Hageneuer, S. (ed.) (2020) Communicating the Past in the Digital Age: Proceedings of the International Conference on Digital Methods in Teaching and Learning in Archaeology (12th-13th October 2018). London: Ubiquity Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/bch
My chapter is also at Research Gate: Games People Dig: Are They Archaeological Experiences, Systems or Arguments? February 2020, DOI: 10.5334/bch.b
This free mini-symposium of talks from leading UK NZ and Australian experts will explore recent developments and intriguing challenges in spatial and platial design involving aspects of both culture and technology.
10:10 Dr Stuart Dunn, Head of The Department of Digital Humanities King’s College London, UK. Finding ourselves from Ptolemy to GPS: creating, exploring and communicating personal cartographies with technology
10:50 Dr. Juan Hiriart, Senior Lecturer in Interactive Media Art and Design, Salford University, Manchester, UK. People and Things: Representing Past Societies and Material Cultures in Game-form.
11:30 Dr Chris McDowall, Freelance Cartographer, New Zealand. Looking up from the map: We Are Here: An Atlas of Aotearoa.
12:30 Ms Nat Raisbeck-Brown, Experimental Spatial Scientist, Indigenous Ecological Knowledge Project, Atlas of Living Australia, CSIRO, Perth. Linking Indigenous to Western science knowledge through the Atlas of Living Australia.
12:50 Professor Erik Champion, UNESCO Chair of Cultural Heritage and Visualisation, Curtin University.
February 17-18, 2020, The CREASE University of South Australia, Kaurna Building Level 2, City West Campus
This workshop will explore examples of how the application of digital technologies in the humanities, built environment, creative arts and design are affecting how heritage environments are studied, preserved, shared and celebrated. The advent of technologies such as LIDAR (Laser scanning of natural and built environments), Virtual and Augmented Reality and immersive interactive environments, in areas such as site data collection, site visualisation and heritage exhibitions, are transforming how we study heritage environments and experience them both in situ and elsewhere. These changes have implications in diverse domains, including archaeology, anthropology, museology, tourism, architecture, restoration and education.
Program
Day 1 Monday February 17, 2020
13:00 Welcome to Country
A/Prof. Jane Lawrence, Head: School of Art, Architecture and Design
13:15 Introduction to the day, Prof. Simon Biggs
13:30 Keynote: Prof. Erik Champion, Curtin University, Perth (Chair: Prof. Ning Gu)
Prof. Champion is UNESCO Chair of Cultural Heritage and Visualisation, and Professor of Media Culture and Creative Arts, in the Humanities Faculty of Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia.
14:45 Q&A
15:00 coffee and networking – Catered by Folk Lore
15:30 Burra Digital Heritage Project: Dr. Julie Nichols and Darren Fong
16:30 Discussion
17:00 Drinks at West Oak Hotel
Day 2 Tuesday February 18, 2020
09:00 coffee and networking – Catered by Folk Lore
09:30 Presentation 1 – Dr. Aida Eslami Afrooz – Time Layered Cultural Map project
10:15 Presentation 2 – CAD Walk – immersive environments for heritage simulation
11:30 Presentation 3 – Dr. Gun Lee – Augmented Reality in Outdoor Experience
12:15 Discussion
12:30 Lunch – Catered by Folk Lore
13:30 Presentation 4 – Sahar Soltani – The HYVE (in the HYVE)
14:15 Presentation 5 – Ben Keane and Alex Degaris Boot – AR for Heritage (in CCS)
This free mini-symposium of talks from leading UK NZ and Australian experts will explore recent developments and intriguing challenges in spatial and platial design involving aspects of both culture and technology.
10:00 Dr Stuart Dunn, Head of The Department of Digital Humanities King’s College London, UK
10:40 Dr. Juan Hiriart, Senior Lecturer in Interactive Media Art and Design, Salford University, Manchester, UK.
11:20 Mr Chris McDowall, Geographer, New Zealand, independent consultant.
Dear CAA member or ex-member, If you are interested in running a workshop on Tuesday, 14th April before the CAA 2020 conference starts, please email us at caa2020@arch.ox.ac.uk. Please provide us with the title of the workshop, a short (250 words or less) abstract of the workshop and what attendees will learn by attending it. Please also include a list of any equipment you might need (i.e. LCD projector, etc.) to successfully deliver your workshop. As the organisers will not provide computers for the attendees, please do remember to list all the items that will be required for participation (laptop, notepad, software). Please also indicate whether your workshop will be a full day or half day session, and whether you wished to set maximum numbers for attendees. Please submit your abstract by 12th February 2020 (midnight). Please contact the organisers at caa2020@arch.ox.ac.uk for clarification or further inquiries.
The slides can be viewed and downloaded in the nzerik directory at slideshare.
MAIN POINTS
Digital heritage, Virtual Heritage, Extended Reality (XR): what are they?
Can gaming, AR or MR provide insight to the past?
OR: Are they a waste of money, expensive new technology?
Could, for example, digital heritage pose a threat to culture?
Ziauddin Sardar 1995: “Cyberspace is a giant step forward towards museumization of the world: where anything remotely different from Western culture will exist only in digital form.”
Digital Heritage highlights and challenges (interactive + immersive examples).
To cut over 80 slides short, my answers to the initial questions are
VR: “reality”: untapped potential, save the IxD!! (We should preserve and disseminate the interaction design and experience, academic papers are not the answer here).
Gaming, AR, MR provides insight to the past-but learning more from designing.
High-technology gets in the way.
Digital Heritage poses a threat to culture, if we don’t clearly consider “culture”.
Sardar: Cyberspace a symptom not a cause, museumization a partially necessary evil, Western culture is a vague target.
Digital Heritage communicates, seldom preserves, more end-user involvement required.
I suggest future research and potential solutions are
Experiential Tourism and Virtual Heritage: the interaction design challenges.
Material heritage decays, intangible heritage disappears. But virtual heritage (virtual reality serving the aims of digital cultural heritage) has performed abysmally when attempting to preserve either, and whether virtual heritage communicates heritage values effectively, is up for debate. Former UNESCO World Heritage expert Alonso Addison, warned (Addison, 2008) there is a “vanishing virtual.” And Hal Thwaites declared digital heritage projects disappear faster than the actual heritage sites, artefacts, and practices that they simulate (Thwaites, 2013). Yet there is a huge market opportunity. Australian tourism is predicted to recoup $143 billion this year (Ludlow & Housego, 2019) and nearly 30% of international visitors visit a museum or gallery (Ludlow, 2019). Can gaming and XR (virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality) provide insight to the past and leverage the cultural tourism market? Or are the interaction design challenges underestimated?
Addison, A. C. (2008). The Vanishing Virtual: Safeguarding Heritage’s Endangered Digital Record. In Y. E. Kalay, T. Kvan, & J. Affleck (Eds.), New Heritage: New Media and Cultural Heritage. (pp. 27-39). Oxfordshire UK: Routledge.
Ludlow, M. (2019). Cultural attractions used to lure tourists. Financial Review, 2019(16 November 2019).
Ludlow, M., & Housego, L. (2019). Tourism now employs one in 13 Australians. Financial Review, 2019(16 November 2019).
Thwaites, H. (2013). Digital Heritage: What Happens When We Digitize Everything? In E. Ch’ng, V. Gaffney, & H. Chapman (Eds.), Visual Heritage in the Digital Age (pp. 327-348). London: Springer.
Mr Ian Brodie, award winning photographer and film tourism author, will engage us with his AR projects as part of HIDDEN.
Archaeologist and Senior Research Librarian, Alexandra Angeletaki, (NTNU Trondheim Norway), will talk about her use of immersive VR and related technology projects to bring historical texts and artefacts alive in the Gunnerus Library, Trondheim (founded 1768) via projects like MUBIL.
Mr Ian Brodie, award winning photographer and film tourism author, will engage us with his AR projects as part of HIDDEN.
Archaeologist and Senior Research Librarian, Alexandra Angeletaki, (NTNU Trondheim Norway), will talk about her use of immersive VR and related technology projects to bring historical texts and artefacts alive in the Gunnerus Library, Trondheim (founded 1768) via projects like MUBIL.
nb below are photos of the venue (direct drive in from Manning Road, east of Waterford Plaza). Theatre “Exhibition Space” is on the ground floor directly ahead, after entering the door in the photo (to the left of the vertical Visitor Reception sign).
In his book Critical Gaming (2015), Erik Champion argued that virtual realities should express ‘cultural presence,’ the meaning and significance of a time, place, or object to people of the past. Hyper-reality, photogrammetry, and ever-increasing levels of ‘accuracy’ in 3D models do not inherently convey aspects of cultural significance and meaning, and many VR/AR/XR experiences fall dramatically short of the goal of expressing the importance of past places and things to their original communities. Emphasis on technological and (especially) hardware innovation often deflects attention from critically engaging with questions of meaning-making.
Juan Robert and I were fortunate to have our session proposal accepted for Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology conference (CAA2020), 14-17 April, 2020, Oxford UK. Here it is below. We will work on a session call for papers in the next few weeks.
Over the last decade, gaming technologies have been incorporated into many aspects of archaeological practice (Mol, Ariese-Vandemeulebroucke, Boom, & Politopoulos, 2017; Reinhard, 2018) and related heritage and historical fields (A. Chapman, 2016; Adam Chapman, Foka, & Westin, 2017; McCall, 2013). In many ways, the particular affordances of this new media offer new ways of examining archaeological data and communicating findings in museums, online websites, and formal educational environments. As the use of gaming technologies in this context have become more widespread, however, many questions in regard to the representational appropriateness of the medium and the theoretical and practical problems involved in designing and using them remain still largely unanswered.
We invite submissions addressing the historical questions related to digital archaeology and related computer applications when applied to and experienced in the medium of computer games and playable interactive experiences. Which issues could be better tackled in archaeology and heritage games? Which central related issues have writers raised but not resolved and can we resolve them?
In particular, we are interested in answers to the following questions:
How can historical methods and interpretations be transferred and evaluated in archaeology and heritage-related interactive, playable media?
How can specific historic periods or historically distinctive sites and cultures be experienced and conveyed through interactive, playable media?
A description of the proposed format for the session
We envisage a half-day 3 to 4-hour session of 30-minute presentation, featuring a theoretical issue, and if possible, a practical demonstration or testing session of a history/heritage game project, prototype, or proof-of-concept. Ideas to actively involve the audience and to seek feedback are encouraged. Links to resources for proof of concept, prototyping and play-testing game ideas will be provided to participants before the session.
The importance and potential contributions of research in the field
In recent years, a growing community of scholars have focused their attention to the study of the intersections between history, archaeology and games, joining efforts in a field now established as historical game studies; “the study of those games that in some way represent the past or relate to discourses about it” (Chapman, 2016, p. 16). The scope of this strand can be positioned within this field of inquiry, as well within the more recently proposed research area of archaeogaming, the “archaeology both in and of digital games” (Reinhard, 2018, p. 2).
There are very few workshops and interactive sessions at digital archaeology conferences in the area of game design and game theory. We ran a workshop on game prototyping at CAA Atlanta, and we believe that session was highly successful, but we did not clearly explain how historical problems in game design can be tackled, this session aims to address that.
Focal questions:
Problems of using gaming interactions in archaeological context (ethics, trivialisation of history…)
Translation of historical / archaeological data into game form
Narrative and drama versus freedom and autonomy of the player
Historical accuracy versus immersion and engagement
Conveying historically situated events, places and perspectives through games
Likely audiences for proposed session
We invite all those interested in solving game-related problems in conveying digital archaeology: archaeologists, historians, researchers, game designers/developers, students and gamers. Possible topics to explore may include, but are by no means limited to:
Reconstruction of ancient spaces using gaming technology
Playful media in museums
Interdisciplinary projects involving games and archaeology
Participatory design methods to develop heritage games
Rapid prototyping
Teaching history and archaeology with games
Mobile apps and online platforms using playful interactions with history
Play and material culture
Game modding
Serious gaming
Board games and physical historical games
Evaluation of heritage games
An overview of the expected outcome of the session
After the conference we will pursue publishing opportunities and innovative ways of including prototypes and related game pitch media.
Organizers
Erik Champion is Professor and UNESCO Chair of Cultural Visualisation and Heritage at Curtin University. He has written Critical Gaming: Interactive History and Virtual Heritage, (Routledge, 2016), and Playing with the Past (Springer, 2011), and edited Phenomenology of Real and Virtual Places (Routledge, 2018), and Game Mods: Design, Theory and Criticism (ETC Press, 2012) as well as co-editing Cultural Heritage Infrastructures in Digital Humanities (Routledge, 2017). He has taught or organized game workshops in Qatar, Turin, and Atlanta.
Juan Hiriart is a digital designer and senior lecturer in Interactive Media Arts and Design at the University of Salford, in Greater Manchester. His doctoral thesis, ‘Gaming the Past: Designing and Using Digital Games as Historical Learning Context’ was completed in May 2019 at the University of Salford. He has developed and taught game design and digital media programmes in the UK, Malaysia and China.
Robert Houghton is a Senior Lecturer in Early Medieval European History at the University of Winchester. Outside the University he works as a researcher for Mouseion Ltd and with Paradox Interactive and as an editor for The Public Medievalist. His teaching interests include the Italian city communes and proto-communes, Church and Empire during the Investiture Contest, and representations of the Middle Ages in modern games.
References
Chapman, A. (2016). Digital Games as History: How Videogames Represent the Past and Offer Access to Historical Practice.
Chapman, A., Foka, A., & Westin, J. (2017). Introduction: what is historical game studies? The Journal of Theory and Practice: Special section: Challenge the Past – Historical Games, 21(3), 358-371.
McCall, J. (2013). Gaming the past: Using video games to teach secondary history: Routledge.
Mol, A. A. A., Ariese-Vandemeulebroucke, C. E., Boom, K. H., & Politopoulos, A. (2017). The Interactive Past: Archaeology, Heritage & Video Games: Sidestone Press.
Reinhard, A. (2018). Archaeogaming: An introduction to archaeology in and of video games: Berghahn Books.
Champion, E. (2019: in press). “From Historical Models to Virtual Heritage Simulations”. Open access book chapter for The Virtue of the Model 2.0 → From the Digital 3D Dataset to the Scientific Information Model V.2, Heidelberg University Press, Germany, March 2019. URL: http://books.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/arthistoricum/series/info/caa?lang=en
Champion, E. (2020). Games People Dig: Are They Archaeological Experiences, Systems, or Arguments? In S. Hageneuer (Ed.), Communicating the Past in the Digital Age: Proceedings of the International Conference on Digital Methods in Teaching and Learning in Archaeology, (12th-13th October 2018). London, UK: Ubiquity Press. URL: https://communicatingthepast.hcommons.org/2018/04/19/release-of-the-call-for-paper/
Champion, E. & Foka, A. (2020: in press). “Chapter 19 Art History, Heritage Games, and Virtual Reality”, in Brown, K. J. (Ed.). The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History. Routledge, UK.
Champion, Erik, and Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller. 2020 (pending, invited). “Blue Sky Skyrim VR: Immersive Techniques to Engage with Medieval History.” In Games for Teaching, Impact, and Research edited by Robert Houghton.
Journal Articles
Champion, E. (2020). Culturally Significant Presence: How Computer Games Can Facilitate Cultural Heritage. International Journal of Heritage Studies. Extended abstract accepted. Full Article in review.
A journal article with Mafkereseb Bekele on augmented reality has been accepted, I think, for Frontiers.
Invitations, keynotes, workshops and applications
Invited and funded to present at Learning by Game Creation Summer School, Turin, Italy, 1-8 September 2019.
I am traveling to Italy first week of September teaching a workshop on serious games and game prototypes for history and heritage, and providing a lecture on virtual heritage scholarship.
In December I am giving a keynote and a similar workshop in Sydney on serious games for digital humanities.
In-between I have been invited to China to give a talk on cultural heritage and tourism (not confirmed, I have to get back to them) and I also have a small grant to visit Wellington New Zealand to discuss a grant with potential partners (possibly October or November).
Then no traveling planned at all, but a long holiday!
There is a book on virtual places I was hoping to have published next year but it is taking a long time to be reviewed (reviewed for the second time). Perhaps I should put pending publications in a following post.
And I wrote a chapter in it!
Space, place and people-oriented technologies and challenges of digital humanities.
Ear Zow Digital