ways to host both the digital models and related paradata and publications, and transfer formats (for desktop use, mobile computing etc.), ideally with UNESCO, and leverage Curtin and partner institutes like the HIVE and integrate with our new visualisation courses in the Humanities (preferably at Masters level).

Context and justification (300 words)
Analyse trends and issues surrounding the theme of the proposal. What difference will the project make in terms of capacity-building, transfer of knowledge, and strengthening links between universities/other higher education institutions and development bodies?
Why is this necessary?
Professor Hal Thwaites, longtime President of VSMM, wrote in “Chapter 17: Digital Heritage: What Happens When We Digitize Everything”
In the very near future some critical issues will need to be addressed; increased accessibility to (and sharing of) heritage data, consistent interface design for widespread public use and re-presentations of work, the formalization of a digital heritage database, establishment of a global infrastructure, institutionalized, archival standards for digital heritage and most importantly the on-going curation, of work forward in time as the technology evolves so that our current digital, heritage projects will not be lost to future generations. We cannot afford to have our digital heritage disappearing faster than the real heritage or the sites it seeks to ‘preserve’ otherwise all of our technological advances, creative interpretations, visualizations and efforts will have been in vain.[1]
Trends at EU level are to create archives and digital humanities infrastructures but 3D models have been left behind, and the major related EU project, CARARE, created a common library format of 3D models but they were trapped inside PDF format so people could not modify and develop their own content, and the model did not dynamically link to the scholarly information that made the model possible.
This project would create a free online introductory to the field of virtual heritage, provide free online 3D models for use by the public, and create policies and guidelines for integrating digital heritage sites and models with library and community media and related information infrastructures. Web traffic, user feedback and user web forum information would be published. Plus the educational material developed would help visualisation courses incorporate heritage material into their educational programmes.

[1] Thwaites, Harold. “Digital Heritage: What Happens When We Digitize Everything?.” Visual Heritage in the Digital Age. Springer London, 2013. 327-348.

The Tyranny of Distance Panel at DHA2014, Perth Australia 2014

Digital Humanities, visualisation, , , , , , , , , ,

Digital Humanities And The Tyranny of Distance for http://dha2014.org/ Wednesday 19 March, 2014, Hosted at University of Western Australia, Perth Australia

Slides

Talk 1 (virtual): No Panacea: How Can Virtual Research Environments Enhance Distance Research-Matt

After a recent report on virtual research environments (VREs) from the Joint Information Systems Council in the UK (JISC) found that, even after 6 years of funding and study by JISC, “the ‘emergent community of practice’ has failed to grow significantly beyond the pool of practitioners in direct receipt of JISC project funds,”[1] perhaps it is time to step back and consider whether VREs truly can be a useful addition to humanities research and, if so, under what circumstances.  This paper will discuss the areas in which scholars should expect VREs to assist them in distance research (access to the same tools, data, and workflows in a single environment) and the price they will need to pay for these advantages (either significant time and energy to develop their own environment or being satisfied with a pre-existing solution).  This paper will conclude that VREs can be an excellent tool for distance research, but one for which a significant price must be paid given the current state of existing VRE platforms.

Talk 2 (virtual): Collaborative writing in a distributed research consortium: requirements and possible solutions-Christof

This contribution reports on experiences made with collaborative writing in the DARIAH consortium (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities, www.dariah.eu). DARIAH is a distributed research project involving numerous partners from 12 different European countries and in which tools supporting various collaborative writing and project coordination tasks have been used over a considerable period of time. Despite the fact that collaboration across geographical distance is essential for this and many other projects, the existence of conflicting requirements of scholarly collaborative writing processes make a generic solution very hard to come by. Among these requirements are real-time collaborative writing, flexible word-level commenting, footnote support, version control, access rights management, publishing options and open-source availability of the tool itself. Currently available technical solutions do not meet all of these requirements. Tools discussed in this contribution include Etherpad, Mediawiki/Confluence, GoogleDrive, Dropbox and WordPress. Finally, one promising solution will be discussed which is still in early stages of development, namely Penflip (www.penflip.com), a GitHub front-end for text composition.

Talk 3 (virtual): Recognizing Distance: On Multilingualism in Digital Infrastructures-Toma

Infrastructures are installations and services that function as “mediating interfaces” or “structures ‘in between’ that allow things, people and signs to travel across space by means of more or less standardized paths and protocols for conversion or translation.” [2] By definition, infrastructures are in the business of overcoming distance: they have always been seen as motors of change propelling society into a better and brighter future. Which is why it would be all too tempting — and all too easy — to approach the question of digital research infrastructures uncritically by embracing the master narratives of efficiency and progress without discussing the larger and more complex implications of institutionalizing networked research. A digital infrastructure is not only a tool that needs to be built: it is also a tool that needs to be understood. In this talk, I will address the challenge of multilingualism in research infrastructures evolving against the backdrop of global capitalism in its electronic mode, the so-called “eEmpire” [3] How can we make sure that digital infrastructures — not only the ones we are trying to build now, for ours are baby steps, but the future ones, the ones we hope to see built one day — do not turn from being power grids into grids of (hegemonic, monolingual, monocultural) power?

Talk 4 (in person): The 3D world is your stage-Erik

How can scholars collaborate in virtual environments in a manner similar to video-conferencing? Which conferencing and distributed modeling tools are particularly appropriate to research and collaboration in the spatial and artefactual humanities? This talk will briefly outline needs, issues and promising services and working prototypes.

Authors

Matthew Munson <mmunson@gcdh.de>

Matthew Munson is a researcher at the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities (GCDH) in Göttingen, Germany.  He holds a bachelor’s degree in Education from the University of Kansas and in Theology from Loyola College (now Loyola University) in Baltimore, Maryland, and a master’s degree in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia.  While a student at the University of Virginia, Matthew began working in the digital humanities center there, the Scholars’ Lab, and immediately became interested in the fascinating insights digital methods could give into ancient religious texts.  He received a Scholars’ Lab Digital Humanities Fellowship in 2009-2010 to explore the use of text-mining strategies to identify relationships between the Greek texts of St. Paul in the New Testament and the Hebrew texts of the Old Testament.  At the GCDH, Matthew works in the European project DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) and coordinates the DARIAH work package concerning VREs on the German and European level and is also coordinating the development of the DARIAH international digital humanities summer school, planned for August 2014 in Göttingen.  His current research interests lie in the area of semantic drift and methods of calculating the change in the meanings of words from the Old Testament to the New Testament.

Christof Schöch <christof.schoech@uni-wuerzburg.de>

Christof Schöch is a researcher at the Chair for Digital Philology, University of Würzburg, Germany, working in the DARIAH-DE (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) project. He obtained his PhD from Kassel University & Paris-Sorbonne in 2008 with a study published as La Description double dans le roman des Lumières 1760-1800. His interests in research and teaching are French Literature (Enlightenment, contemporary novel, classical drama) as well as digital humanities (scholarly digital editions, quantitative text analysis, digital infrastructure).

Toma Tasovac <ttasovac@humanistika.org>

Toma Tasovac is the director of the Belgrade Centre for Digital Humanities. He has degrees in Slavic Language and Literatures from Harvard and Comparative Literature from Princeton. He works on complex architectures in electronic lexicography, digital editions, and integration of digital libraries and language resources. He is equally active in the field of new media education, regularly teaching seminars and workshops in Germany, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Erik Champion <nzerik@gmail.com>

A Professor of Cultural Visualisation at Curtin University, Erik was previously Project Leader of DIGHUMLAB Denmark, and co-Leader of the Research and Public Engagement part of DARIAH. His research is primarily in virtual heritage, serious games, and 3D applications in the Digital Humanities. He has postgraduate degrees in Architecture, Philosophy, and Engineering (Geomatics). He has written Playing With the Past, edited Game Mods: Design Theory and Criticism (a free download at ETC Press), and is writing Critical Gaming in the Digital Humanities.

[1] Miller, Paul, “JISC VRE Programme: Impact Study,” March 2010:http://www.immagic.com/eLibrary/ARCHIVES/GENERAL/JISC_UK/J100315M.pdf, p. 21.

[2] Badenoch, Alexander and Andreas Fickers (2010), ‘Europe Materializing? Toward a Transnational History of European Infrastructures’, in Badenoch, Alexander and Andreas Fickers (eds.), Materializing Europe: Transnational Infrastructures and the Project of Europe (Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 11.

[3] Raley, R. (2004). eEmpires. Cultural Critique 57, 132.

February 2014 talks in California

3D and game editors, Announcements, Architecture, Biofeedback, Conference, game, virtual heritage, visualisation, , , , ,

Update: http://events.berkeley.edu/index.php/calendar/sn/arf.html?event_ID=74777&date=2014-02-11

Schedule of my visit to the San Francisco Bay Area:

1) Monday 10 February, 2014. 4pm-6.00pm. Kroeber Hall, Gifford Room.

Title: What is Virtual Heritage?

Virtual heritage could be viewed as a hybrid marriage of Virtual Reality and cultural heritage. Stone and Ojika (2000) defined it as

“[It is]…the use of computer-based interactive technologies to record, preserve, or recreate artifacts, sites and actors of historic, artistic, religious, and cultural significance and to deliver the results openly to a global audience in such a way as to provide formative educational experiences through electronic manipulations of time and space.”

The above is an interesting definition but I wish to modify it slightly, for it does not explicitly cover the preservation, communication and dissemination of beliefs, rituals, and other cultural behaviours and activities. We also need to consider authenticity of reproduction, scholastic rigor, and sensitivity to the needs of both audience and to the needs of the shareholders of the original and remaining content. No doubt this is due to the many issues in the presentation of culture. One is the definition of culture itself, the second issue is to understand how culture is transmitted, and the third is how to transmit the local situated cultural knowledge to people from another culture. In the case of virtual heritage, a fourth also arises, exactly how could this specific cultural knowledge be transmitted digitally?

Although I personally believe that fundamental issues of culture, place and inhabitation are still to be successfully addressed (Champion, 2014); computer games offer interesting opportunities to the audience, designer, and critic. They are no longer single player, shallow interfaces. They are turning into multivalent, multi-dimensional, user-directed collaborative virtual worlds. Commercial games are often bundled with world creation technology and network capability that is threatening to overtake the creation and presentation displays of expensive and complex specialist VR systems. In this talk I will not suggest that computer games are revolutionary, only that they are potentially changing the way we think, act, communicate, and feel.

 References

Stone, Robert J., & Takeo, Ojika. (2000). Virtual Heritage: What Next? . Multimedia, IEEE, 7(2), 73–74.

Champion, E. (2014). History and Heritage in Virtual Worlds. In M. Grimshaw (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2) Tuesday 11 February 10.30-12.30pm. 2224 Piedmont Avenue, MACTiA lab (room 12)

Informal Workshop/Brainstorm/Discussion with Dr. Erik Champion: Games – serious or otherwise – for and about archaeology and cultural heritage

Please feel free to drop in to this workshop and brainstorming session where archaeologists with Erik Champion will work through some ideas and plans for the design of computer games that are based in data of archaeological research and cultural heritage management and the interpretations of the past.

Starting point: Champion, Erik (2011) Playing with the Past. Springer, London.

3)Wednesday 12 February, 2014. 12noon-1pm. Archaeological Research Facility Lunchtime series: 2251 Building, Room 101.

Title: Heritage Via Games and Game Mods

In this informal talk, I will discuss classroom experiences (both good and bad) gleaned from teaching game design, especially work by students to develop serious games using historical events or mythological happenings.

My central argument is that despite apparent initial barriers, both students and teachers (and academics in general) can learn from the actual process of game design, and from watching people play. Theorists learn about the entangled issues of game design, the politics of user testing, and the designer fallacy (I designed the game, I know how best to experience it, if the audience can’t work it out there is something wrong with them, not the design). Students, in turn, can begin to understand (perhaps) how theory, good theory, can help open eyes, inspire new design and turn description into prescription. There are of course even more dilemmas and difficulties for visualizing and interacting with history and with heritage, and with moving from easily accessible commercial games and open source games, to larger Virtual Reality centres, planetariums and museums, but it has been done, with some significant successes.

This talk will touch on and move past projects mentioned in the following and free to download book: Champion, Erik (Ed.). (2012). Game Mods: Design, Theory and Criticism. Pittsburgh: ETC Press. URL: http://press.etc.cmu.edu/content/game-mods

Off-campus

4) Thursday 13 February, 2014. 12noon. Modeling, Virtual Environments and Simulation (MOVES) Institute, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey.

TITLE:  Cultural Heritage and Surround Displays, VR and Games for the Humanities OR Immersive Digital Humanities: When The Motion Tracker is Mightier Than The Pen

How are scholars using surround displays, stereographics, gaming technologies and new peripherals to disseminate new ways of viewing, interacting with, and understanding humanities content, and in particular, cultural heritage? Which issues in cultural heritage and interacting with historical content need to be kept in mind by VR experts when working with humanities scholars? And are there key concepts and research developments in the VR field that humanities scholars should be more aware of? Or are the fields of interaction design and (digital) humanities converging?

NB Public talk but guests have to be pre-approved as it is at the Naval Postgraduate School.