Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Digital Humanities with Sebastian Heath - Ep 101
180 Plays6 years ago
Today we have on the line Sebastian Heath from NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. Dr. Heath is ISAW's go-to Digital Humanities professor, and we'd like to discuss his take on DH in archaeology.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Episode 101
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 101. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul
Digital Humanities with Sebastian Heath
00:00:15
Speaker
Zimmerman. Today, we talk about digital humanities with Sebastian Heath. Let's get to it.
00:00:22
Speaker
All right, welcome to the show. Paul, how's it going? Pretty good, Chris. How are you doing today? Not too bad. Not too bad. Kind of kicking off as I know these recordings are always a little bit delayed. I'm headed to the Society for California Archaeology meetings this week, which means it's already happened as you're listening to this. And I'm hoping to get a lot more content over there. So some good interviews planned. But in the meantime, I want to remind everybody in case you are listening to this in somewhat real time, I am going to the Society for American Archaeology meetings, albeit the Wild Note booth.
00:00:48
Speaker
in the exhibit hall, so stop by. Let's chat tech. Maybe we can record an interview and get that done. I want to mention that on the next few podcasts. But today, we have a great interview. And Paul, why don't you go ahead and introduce the topic
Society Meetings and Guest Introduction
00:01:03
Speaker
and our guest.
00:01:03
Speaker
All right, so today we have a guest is Sebastian Heath. He's from NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, which is interestingly enough, to me at least, only a few blocks away from me. And as I found out at the last lecture or the last time I saw you, Dr. Heath, you're also a graduate of the school that I've been working at for the last 19 years. So not only are you five blocks away from me for your job, but I guess your school would have been what?
00:01:31
Speaker
half a block away from me in the next building over. Anyhow, Dr. Heath is ISA's go-to digital humanities professor. And we asked you to be on today because we really wanted to discuss your take on DH and archaeology. I'm looking forward to it. So let me just kick this off with a very
Career Journey and Teaching at NYU
00:01:48
Speaker
simple question. How long have you been teaching at ISA? I'm actually not aware.
00:01:51
Speaker
I came here in 2010 and sort of had a ramp up. I was at the American Numismatic Society. There was sort of some overlap in positions. So came here in 2010, really got teaching underway in 2012, I believe. So coming up on a decade, which has gone by quickly. Great. You were pretty active there.
00:02:18
Speaker
Try to be yeah. Yeah. Have you always been the DH guy there? So I've always been a DH guy I'll start out right at the beginning as many DH places, you know, we focus on community so I have a colleague Tom Elliott who works on epigraphy and he's a profoundly competent digital human humanist our librarian so without going through all names just
00:02:45
Speaker
I saw as a place that builds community and one of the areas around which we've tried to build community is digital humanities. So yeah, I came here doing digital
Public Lectures and Community Building
00:02:54
Speaker
things. I've kept doing digital things, but frequently in collaboration with my colleagues. Well, I find it exciting going to the ISA lectures. I go to them frequently and that's where I got to meet you initially, just because there's so much going on there and there's all these public lectures going on. And like you said, there's a lot going on around digital humanities. There's a lot in the city actually going on about digital humanities, but
00:03:15
Speaker
The stuff that's particularly targeted towards archaeologists and ancient studies is always appealing to me. Talking about the lectures, which of course I just said I love going to, did you find that kind of the lectures, the public lectures outreach, does ISOL find that a central part of your approach and ISOL's approach to DH or is that kind of a sideline, a happy sideline maybe?
00:03:38
Speaker
No, I mean, we think of it as essential. It's why we do them and why we start them at six o'clock so that people can come. It's why we try to have them represent the whole range of the activities at the society. It's why we host other organizations, you know, the AIA, the Archaeological Institute of America, the New York Chapter.
00:04:00
Speaker
does lectures there. The American Research Council Center, Egypt, RC does lectures here. So we hope that ISAW can be an important part of, you know, people meeting each other and talking about things. New York's a huge place. We play a small, small role in bringing people together. That's what we try and do.
00:04:22
Speaker
That's great. Well, from my perspective, it was very pretty successful. You know, a few weeks ago, I was at one of your lectures entitled 3D for Archaeologists, and you ran through a whole laundry list of different technologies that you and your students
3D and Virtual Reality in Archaeology
00:04:35
Speaker
were using. I was wondering if you'd give our audience a brief synopsis of what you were discussing at that lecture.
00:04:40
Speaker
Yeah, I think the title of the lecture was something like the Practical Archaeologist's Approach to 3D and Related Technologies. Close enough to that. And I think the title slide that I put up of course didn't exactly match the title as listed, whatever. I have been for a while now trying to track 3D technologies that have
00:05:06
Speaker
become a tool that archaeologists might reasonably use with existing hardware out in the field, there remains just a tremendous amount of expertise as one pushes forward, but there is also just a sort of growing collection of approaches and tools that people should know about. And the people who should know about them are one of the archaeologists out there in the field,
00:05:30
Speaker
And then also the general public as they're coming to understand how archaeological data is created. That is why I wanted to give the talk. It did overlap with a class called pretty generically, something like 3D and virtual reality for the ancient world that I taught last semester. So I had a pretty good, what I hope was a good set of examples in line in the lecture. And I will ask you guys to interrupt me if I just start monologuing too much.
00:05:58
Speaker
monitor to move through ways of creating 3D data and put those in parallel with how it is that there's this thing, the internet, to which people have been adding 3D data that they have created. So creating and acquiring content, either again, this one
00:06:18
Speaker
doing it oneself, for one is doing a mashup of your own 3D models and things you've downloaded. And then the idea of rendering that 3D content. So maybe one takes, as I just said, one's own model and one combines it in a scene with somebody else's. You then add artificial lighting to that and have the computer, what is called rendering it, that is just create an image of it.
00:06:44
Speaker
to get the audience understanding that. And then I moved to not just adding in light, but adding in physical properties. So I showed an animation that I do of a Roman military vexillum from the third century found in Egypt, but I rendered it into a sort of mountainous
00:07:02
Speaker
semi-border scene. So the idea of adding in more properties than just light, but wind and then sound, all of these sort of moving slightly towards the idea of immersion, whether that's
00:07:19
Speaker
what we think of as actual VR or just like allowing people to use their own minds to imagine what the scene might be more completely. So yeah, there's a lot going on on the screen, but I am interested in putting people in position to look at a 3D rendering and start thinking about the underlying
00:07:42
Speaker
object, but then also the people who might have been using that object. And of course those people come together in cultures and territorial states and empires. So the extent that we can have 3D modeling allowing people to think about the interesting things that people who study the ancient Mediterranean or archaeology as a whole can be thinking about, then I'm like,
00:08:03
Speaker
I'm on the way. And if I'm teaching my students to do that, I'm having a good time.
Curated Resources for Archaeologists
00:08:07
Speaker
And then I then moved forward in the lecture to gamification. So instead of just watching my animations, being able to interact with the scene and take on some idea of a character moving through things. And then I did bring out an Oculus Go at the end where people could line up, put VR goggles over their heads and be like, oh, that's really cool.
00:08:30
Speaker
So Paul, you were there. I hesitate to say how it was perceived, but I did think it was. I think we all had a good time. I had a good time. I looked like the audience had a good time. Just getting the idea that these tools are out there. Many of them are cloud-based or they're open source or they're free. I didn't quite lie and say they're all trivial to use, but many of the techniques that I went through are things that a
00:09:00
Speaker
curious computer user could figure out on their own because you just search how to do this and you'll come across a YouTube video or a tutorial or some other person who wants to help you virtually because they've made a resource on the internet to let you figure out how to do it. So that was a little bit of a blurb by me, but that's what I went through.
00:09:25
Speaker
I gotta say, just based on what you just said there, Sebastian, it's always kind of floored me that we don't yet have some sort of service where an archeologist or really any professional in their industry, maybe other industries do have this, but where we can't go to a website or somewhere that says, listen, I have this problem. I want to do this.
00:09:45
Speaker
You know what technologies will help me do this and to have that curated by archaeologists that have that have used it or other professionals that have used it and say, well, I tried this app out. I tried this thing out. I tried this piece of hardware out. Here are the pluses. Here are the minuses. And then other people can just basically put together a recipe of technology for what they need to do to do their thing. Because it seems like every project, every reaches student, every grad student out there
00:10:09
Speaker
is trying to reinvent the wheel and figure out what they're doing. It amazes me that we don't have this resource yet. What do you think about that? So I think it's a very important issue. I think there is the aspect that the technology is changing very quickly. And so I make sure in my teaching to just figure out
00:10:33
Speaker
Every semester, I'm pretty sure that there's one new tool out there that I haven't really used because it came out in the months before I'm teaching the class, or it became something that I felt I could now dive into, and we can come back to that a little bit.
00:10:51
Speaker
So, in direct response to the question, things are changing so quickly so that a podcast like this is actually part of a dialogue that is where
00:11:08
Speaker
It helps the information flow. I have slight concerns about people having the idea that there is a list they can go to that will have recipes that will tell them what to do. So that's not to reject the idea, but that's to be in dialogue. How do we give people
00:11:28
Speaker
the confidence that they can explore the internet on their own to find out what is enough of a starting point that they think, okay, you know, I know how
00:11:43
Speaker
to do one thing, like maybe I'm good at making maps. On the basis of that, how do I find out how to turn that into a 3D terrain model? And then once I know how to do that, oh, how do I add lighting? So rather than lists with here's how to do things,
00:12:02
Speaker
building competency of how to discover to do things. Because wait six months, and what you knew how to do will be slightly out of date. I'm going to drop a trope that I use places. I can identify myself over the years as four or five different digital humanists as I have taken on skills that have allowed me to do new things.
00:12:32
Speaker
an essential digital humanity skill, essential digital archaeological skill, is being able to learn new tools. So that's not to reject that there should be a list, but just keeping the world flexible and moving forward because the tools are changing so quickly. Does that make sense?
Sharing Technology Solutions
00:12:51
Speaker
Makes a lot of sense. Absolutely. I agree with you wholeheartedly.
00:12:54
Speaker
I can't quite shake the sense listening to both of you discuss this that we almost need like a stack overflow for archaeologists. One of those places where you kind of know what the question is you want to ask, you see some answers. Well, this one's from 2011, probably doesn't apply anymore. But hey, these two from 2018 might be useful, helps you refine a better question that gets you a better answer, that gets you somewhere closer to where you want to be. So an actual question, will your audience know what stack overflow is?
00:13:24
Speaker
I would think that most would. I think anybody that does any programming does. I certainly, as the joke is, a lot of programmers use Stack Overflow as a starting point to jog their memory about matters of syntax in any given language. I haven't used SQL in a while. How do I do a left outer join? I can't quite remember. Google it, it comes up as a first hit, you remember, and then you move on.
00:13:51
Speaker
Yeah, the only thing I ask that because yes, one of the skills I want to give to my students is the ability to navigate Stack Overflow. So when I'm teaching Python programming, it is true that none of the examples on
00:14:07
Speaker
Stack Overflow or about doing tables of ancient world data or anything like that, but their ability to read a modern problem. I'm searching rent records in New York City and I downloaded 10,000 records or whatever, all that kind of stuff, and to figure out how that is the same structure with their own data is actually a very important skill that I give them.
00:14:32
Speaker
Stack Overflow is out there, and being able to use that, that's the kind of skill that I think jump-starts people becoming their own digital humanist, not just where to click, but how to conceive a problem. And diving into tools like Stack Overflow is an important part of that.
00:14:51
Speaker
Well, another important part of it, and you kind of touched on this as you were explaining, giving the brief synopsis of that lecture, was the particular tool sets. And you did say using a lot of web-based free open source software. But I really got a kick out of the number of tools that you use that I've seen at use here at school amongst elementary school kids.
00:15:14
Speaker
You went for an example of doing a reconstruction with SketchUp. And I've not only just seen a few kids use SketchUp, I've taught dozens of them to use SketchUp in order to attack archaeological problems. And so, it's interesting to see that confluence between what's being done with grad students and also what's being done with elementary students and how it kind of participates in the same sort of knowledge-based approach to attacking problems.
00:15:43
Speaker
and to dealing with the tool set at hand to come up with novel solutions. So it was really gratifying to see that you were using some of the same tools like that. Yeah, and I think you mentioned that when we spoke right after the lecture, and of course I was super happy to hear that. Yeah, you know, creating a virtual 3D space that communicates to other people
00:16:08
Speaker
what might have been going on and invites them to think about further things that were going on in a virtual space. You know, it can be crazy complicated, you know, to make it to whatever 3D movie that is out now, whatever. That takes whole teams and hours, and as we know, you know, millions and millions of dollars. But to
00:16:29
Speaker
I'm looking for a word other than basic, but the effective communication in 3D can happen quickly by people learning tools like SketchUp. And yes, so I'm not surprised to hear that it's elementary school students. They may even have an advantage over graduate students because nobody has told them that it is hard or anything like that. So, you know, they're
00:16:55
Speaker
your elementary students may have less fear about it and more willing just to jump in than my graduate students. So, of course, I love my graduate students and they work very hard. I'm really happy with the work they do here. So, I don't know how to maintain to be being a downer about graduate students or about any student, anybody willing to learn, they can figure out these
Teaching Digital Tools and Collaboration
00:17:16
Speaker
tools. No, I agree. Why don't we take a brief break here and when we come back, I've got some more questions to you about your approach to teaching and learning. I look forward to them.
00:17:30
Speaker
Hey everybody, Chris Webster here jumping in to talk about WildNote. Check it out, wildnotep.com. So we've made a lot of improvements to the WildNote platform. If you're hearing this, it is currently March of 2019. And we have an awesome dashboard that we have up on the main page where you can see all sorts of helpful information. You can also see your active projects, archive projects, surveys, photos, and exported reports.
00:17:53
Speaker
for all the projects that you're a part of. So what that means is using our access control, if you are say a project manager and you are associated with three different projects, you can jump right into here and check what progress was made on just those projects by going to your exported reports or going to your surveys or going to photos the next morning and see what was uploaded the day before. That's a pretty awesome thing. So you can click over here to check on it at the end of the day, see what your field crews have done,
00:18:20
Speaker
and understand what tomorrow's cleanup is gonna be like. So check it out, wildnoteapp.com. That's wildnoteapp.com and you can always schedule a demo with me for Wild Note at digtech-llc.com forward slash wildnote. All right, back to the show.
00:18:44
Speaker
All right. Welcome back to episode 101 of the architect podcast. And Paul and I are talking to Sebastian Heath about digital humanities. And Sebastian, I got to say, I still can't get, I think you need to put a grad student on this because I still can't get over the idea of a system that people could go to because there are apps out there that will tell you based on the food you have and the expiration date of that food, you have what you can actually cook in your kitchen. And if we can just put something together like that,
00:19:10
Speaker
I'm not going to let it die. I'm just not. So we're going to keep talking about it. No, I'm just kidding. No, I'm totally happy to keep talking about it. What are the multiple ways that a person can understand their situation well enough to figure out
00:19:28
Speaker
what is the next step, whether that's just jumping right into a tool or figuring out who to go to. I mean, we spend a tremendous amount of time as a society teaching young people how to engage in research projects that involve reading text, producing text, reading other people's texts, and synthesizing those. That is from day one. I started, I have three children.
00:19:56
Speaker
Of course, I was reading to them, all that kind of stuff. And they're reasonably computational competent. But we have a society. We focused on narrative as a narrative and writing. And that's not bad. I'm not trying to replace that. But it means that we put people out on the internet with more complex data forms. And they're sometimes unsure what to do. So yeah, I agree with you. How do we get more people comfortable doing things with digital tools and digital data?
00:20:26
Speaker
Well, the first lecture I think I ever saw you give was you were talking about using R as a GIS for data about Roman amphitheaters. I remember coming away from that lecture and thinking, wow, it was really
00:20:45
Speaker
Amazing to me. The way that you're using R, along with the fact that you're hosting your data on GitHub, those are both really novel to me. I've gotten a sense from that and from other lectures that experimentation and even play really are informative to your work. Would you mind going into a little more detail as to how they do inform what you do?
00:21:08
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's right. There's a colleague on the internet, Sean Graham, an electric archaeologist, sometimes his Twitter handle, something like that. Paul, you both may know him. And he talks about failing gloriously as an important concept, the idea of play. I tell my students, nobody gets hurt when you see an error message. You come to
00:21:35
Speaker
not have a little sense of angst when your computer tells you, you know, warning, failed, died or whatever it is. And you just learn to unpack that and to see what is going on. You learn to, you know, to allow
00:21:51
Speaker
everybody wants self to be in dialogue with the digital representation of scholarship that you've worked to put into your machine and then you iterate over it and you get something back on the screen and it goes into your head and you think about it and then that causes you to type on your keyboard which causes something to happen on the screen which goes into your head which causes you to type in back and back and back. If you can get that cycle
00:22:14
Speaker
And then you're sharing it on GitHub so that other people can see it. If you can get that cycle of, it's not so much never stopping, but never feeling that you are coming to a finished point. And the point of reaching a stage is never to say, I am done. It is to say, what questions, what have I communicated, and what further questions are?
00:22:40
Speaker
Digital data does not inherently have arbitrary stopping points. It encourages you to say, what else should be on that map? How can I get that other data? So there is no perfect stopping point at which you can put it on the screen in front of an audience and say, look, I have finished, and there you are all to just gaze upon it.
00:23:02
Speaker
just, you know, put stuff out there, see what you think about it, see what other people think about it, and keep going forward. So yeah, is it play? Is it failure? Is it this? Is it sharing? Many eyes make for better work. You know, one of the things I like about being here at ISA is that kind of attitude, general approach to things is encouraged.
00:23:25
Speaker
That leads me to wonder a little bit more in general about, maybe we're leading away from digital humanities for a second, but a little more about graduate students and this particular type of research, because there's always a common understanding when you undertake new research, especially for a PhD dissertation or something like that, that you're doing original research, right? You're having original concepts, original ideas. So there's a lot of ownership that happens with that. And how are...
00:23:53
Speaker
How are people such as yourself teaching these people coming in that while you want to come up with original things and really figure this out, you need to play well with others and let others see this and experiment with it and not take offense when somebody does something different to your experiments or your projects or your data?
00:24:10
Speaker
How do you try to convey that to students? As a practical pedagogic matter, one of the ways I convey that to students is by not requiring that they do it.
00:24:27
Speaker
Everybody knows, you know, hear it. I saw whatever that I'm oversharing on Twitter and GitHub all the time. But then we come into class and I will talk to the students about, you know, I'm trying to teach them.
00:24:44
Speaker
ways of interacting with digital data so that should they choose to, they could tweet out a link and people would follow that link to a meaningful way of interacting with some manifestation of their project. But I really say, you do not have to.
00:25:04
Speaker
The language that I'm about to say makes no sense in that. I tell them, you know, I'll love it if you do that, but I won't give you extra credit or anything like that. Like, I just want to make absolutely sure that the students don't have to. And then I sort of, you know, some students enjoy
00:25:22
Speaker
tweeting out the work that they do in my classes, and some don't. I think as one moves ahead and finds students here who want to have digital humanities be part of their profile as they go out into the world, I will say, yes, it is good to
00:25:45
Speaker
participate in the public sphere that is the internet in however you want to do it. Of course, the ones who demonstrate some interest in participating in this community and being digital humanists are inclined towards doing that already. So it's usually not a battle. But just create
00:26:12
Speaker
I model a culture of sharing. I certainly model it in the classroom. We're all sharing each other's digital work in the classroom, so they become comfortable in that mini community. But in many ways, that's what a classroom is supposed to be, like a mini, safe,
00:26:30
Speaker
part of the real world you know analog for the real world and where students can learn how to do things and then they choose of the selection of courses that they've taken with me or elsewhere you know what are they going to take forward into their own lives as they become their own independent
00:26:48
Speaker
professionals. So I think I don't think I can require that people share stuff just because, you know, laws about educational privacy. But I have found that it is that that the best way to get people comfortable with what they might want to share of their own work is to let them decide what they want to share of their own work. And most students I take it are happy to share.
00:27:11
Speaker
And many, you know, absolutely many, many of them are. They'll just, yeah, you know, really happy that like last year some students used, last semester students used Play Canvas. Paul, that was one of the tools that I showed in the lecture to create a virtual
00:27:34
Speaker
museum that recreated the space around the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan that were destroyed by the Taliban. They did a really nice job, preliminary work, but they did a nice job. They wrote it up in a paper that also included other techniques they were using. They posted that paper to academia.edu with links into their work. And they had a brief explosion of it being top 1% or something like that.
00:28:03
Speaker
And they were super pleased to have put that work out. So again, you just let students control their own. I think it came up the term ownership. Giving students ownership of their own identities, if that will let them go out onto the internet confident that they will
00:28:26
Speaker
retain ownership of their identities, but in a way that is collegial and sharing. I encourage them, yeah, somebody may take your stuff and do something with it, but they can do that if you publish an article and they plagiarize you. That's not unique to anything digital. That certainly isn't. Do you have other projects that you're currently working on or your students are working on that you'd like to let us know about something that's really exciting you right now?
Digital Study of Pompeii
00:28:53
Speaker
I'm pleased to be able to report that the Getty Foundation's Digital Art History Project just gave a grant to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, my colleague Eric Poehler up there, who would make it for a great interview if you haven't done one already. We got a
00:29:15
Speaker
University of Massachusetts is the lead institution on a three-year grant for a project called Pompeii's Artistic Landscape, or the Pompeii's Artistic Landscape Project, POP, which is a good hashtag. That's always important for a project in which we're going to be
00:29:32
Speaker
applying the principles of linked open data and graph databases overlapping with tools and techniques from the semantic web to Pompeii to allow not just site-wide searching of wall painting and the motifs and you know
00:29:51
Speaker
find Dionysus as represented on wall paintings around the city, but focusing on the relationships between the architectural contexts in which wall paintings are such that one can say, sure Dionysus is here, but quickly show me what's in neighboring buildings
00:30:11
Speaker
adjacent buildings or what motifs are appearing in buildings that are across the street, really trying to focus on the street as an organizational principle within an ancient city. And so we're just at the beginning of that.
00:30:28
Speaker
But with the websites already up and running, we were we were open content from day one, our data already you know going on to GitHub practically as it's being created. Eric motivating force behind the NEH I think funded.
00:30:44
Speaker
Pompeii bibliography and mapping project. My apologies if I got the exact funder of that wrong. And we're taking much of the data that was collected for that, which exists as ArcGIS shape files and bibliographic records and sort of chunking that, making that into smaller, flexible chunks that can be associated with art historical descriptions of wall paintings to allow all the things that I just said. So we're,
00:31:11
Speaker
heard in December. It was announced on February 14th. We are underway and to overlap with the topic of the conversation earlier. I am tweeting out links into that database that let people explore where we may be going. It's not
00:31:28
Speaker
Give us some time to really make it a rich environment. But from day one, put it out there, see how the world reacts to it. We may have to constantly say, yes, that's coming, that's coming, that's coming. But eventually, the things that are coming will come and people will know about it already and be using that resource to explore the complex urban landscape of Pompeii.
00:31:51
Speaker
That's fascinating. It makes me wonder another question here. What do you do about the things? How do you assess as you're going along what's successful and what's not? And how do you decide to abandon certain lines of inquiry, certain tool sets, certain experiments as being unfruitful?
00:32:10
Speaker
That's an excellent question. I think I would almost shift it around and say, how do I work to avoid that? Not that I, as I answer slightly phrasing, I'm sure I may come up with a situation that directly answers your question, but I am very interested in maintaining the separation between
00:32:36
Speaker
data and tools. And I have a real interest in how to structure information so that it can be used in a number of ways. And flexibly, and that people can use it for purposes that I might not have thought of. So I'll really focus on the data first, and I'll be a little bit of a zealot about trying to get that right. And then I'll
00:33:06
Speaker
I'll try different tools to see what they can do with that data. If I find that a tool does not work, I will abandon it quickly, but with low consequences because there's something else out there that will let me work on things.
00:33:26
Speaker
Can I turn that into specifics? Nothing's coming up right on the top of my head, but it's more the strategy. I have found that the strategy for success is to focus on data upfront and then to
00:33:45
Speaker
and then the sort of deeper, more granular tactical level is to try it with different tools. Somebody says, I've got this great 3D program. Okay, what can I do with my models? I've got this great tool for doing network analysis. All right, let's try it on the network and see whether it's a toy or not. But nothing rides on the answer to that because there are sets of tools that can do things. So to the parts of the internet that change,
00:34:14
Speaker
try them and have your data be, not that it's not changing, but that you're creating sort of, you're thinking of it as an archival resource to which yes, every six months you will try something new on it and then you just keep doing that.
00:34:34
Speaker
So again, I don't know if that's quite an answer to your question, but the separation of data and tools, that's a pretty fundamental computational approach.
Data Flexibility in Research
00:34:43
Speaker
But I really enjoy thinking about representation, and I find that that makes iteration functionality, programmatic approaches easier. No, that makes sense.
00:34:55
Speaker
You'll find fans amongst us about separating data from the toolset. We talk about born digital data quite a bit with regards to field data collection. I constantly talk about making our data sets human readable, so if we lose a particular program, we can still re-engineer something in the future.
00:35:15
Speaker
Yeah, so it's all sort of a similar kind separating one's dataset from the actual tools that are being used to analyze or manipulate those data. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so as a computational archaeology, digital archaeology, that's pretty basic. And the trick is actually as a discipline
00:35:42
Speaker
practicing that and having not just you use your data, but again, a reason to let other people use your data is to find out what is wrong with it because they will do something with it and say, this link isn't working or something like that. And then you fix it and you push it back up to GitHub and the world's a better place.
00:35:59
Speaker
The constant desire to make the world a better place is what motivates much of us. It's a slightly strange tool to think about digital archaeology for doing that, but I like to think that by sharing well-structured archaeological data, I'm just slightly making the world a little bit of a better place. I'd like to believe you are, too. Thanks.
00:36:22
Speaker
Well, on that note, let's wrap up this interview, Sebastian. Where can people follow you on Twitter and GitHub? I'm s-e-b-h-t-h, so sort of Seb Heath on Twitter. GitHub is s-f-s-h-e-a-t-h. But if you Google Sebastian Heath GitHub, maybe throw in Roman or something like that. People should be able to find that. I've dumped my Facebook account. I haven't quite
00:36:51
Speaker
deleted it because I wanted to hold that territory, but I haven't logged in since maybe over a year now. So Twitter and GitHub are places to follow things. And I do try to regularly tweet out
00:37:08
Speaker
like links to my work or observations or retweet people who are doing interesting things, you know, every interaction is both about oneself, but also about, you know, helping other people, enabling other people. So yeah, Twitter is a good place for me and other people, you know, to see what's going on in digital archaeology. There are a lot of us out there trying to share things.
00:37:30
Speaker
All right, fantastic. Well, again, thanks for coming on the show and be sure to tell your students and, of course, yourself and any of your colleagues, if you guys got anything cool you want to talk about in technology and archaeology and where they intersect, then you know where you can talk about it. Yeah, it's been a whole ton of fun. Thank you so much for the invitation. And yeah, I'll spread the word. Thanks a lot. All right. Thank you. Take care. And we'll be back in just a second with the App of the Day segment right at the show.
00:37:59
Speaker
Hey, everybody. Chris Webster here to talk about one of the Archeology Podcast Network's affiliates, and that is Timular. T-I-M-E-U-L-A-R. Timular is two things. One, it's an application that you can actually just download and use for free. And it's really great for time tracking. You can track up to eight different things at once. Just choose the one, and then you can use the at symbol and hashtags to help coordinate what you're doing. I actually have clients I use this for, and I build them monthly. And I just sort by the month and then choose the client.
00:38:28
Speaker
And I can see all the activities that I build that client for and just export that in and bring it right into QuickBooks and draw that invoice. So if you want, you can also buy their cube, which is an eight-sided cube. So if you need that visual cue that when you get a phone call, you don't want to switch over to an application or do something like that. But when you got to track when you're on the phone or track when you're in meetings or track when you're checking email, track when you're screwing around on Facebook and you're not supposed to be, if you want to track all those things.
00:38:53
Speaker
You just assign those to a side. They give you a pen to draw on it with, or you can use one of their sticker sheets or one of their labels to actually write on there. And the pen has an eraser that comes with it too, so it's like a marker with an eraser. And you can just assign those sides. That way you can just quickly flip it. It's connected via Bluetooth to either your computer or your smart device. And you just flip it and it starts tracking that time. You can always go back and edit things, you know, add comments to the time that was tracked or anything like that.
00:39:21
Speaker
Again, check that out at arcpodnet.com forward slash timular. That's arcpodnet.com forward slash timular. Support Timular and support the RKLG podcast network at the same time. Thank you.
Accessible Training for Archaeologists
00:39:38
Speaker
All right. This is Chris Webster with one more quick ad, and that is for team black arc cert dot black. So we are setting up a Patreon account and we're soliciting people for basically experts in the field that will do a webinar, essentially 30 minutes to one hour on a single topic, something you're an expert in, something you think you're an expert in.
00:39:58
Speaker
and put together a presentation. I'll do the recording. You don't need to do anything. We'll coordinate how we're going to do that. And then we're going to put that up on our account. And when people go there with a subscription, we track views on that and you get a 70 percent revenue share after expenses based on the number of views, the percentage views that you have on your particular videos. So it's a great way to make some extra income.
00:40:18
Speaker
but it's an even better way to put awesome information out into the field so archaeologists have one place to go to find all these things. And why are we charging for this you might ask? Well, good things have value and things that are training have value. However, I don't believe in charging $100 for a webinar an organization you already belong to.
00:40:36
Speaker
I don't believe in charging even more than that in an organization you don't belong to, and they're just trying to put out good information. This information is worth a lot of money, but it shouldn't be inaccessible, and there shouldn't be such a huge barrier to entry to make us all better people and better archaeologists. So check out arccert.black to see what we have out there right now, and email me chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com if you want to participate, or if you know someone that can participate and can put us in touch. All right? That's arccert.black. Now back to the show.
00:41:14
Speaker
All right, welcome back to The Architect podcast episode 101. And this is the app of the day segment. And I'd like to follow up with an application. I guess it could help you in your digital humanities work, especially if screen real estate were an issue. What we're going to talk about is something that's actually been in my list of apps to talk about for a little while. However, I have avoided it because, well, to be honest, they had some issues. And what I'm going to talk about is Duet Display.
00:41:40
Speaker
I love anything that makes something do something else. You can buy something and not have buyers remorse and know that even if maybe you're not using it for the right purpose or the purpose it was intended for, you can use it for something else and still keep using it. One of those things is like an iPad or even an iPhone or for that matter, something else that this can display to.
00:42:00
Speaker
But Duet Display is for extending your desktop display. And I love it as a tool for, say, going to a coffee shop or you're on the road, you're an archaeologist that's traveling, you don't want to have a huge display, but you need the extra real estate. You can bring Duet Display because a lot of people carry iPads with them these days anyway, right? They might have one just on them and using it for other things. Well, you can set up in a coffee shop or set up in your hotel room wherever you're at and just plug this in and use it.
00:42:28
Speaker
It's not a super cheap application and Apple's not showing me the price because I already own it. But it works on Mac or PC. So if you have an iPad, you can actually extend your PC display as well. You don't need to expand your Apple display. But unfortunately, it doesn't work on Android tablets right now. So it's intended to work on an iPad. But the thing I like about it is
00:42:48
Speaker
There's a lot of display extenders out there, and a lot of them work wirelessly, which is really cool in concept, but it actually doesn't work very well. The display is not very crisp, it's a little pixelated. Duet has managed to not only give you a pretty crisp, clear display when you're extending via wireless, but they actually encourage you to just plug in with a lighting cable or whatever you have.
00:43:11
Speaker
that plugs into your iPad. And then you have a really cool, really clear, pixel perfect display sitting right next to your tablet. You can go into your display preferences, you can move it around so you're dragging windows properly. And the other really neat thing is, for anybody that's seen one of the new MacBook Pros, I've got a 2017 MacBook Pro sitting in front of me, and it's got that little touch bar that's right in front of the keyboard. Well, you can turn on the touch bar for duet display. So even if you don't have a computer with the actual touch bar,
00:43:41
Speaker
you turn it on and now that touch bar with all the functionality that you normally have on it is right there on your duet display, which is a pretty awesome little concept. I actually didn't even notice that until I did it accidentally with one of my older computers the other day when I was just had to bring it up for some reason and I was actually kind of seeing if duets still worked on it because I needed to do some stuff.
00:44:01
Speaker
Anyway, that's pretty sweet. I love Duet. It's a great program. Again, it's not free. It's not super cheap, but I think it's a hell of a lot cheaper than buying an external display and carrying it around with you. Use the thing that you've already got and try that. You can actually extend an iPhone as well onto an iPhone, which is a little weird. I'm not sure why you would do that, but you can do that.
00:44:22
Speaker
And and go from there. So really high quality, really great. And, you know, makes a touchscreen out of your out of your Mac because they're not touchscreen yet. And just that touch bar is really cool functionality to have right over there on that. So Paul, do you use any display extenders or anything like that that are related to tablets? No, I at work, I use an external monitor and I and I connect on my computer that I do all my
00:44:49
Speaker
My main work on one screen and then I have my text windows and to-do lists and such on my smaller screen to the side. But no, I don't do it between any mobile devices, certainly. I mean, we do something similar in that we project via either
00:45:09
Speaker
Apple TVs or an AirPlay receiver that you can run as software on a Mac if we want to display things from iPads up on projectors and classrooms. But that's something different. That's not something I personally do because I'm very rarely projecting something from an iPad onto a screen in class. But no, it's also
00:45:30
Speaker
You know, getting used to two screens is one of those crazy things that once people start using them with their computers, it gets very hard to shift away from using it. You feel very constrained when you're only using one screen. So I can certainly see the appeal of wanting multiple screens, of wanting the touchscreen, of all the above, back and forth between the two different devices.
00:45:53
Speaker
I'll tell you one thing I've been trying to do with mine, which is why this came back into focus for me. To be honest, I haven't been using mine that much because I'm mostly working in my office and I have a 27-inch iMac hooked to a 27-inch Thunderbolt display, so plenty of real estate there. But when I go home, I'm still working on my computer and sometimes I want that, but really the functionality I'm looking for
00:46:14
Speaker
is air travel and I've got some, some more air travel coming up here shortly. And when I'm flying on a plane, I like to do something, you know, like, I like to stay productive when I'm on a plane. Cause it's like a, it's almost like an isolated environment where I have no texts, phone calls or emails coming in and I could just get some solid work done.
00:46:31
Speaker
It's a very unique situation, but the problem is I don't fly first class because, you know, I'm an archaeologist. And so you're back in economy or even basic economy these days. And the minute somebody even moves their seat back or even if they don't, there's just not enough room for this. You know, I've got the 15 inch MacBook Pro and there's no way for me to open that screen and actually be able to use it.
00:46:53
Speaker
I've been working on a way, and the only reason I haven't gotten this to work yet is because you got to turn off a bunch of stuff that I'm not ready to turn off just yet. But when I do actually go on a plane next month, I'm going to do this. But you have to turn off firewalls and some other stuff to make this work. But there is a way to hook the display up via cable through the lightning jack or the USB-C on the side here.
00:47:15
Speaker
and then close the laptop and basically just use the duet display on my 12.9 inch iPad as the display with my Apple pencil. So I can be able to put the iPad, put the computer just in the seat back pocket of the airplane and then have the iPad in front of me and actually use my computer as a basically a touchscreen through the iPad and do everything I need to right there. I've seen that that is possible online, but I haven't made that work yet. Like I said, I got to turn a whole bunch of shit off that I'm not really ready to do.
00:47:43
Speaker
That sounds handy. It must be a little awkward if you have a lot of typing to do, but I used to always keep my computer hooked up to my external monitor at work, but I'd have the computer closed and I used an external keyboard and an external mouse. Back in November or October, we upgraded our computers to the new MacBook Airs, which have the retina display.
00:48:04
Speaker
And that's so much nicer than my old 11-inch MacBook Air that now I use the two screens side by side. But I used to do a similar sort of thing except for not quite as cool as having the touchscreen display on the iPad. I just pulled up the App Store here, so we have the price. It's $9.99 for duet display. Oh, yeah. Well, that's not as bad as I thought it was. Yeah, that's pretty affordable. No, especially if you find it really useful.
00:48:29
Speaker
Yeah, you might think it odd that you can't just close the laptop and have the display still work because that is pretty common to be able to do. The problem is when the iPads plugged in through the lightning connector or even the new, you know what, the newer iPads, iPad Pros with the USB-C connector on the bottom might actually read differently, but I'm not sure. But the one with the lightning jack on it that I have, it doesn't read as a display.
00:48:53
Speaker
that's the problem. So you have to trick your computer into basically staying on and then essentially turning it on or keeping it on with this connection. And that's not something it wants to do naturally. Um, there's a lot of permissions that have to be relaxed for that to be able to happen. Otherwise somebody could bust into your computer by just basically plugging it, you know, plugging into your lightning jack, plugging into the connector that way, because it is, it is an interface. It's not just a display. It's actually an interface and that's the issue. So you got to turn a much stuff off for that to work. So,
00:49:23
Speaker
I'll report back on that when I get it to work. But in the meantime, I think Duet is a really great one. I've tried Air Display, which I actually have on my list of things to talk about for an app of the day segment. And I'll review that at a later time. But I think Duet, when it works well, works really well. And you just get superior quality with it. So that's my app of the day segment. What do you got for us today, Paul?
00:49:44
Speaker
Okay. Mine was a little bit of a frustration. This isn't going to be as glowing a review as what you had. The last app of the day segment, I talked about an app called Clone, Q-L-O-N-E, which is an app for making AR models out of real objects. So using the camera on your phone and it doesn't need the newer phones with the AR capable cameras. It works with, for example, my older iPhone 8.
00:50:13
Speaker
And that review was a little mixed. It kind of worked, but the models that it came up with weren't very good for anything with sharp edges, which was pretty much everything I tested. It only worked well with a very lumpy object. But it was interesting that you print out a checkerboard grid
00:50:32
Speaker
and then place the object on top of that. So it would key in and find just the object and it wouldn't get the background. The reason why I found that one is I was originally looking in the app store for another app, which is what I'm going to review today called Turnio. It's T-R-N-I-O. I have no idea how they came up with that name.
00:50:50
Speaker
I didn't get the tourneo one before clone, even though tourneo was recommended. I had a lecture I went to that was being done by architects who were showing their workflow for doing some work conserving furniture with a conservator and they were using tourneo for showing
00:51:13
Speaker
3D models of the object back and forth. And they were talking it up as being an exceptionally easy way to capture a number of pictures and turn those into basically a structure for motion kind of model. So I didn't download Turnio initially. I downloaded clone because it was free and Turnio cost a whopping $3. It's iOS only. So if you want this terrible, terrible program,
00:51:40
Speaker
On your Android, I guess we're sparing you the trouble. Same sort of thing, it works with the camera. In this case, you open it up, it projects a circle down onto the ground plane around and over the object and the idea is you move the camera, you move the phone with the camera aimed at the object all around it 360 degrees until it has a bunch of images.
00:52:06
Speaker
Then it uploads those images to Turnio's servers and short time later, about five minutes or so, you end up with a model that you can view and turn around and spin around and project onto a surface and view an AR.
00:52:23
Speaker
Now, the reason why I am not very thrilled with this program despite the high praise that it got from those architects is that in the six models that I've tried, only one of them actually created. All the other ones came back saying that it couldn't create a model from the photographs.
00:52:44
Speaker
It doesn't give me any explanation as to why. The one model that it did make, when I go to view it in AR, instead of lying flat on the surface I'm trying to view it on, it has it stuck up at some weird 45-degree angle from that surface, so it makes it very jarring. It doesn't look very good. One of the demos that I saw of theirs actually has the same problem, so I think it might be something common to the software. But then what I really
00:53:10
Speaker
What really rankled me was that I decided I must be using this wrong because it's not unusual for me to pick up some software and just mash buttons and see what works and what doesn't. Then if it doesn't work how I expected it to, then I go back and read the manual.
00:53:26
Speaker
So, Sebastian was talking about, you know, awareness of having instructions, you know, cookbook style instructions online for how to do, you know, X, Y or Z tasks because he said that, you know, in half a year, they're going to be out of date. So, anyhow, I went to Ternio's website to go find out how to use this program and their blog posts, nothing's been updated in a couple of years. They have a nice video for how to use it and the interface doesn't match at all.
00:53:55
Speaker
I mean, not even remotely to the interface that I've got. It works totally differently. It's missing features that are highlighted on their website. Like on the website, you can rotate the model and crop out elements of the background. Well, there's no way to do that in the app here. I haven't been able to find out if I can log into an account on their website and do it there, but it doesn't appear to be the case.
00:54:19
Speaker
Yeah. If you really want to spend $3 and see if you have better luck than I did, then go for it. But if not, I can't recommend this one at all. I got only one marginally useful musical model out of all the tries that I've had, and even that one has serious flaws.
00:54:39
Speaker
You know, I did notice on their website here, the models are actually hosted by Sketchfab. You sure they don't intend for you to do your modifications on Sketchfab, not on their website, or they're just being misleading about that? On what they showed on the website, it looks like you can modify them directly in the app, which is certainly something I cannot do. Yeah.
00:55:01
Speaker
There's a button to upload to Sketchfab, which I didn't do, but it's not clear in that case that that's what I have to do is to go upload them to Sketchfab and then make whatever modifications there. So if that's the case, fine. Then I'll keep on kicking the tires on this one and hopefully figure out how to really use it. But the lack of instructions and the fact that the instructions that they do have don't match the actual interface make this feel kind of sketchy and not sketchy in a good way. I mean, sketchy as in they took my money.
00:55:31
Speaker
Nothing that is poorer and only have a story to tell. It's not sketch fabulous. No, it's not even close Maybe it is maybe maybe I'll figure it out and then figure out the exact workflow I have to use but But I haven't yet either way it's not very good It's just not very good when you just can't figure out how to use it You know what I mean? Like it might be the greatest thing in the world But if you can't convey that then what's the point?
00:55:56
Speaker
Yeah. And I was led to believe that it was really a fantastic program by people who gave an otherwise outstanding lecture a few weeks back and showed exactly how they were working amongst different groups of people, architects and conservators and archaeologists and using it very effectively. And so for me to have such a different experience with the same program that was
00:56:23
Speaker
an important part of the workflow is a little weird to me.
00:56:27
Speaker
All right. Well, I guess that's it. Let us know if you use these things. Uh, if you've used, uh, any external displays or if you have used tourney, oh, how are we pronounce that or anything else that you like that's, um, that's out there. So, and if you have any suggestions for our app of the day segment, go ahead and email me, Chris at archeology podcast, network.com. You can leave a comment on this show on the website at arc pod net.com forward slash archeotek forward slash one zero one.
00:56:55
Speaker
I think that's all we've got for this week, Paul. Anything else? Yeah. If anybody hears this and they know how to use Ternio and they know what I did wrong, I would love to be schooled on the matter because I, yeah, not being able to use a piece of software is a supremely frustrating to me. Indeed. Indeed. All right. Well, again,
00:57:15
Speaker
Send in your instructions for Paul so we can get this thing, uh, this thing worked out. Yeah. Just send in the emails, uh, subject line. You're an idiot. And they'll just like all the other emails I ever get. Yeah. How are you going to differentiate that Paul? Seriously? I didn't think this one through either. Did I not so much, not so much. All right.
00:57:36
Speaker
All right. Well, thanks everybody for listening. And again, sending those app suggestions, interview suggestions, and, uh, and please go to the website and comment. We love hearing comments and, uh, and what you guys are getting out of these. So, all right. Thanks Paul. And, uh, next time we'll probably have some, some good interviews that I'm gonna record this week. Actually, again, in the past for everybody listening to this, um, at the society for California archeology meetings. And if you are hearing this on time, then check me out at the wild note booth at the 2019 society for American archeology meetings.
00:58:06
Speaker
in Albuquerque, New Mexico in April. Alright, we'll talk to you later. Thanks, Paul. Thanks, Chris.
00:58:17
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paul at lugall.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:58:42
Speaker
This show is produced and recorded by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:59:03
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to this episode and for supporting the Archaeology Podcast Network. If you want these shows to keep going, consider becoming a member for just $7.99 US dollars a month. That's cheaper than a venti quad eggnog latte. Go to archpodnet.com slash members for more info.