Thu 10 Jan 2008
2nd Life and Archaeological Databases
Posted by Eric Kansa under archaeology , informatics , instruction , open data , Second Life[3] Comments
Shawn Graham over at the “Electric Archaeology” weblog has a post asking about the use of 2nd Life to teach archaeology. There is a UC Berkeley Catalhoyuk reconstruction in 2nd Life now, intended to be a teaching resource (it won an “Open Archaeology Prize“). He has some very interesting ideas about linking archaeological databases dynamically with the virtual world.
I think it’ll be really useful to connect Second Life with different archaeological databases for visualization. 2nd Life does support connections with other online data sources, or web services, (see link). I’ve never done any programming in Second Life, so I’m not sure what sorts of limits the system has in reading outside data.
At any rate, outside databases would have to express data in a machine-readable format so the Second Life scripting language could parse the information. XML is an obvious choice, but there needs to be lots of thought on how to apply it to support Second Life visualization.
Most archaeological datasets that I’ve seen don’t have enough spatial information to make an easy and precise mapping into a virtual world. For example, many finds are in “bulk find” category, and you’ll only know their spatial context approximately (from say from a specific contextual unit). The contextual units, their size, shape, and relative positioning may be very poorly recorded and documented. Thus, rendering in Second Life will require lots of guestimation.
Shawn mentions Open Context in his post as an example data source. Open Context does make XML data available for all media, locations & objects, and for its faceted browse. Examples:
(1) Here’s a link to XML data for all small finds from Petra that have pictures (from the faceted browse).
(2) Here’s a link to XML data for a specific sheep radius from Petra.
(3) Here’s another link to XML data for an elephant capital also from Petra.
Although there’s contextual information, the contexts don’t have very clear spatial referencing, so it’ll be hard to simply put these data into a good Second Life 3D view. Having some clear common standard for spatial referencing in 3D will be really useful, as well as clear conventions on how to visualize archaeological data when detailed spatial referencing isn’t available.
January 11th, 2008 at 11:26 am
Thanks for the comments – much to think about!
I’m going to try to keep things simple at first. I’m thinking of maybe trying to recreate, say, figure 6.13 from Peter Drewett’s ‘Field Archaeology: An Introduction’ (UCL Press, 1999), and dropping simple prims – boxes, prisms, etc – within the layers. Opening these boxes would provide the linkage to say some appropriate small find from Open Context. So in the virtual excavation, the students would ignore the contextual info from the ‘original’ objects, since the virtual excavation is providing the new context. My reasoning for this is partly thatI didn’t want to try making 3d objects/artefacts right from the start.
Students would use virtual planning frames to record their work (drawing them up in Paint or something simple, then emailing the plans to me)… anyway, it’s all still in flux.
If I were to recreate an actual excavation from the real world in Second Life, then yes, the problems of clear spatial referencing would certainly be an issue.
January 11th, 2008 at 11:41 am
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January 14th, 2008 at 11:21 am
[...] the beginnings of an interesting discussion here and here about using archaeological data in Second Life, or using Second Life as a teaching [...]