1. Digital and Non-Digital Cultural Methods
For Mapping the World Around Us
Malta workshop Knowledge maps and access to digital archives
Erik Champion Curtin University @nzerik erik.champion@curtin.edu.au

2. a not ideal knowescape situation?

3. Outline
1. Spatial and experiential issues of digital/virtual archives
• VR equipment and projects are SILO’d
• Mapping is personalisable, filterable, cultural
• Architecture has some lessons for us
2. Archives of spatial objects and platial relationships
• Cultural Heritage+tools+archives not well integrated in
Digital Humanities
• 3D and 4D objects not well integrated with 2D (literature,
videos)
• Emergent projects at Curtin & elsewhere
http://i.imgur.com/olIvoIv.jpg
Presidio Modelo a panopticon prison
built on Isla de la Juventud in Cuba

4. Digital Humanities
& Future Archives: Collaboration
• Digital history may narrow the gap between academic and
popular history, and increase cross-disciplinary and international
collaboration.
• New digital tools have not yet changed most historians' research
methods substantially but digital tools and methods should be
included in history curriculum.
• Libraries, archives and universities see future digital preservation
challenges similarly, which encourages further collaboration.
• Digitisation projects: work-intensive..require new skills and attitudes.
• Private-public partnerships in the culture heritage sector are in many
ways controversial but may offer opportunities for collaboration.
http://www.finnish-institute.org.uk/en/articles/1011-new-report-digital-humanities-and-future-archives

5. Ltd Collaborative Tools: DHa2014
• Matt Munson,
Leipzig/Göttingen
• Christof Schöch,
Würzburg
• Erik Champion,
Curtin
• Toma Tasovac,
Serbia
http://erikchampion.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/the-tyranny-of-distance-panel-at-dha2014-perth-australia-2014/

6. Problem: Intangible & Material Culture
Our experience with the material culture of situated heritage is typically embodied, personal
and unique.
Literary understanding of the past as developed through reading of scholarly texts is typically
linear, monovocal, and aplatial.
Our experience and our literary understanding are two modes of knowledge that seldom
meet. (Exceptions: Orbis, Pelagious, Omeka/Neatline, HistoryPin).
h"p://pelagios-project.blogspot.co.uk/6

7. Lack of collaboration and shared feedback (isolation in
HMDs, Minecraft, by contrast, offers collaboration)
What are the concerns
of non-text?

8. http://webvr.info/
WebVR is an
experimental Javascript
API that provides access
to Virtual Reality devices,
such as the Oculus Rift
or Google Cardboard, in
your browser.
BELOW image: Pisa Lab VR, Oculus Rift and finger tracking

9. Map ancestors
• Sterelny: With the invention and elaboration
of pictorial representation, humans came to
be makers of specialised epistemic artefacts’.
As epistemic artefacts (‘tools for thinking’),
that is, items that structure our knowledge
outside of our minds, maps are ‘“portable”
representational resources’.
• Even though maps are abstract, they are still
part of the cultural process; we must learn to
read them for the rules of abstraction are
derived from cultural rules.
• Culturally specific and socially constrained,
designed via social conventions for a specific
audience, maps are abstracted to help
people’s cognitive mapping.
• French Neolithic caves- Niaux in Ariège:’ In at
least ten locations, drawings of horses, bison,
and mammoths seem to match locations that
focus, amplify, and transform the sounds of
human voices and musical instruments.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/
2008/07/03/2293114.htm
OR webistem.com/acoustics2008/acoustics2008/cd1/data/
articles/000892.pdf

10. Aboriginal art
Nearly all Aboriginal art can be related
to landscape and some paintings and
designs do represent explicitly the
physical relationship between different
features of the landscape. However,
Aboriginal paintings should be seen
primarily as maps of conceptual
relationships that influence the way
the landscape is seen and
understood. When Aboriginal
paintings do represent specific
features of landscape, they show
them in their mythical rather than their
physical relationship to one another.
•Australian Aboriginal arten rock painting of
Mimi spirits in the Anbangbang gallery at
Nourlangieen in Kakadu National Parken.
•Photo by and ©2002 Dustin M. Ramsey
(Kralizec!) - My own photographic work.
•This file is licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5
Generic license.

11. Mapping and Navigation in
Virtual Worlds
Maps are not just instrumental artefacts but
also epistemic ones with a long history: they
have helped organise our knowledge of the
world for millennia.
Navigation in virtual worlds:
Modjeska:“locomotion + wayfinding.
Locomotion is the activity of moving from one
location to another.”
Wayfinding is primarily a cognitive process,
comprising three abilities:
• cognitive mapping or information
generation to understand the environment
• decision making to structure and plan
actions
• decision execution to transform decisions
to behavioural actions.
The Glass Brain is courtesy of Gazzaley Lab, UCSF: Swartz
Center, USCD. Special thanks to Adam Gazzaley, MD, PhD,
Associate Professor of Neurology, Physiology and
Psychiatry, Director, Neuroscience Imaging Center, Principal
Investigator, Gazzaley Lab, University of California, San
Francisco (UCSF); Sandler Neurosciences Center.

12. Maps and VR
• Disorientation in virtual
environments is a frequent and
troubling issue for many users, an
issue noted by various writers,
hence a map plays an important
practical aid in Head Mounted
Displays (HMDs) and motion
tracking lack many orientating
features of the real world (Vinson).
• Interactive, recordable, and
dynamically personalizable, digital
maps can gradually or contextually
reveal the unknown, keep a
personally relevant record of the
past, or offer a shadowy gate to the
future.

13. Navigation is a complex activity
• Navigation: situating oneself in a world, creating an overview of the locality (often involving specific tools or
techniques).
• In “Contextualising Archaeological Information through Interactive Maps”, Johnson lists many possible uses of digital
maps, for example, that they can act as cultural representations but concentrates exclusively on the ability of digital
maps to interactively access and filter database-driven data.
• One must learn how to understand (overview) and move between landmarks, changes in time scale, and differing
points of view (both socially, and in terms of what was recreated or otherwise envisaged).
• A foreteller of what lies ahead, or what is a worthwhile digression or quicker way around a yet to be seen obstacle,
real world maps help ‘preview’ possible and optimal journeys. Yet digital maps used for previewing (wayfinding) can
also be irectional and proxemic. As users progress through the virtual environment, a digital map could improve in
local accuracy.
• Modjeska and Elvins: maps in VEs shouldn’t be just abstractions of reality. Navigation will be more usable if maps are
similar to the way our spatial memory is created recalled and acted upon as part of a decision making process.
• Raubal & Egenhofer: distinction between ‘practical space (i.e., acting in space) & conceptual space (i.e., representing
space)’.
• Johnson: wayfinding developed by habits and social practices, along with image schemata, ‘recurring mental
patterns that help people to structure space so that they know what to do with it’.

14. interactive spatial cognitive
map
Ramloll and Mowat created a
virtual environment where
participants could take in-scene
snapshots of exit and entry
points. They could retrieve these
snapshots at any time and click
on them to move to those
specific locations. The writers
reported that this function
increased ease of navigation.
• Wayfinding in virtual
environments using an
interactive spatial cognitive
map

15. Interstitial Archival Space by Sverre Fehn:
Hamar Bispegård museum Oslo = 2 buildings

16. Architecture: Wayfinding + Spatial Relationships
Aalto, Jyväskylä

17. D
Phototopia: Light And Slope Influence Wayfinding

18. NPS: Text and Model Amela Sadagic, PhD, Research Associate Professor, NPS,
MOVES Institute

19. Video Map-tracked Tables
http://gagarin.is/work/s
Marseilles DH2015

20. 2005 Unreal Tournament:
Mapping Systems
Mayan Calendar embedded as rotating minimal

21. Some partial VR solutions
Widescreen audience interaction

26. Archived books now in games but how do you find and
link between them?

28. Markham Panorama
car collections+archives
The Markham car collection heritage was entrusted
with the Western Australia Museum in 1969.
Subsequent events caused estrangement between
the state’s motoring community and the museum,
and forty-five years later still engender anger in
motoring enthusiasts in Western Australia.
Recollections of what actually happened are
inconsistent; this paper investigates what happened
and what went wrong. A qualitative research
approach using interviews, archival records, car club
magazines and newspaper clippings was employed.
The interviews were conducted with selected
representatives from the motoring community and
the Markham brothers. The paper concludes with
discussion on the lessons learnt from this
controversial incident for the Markham family,
motoring community and cultural institutions.
Questions about trust and ethics with donors and
depositors, including the role of cultural institutions
as custodians of national heritage are posed.
Joseph, P. (Peer Review) Heritage of the Markham
Car Collection: Estrangement with the West
Australian Motoring Community. Collections: A
Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals.

29. Part II: Digital Heritage a Digital Archive?
• A digital archive is..a repository that stores one or more
collections of digital information objects with the
intention of providing long-term access to the
information. A digital archives can be a sophisticated,
multi-tiered storage system or simply a C: drive on
someone's home computer.
• http://archivemati.ca/2005/11/08/digital-archives/ Nov
9, 2005.

30. You must walk around Buddhist description
of universe-biggest book in the world- but
aesthetic experience is being eroded Kuthodaw Paya Myanmar

31. Beyond Space and Time-Forbidden Palace
http://www.geek.com/news/expore-the-virtual-forbidden-city-courtesy-of-ibm-593731/
http://www.beyondspaceandtime.org/
Long story short, according to Mure Dickie writing in the October 10, 2008 Financial Times: "A virtual Forbidden City offering the kind of
immersive and interactive online experience pioneered by multiplayer role-playing games such as Second Life."
http://www.kith.org/logos/things/VRML/handbook/
http://www.kith.org/logos/things/VRML/handbook/

32. “Digital heritage disappearing
faster than the real heritage”
• “In the very near future some critical issues will need to be addressed;
increased accessibility to (and sharing of) heritage data, consistent
interface design for widespread public use and re-‐presentations of
work, the formalization of a digital heritage database, establishment of a
global infrastructure, institutionalized, archival standards for digital
heritage and most importantly the on-‐going curation, of work forward in
time as the technology evolves so that our current digital heritage
projects will not be lost to future generations. We cannot afford to have
our digital heritage disappearing faster than the real heritage or the sites
it seeks to ‘preserve’ otherwise all of our technological advances,
creative interpretations, visualizations and efforts will have been in vain."
• Thwaites, Harold. "Digital Heritage: What Happens When We Digitize
Everything?" Visual Heritage in the Digital Age. Springer London, 2013.
327-‐348.

33. [oz] historic collections could
be lost to ‘digital dinosaurs’
• Brunig: 2.5billion industry, 25% digitised, 629km of archives
• MUST shift to open access models and greater collaboration with the
public
• Explore new approaches to copyright management that stimulate
creativity and support creators
• Build on aggregation initiatives such as the Atlas of Living Australia
• Answer: exploiting the potential of Australia’s Academic and Research
Network (AARNet) and the National Broadband Network (NBN) for
collection and collaboration
• http://www.csiro.au/en/News/News-releases/2014/Australian-museums-risk-becoming-digital-dinosaurs OR
https://theconversation.com/historic-collections-could-be-lost-to-digital-dinosaurs-31524

34. Format issues
• Anyone who has worked in the field of
computer graphics for even a short
time knows about the bewildering
array of storage formats for graphical
objects. It seems as though every
programmer creates a new file format
for nearly every new programming
project.
• The way out of this morass of formats
is to create a single file format that
is both flexible enough to
anticipate future needs and that is
simple enough so as not to drive
away potential users.
• http://paulbourke.net/dataformats/ply/
• WebGL: JavaScript API for rendering interactive
3D graphics and 2D graphics managed by the
Khronos Group
• O3D: developed by Google (example)
• 3DMLW: 3D Markup Language for Web (Tallinn)
• COLLADA: interchange file format for interactive
3D applications, managed by the Khronos Group
• U3D: Ecma International standard ECMA-363
• VRML: precursor of X3D
• NB older:http://
archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/
advice/FileFormatTable

35. Options
• Re-record everything (3D capture)
accurately or agree on labelling.
• Template or provide framework to
support / record sites (from charter?)
• Immersive explanation of every 3D site.
• Policies to encourage use/re-use of 3D
models.
• Collection and dissemination network.
• Store models, base components,
paradata, or embed exes? See https://
olivearchive.org/ “for long-term
preservation of software, games, and
other executable content.”

36. international efforts
• 3D Icons (3D HOP) in CIDOC CRM
• Europeana
• Smithsonian Institute X3D BETA
• Fraunhoefer (X3DOM ON GITHUB)
• Ariadne
• CARARE
• EU EPOCH
• V-MUST
• DARIAH, CLARIN, DASISH

39. UCLA VSim real-time exploration of
highly detailed, 3D computer models
• Supports interaction with content generated in free
modeling software (e.g., SketchUp andBlender)
using the common COLLADA format.
• Mechanisms fto annotate their 3D work, embed &
categorize comments about modeled environment
• Mechanism for embedding spatially aware links to
URLs and primary and secondary resources
• Supporting the creation of academic arguments
within the virtual environments either as a linear
narrative or as a sequence of annotations
encountered during user-driven exploration.
• Providing a mechanism to package the 3D
environment, associated narratives, and embedded
resources into a single file for distribution
• Accommodating citation of project content at
model, narrative, node, & embedded resource
levels.
https://idre.ucla.edu/research/active-
research/vsim

40. Conclusion
• VR equipment and projects are SILO’d
• We need to integrate collaboration and display equipment, webVR has
promise
• Mapping is under-utilised beyond simple usability aids
• Architecture has some lessons for us
• Archives of spatial objects and platial relationships requires more research
• Cultural Heritage+tools+archives not well integrated in Digital
Humanities
• 3D and 4D objects not well integrated with 2D (literature, videos)

41. references
Elvins, T.T. “Virtually lost in virtual worlds -- wayfinding without a cognitive map”. ACM Computer Graphics. 31.3 (1997): 15-17.
Johnson, J.“Contextualising Archaeological Information through Interactive Maps.” Internet Archaeology 12 (2002). 20 May 2005
<intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue12/johnson_index.html>.
Joseph, P. (2015). An exploration of community-based organisation’s information management challenges. Proceedings of ISIC: the
Information Behaviour Conference, Leeds, 2-5 September, 2014: Part 2, (paper isicsp15), 20(1). Retrieved from: http://www.informationr.net/
ir/20-1/isic2/isicsp15.html#.VRDGu-G6Rq0
Modjeska, D. “Navigation in Electronic Worlds: Research Review for Depth Oral Exam”. Department of Computer Science. 10 January
2005. <http://www.fis.utoronto.ca/faculty/modjeska/Pubs/lit_rvw.pdf
Ramloll, R, and D. Mowat. "Wayfinding in virtual environments using an interactive spatial cognitive map." Information Visualisation,
2001. Proceedings. Fifth International Conference on. IEEE, 2001.
Soini, K. “Exploring human dimensions of multifunctional landscapes through mapping and map-making.” Landscape and Urban
Planning 57.3-4 (2001): 225-239, p. 229.
Thwaites, H. "Digital Heritage: What Happens When We Digitize Everything?" Visual Heritage in the Digital Age. Springer London, 2013.
327-‐348.
Wang, H. Johnson, T. and, Zhang, J. “The mind’s views of space.” Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference of Cognitive Science.
Beijing: China (2001): 191-198.
other inspiration: http://dhcommons.org/; publicVR.org; An Ontology for 3D Visualization in Cultural Heritage, https://kcl.academia.edu/
ValeriaVitale
alternative: low-cost or free software, templates and componentization: http://muse-opensource.org/ (part of Open GLAM); http://
www.x3dom.org/; blender.org; http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/; www.mukurtuarchive.org/