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

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!

Skype Can’t Hear Me Anymore

I do some teaching via Skype. I also use it as a replacement for my office phone (take that Telebec!). Recently, whilst in the middle of a conversation, Skype suddenly couldn’t ‘hear’ me anymore. It was as if my microphone was muted. Calls to the ‘test123′ service confirmed that no sound was being recorded. What good is voip if the outgoing voice doesn’t carry?

In frustration, I worked through all of the literature, the faqs, the help files, every-bleedin’-suggestion I could find. My microphone works fine with voice recorder and audacity; it’s only Skype which has gone deaf. Then, for one glorious moment, for no reason I could discern I was able to call - and they could here me! But it only lasted for one call.

Suggestions? I’ve worked through all of the documentation, and I follow directions fairly well, to no avail: so don’t send me back there…

Digital Digging, a new version of Google Earth, and Mycosm

A new version of Google Earth is out, featuring:

Photo-realistic buildings from cities around the world

Dawn to dusk views with the Sunlight feature

Swoop navigation from outer space to street-level

Henry points me to Digital Digging, where they’ve got some fantastic sketch-up models of archaeological sites imported into Google earth. They’ve got a great site going on, with lots of material on one of the most famous of counties (at least archaeologically-wise!) in England - Wiltshire. The movie below is a reconstruction of the sanctuary at Avebury:

A site (both web & archaeological) well worth exploring!

On a related note, a new virtual world called ‘Mycosm‘ promises to allow users to import Sketchup models to make the world their own. If that works well, it’ll be a jump on Second Life… I’ve never had a more frustrating time than trying to make things in SL!

Piccolo for dynamic Harris Matrices (amongst other things)

Somewhere circa 1999 I came across something called ‘Jazz’, a zoomable user interface for browsing the web. As you can imagine, it had some issues since it was an early prototype. Essentially it organised a web page (or other information) literally in layers. Using the mouse, you zoomed down through it (which could induce a kind of vertigo, since it was easy to get lost in the empty spaces between things).

That tool is now called ‘Piccolo‘, and it comes from the University of Maryland. It is much more developed, open source, and can be used to devise the zoomable user interface of your dreams (should you dream about such things). I thought then, and I still think now, that this tool could be very useful for spatially organizing hierarchical levels of nested data - everything from Harris matrices to finds catalogues. This example of Piccolo in operation is called ‘the fish-eye calendar‘. Explore it. You’ll soon see what I mean… (the example of a presentation applet is particular neat, showing the versatility of the product.) To get started, visit this page. There are also tutorials and examples of how they made the showcase applications - more than enough material for an enterprising archaeologist to make an archaeological application. Maybe a project for a grad student…  nb. Piccolo wouldn’t work in Firefox, but does in Explorer.

More from their site:

“Piccolo is a toolkit that supports the development of 2D structured graphics programs, in general, and Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs), in particular. A ZUI is a new kind of interface that presents a huge canvas of information on a traditional computer display by letting the user smoothly zoom in, to get more detailed information, and zoom out for an overview. We use a “scene-graph” model that is common to 3D environments. Basically, this means that Piccolo maintains a hierarchal structure of objects and cameras, allowing the application developer to orient, group and manipulate objects in meaningful ways.

Why use Piccolo? It will allow you to build structured graphical applications without worrying so much about the low level details. The infrastructure provides efficient repainting of the screen, bounds management, event handling and dispatch, picking (determining which visual object the mouse is over), animation, layout, and more. Normally, you would have to write all of this code from scratch. Additionally, if you want to build an application with zooming, that’s built right into the framework too.”

Dryad and Simplifying World Design

Ah Second Life. “Your World. Your Imagination.” You promise so much, but it’s so bloody difficult some times.  From the MIT Technology Review, an article on a promising new piece of software for making it easier to design for 3d Worlds - ‘Dryad‘. Of course, the word ‘dryad’ should be a tip off - right now, it’ll only help you make trees. More is promised down the line though.

“Vladlen Koltun, an assistant professor at Stanford who heads the group, says that he hopes design programs like Dryad will one day make it easy for anyone to create compelling content for virtual worlds, without having to learn a scripting language, or how to use a sophisticated 3-D modeling tool. He particularly hopes to make it easier for academics without computer-science expertise, for whom “content creation is one of the bottlenecks,” to put together virtual worlds for educational or experimental purposes.”

…. amen!

Language Switcher for WordPress

I’ve recently had occasion to install the Language Switcher WordPress Plugin on a website I’ve been building for my family’s Cider Mill business. The business operates in Quebec, so it was desirable to communicate with customers in both English and French. I mention the plug-in here, because the archaeological community has always been naturally multi-lingual, and it would be good if archaeological websites could reflect that multi-lingualism.

The problem with designing multilingual websites though are two fold - getting everything translated, and then managing the mass of pages, since everything needs to be duplicated, triplicated, or what have you. It can be very easy to end up with multiple trees, folders, files and complicated interlinkages between them. The Language Switcher plugin on the other hand works by treating language as just another display tag, and adding a filter to your wordpress. If the ‘English’ button is pressed, it filters the entire site so that anything written  in a post or page (including titles and categories) between [lang_en] and [/lang_en] tags is displayed in English - German would be bracketed with [lang_de] und [/lang_de] tags, etc. So one post can contain as many languages as you want, greatly simplifying the management of your site (little nation flags are included as well to use as buttons, if desired).

This could even be useful someone wanting to use their wordpress site - in conjunction with the Courseware plugin or similar - to teach languages (including Latin; I suppose it could be made to work with non-Roman alphabets too).   There are other language plugins out there, but this one worked best for me. Unfortunately, since ‘electric archaeology’ is a hosted blog courtesy of wordpress.com, I can’t add the plugin to this site.

As for translation - I read French quite well, but writing it  is quite another matter. So, in this case, I took my English text and ran it through Babble-fish and Google Translate. Then, when I read the competing versions, I could tell where things were loopy, and was able to correct them so that, although not particularly elegant, the French text read reasonably well. This is an approach that many others could take, since as academics we tend to be able to read many languages, but are only able to write fluently in a few.

Moodle + WordPress = Online University

A year and a half ago, I was looking for some online teaching to round out some contracting work I was doing, and I saw an advertisement in the Classical Association of Canada Bulletin from a new online university called ‘Robert Welch University‘. I applied, and soon found myself teaching Latin 101 over RWU’s Moodle system. Moodle is one of a number of course management or learning management systems (others you might be familiar with are Blackboard, Horizon/wimba, and of course, the much loathed WebCT). What is nice about Moodle is that it is all open source, php and mysql driven, and there are numerous plugins, modules, and themes to expand its functionality.

Being inclined to tinker around the innards of things I soon found myself in charge of managing the moodle and doing a university-wide moodle upgrade (nothing like a small institution for upward mobility!) RWU is a completely online school, devoted to Classics and Liberal Arts. When the moodle goes on the blink, the whole university effectively ceases to exist. The moodle interfaced with a front-end website that was completely custom-coded by hand, so when I upgraded the moodle to the latest version, I was not aware of the full complexities of how that interface was handled.

Uh-oh.

For about 10 hours one bleak afternoon, the university disappeared. It would be like somebody turning up for class at the University of Toronto, and finding just an empty lot where the campus ought to be. I learned a lot about php that day…

A daily problem we were having with the front-end of the University site and the Moodle was all of the custom coding. It was so byzantine that once the original creator had moved on to other things, it took a lot of trial-and-error to figure out what was responsible for what. It was also extremely difficult to update the site with new content or layout. Consequently, it was stuck in something of a design rut. Anyway, the point of this post: I’d been thinking of ‘ecologies’ of various web services for delivering education (see earlier entry on Facebook and WP Courseware plugin), and decided that moodle + wordpress = online university. So over the last two weeks I’ve been carefully migrating all content and functions from our old site to WordPress, and I’m pleased to say that it is done and I invite you all to take a look.

Why WordPress? We’d looked at Joomla initially. I even did a mock-up Joomla site. But in the end, my experience writing this blog won the day. WordPress just seems to be much more flexible and with its enormous user-base, there’s a plug-in for almost any occasion. The next time we want to change the look of the site, it ought to be much less painful, too. When I killed the site this time, we were only offline for two minutes.

More about RWU:

RWU is a new university based in Wisconsin, receiving state EAB approval to operate as a university and to grant the Associate Degree in Liberal Arts. Its proposed BA is currently undergoing review. It operates five six-week sessions per year, with seven to ten students on average per class. The university concentrates on Classics and Classical languages, along with modern and ancient Hebrew, and Arabic.

Omeka & Archaeological Survey Project Websites: a good fit?

In an earlier post, I mentioned that the Omeka toolkit might have useful archaeological applications. The Omeka people themselves picked up on that thought, and there’s some interesting discussion on their blog on how smaller institutions (’Beyond the Museum‘) might use Omeka.

“[...]we have always intended Omeka to be used not only for history museum exhibitions, but also by enthusiast collectors, scholars, libraries, and community groups in many fields—really anyone interested in collecting and displaying digital objects in rich visual and interpretive environments. One good example of Omeka’s flexibility is the community site braddockheritage.org, which was developed in concert with CHNM by local volunteers in the Braddock district of Fairfax County, VA.”

I’m reminded again how timely the emergence of this tool is by Bill Caraher’s discussion on the state of archaeological survey project websites:

“[...]survey project websites are a mixed bag[...] It seems to me that since many survey projects tend to be less stable institutional entities with life spans between a few years and a decade and make little investment in semipermanent, physical infrastructure (e.g. dig houses, site guards, fences, et c.), this often translates to instability on the web[...]The preceding links to survey projects show how most (but not all!) have broken links, pictures that fail to appear, or offer little more than static data (nice photos, some maps… in fact, much of this doesn’t count as data at all; of course, some surveys, like the the Sydney Cyprus Survey Project, have archived their data officially in places like the Arts and Humanities Data Service ).

If Omeka can live up to its promise, I could imagine a free-ish hosting service (much like how WordPress hosts this blog) with Omeka installed on it, and survey archaeologists uploading their information to it from wherever they are in the world. I haven’t yet played with Omeka, but if all the various mapping services out there can be mashed in there too, then we can perhaps mitigate the factors that Bill discusses.