event: Aspects of Space and Time in Humanities e-Science
This lecture is part of the e-Science in the Arts and Humanities theme at the e-Science Institute in Edinburgh. This lecture will be simultaneously webcast and available on demand after the event.
Dr Stuart Jeffrey, AHDS Archaeology
Finding your way to the map, the challenges of delivering geospatial data for archaeologists.
Archaeology as a discipline generates a significant volume of geospatial data for the purposes of curation, cultural heritage management and academic research. In addition to the contested nature of much of this material and the significant legal and ethical problems it can raise, simply finding efficient methods of delivering this data can be challenging. The Archaeology Data Service/AHDS Archaeology has taken a lead in drawing together heterogeneous geospatial datasets and presenting them in appropriate contexts for research reuse. This talk will outline these approaches as well as looking to the future and highlighting the complex interaction between interpretational debates and data presentation.
James Reid/Chris Higgins, EDINA
Experiences at EDINA: the role of Standards and Metadata in SDIs
Over a number of years EDINA has gained experience in the management and dissemination of national spatial datasets, the development and operation of online metadata editor and publishing tools; engagement in academic and national spatial metadata initiatives to support data discovery, management and sharing; and, more recently, involvement in projects and activities relating to the sharing and curation of spatial data.
This talk will look at the use of relevant standards and metadata in these services and projects and their role in enabling the development of spatial data infrastructures.
Dr. Femke Reitsma, University of Edinburgh
Aliens and Spatio-temporal Things: a GIScience perspective
The presentation summarises how the objects of geographic investigation have been represented in GIScience. The limitations of these representations for spatio-temporal things as well as other kinds of non-traditional information will be discussed.
Webcast
This meeting is due to be webcast live:
http://go.yaplet.com/?url=http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/webcast/...
For further information please see the theme wiki at: http://wiki.esi.ac.uk/E-Science_in_the_Arts_and_Humanities and http://www.ahessc.ac.uk/theme
Open for comments and question
This thread is now open for public comments! We will relay your questions to the speakers.
Actual geography
Stuart (Jeffrey) just mentioned medieval maps and Jerusalem being in the cente of these maps, because it was the place that mattered most to the people then. Stuart then said that this had no relation 'to actual geography' - I guess by that he meant geography as we see it today, because it is always about interpretation and our system is also a distortion of what 'actual' space is like...
Ah, from what Stuart just
Ah, from what Stuart just said I think this is actually what he was getting at!
Interpretation
Stuart just stressed that all geographical work is about interpretation and he also said that new ways of map making (3D) might actually lead to a new way of seeing space - so, Markus, I guess both of you are looking at this from the same construction/deconstruction viewpoint!
Religious schisms
James - you talked about a religious war between bottom-down and web2.0, that is traditional institutions (ISO, just as an example) vs. the google / communtiy / mashup. This war may be ongoing, but I do wonder whether IPR and other, older approaches, can survive against the way technology changes our society?
visualization and the geoweb
To what degree does the proliferation of both free-commercial and open source map/visualization tools and formats (and their integration with web-wide search) affect how we should be thinking about:
* the invention of new map/visualization interfaces for our repositories and projects (should we bother?)
* the surfacing of feeds and formats recognized by these 3rd party services as pointers to or serializations of our data (shouldn't we?)
Presentations
Just a general comment: Powerpoint and PDF versions of the presentation are online at http://www.nesc.ac.uk/action/esi/contribution.cfm?Title=788
Time in archaeology
An issue that just came up during the discussion is time - would the alien from Femke's presentation really think in terms of time and space that we know? The concept of time is of course crucial for our idea of change (as in a 3D map, for instance, that shows how an area changed over the years) and should be questioned, but I wonder (and I should stress that I am not an archaeologist, whether archaeology, GIS or not, is actually thinkable without the western idea of time? Maybe too off-topic?
Time in archaeology
There are (or there is at least one) physicists who are trying to construct time as a product of relationships between events (and the need for causality) rather than as a fundamental property of space(-time)
Discussion continues
The discussion about issues of space and time continues via our group forum at:
http://www.arts-humanities.net/mapping_past/212
Feel free to join us!