Afarensis

While I toil away in the blogmines, working on my take of the recent cladistic analysis of hominids I thought I would mention a few stories that I found to be interesting.

What if you were holding a Darwin Day celebration at a local nature preserve and had invited an anthropologist from the University of Southern Florida to give a speech? What if local officials steped in and canceled the speech because it talked about evolution? Think it can't happen? Guess again:

"Her topic was about evolution," Davis said. Well, yeaaaaaah! "I flinched on that."

"I canceled her out after discussing it with my supervisors," he said. "We are not the platform for debate on creationism versus evolution."

Even on Darwin Day?!?!?! Apparently not.

"We don't believe it's our role to engage in that debate," Davis said.

Is that so? If an acknowledged academic expert on evolution is deemed an inappropriate speaker to deliver a speech, especially on the very day honoring the man who created the scientific theory of evolution, then just when would it be acceptable for Professor Madrigal to offer up her views?

It's a bit difficult to believe that those attending a Darwin Day speech would have been particularly scandalized by a discussion about the scientific theory of evolution.

Rather, the real scandal is that a scholar attempting to exercise her First Amendment rights found herself the victim of scientific McCarthyism at the hands of clipboard-packing bureaucratic amoebas.

Anybody shocked?

Shortly after writing yesterdays post about who owns antiquity I received the Preservation Archaeology News for Spring 2008. This is a newsletter put out by the Center for Desert Archaeology. The newsletter contained an extensive discussion of the Virtual Vault - a joint project of Center fr Desert Archaeology and the Arizona State Museum. This is an extraordinary project that bears emulation. I hope you will forgive me for quoting the entire discussion, but it is fascinating and deserves as wide an exposure as possible. Here is what the newsletter had to say:

Virtual Balancing Act

Douglas Gann (Center Preservation Archaeologist and Digital Media Specialist) and Davison Koenig (Curator of Exhibits, Arizona State Museum) discuss their NEH award-winning proposed solution to a common museum dilemma: how to preserve objects and make them more accessible to the public and researchers.

From thwarted plans comes a breakthrough interactive application that has the potential to transform museology and bolster the preservation of heritage objects. Known as the "Virtual Vault," this joint project of the Center and the Arizona State Museum (ASM) grew out of a brainstorming session between friends and colleagues Doug Gann and Davison Koenig.

The Virtual Vault Conceived

In 2000 ASM launched the "Pottery Project," a multi-component initiative to preserve and interpret the ceramic legacy of the American Southwest and Northwest Mexico. Comprised of about 20,000 whole vessels, ASM's collection represents the world's largest and most comprehensively documented assemblage of ancient and ethnographic Southwest Indian pottery. With support from the Save America's Treasures program, ASM was able to build a state-of-the-art storage and conservation facility to house the collection, which was in desperate need of relocation. As Curator of Exhibits, Davison was charged with the task of providing interpretive tools and visual access to the newly re-housed pottery. Initial plans called for a "Visible Vault"-an open storage design that would have allowed visitors to get a sense of the breadth and depth of the collection.

When it became apparent that conservation concerns and architectural constraints justifiably precluded the open storage concept, Davison shared his accessibility challenge with Doug. "We'd worked together on a number of smaller projects, and I was familiar with his incredible digital reconstructions of the Presidio de Tucson and the Convento [Mission San Agustín]," Davison recalls. "It seemed like there still had to be a way to share these pots with people in an intellectually stimulating and visually engaging way."

"At the Center, I'd been successfully exploring the applications of 3D Solid Object Modeler, an accurate, low-cost three-dimensional profile modeling technology that was being developed for e-commerce applications," explains Doug. "It's primarily used in online retail so that shoppers can view an item accurately from any angle. The software companies-Creative Dimension Software Ltd. and Strata Inc.-have been very gracious in providing me with testable beta-versions of the program." According to Doug, this method quickly creates photorealistic digital models of objects and structures using photography rather than costly, time-consuming laser scans. The models also have the advantage of being relatively low bandwidth (300-500 kilobytes).

Both Doug and Davison knew that several museums-including ASM-were using Apple's Quicktime Virtual Reality (QTVR) to display mini-movies of pots rotating. "But the profile modeling technology goes beyond QTVR in its ability to share accurate three-dimensional information and allow examination from any perspective," continues Doug. "It provides an ideal solution for digitally representing the pots and sharing them in an interactive exhibition setting and over the Internet." At first, Davison and Doug conceived the Virtual Vault as just this kind of tool: a means of exploring the collection and examining the pots both on-site and online.

The Virtual Vault Expanded

At the same time, neither was fully satisfied with the level of interpretation offered by many current Internet-based explorations of archaeological ceramics from the Southwest. Those modules tend to list a vessel's type and ware designation, description, dating, and function-often referencing analytical techniques and classification systems that require a significant level of expertise to understand and interpret. Doug and Davison wanted the interactive experience to align with contemporary exhibition philosophy and preservation archaeology goals. As they considered how to embed dynamic layers of content and context, their awareness of the potential power of the Virtual Vault grew significantly.

Doug's ongoing work at the Center showed that he could, in fact, situate archaeological pots with known proveniences into digitally rendered 3D reconstructions of archaeological sites and their surrounding cultural landscapes-sometimes even in situ, within rooms or other features and in relation to other objects. Moreover, he had the ability to create a virtual representation of ASM's storage facility that would allow visitors to enter and effectively "browse" the shelves. Doug also recognized the impact of placing the models in a user interface that shares accurate metric data in a wide variety of web-accessible formats such as Javascript, Flash, and PDF. This functionality means that researchers will be able to collect a range of baseline data without physically examining the actual vessels.

Davison saw an opportunity to capitalize upon ASM's partnership with KUAT Public Television (now known as Arizona Public Media). As part of the Pottery Project, the two institutions are producing "Native Voice," a high-definition video that gives voice to those who crafted the vessels by combining interviews with Native American potters and elders with documentation of pottery-making traditions. Curators, anthropologists, and conservators also share insights about knowledge gained through research on ASM's collection and associated preservation concerns. This became another key element of the interactive.

The team now envisions an Internet-based Virtual Vault browser that enables on-site and online visitors to enter the storage area, or "pottery vault," remove a pot from the shelf, rotate it, investigate the site where it was found, watch a potter explain how it was made and the stories it embodies, hear a curator discuss its cultural significance, and peruse catalog data about it, among other activities. Interpretive components will situate the development of ceramics within the broader context of current archaeological and ethnographic research.

The Virtual Vault Funded-Phase One

Armed with this vision, Davison and Doug applied for a Level 1 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities last fall. In March, they were awarded $25,000 to develop an alpha-level prototype. Doug is quick to explain that this initial phase is "about demonstrating potential-not creating the finished resource. The explicit goals in this phase are to create a prototype and produce a white paper discussing procedures, best practices, and dead ends. We want to get museums to start talking about participating in this process of sharing three-dimensional information about cultural heritage objects."

Ultimately, the team believes in the potential of the Virtual Vault and its offspring for changing how we view objects and our relationship with the past and present-but first they need to complete the prototype and raise funding for subsequent phases.

The Virtual Vault Technology Explained

Doug and his research assistant, Katie MacFarland, demonstrated the digitization process that produces the models at the Arizona Archaeology Expo in March. The pots remain at ASM; a vessel is set on a target mat and photographed using a specially calibrated digital camera. A host of images is taken from multiple angles. The images are downloaded at the Center's digital imaging lab (also known as Doug's office). The operator of the software-usually Katie or volunteer Frank Finkenberg-subsequently uses a mouse to trace the profile of the object onscreen for every image. The software compiles these profiles and develops an accurate representation of the three-dimensional geometry of the object. From the images, it understands other aspects such as color data and surface texture.

"The entire process takes two to three hours for each pot," Katie estimates. "Frank and I have digitally rendered about 120 vessels out of the 275 that have been photographed so far. At this point, two-thirds of the photographed pots are from the ethnographic collection. We're looking forward to starting on the archaeological vessels in earnest soon."

The Virtual Vault Launched

Visitors to the May 10th grand opening of ASM's Pottery Project will get to explore a pilot version of the Virtual Vault prototype. "They'll be able to play with examples of some of the ceramics we've digitized so far," Doug confirms. "It's really more of a ribbon-cutting," explains Davison. "We'll have the new Interpretive Gallery open, where visitors can look into the storage vault, examine potsherds through microscopes, learn about the life of a pot, see the Native Voice presentation. The Pottery Project is definitely a work in progress." Doug and Davison feel that a more complete version of the Virtual Vault as they envision it will be online by 2009.

To Davison, the primary benefit of the Virtual Vault is that "it allows us to share stories about the pot. It connects visitors with actual potters. It's not just about 'seeing' it or looking at it or the basic facts-we're providing something richer and deeper with this content. It's a self-directed exhibit experience," he continues. "You're not being told 'read this.' We're using so many other tools to convey information-interviews, landscapes, contexts. The visitors choose what pots they want to learn about and what they'd like to know about them. That's huge."

For Doug, the Vault represents "a perfect example and application of preservation archaeology. Museums have an inherent conflict in which they must balance the need to preserve cultural heritage objects with the need to provide public access to them. The Virtual Vault mitigates that conflict by providing meaningful open access to collections while the actual storage vault ensures appropriate preservation conditions."

Initial progress on a prototype of this "Virtual Vault" can be viewed at the celebratory opening of the Arizona State Museum's "Pottery Project" between 1:00 and 4:00 pm on Saturday, May 10, 2008, in Tucson, Arizona. Details are available at www.statemuseum.edu. To support the Virtual Vault project, contact Steve Harvath, ASM's Director of Development, at 520-626-3466 or harvath@email.arizona.edu.

It's relevance to Cuno's book is obvious.