What%20can%20CS%20do%20for%20Archaeology?%20(and%20vice%20versa)

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What can CS do for Archaeology?(and vice versa)

• John Hughes
• Brown University
• Providence
• (visiting EVASION/INRIA 2003-2004)All images
  courtesy of Eileen Vote, Brown Universityand the
  ARCHAVE project

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Some General Problems
Field collection support Post-collection
analysis Post-collection dissemination of
site-experience Fragment assembly
Objects from the Petra Great Temple Excavations
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General Problems

• 3D shape representation for recording and
  documentation (images and video)
• Reconstruction of 3D objects for artifact
  reconstruction (pottery)
• Analysis of the 3D aspects of the record
  (databases and visualization)

4

ARCHAVE Features
Tools
Visualization
Context
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Potential applications CS aArchaeology

• Biased towards graphics
• GIS applications may suggest new ideas

6
Shape/appearance matching

• Find me all the other artifacts that look a bit
  like this one
• or like a piece of this one
• 3D database search is rapidly getting close to
  supporting this

7
Presentation Tools

• Help me display my data in a compelling way to
  others
• Let me highlight the important features
• Give rough sketches where only rough information
  is known
• Make it easy to put on a web page, a video, or
  slides
• Expressive Rendering literature
• Adaptive layouts
• McCloud Understanding Comics
• Help me share the experience of being an
  archaeologist.

8
Interface design

• I need a way to do my scientific work in this
  CAVE, but I cant bring my laptop with me!
• Convenient tools for day-to-day research in
  context of VE
• wide open research area

9
Graphical Models

• Is it possible to estimate the distribution of
  shapes in some site to make reasonable guesses of
  missing shapes from the ones we see?
• Treat collected data as samples from unknown
  distributions with (partly) known relations.

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Potential applications Archaeology aCS

• Testbed for expressive rendering in virtual
  environments
• What are the tensions between expressive
  rendering and a sense of reality?
• What happens when you put marks brushstrokes,
  pen-lines, etc. in 3D?

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The Agora is a space first, and not just a
building data representations

• CS builds general models
• but when we encounter real data, our models are
  inadequate
• We dont handle
• qualitative data
• missing data
• higher-level characteristics (what is the
  space? instead of what are the shapes?)

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fin
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Thanks

• Eileen Vote, Brown Univ., provided slides about
  Archave/Petra.