Blog
To Visualise or not to Visualise?
Or perhaps more accurately how to visualise is a question that has been much debated by the City Witness team recently. Visualisation, the reconstruction of how things might have looked, to aid the interpretation of historical and archaeological interpretations is nothing new. What is new is the range of techniques available to produce reconstructions. Examples of this can be found on a number of websites taking many forms from the schematic to photorealistic(e.g. http://www.antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/lilley/; http://www.portusproject.org/blog/2012/12/reconstructing-portus/; http://www.heritagetechnology.co.uk/gallery; http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/professional/research/archaeology/graphics/). However we approach representing the past it has to be done with care and consideration. Academically the questions relating to how the past has been, and can be, visualised has been a source of debate.This has led to the drafting of documents to provide guidelines for the creation of visualisations such as the London Charter (http://www.londoncharter.org/) or the guidelines by the Archaeological Data Service (http://guides.archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/g2gp/Vr_Toc). A recent publication in Internet Archaeology (Giles et al 2012 http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue32/1/3.2.html) highlights many of the concerns over the reconstruction and visualisation of evidence.
Discovering Medieval Cities
If you're interested in our work on medieval Swansea, you might want to take a look at our the projects we've undertaken in Chester (Discover Medieval Chester and Mapping Medieval Chester). They'll give you an idea of some of the digital tools we bring to our research, as well as the events and activities which enable the wider community to engage with our work. The Medieval Chester Blog has recent stories about the GPS-enabled mobile resources we've produced for medieval Chester - something we hope to do for Swansea too - and recent coverage on Heno on S4C.
Translation Issues: Distancing the Reader
Well, despite the hopes voiced in my previous blog about the manuscript’s punctuation assisting my translation it is proving tricky to translate into flowing, readable English!
