The new Assassin’s Creed game takes place in Ancient Egypt. Beside the usual gameplay, where you have to follow a story, collect items and explore the world, you can experience the game totally free from that as a kind of observer in order to learn something about Ancient Egypt. Is this concept ready for the classroom?
There are quite a number of cartoons out there, which feature jokes on statistics and which I use in my quantitative methods for archaeologists class. I want to share my fun, but there are too many for just one blog post, therefore: Let a new series be born!
I’ll begin the series with more general statistical topics in cartoons. (more…)
It is 2018! Time to document our archaeological digs digitally, wouldn’t you say? We have it all: CAD to draw plans; GIS for maps; photogrammetry / structure from motion for 3D models and rectified photos; databases to connect all this with feature description… why use paper at all?
Well… (more…)
In this series of posts, I want to test in what capacity a AAA-game in a historical setting can actually teach me – as an aracheologist – something I don’t know about history. I have studied Near Eastern Archaeology, Prehistory and Assyriology, but never Egyptology, what would be the perfect branch of study for this game. Nevertheless I still can learn and by playing Assissins Creed Orgins and researching the scientific facts behind it, I want to find out if the game is well researched and document what I learned from it. Spoilers ahead!
For a long time, I did not post anything about the progress of the visualisation project in Cologne-Weiden. Now, we are actually almost finished and I will try to recap some of the steps we were going through. Today’s post topic are the Structure from Motion models of the busts in Cologne-Weiden.
On the 12th to the 13th of October 2018, we will host a symposium at our institute. The symposium (that means there will be wine!) is called “Communicating the Past in the Digital Age – Digital methods for teaching and learning in Archaeology” and the actual Call for Papers is out!
Sebastian and I joined the international community of nerds in archaeology at the conference for Computer Applications & Quantitative Methods in Archaeology in Tübingen, which we advertised here. (more…)
Why use such complicated stuff, which is concerned with numbers, probability, density, tests, and all that which we hated in school? Why oh why?!
Fact is, archaeologists produce huge amounts of data.
Some time ago, I made a speed video of a Structure from Motion process. It is still a valid and entertaining video.
The well known Austrian information scientiest Gerhard Chroust wrote an article “Software-Archäologie: Eine interdisziplinäre Betrachtung” (“software-archaeology: an interdisciplinary view”) in which he compares the maintenance of software with archaeology. It is a kinda cool and funny article, really.
This is a dialogue between Sophie Schmidt and Sebastian Hageneuer, where we will discuss the advantages and frustrations of free and open source software. We invite you to join the discussion in the comments below.
We completed the second (and last) session of the Structure from Motion documentation of objects from the Egyptology Department of the University of Cologne. The digital Egyptology collection now comprises of seven objects.
In a new project of the Archaeological Insitute of the University of Cologne, we document, reconstruct and gameify a famous burial chamber, that is otherwise difficult to access. The results of this project should be presented at the next AIAC in Cologne/Bonn.
So, I found this cartoon and think it’s pretty funny.
I asked myself what it means in our discipline. Everyone is talking about “data“. Or “databases“. Or “big data“. So, what the heck is this “data“? Or are these “data”, because, well, shouldn‘t it be a plural word from “datum“? (more…)