Metaverse Friday – Museums and Archeological Modeling

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Posted by Richard Urban on Friday June 8 2007

Perian is starting to scare me with her prescience. I’ve actually been spending the week at the 2007 Digital Humanities Conference sponsored by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) and the Association for Computers in the Humanities (AHC).

I won’t provide a blow-by-blow coverage here, but will throw out a few little tidbits that I think will be of interest to Musematic readers. Complete abstracts from the conference are available here.

At the conference there were a number of presentations about visualization and archeological and architectural modeling. (see particularly the UCLA Cultural VR lab and the Monarch Project at Brown).

There’s a large body of literature on the issues of this kind of modeling if you care to read more. But one thing that I should bring to your attention that was mentioned over and over is the London Charter:.

This Charter aims to define the basic objectives and principles of the use of 3d visualisation methods in relation to intellectual integrity, reliability, transparency, documentation, standards, sustainability and access.

This appears to be a useful framework for anyone building cultural heritage applications, whether in Second Life or for other in-musuem interactives. Does your museum’s recent work comply?

My poster looked at how Second Life residents are doing similar things on their own (much like the museums we’ve looked at).

Okapi Island is a project of the Open Knowledge and the Public Interest (OKAPI) at UC Berkeley. Its a build that’s still under construction, but looks like it will be an interesting example of what you can do with recreating an archeological site. So far, this is the only academic research build that I’ve found in SL.