Dirt Blog - Latest Comments

Re: “We All Walked Together”: A Digital Project

ajgulyas — Wed, 16 May 2012 14:50:02 -0000

Documents would be ideal, but also short videos introducing the archaeological process on a site that has such relevance to the course would be great.

Re: “We All Walked Together”: A Digital Project

Terry Brock — Wed, 16 May 2012 12:19:58 -0000

Excellent! Hopefully it will be useful! The hope is to focus on documents, objects, and architecture, and try to tell a story about the movement from slavery to freedom. We'll see how it goes! What types of things would be useful for you?

Re: “We All Walked Together”: A Digital Project

ajgulyas — Wed, 16 May 2012 12:09:47 -0000

Very exciting. I'm teaching the early US survey in the fall semester and look forward to possibly using this as a resource for students.

Re: The Arqball Spin: 3D for Everybody (and Every Archaeologist?)

Jason — Wed, 16 May 2012 10:07:27 -0000

Hi John,

You are correct that our current system represents the 3D object as a series of images. We see that as a major advantage of our approach over more traditional 3D modeling tools that don't provide a reliable user experience. Additionally, the ease of use and simplicity of our capture/edit/share workflow is novel. Why didn't QT3D ever take off? They were always very hard to create and view!

We will be rolling out features in the coming months that let you export spins in a variety of formats (animated GIF, SWF, iBook Author widget, etc.) along with 3D surface meshes (OBJ, 3DS). We expect those features will help disrupt the 360 photography, 3d scanning, QTVR space even more!

Does your application require the surface geometry?

Thanks for your interest and feedback!

Best,
Jason
Arqball

Re: The Arqball Spin: 3D for Everybody (and Every Archaeologist?)

Terry Brock — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:00:37 -0000

The ease at which they are created is the advantage, as is the low cost of the tech. The primary application I see for this are small museums on budgets that would like to display artifacts on the web in a creative and unique way. The panorama is simply another way to share something with the public that they may not ordinarily see, in a way they may not ordinarily see it. As for existing 3D file formats, that's a question you'd probably have to take up with the developers (I'll give them a ping). I imagine they chose this format because it made the technology easy to produce and easy to capture with only the iPhone. But I don't know enough about the inner-workings of 3D technology or the app to know for sure. My focus here was largely on the ease of use, affordability, and applicability for digital public engagement. Thanks for reading and your comment!

Re: The Arqball Spin: 3D for Everybody (and Every Archaeologist?)

John Muccigrosso — Tue, 15 May 2012 22:50:28 -0000

So it's like 15-yr-old Apple QT3D technology?

Snark aside, from your code, it's clear that these are a series of jpegs that are being rapidly flipped between via some javascript. What about existing 3D file formats?

Ditto for panoramas. These have been around for years. Sure, it's easier now to create them, but what's the advantage with this approach? Again, where are the standard filetypes we can share?

Re: The Arqball Spin: 3D for Everybody (and Every Archaeologist?)

Bernard K. Means — Tue, 15 May 2012 10:48:08 -0000

Good to know. Certainly can give you color which is difficult to do with Next Engine!

Re: The Arqball Spin: 3D for Everybody (and Every Archaeologist?)

Terry Brock — Tue, 15 May 2012 09:09:16 -0000

Bernard - you can't. You miss the base and top. Obviously, you can orient the camera to get a more top down 3D image, but there will always be components of the object that you won't get. It's certainly not perfect, but for what it does it does pretty well, and it does it quickly and cheaply. So, if you had a whole bunch of stuff you wanted done, you could easily set up an assembly line and move through them very quickly. Not to mention, it is easy to embed and share on the web, which makes it an affordable, quick, and easy tool for small museums to use to do something fancy for limited cost.

And yes...3D has apparently hit the big time, whether for archaeology or otherwise.

Thanks for reading!!

Re: The Arqball Spin: 3D for Everybody (and Every Archaeologist?)

Bernard K. Means — Tue, 15 May 2012 08:16:22 -0000

Interesting. Can you get a full 360 scan of the object? Or do you miss the base and the top? Certainly seems a plethora of 3D out there.

Re: The Arqball Spin: 3D for Everybody (and Every Archaeologist?)

Terry Brock — Mon, 14 May 2012 15:59:45 -0000

glad you like! It was fun to play with.

Re: The Arqball Spin: 3D for Everybody (and Every Archaeologist?)

Molly Swords — Mon, 14 May 2012 14:57:39 -0000

Very cool!

Re: Using Buffer for your Org’s Auto Posts

Curtin Archaeology — Mon, 07 May 2012 10:51:02 -0000

I love Buffer. I mostly use the browser plugin but the android app is nice too-very simple. I haven't tried the ios app but I imagine it's great.

Re: Using Buffer for your Org’s Auto Posts

Terry Brock — Wed, 02 May 2012 11:51:58 -0000

yep, same concept. Unfortunately, ifttt is not linked with Instapaper, for some reason ( wish it was), but otherwise you could do the same thing. I think it's important to spread these things out as much as possible. My favorite part about Buffer is that you can post to it through email: so, I have my buffer email saved in my address folder on my phone, and when I read something I like on Instapaper or Zite or whatever on my phone, I can email it to buffer, it gets added to my buffer stream, and then posted on the networks. It's one of those great little tools that does one thing, and does that thing really, really, well.

Re: Using Buffer for your Org’s Auto Posts

Quentin Lewis — Wed, 02 May 2012 11:45:48 -0000

Tumblr can do some of that as well--I use it as an interface between instaper, and facebook/twitter. When I star something on Instaper, it automatically goes to my draft folder on tumblr. Tumblr is then set to release two posts a day, regardless of the number of posts in the draft folder, or the number of posts added by me. That way, if I burn through a bunch of stuff on instaper and I want others to see it, they don't get content overload.

Re: Welcome to my new site!

Terry Brock — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:49:07 -0000

thanks, Burt! I hope things are going well with you!

Re: Welcome to my new site!

Burton Bargerstock — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 11:50:44 -0000

Looks great, Terry!

Re: Visualizing Emancipation: Examining its Process through Digital Tools

Terry Brock — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 16:13:43 -0000

yep...you just described what I'm trying to do in my dissertation: try to determine what types of effects this process had on how African Americans used space during and after slavery. When you start taking into consideration things like mobility, and the way space use changes in community functions (think Church and schools, for example), you start to see the effect these legislative actions did have. The Civil War was the tipping point, but it took a lot of agency on the part of enslaved blacks to make it tip. Post-slavery, it's unfair to say that the score reset, since white folks still had the upperhand economically, politically, etc., but the rules of the game definitely changed.

Re: Visualizing Emancipation: Examining its Process through Digital Tools

Quentin Lewis — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 15:00:15 -0000

Great stuff, Terry (as usual!) The process thing is really important to emphasize--both because it reminds us that Emancipation was something that Black folks were doing long before White politicians encoded it into laws, and because it produced an uneven set of social relations in its wake. It's something a bunch of us are trying to think our way through in New England--it's not always clear exactly what changed following de jure emancipation, and what effect legislative actions had on back-country plantations, households, and communities.

Re: Visualizing Emancipation: Examining its Process through Digital Tools

Terry Brock — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 13:55:53 -0000

Thanks, Jean! I will continue to write about it here...and I have a new project coming up that will take put it in a new space. Stay tuned!

Re: Visualizing Emancipation: Examining its Process through Digital Tools

Jean Libby, Editor — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 11:15:28 -0000

This is very interesting and I look forward to following your research. Jean Libby, B.A. African American Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1986.

Re: Ifttt, Evernote, and creating a wine label Notebook

Catherine Liao — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 14:58:43 -0000

Thanks for posting this Terry! I love your approach of leveraging Ifttt + Evernote to create your digital label album. I was always taking photos of wines I'm having and ended up creating a wine app called Corkbin instead.

Re: SHA Presentation: Space, Place, and Emancipation

Terry Brock — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:37:40 -0000

By the way, if you want to see a really wonderful video, you must check out this one. I don't want to say I'm a cinematic genius, but.... http://vimeo.com/25564604

Re: SHA Presentation: Space, Place, and Emancipation

Terry Brock — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:36:22 -0000

Dave, I will happily teach you how to do this! It's actually pretty simple. As for sound quality: it was just me talking into my laptop built in mic. We need to sit down soon and chat about landscapes. I think we have a contribution to make, my friend!

Re: SHA Presentation: Space, Place, and Emancipation

Dave Brown — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 19:18:04 -0000

Nicely done. I like the format and even the sound quality was pretty good. Entertaining and educational. Looking forward to more of these - and you teaching me how to do this sort of thing in the future....
dave

Re: TwapperKeeper is gone…Now What?

Terry Brock — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:31:57 -0000

glad you like it! I don't know how I survived without Evernote and ifttt...