Archaeometry Cluster Analysis, BSR Brick Stamps

A few posts ago I put up the raw data from my xrd analysis of the South Etruria Survey Brick Stamp collection conserved at the British School at Rome, suggesting that it might be, amongst other things, useful in teaching archaeological statistics… happily, it is being used in just that fashion at   the Quantitative Archaeology Wiki.

The wiki seems to be maintained by scholars in Italy, but I’m not sure. One of their projects is to update the exercises in Fletcher and Lock’s “Digging Numbers”. I still have that on my bookshelf - it was the required text in Archae 341 at WLU, back in ‘96… (I note also that one of the banner images from the Laurier archae website is of an old classmate in his long-haired days, who is now a lecturer at the University of Western Ontario…nice one, Marty!)

Simulating History Research Lab

The Simulating History project folks at Brock University’s Centre for Digital Humanities, with whom I do my games-based research,  have released a nice little video about the Lab:

Dodging Bullets in Presentations

I love the circularity of the internet sometimes. My post on Flypaper got picked up by an automatic blog aggregator, and was put on “Hey Jude” under a posting on ‘The Problem With Powerpoint’. Somebody clicked on that, and wordpress stats told me about it. So I went to the post, and lo! there was this extremely well done powerpoint on ‘Dodging Bullets in Presentations’ by Rowan Manahan. Whether you use Flypaper, Powerpoint, or something else, the lessons here are extremely good. Maybe all conference presenters should view this one before they do their papers…! I know I’ve been guilty by times…

Winnipeg: MADLaT conference

Am going to sunny Winnipeg next week (think it’s stopped snowing), for the MADLaT 2008 conference, ‘E-Learning Comes Together‘

I’m presenting in Session 7, abstract below; my presentation might actually match the abstract. We’re using Flypaper to do our multimedia - they’ve been really great, crafting a template for us to use, and helping out with all the fiddlybits.

The Use of Moodle, Virtual Reality and Other Emerging Technologies in Online Classics Teaching

Session Description:

Robert Welch University is an entirely online Liberal Arts university in Appleton, Wisconsin which was approved as a degree-granting institution in 2005.

Those of us who start an online university may believe the theory “If we build it, they will come.” Students may come, but will e-learning come together for them? Once we have set up the online courses and basic communication, we must ask ourselves whether meaningful communication and class participation are actually occurring. Our students find emerging technology appealing, particularly VOIP and user-created content. How can we incorporate advances in communication and the participative web in our teaching practices?

This paper recounts how Robert Welch University evolved from simple document delivery with its Moodle learning management system (html pages, PowerPoint, mp3 files) and basic communication (asynchronous forums and real-time chat) to an immersive learning environment featuring wikis, Skype, webcam, game-based learning, YouTube videos and Second Life in order to make students active participants in their own learning.

All educators face the challenge of how to encourage students to engage with the material, but online educators face special challenges such as how to meet the needs of a diverse blend of non-traditional students and how to foster a sense of community between instructors and students.

At RWU we have come to realize that even distance learners need a social setting for their learning and that students may benefit from the kind of immersive environment which a persistent virtual world can provide. Our students will collaborate online in Second Life as they reconstruct the ruins, practice archaeological field skills and perform the Greek tragedy which they are translating.

VisitorSim: agent modeling for site management

A few years ago I developed an agent based model prototype for exploring visitor impact on archaeological sites - the idea being to model where visitors would go on a site, and to explore the consequences of alternative routings and so on. I found the presentation I made about ‘VisitorSim’ this morning, as I was looking for something else, and thought that it might be interesting to share it here. I’m interested to know if other archaeologists have ventured down this route, thoughts, ideas, etc for improving the model. I note that Keith Still, the founder of crowddynamics.com has a professional consultancy built around a similar idea, see below.

First, the VisitorSim powerpoint:

And now a page from ‘Crowd Dynamics, about the ‘Myriad II software suite’. The Venn diagram provided neatly encapsulates my own approach to ABM, networks, and archaeology; I wish I’d come across his work during my thesis years! At any rate, Myriad II looks to be an excellent piece of software, to which my VisitorSim is like a tinker-toy…

They’ve also done some analysis on historical problems:

Battlefield Detectives	Agincourt - how the battlefield geometry may have contributed to the French defeat
	Battlefield Detectives - details about the series and the book.
	Gettysburg - how the town geometry may have been a decisive factor in the battle outcome

Myriad II - Integrated Crowd Dynamics Modelling Suite

Over the last 15 years we have been using a range of modelling and analysis techniques for places of public assembly. The process of model building typically requires three different mathematical modelling disciplines. The table below shows how these methods overlap for various projects.

AGENT ANALYSIS	SPATIAL ANALYSIS	NETWORK ANALYSIS

TypeRacer

…It’s like the Typing of the Dead, but with race cars. My best so far is 71 wpm. Weee… a new way to waste time AND improve my skill-sets. Play here.

Library Research Skills Game from Carnegie Mellon

Carnegie Mellon Libraries are introducing some games to help students “develop research skills through

entertaining and easy-to-repeat activities. At this stage, we are testing each game to work through any technical glitches and prepare the games for a final version.

Please feel free to send us your comments & suggestions on ways that we can further develop the games.”

VastPark Stress Test

It’s been a virtual morning. Just participated in the VastPark stress test. VastPark is a nascent virtual worlds platform - according to their material,

VastPark is an end-to-end solution for creating, deploying and distributing virtual experiences on the web. It’s composed of a new breed of applications, designed to make creating these experiences simpler and faster, with a more immersive result. We call this the era of the virtual web.

Powered by open specifications

VastPark is powered by some exciting new specifications that have been developed to fulfill two of the layers in this virtual web; MetaWSS for content distribution and IMML for content presentation

Read more about how VastPark is working to standardise the virtual web.

So I downloaded the alpha browser, and logged in.

The point of view was first person, mouse controls and keyboard controls for moving around. There’s a chat window in the right… felt a bit like one of those VRML type sites. I couldn’t connect using my poor old Toshiba laptop, but my desktop graphics card was up to the task, and connection was achieved in 5 seconds, throwing me in-world. The first world worked fine enough, second one I tried caused it to freeze up (but that may have been because the test ended right about the same time). Now, I realise that this is the alpha build, and that this was a stress test, so one shouldn’t expect too much, yet (I was annoyed the way the browser grabbed my mouse, and wouldn’t let me leave the world pane of the browser. Turns out you have to hit the secret key to get it to release). They’ve already made all of their tools available, even at this early stage, so that’s something to be commended! Check ‘em out, see what you think. Full features list here.

AutoCad into Unreal2

Just had an interesting conversation with Joe Rigby, of MellaniuM Design

He was showing me a plugin that they’ve developed for exporting AutoCad models into the Unreal2 engine, and then scaling the textures back onto the model (usually, one would use something like 3d Studio Max or Maya to import models into Unreal2). From an archaeological point of view, archaeologists have been using AutoCad for years to create reconstructions of sites. To get those models into a world engine usually’d involve all sorts of translations, but if you could import directly from your existing archaeological AutoCad model…. you’d suddenly be able to experience the space that you’ve recreated. A 3d picture is still just a picture. Experiencing the space makes - as it were - a world of difference. Read Diane Favro or Kevin Lynch for a start on the importance of experiencing space.

In the demo Joe showed me, he walked his avatar around several architectural reconstructions (houses, etc), into a large art gallery / museum (pictures on the wall never pixellated, which was nice), and by their reconstruction of the Titanic. All the textures were very photorealistic, at least as good if not better than anything I’ve seen in SL. This being Unreal2, he had to turn off the weapons, etc, but he did show a novel use of the sniper-scope feature, zooming in on the detail of his model. Unreal2 brings people into the world via a peer-to-peer system, so allowing at least 30 odd if not more people to experience the same space at once: certainly enough for that class trip!

Joe’s interested to hear from any archaeologists who’re interested in exploring this technology, perhaps for some joint projects. I’d send him what I had, just to see what would happen, except I don’t have any AutoCad models lying about!

RWU: first in the world!

Robert Welch University got an excellent mention in a recent article in The Classical Journal.

From  Andrew Reinhard, “From Slate to Tablet PC: Using New Technologies to Teach and Learn Latin and Greek”, CJ Forum Online 2008.03.03:

[...snip...!]Robert Welch University is the first school in the world to offer
an on-line major in Classics featuring courses that include regular
journeys into Second Life to an eLearning island called EduNation.
The school has rented space for teaching Latin here, giving students
from around the world a place to play and interact within the
constructs of the language. Other schools such as the University of
Central Missouri have been using Second Life for language
education for over a year, but Robert Welch University is the first to
offer anything Classics-related.[...]

I had thought that maybe we were the first, so it’s nice to have independent verification! Andrew then goes on to survey current trends in Classical teaching online, and comes to the conclusion:

I challenge Classics teachers to find their way to new technology
and play with it. 100% book-learning is dead.

You said it, brother.