Phototripping

Alun Life 3 Comments , ,

I’ve been busy recently which a couple of things that will be blogged here sooner or later.

In the mean­time I took an after­noon off a couple of Sundays ago to take some pho­tos with a new lens. It’s for some­thing else I’d like to blog about on pho­to­graphy. There’s been some inter­est­ing stuff writ­ten, but I’m not com­fort­able with the idea that pho­to­graphy can present an object­ive record of a view. It’s not simply that pho­tos can be manip­u­lated, it’s not pos­sible to present a default view.

I’ve also tweaked my Flickr set­tings again. I’d love to be able to release them as BY-SA. At the moment they’re BY-NC-SA, because there’s issues with com­mer­cial rights and prop­erty rights. It’s partly related to the Eng­lish Her­it­age rights grab/assertion on pho­tos of Stone­henge. It’d be easy to por­tray them as a greedy quango hold­ing back research, but there are big­ger issues at stake. Which will need another blog post.

In the mean­time my most recent pho­tos are on Flickr.

Nine Ladies stone circle near sunset

Nine Ladies stone circle near sunset

Do we need an Industrial Archaeology?

Alun Life, The Past 1 Comment , , , , ,

Cromford Canal

Crom­ford Canal. Click for lar­ger image.

It’s easy to take a World Her­it­age Site for gran­ted when it’s on your door­step. I had thought of shoot­ing a short port­fo­lio of Crom­ford for a com­pet­i­tion. They required ten pho­tos. After look­ing into the pro­ject I’ve decided that the com­pet­i­tion isn’t going to hap­pen for me, but a short photo essay on Crom­ford, or pos­sibly the Derwent Val­ley Mills, remains an inter­est­ing idea.

Indus­trial Archae­ology can get short shrift from other archae­olo­gists. Often there’s writ­ten records, plans and for some places oral accounts of work at a site. Is Archae­ology neces­sary? Mark Hen­shaw, the Archae­ology Dude, makes a good argu­ment that Archae­ology can draw mul­tiple lines of evid­ence to inform his­tor­ies of the past. I wouldn’t dis­count that, and I think his point, Archae­ology isn’t just about dig­ging, is very import­ant from an Amer­ican per­spect­ive because there Archae­ology is seen as a branch of Anthro­po­logy. In the UK you’re more likely to see Archae­ology paired with His­tory or Clas­sics. So do we really need Indus­trial Archae­olo­gists when there so many Early Mod­ern Historians.

I think another factor Archae­ology brings is spa­tial think­ing. Look­ing at the early days of the pro­fes­sion­al­isa­tion of Archae­ology in Bri­tain, one of the fea­tures is an attempt to dis­tin­guish Archae­ology from His­tory by tak­ing on ideas of Geo­graphy. People like OGS Craw­ford were keen to emphas­ise that Archae­ology stud­ied human activ­it­ies in space as well as time. Again, in the UK, when Pro­ces­su­al­ism was tak­ing off in the USA, the Brit­ish aca­dem­ics took inspir­a­tion from it, but also from the ‘New’ Geo­graphy.

The Manager's House, Cromford.

The Manager’s House, Cromford.

Apply­ing this prac­tic­ally, it’s easy to say what the pos­i­tion­ing of the Fact­ory Manager’s house, oppos­ite the main gate of Arkwright’s Mill at Crom­ford, means by its loc­a­tion. There are other more subtle ques­tions though. What did draw­ing a second water chan­nel through the Derwent Val­ley mean for land use and access­ib­il­ity? Why was Willers­ley Castle, a grand house that Ark­wright built for him­self, placed where it was? How did it relate to the church he built? If you want to know why a mill owner would want to build a church for his work­ers then, as Mark Hen­shaw says, you have to look at his­tor­ical records too.

You can write a his­tory purely from his­tor­ical records and archives, but if you want to exam­ine the human exper­i­ence, espe­cially of humans that weren’t writ­ing much, then an Indus­trial Archae­ology can yield a richer, more four-dimensional exper­i­ence, than Anthro­po­logy or His­tory alone.

“You’re being quiet”

Alun Life 1 Comment

No, no, no! I’m being extremely noisy, just in a place where you can’t hear — yet. I’ve been asked to par­ti­cip­ate in a blog and we’re doing the ini­tial set-up for it now. There’s a few people involved, so it’s not sched­uled to be live till the end of August. I’d rather not go into detail until the pro­ject is signed-off. How­ever, some of the innov­a­tions there will feed back to here in the autumn, unless some­thing else derails me.

It doesn’t help that I have a new toy. It’s an R72 fil­ter. It blocks the vis­ible spec­trum from enter­ing the cam­era and that makes the view­finder totally black. How­ever, the CCD in the cam­era is also sens­it­ive to infra-red radi­ation. The photo below is my first attempt at get­ting an image out of it.

Water Garden IR

Leicester Botanic Garden in infra-red.

Photo Credits

Alun Digital Academia, Life No Comments ,

Croxden Abbey

The west door of Croxden Abbey

I unex­pec­tedly went to Croxden Abbey recently. Until just over a week ago I didn’t even know it exis­ted, but it’s a nice place to go — if it’s sunny — for pho­tos. I’ll blog a bit more about it in the future. Right now I thought to give credit to people on the web who helped me with my pho­to­graphy skills. They used to be awful but now, call me arrog­ant if you like, some­times I think my pho­tos are quite lit­er­ally adequate. I think I messed up the per­spect­ive a bit here, but stand­ing in the right place would have meant tramp­ling someone’s flowers, so this is good enough for me.

The biggest help was Aydin Örstan who gave me a very simple piece of advice: More

Now qualified to talk to lagomorphs about the sky

Alun Life, The Past 7 Comments ,

photo

Cre­at­ing Col­lect­ive Iden­tit­ies through Astro­nomy, a thesis about time and space. Passed by Prof. Giulio Magli (Dipar­ti­mento di Matem­at­ica, Politec­nico di Mil­ano) and Prof. Gra­ham Ship­ley (School of Archae­ology and Ancient His­tory, Uni­ver­sity of Leicester). Com­ing soon to an open access research archive near you. If you live near Leicester.

Update: Lago­morph, the fam­ily of anim­als that includes pikas, hares and pesky wabbits.

Bateman’s Scars

Alun Featured, The Past No Comments , , , , ,

Arbor Low. Photo © Google.

Arbor Low on Google Earth

Arbor Low is a Neo­lithic stone circle and henge in the Peak Dis­trict. The henge is the bank and ditch arrange­ment with the bank on the out­side and is prob­ably the old­est part of the monu­ment. The cur­rent estim­ate is that it was built around 2500 BC. That’s a date that’s open to a lot of revi­sion as the last pub­lished excav­a­tion was 1901–2 I think. The stone circle could be as late as 2000 BC.

There’s some odd things at Arbor Low. For example the two entrances mean that the path through the henge runs in the same dir­ec­tion as the Roman Road built over two mil­len­nia later. That sug­gests there’s some pretty deep ideas about move­ment embed­ded with the land­scape. Excav­a­tions at Stone­henge and Dur­ring­ton Walls have revealed pos­sible tim­ber posts and mul­tiple phases for build­ing, often much earlier and much more com­plex than pre­vi­ously thought. So why hasn’t any­one taken a mat­tock to the site for a cen­tury? One reason is money, but another can be seen on the east side of the monument.

Some time in the Bronze Age, a chief­tain looked at the henge and decided: ‘I’m hav­ing that.’ He gathered a lot of earth, quite a bit from the henge bank, and built a round bar­row to be bur­ied in. If a tomb is a machine for remem­ber­ing, then any­one who used the site after that would be reminded that here lay someone who as power­ful enough to take one of the biggest, most ancient, sites in the region and make it his. These days we’d call it van­dal­ism and egot­ism but because it happened over three thou­sand years ago it’s part of the rich pal­impsest of the land­scape. Yet his actions made him a tar­get for the future.

The Bronze Age barrow at Arbor Low

The Bronze Age bar­row at Arbor Low.

Around the eight­eenth and nine­teenth cen­tury anti­quar­i­an­ism came into vogue. People were becom­ing aware that there was a long pre-biblical past and one way of find­ing out about it was to crack open some of the many ancient monu­ments that littered the land­scape. The gentry would go out for a pic­nic at the week­end and watch, while the hired work would set about a bar­row with pick-axes, spades and shovels to see if any­thing was in it. Which usu­ally meant gold. There might be a few stone tools or bones, but at this time the pre­his­toric inhab­it­ants were thought of as crude sav­ages. Rather like the people out in the Empire that they were civil­ising. But some people took more of an interest, and one of these was Thomas Bateman.

Thomas Bate­man was born in 1821, and was the son of an ama­teur archae­olo­gist. His interest grew and he joined the Brit­ish Archae­olo­gical Asso­ci­ation in 1843, where he saw how to dig a bar­row. The next year he dug almost forty bar­rows. In total he opened up over a hun­dred dur­ing his life. He used the tech­niques of his time. That’s why, since Bateman’s excav­a­tion, Arbor Low looks like someone thought what the place really needed was a giant earth­work hot-cross bun.

Bate­man wasn’t a bad archae­olo­gist for his time. On the con­trary, he pub­lished his find­ings. Nev­er­the­less he used the tech­niques of his time, and dig­ging deep trenches across the bar­row were an effect­ive way to get at the arte­facts and pot­tery. Strati­graphy, the idea that the lay­ers of soil overly­ing a site could reveal some of the con­text of finds, wasn’t really recog­nised until the work of Pitt-Rivers and Flinders-Petrie towards the end of the nine­teenth cen­tury. Bateman’s tragedy is that he had the tech­no­logy, but he worked before there was a bet­ter under­stand­ing of how to use it.

Mod­ern archae­olo­gists are aware that not only do ideas change, but so too does the tech­no­logy. Bateman’s excav­a­tions could be called van­dal­ism, but he didn’t have the bene­fit of hind­sight. Archae­ology often invest­ig­ates a site by des­troy­ing it, and that can only be done once. Today we have a per­man­ent reminder in the Bronze Age bar­row at Arbor Low, which still bears Bateman’s scars.

Foreground: The remains of Bateman's trenches across the barrow. Background: The interior of Arbor Low.

Fore­ground: The remains of Bateman’s trenches across the barrow.Background: The interior of Arbor Low.

Flickr as a database?

Alun Digital Academia No Comments , , , , , ,

Nine Ladies stone circle, viewed from the King Stone

Nine Ladies stone circle, viewed from the King Stone

I went out on a photo trip yes­ter­day. I’ve been test­ing the iPhone app Geo­Lo­gTag recently. For some reason I simply can­not get my iPhone talk­ing to my Mac­Book, which makes a lot of the WiFi syncing apps a waste of time. Geo­Lo­gTag has an option to geotag pho­tos on Flickr. If you visit this photo’s page on Flickr and look at the data on the right side, you’ll see it was taken near Stan­ton in Peak and there’s a map so you can see other nearby pho­tos.

Once you’ve remembered to leave the phone on, which means can­cel­ling the auto-lock, which geo-logging, then tag­ging is pretty much pain­less. The phone keeps track of where it is at any given time. It con­nects to Flickr and any ungeot­agged pho­tos that were taken while the phone was log­ging get tagged. This works because the pho­tos have a record of the time they were taken. If you remem­ber to take your phone around with you when to take a shot, then you can have a reas­on­ably accur­ate log of where you are. At $5 it’s a lot more sane than buy­ing one of those ded­ic­ated photo-loggers you can buy. On the other hand you do have to have the phone to go with it.

Being able to log pho­tos quite accur­ately could well be very use­ful next time I go on a sur­vey. At the very least it could be a usable way of map­ping the loc­a­tion of many tombs, so long as the tombs are 10m or more apart. Upload­ing to Flickr to log them is a nuis­ance, I should sort out my home net­work, but it’s pos­sibly also an oppor­tun­ity thanks to the Flickr API. The API makes it very easy to get machine-readable data out of Flickr. Here’s an example.

Fire remains (distant) aligned with two megaliths at Nine Ladies.

Fire remains (dis­tant) aligned with two mega­liths at Nine Ladies.

This is a photo of an align­ment I saw at Nine Ladies. If you fol­low the line from fore­ground over the back stone and on, you might be able to see two black patches in the grass. These are the ash remains of fires which had been lit at the site. Burn­ing, even small fires, is not help­ful. The risk of rampant fire is slim because the grass is short and, because it’s in the UK, it’s nearly always damp. How­ever, at the very least it’ll cause a spike in any future mag­neto­metry sur­veys of the area. Also if there is some­thing bur­ied beneath the ground which hasn’t been found yet, heat­ing is a great way to des­troy it. So I now have some data which I might want to log in a database.

I can put some inform­a­tion about a site into Flickr tags. In this case it’s a Bronze Age stone circle on Stan­ton Moor with some dam­age. So long as I have a uni­form set of tags I use to describe that like “loc­a­tion: Stan­ton Moor” then I can use the API as a search engine. For example I could:

Search for any photos where tag == project: My Project

which would list all pho­tos in My Pro­ject.
It would be easier to be able to lift the data from Flickr and put it into a SQL data­base but that shouldn’t be dif­fi­cult with stand­ard tags. Here’s an example of what inform­a­tion Flickr has about the photo above.

<rsp stat="ok">
  <photo id="3890427837" secret="c89e5a1e94" server="3530" farm="4" dateuploaded="1252190752"
   isfavorite="0" license="5" rotation="0" originalsecret="3a9cc5e6bf" originalformat="jpg"
   media="photo">
    <owner nsid="79983635@N00" username="Alun Salt" realname="Alun Salt" location="Derby and 
     Leicester, UK"/>
    <title>Alignment at 9 Ladies.jpg</title>
    <description>
      Or, how not to photograph burning. If you follow the line from the foreground over the 
      back stone and beyond, you might be able to see two black patches in the grass.
      <a href="http://www.bighugelabs.com/onblack.php?id=3890427837&amp;size=large" rel="nofollow">
      A larger view might help.</a>

      Burning, even small fires, is not helpful. The risk of rampant fire is slim because the 
      grass is short and, because it's in the UK, it's nearly always damp. However, at the very 
      least it'll cause a spike in any future magnetometry surveys of the area. Also if there 
      is something buried beneath the ground which hasn't been found yet, heating is a great way
      to destroy it.

      I took the photo from this angle as there were some people behind me, which meant a HDR 
      shot from the opposite direction wasn't viable at the time. When I did set up some shots 
      from the other side I'd forgotten about getting the shot of the fires.
    </description>
    <visibility ispublic="1" isfriend="0" isfamily="0"/>
    <dates posted="1252190752" taken="2009-09-05 18:58:27" takengranularity="0" 
     lastupdate="1252239594"/>
    <editability cancomment="0" canaddmeta="0"/>
    <usage candownload="1" canblog="0" canprint="0"/>
    <comments>0</comments>
    <notes>
      <note id="72157622266401280" author="79983635@N00" authorname="Alun Salt" x="233"
       y="108" w="29" h="16">A patch from a small fire.</note>
      <note id="72157622141844777" author="79983635@N00" authorname="Alun Salt" x="238" 
       y="95" w="31" h="16">A patch from a larger fire.</note>
    </notes>
    <tags>
      <tag id="204526-3890427837-771" author="79983635@N00" raw="archaeology"
       machine_tag="0">archaeology</tag>
      <tag id="204526-3890427837-1520781" author="79983635@N00" raw="stanton moor"
       machine_tag="0">stantonmoor</tag>
      <tag id="204526-3890427837-98094" author="79983635@N00" raw="bronze age"
       machine_tag="0">bronzeage</tag>
      <tag id="204526-3890427837-110" author="79983635@N00" raw="UK" machine_tag="0">uk</tag>
      <tag id="204526-3890427837-5933" author="79983635@N00" raw="Derbyshire"
       machine_tag="0">derbyshire</tag>
      <tag id="204526-3890427837-778" author="79983635@N00" raw="megalithic"
       machine_tag="0">megalithic</tag>
      <tag id="204526-3890427837-38882" author="79983635@N00" raw="prehistoric"
       machine_tag="0">prehistoric</tag>
      <tag id="204526-3890427837-56210" author="79983635@N00" raw="HDR"
       machine_tag="0">hdr</tag>
      <tag id="204526-3890427837-45290559" author="79983635@N00" raw="project: test project"
       machine_tag="0">projecttestproject</tag>
      <tag id="204526-3890427837-45290561" author="79983635@N00" raw="location: Stanton Moor"
       machine_tag="0">locationstantonmoor</tag>
      <tag id="204526-3890427837-45290563" author="79983635@N00" raw="period: Bronze Age"
       machine_tag="0">periodbronzeage</tag>
      <tag id="204526-3890427837-45290565" author="79983635@N00" raw="type: stone circle"
       machine_tag="0">typestonecircle</tag>
      <tag id="204526-3890427837-45290567" author="79983635@N00" raw="damage: yes"
       machine_tag="0">damageyes</tag>
    </tags>
    <urls>
      <url type="photopage">http://www.flickr.com/photos/alun/3890427837/</url>
    </urls>
  </photo>
</rsp>

So with some fairly simple code I could get Flickr and the data­base to talk to each other.

GET all photos WHERE project == My Project
FOR EACH photo_id in the list of results
 { GET INFO for photo_id
   INSERT into database id = photo_id;
   READ latitude tag;
   INSERT into database latitude = latitude_tag;
   READ longitude tag;
   INSERT into database longitude = longitude;
   READ period tag;
   INSERT into database period = period_tag;
   READ location tag;
   INSERT into database location = location_tag;
   AND SO ON with the rest of the relevant tags;
  }

You could use the photo date tags to log when the site was vis­ited, the author tag to log who vis­ited it and so on. There are some poten­tial prob­lems. You can add tags to my pho­tos because I let any­one tag them. That could come back to bite me if someone decides it would be fun to add a period: Neo­lithic tag onto the photo. How­ever if you look at the tags in the data file it also notes who is author of those tags, so you can alter the search to reads TAGS where author == PERMITTED AUTHOR. The API also allow you to search groups, so a group of people could con­trib­ute to a pool of data if there were agreed tag­ging standards.

It’s also just occurred to me that if you made pro­ject tags in the format Pro­ject Iden­ti­fier : Tag : Con­tent like StonehengeSurvey:Location:In the pub, then the same pho­tos could be incor­por­ated into mul­tiple pro­jects, so there’s no need to have a uni­ver­sal defin­i­tion of terms like Early or Late.

Another thing I’d be wary of it mak­ing my data pub­lic as I cre­ate it. Some things I’m work­ing on are likely to be very simple. If I’m out in the field and you can read my data from your home you could be in a pos­i­tion to scoop me, even if you credit me as the source of data. One way round that is to upload pho­tos as private. Geo­Lo­gTag is happy work­ing with private pho­tos (I’ve tested it). A group work­ing together would have to make use of the con­tacts fea­ture in Flickr, pos­sibly accept­ing that for the pro­ject they’re all fam­ily so they share access to each other’s uploads.

Cer­tainly my future pro­jects are going to have a very large photo com­pon­ent to them. Geot­ag­ging is the hook which everything else can use­fully fit on to. What’ll be inter­est­ing to see is what effect this will have on GIS, if any­one can eas­ily pro­duce masses of geo­graph­ic­ally use­ful data.

The Lunt

Alun The Past No Comments , , ,

I’m still busy work­ing on re-formatting which is prov­ing to be very slow and tedi­ous. I’ve also found out the ver­sion of Pho­to­matix I was using to develop my pho­tos was out-of-date. Here’s some pho­tos I repro­cessed to test the new ver­sion. They were taken at the Lunt, a recon­truc­ted 1st cen­tury AD Roman fort near Cov­entry. It was one of those days it was either about to start rain­ing, or else it was rain­ing or both. If you’re won­der­ing about both, I got to the car while it was rain­ing. Then it really star­ted to rain.

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