Aerial views of the Past

During a recent visit at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London I stopped at the Photographs Gallery and, while wandering through some striking artwork, I discovered the work of Jananne Al-Ani.
Jananne uses photographs and films to explore the history of his country, Iraq: the works shown at V&A (Aerial III, IV, V and VI) are aerial photographs taken with the sun at its lowest, when the particular light conditions allow underground archaeological traces to be visible at the naked eye. The aerial point of view makes appear the landscape as an abstract entity: at the same time, by showing different strata of human occupation, the camera exposes a dense texture of traces of the past.
An excerpt of the video “Shadow Sites II” was used in the trailer of the Ikono On Air Festival, and can be seen here:

ikono On Air Festival – JANANNE AL-ANI from ikonoTV on Vimeo.

Rebekkah from Historypin kindly posted the interview about my internship in their website’s blog!
http://blog.historypin.com/2014/04/09/farewell-to-wilma/
Thanks to the amazing Historypin team, and all the best for your future projects.

Today is Day of DH!

Today is Day of DH! All Digital Humanists in the world are invited to share online the chronicle of their day, contributing to answer the question which all people dealing with Digital Humanities is asked all the time: “What do you do as Digital Humanist?”

Honestly, during my MA I was asking to myself this question very often, especially during my first year: I guess because DH means A LOT of things, and when approaching this field one needs to find a personal path, remaining at the same time flexible and open to other researches.

When I decided to start my MA, I was hooked by the multidisciplinary approach necessary to study DH, which in some way reflected the different directions I was taking at that time: I studied Archaeology at the University, but in the following years I worked more as a videographer than as an archaeologist. I’ve always found that these two apparently incompatible professions could be linked, as I love documentaries and especially the ones with an historical subject. But I noticed that very rarely television and cinema manage to engage constructively the audience about these themes, and I think the cause of that is a gap in the communication between professionals and amateurs which still needs to be bridged.

I think community archaeology and history projects can be a good starting point to deal with that, but also that more research on the dynamics of public engagement is needed to address these communication issues.
In my dissertation I would like to analyze how the public gets involved nowadays regarding archaeological themes, focusing on the comments posted by users on posts from the British Museum’s blog, the Daily Mail online (selecting the news about archaeology) and the History Channel Facebook page, reflecting also on how different institutions (museums, press, tv) handle social media tools in order to reach a wider audience.
I hope the comments will allow me to measure the level of popularity of posts and the level of engagement of the public, highlighting at the same time users’ preferences and their relationships and connections with other users.

So, that’s what Digital Humanities can (also) be: a field of research which, using knowledge from humanistic and scientific fields, aims to find new ways to communicate and engage the general public about cultural themes, for the benefit both of professionals and amateurs.

Putting Art on the Map at Historypin

In the last few months, I’ve been fortunate enough to do an internship at Historypin.

Historypin has been developed by the not-for-profit company We Are What We Do: It allows users who want to share their memories about places or people to upload their pictures and videos. Thanks to a partnership with Google, the pictures can also be pinned to their precise location in Google maps, comparing in this way how the world looks today with how it used to be in the past.

The aim of the project is to connect people from different generations and locations, and collect individual stories building a catalog of human memories. During my time there, I was involved in a particular project, “Putting Art on the Map“, run in collaboration with the Imperial War Museum in London, which invited the public to locate and research the paintings held in the museum by solving “mysteries” created in the Historypin website and social media platforms.

The data crowd-sourced in this way are then going to be checked by the museum’s staff and help updating and enriching the collection’s database.

Many people played the “game” online (including myself, as you can see in this picture: the location of the painting ”Con: Camp’ – Genoa’ by Olive Mudie-Cooke, is in Genoa, Italy);

but they also participated at live events where small groups of people were set to solve the mysteries. I helped the project officer in collating and publishing the answers provided by the public, and the whole experience on the whole was interesting for me, as I could observe how the audience engages and reacts when involved in a project like this. I also participated at some of those events, and I wrote a post in Hystorypin’s blog about one of them.

 

 

Animal Vegetable Mineral

Animal Vegetable Mineral is a tv show which ran from 1952 to 1959 at BBC, and is a great example of how archaeology can be shown in television and reach successfully and educate in a fun way a mass audience.

Eminent scholars coming from prestigious universities were invited in each episode, chaired by Glyn Daniel from Cambridge University, and challenged to identify mysterious ancient artifacts. In this episode, Sir Mortimer Wheeler (University of London), V. Gordon Childe (Director of the Institute of Archaeology), Professor Sean P O Riordain (University College Dublin)

The Portable Antiquities Scheme

For my MA in Digital Humanities, I am taking a module called ‘Communication and Consumption of Cultural Heritage’, taught by Dr Gabriel Bodard, Dr Stuart Dunn and Dr Charlotte Tupman.
Last Wednesday’ s lecture was called ‘Legal and ethical aspects of collection and dissemination: the Portable Antiquities Scheme
Dr John Pearce, lecturer in Archaeology at the Department of Classics at King’s, was invited as guest lecturer to talk to the class about the project.

The Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) aims to record archaeological artefacts found by members of the public in England and Wales. Its database contains so far 700,000 objects and provides the basis of over 370 research projects.

The project is crucial not only for its purpose to enable scholars to collect and make sense of contextual data around the artefacts which otherwise would go irremediably lost, but also as an attempt to connect two categories passionate about archaeology which traditionally do not work side by side: professional archaeologists and metal detectorists, who find the majority of the artefacts which the PAS’ team is interested to.

The activation of a communication channel between professionals and amateurs has proved in this case to be advantageous to both categories in many way: archaeologists can educate the metal detectorists to register all the information about the context in where the object was found, gathering data essential to the reconstruction of the object’s life. On the other hand, members of the public have the opportunity to be involved and contribute knowledge, confronting and sharing their passion with professionals and feeling part of a passionate community.

The lecture inspired an interesting discussion around legal and ethical issues around the ownership of archaeological artefacts.While metal detecting is legal in England, is not such in other countries, for example Italy. A project like this cannot be applied in contexts where this technique in particular is condemned by both archaeologists and authorities. However, It is worth considering how the PAS model could help fight the illegal trade of antiquities, noting that the legal ban of ‘alternative’ ways of finding antiquities usually contributes to rise the value of the artefacts in the black market, encouraging illegal practices instead of stopping them.