Stories Past News and Thoughts

More fun to be had in the exhibit hall

2011-09-20T10:41:00.000-07:00

I’m sure therewere some great papers at the AASLH conference, but I spentmy time in the exhibit hall. Most people wander through at some point, and Ihad the unexpected pleasureof meetings some old friends.

So rather thantalk about papers I’ll talk about neighbors! I’ve been following the work ofEduweb for years andthey’ve done some great stuff. One ofthe great things they been doing is putting some resources into finding outwhat works. Check out the research papers at their site.

Opposite me was The Museum Bookmark Collection. Their graphicsand production quality were great. So good in fact that while I chatted acrossthe room someone came up to my booth, ignored my material, and took the samplebookmarks I’d collected earlier!

Kapesni is on amission to get mobile apps everywhere, and they have a very competitive pricingmodel. I think the current app is for iPhone with the Android app coming in a September.

Around the corner wasRe:discovery (where I worked for many years). Rediscoveryis providing the back end of the upcoming NPS web catalog site which is gettingsome early testing. I’m very excited by the progress and early reactions. Plusthey have an updated version of their archaeology module which is hierarchical,content rich and full of features.

Thanks to everyonethat stopped by and chatted!

Putting the cart before the virtual horse

2011-09-06T07:19:00.000-07:00

I’ll be attending the AASLH conference in Richmond this month. Many of our clients are in Virginia and I look forward to catching up, and meeting also new faces.

The conference includes a focus on “Take(ing) advantage of the constantly emerging technologies that have the potential to enable us to increase access to history experiences”

Stories Past has been working on interactive media for over ten years now. (btw check out Google’s page on browser development ). We’re now developing using AJAX, looking at HTML 5 and using Adobe Flash for some other applications.

The danger with new and exciting technologies is that it’s sometimes possible to put the cart before the horse. The issue, I think, is less what can the new technologies offer, and more what do we want to do. We can now develop more quickly; we can incorporate databases, animations and media. But the start of a project is the public outreach/education that you want to achieve. Then we’ll find the best way of doing it. I believe the strength of Stories Past is in its empathy and understanding of history, archaeology and education.

The good news is just virtually anything is possible.

"You've Got Mail"

2011-08-29T07:20:00.000-07:00

I watched “You’ve got mail” last week. The movie came out in 1998 and the ironies were writ large when on Saturday I went to the Borders closing sale. We bought fourteen technologically redundant books for a little over a $100. The big box bookstores (like AOL itself) are now threatened into extinction by e-books and online retailers.

One of the books I purchased was Your Digital Afterlife – an examination of what happens to digital assets after death. I wonder if Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan archived their email romance, or if all those love letters were lost in the ether. Today they’d be on a dating site, or tweeting, and I suspect their electronic exchanges would be even more ephemeral. When I was in college I got and sent letters from friends. These hand-written missives were much longer, and more considered, than the emails, or Facebook posts I get now. They’re in a box in a cupboard - not that paper is the perfect archival material.

As a developer I’m both intrigued and worried by the pace of change. Now its mobile applications; clearly the predominant tool for the under 30’s. Are we reducing complexity, or are the small screens just another challenge. Social is the new Flash, and everyone is famous for 140 characters. We can say it, show it and play it, but we’re still working out exactly how we understand it all.

As we were leaving the bookstore Saturday we passed a sign. LP’s $1. I bought 7, all from bands in the 70’s and 80’s. Nice to hold an album, and be able to appreciate the cover art. Does anyone listen to albums anymore, or just downloadable “singles.” Now where can I buy a record player…

SHA 2012 part II

2011-07-22T06:36:00.000-07:00

At the SHA meeting in Baltimore I’ll be hosting a round table session:

Web Based Public Archaeology
This roundtable discussion examines the different ways archaeologists are using websites and social media to promote archaeology. Please come with some great examples to share and discuss.

Some examples I've recently seen or been involved with:

Transitions in Virginia Slavery: part of the project funded by NEH and carried out by Dr. Barbara Heath of the University of Tennessee. We'll be adding some educational content to the web site soon.

Mount Vernon's Midden blog and Facebook presence have been well followed and full of good stuff with the new web site in progress.

Also I've also recently come across Close Encounters of the Colchester Kind...

Not just archeology, but the Park Service web catalog site is progressing. You can read about it at here.

Obviously there are many others. Please add some examples and comments below!

How effective are they? Is there a conflict between the blogger's voice and the institutional voice? Is the immediacy of blogging at odds with serious research? Is there a public audience for primary archaeological data?

Discuss!!!

SHA 2012

2011-07-11T08:06:00.000-07:00

New NPS collections web site

The lack of blogging has been due to too much going on rather than too little! But I hope I can share projects and other news over the next few months.

July always seems early to be thinking about a January conference, but the Society for Historical Archaeology conference in Baltimore had its deadline for submissions yesterday… . My topic will be “Online archaeology databases and the public” and I mean to talk about the new NPS website, as well as other online catalogs. The Mount Vernon site - 400 extremely well described objects, in a rich context – makes a great contrast. Which is more useful to the public?

There was a great technical leaflet in the AASLH publication” Designing Education Programs that Connect Students to Collections”. It focuses on planning educational content around objects, but I think much of it applies to online collections. The national educational curriculum is doing little to help the social sciences. And unless you want to appeal to a purely local audience the different state standards make creating lessons plans difficult. It is mentioned here - and I discovered this many years ago with the Jamestown modules - it useful to look at the English learning standards which are more focused on reading for understanding than the History ones which, at least in Virginia tend to be more fact based.

I’d be interested in anyone has site or articles looking at using online collections.

Mount Vernon's Midden

2011-05-26T08:00:00.000-07:00

Launching a new web site is always fun. www.mountvernonmidden.org is up and running, with much more content to come. Right now we just have a “construction” page, but we threw in a few teaser images.

The South Grove Midden (or trash pile) was excavated by archaeologists at Mount Vernon, George Washington’s Virginia plantation along the Potomac River. The catalog includes more than 50,000 artifacts including ceramic and glass vessels, animal bones and seeds. We’ll be matching the finds with a database built from documentary information of Washington’s invoices and purchases.

As the site develops we’ll add a object of the week so you can start to see the some of the collections. We’ll be adding a blog for the site and you can follow progress on their Facebook page Mount Vernon’s Mystery Midden.

Please stay tuned!

Promoting the NPS museum collections

2011-05-18T11:38:00.000-07:00

The new web site for the national Park Service continues to progress, and we have a great online video to promote it.

You can follow the progress of the site on the new MuseumCollections blog The new web site will be up at the end of the summer. It will feature thousands of new images, new parks and spotlights – collections of objects in simple web exhibits.

Next time you’re ready to visit a park check out what they’re holding!

The Story in Stories Past

2011-04-26T09:16:00.000-07:00

I’m currently picking my way through Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future there are many ideas in this book (a future blog will be a review) but it made me think about how much has changed in last fifteen years, and how Stories Past developed.

We started from an episodic story Stoney Grove which debuted in March 1998. It ran through three seasons, and is the story of an Englishman and an American women who meet, win the lottery, buy a ‘great’ house in England and finally fall in love. We did three seasons and concluded with a live interactive wedding. The site used multiple narrative techniques – emails, diaries, newspapers, direct chat and letters (it was the old days!). It also used dynamic html to present the story.

From this site we created an education module. Students were asked to explore a version of the house and try and discover the who, what and where – who lived there, when they lived there, what was happening to the family, and what was happening in the world at that time. We were completely naïve when it came with working with schools and, though we did have some great feedback from a number of students who used it, we never were able to go “commercial.”

So we took the ideas and techniques we’d developed went to museums and archaeology programs and said, let us do this for you using your content. Since then keeping up with the technology changes is a constant challenge but the range of what we can do now is extraordinary. If you can describe what you want, we can find a way of doing it. But our approach is informed by some of the ideas we had when creating Stoney Grove: learning works best when it’s contextual, some (though not all) students learn more from an active/interactive learning style, and that a good module is exploratory and non-linear.

If you’ve got a few hours Stoney Grove is still online!

Using Primary Sources

2011-04-21T10:23:00.000-07:00

I’m working on an education module which uses eighteenth century land patents. The module will be part of a new web site “Engaging the Piedmont: Transitions in Virginia Slavery 1730-1790” (more soon!) Archaeologists, as well as historians, use primary documents such as probate inventories and patents to gain a greater understanding of the sites on which they work.

Not only are many of these documents not available on the web, they are written in eighteenth century script. Fortunately technology can at least help students start to work with primary sources. The module below is part of a larger piece we did for the Virginia Department of Historic Resource “What Do Archaeologists Do?”

I’ve had a few people ask if they can just buy the translate box but, unfortunately, there’s a little smoke and mirrors there! It based on an idea I saw years ago “Martha Ballard’s Diary” a great site exploring primary sources. Interactive content can help students get started in looking at difficult material, but it can’t replace research quite yet.

Should You Object? Mount Vernon Midden Archaeology

2011-04-12T06:12:00.000-07:00

New projects are always fun! Over the next few months I’ll be working with the archaeologists at Mount Vernon. We will be creating a web site based around the South Grove Midden, which is currently undergoing re-analysis. At its core will be objects: The 400 - more interesting that the 300 any day! These selected objects provide insights into the site, time period and life at Mount Vernon.

The archaeologists at Mount Vernon have prepared a comprehensive information framework for the objects. The stratigraphy of the site (detailed in supporting field and methods documentation) supplies the temporal context, and there will be a range of documentary material (including timeline, inventories and merchants accounts), along with other pages, to provide a thematic and historical context.

The fun part of the project (for me) is creating a design that helps not only in finding the objects, but in the relationships between them. Within this discrete time period it should be possible to support general queries with a structure that shows related objects, and suggests other interesting pathways through the collection and associated material.

The site is just part of the outreach. The Midden already has an active Facebook presence (Facebook: Mount Vernon’s Mystery Midden) that includes both specific and broadly contextual posts. There have been public events, conference papers and an upcoming dissertation focusing on the site.

I don’t think the web gets talked about enough when discussing public archaeology and this site will be a great example of how archaeological data can be relevant to an educated public and serve multiple audiences. Though the selection of 400 objects presents an initial level of analysis, archaeologists interested in looking at the complete data set will be able to find it at DAACS. For the rest the layered content will make material culture accessible through a contextual presentation.

Please check out this site as it develops.

Millennials

2011-03-31T08:09:00.000-07:00

As an exhibitor I was manning the booth for much of the Tennessee Association of Museums conference. I heard the indefatigable Ken Mayes (AMSE) keeping everyone up to date on web tools (The Online Visitor) and I did get to the session on millennials (The Next Generation of Visitors: Creating Museum Experiences that Connect with Younger Audiences by Lori Cagan of Tombras Group and Sylvia Martin from A Different View). As part of the presentation we had three millennials adding their insights. Millennials are broadly defined as the generation born in the mid 70’s to 2000.

Regarding technology, it’s no surprise that this group is heavily into communication. I had the experience as a younger man of living abroad, pre-internet. I sent and received letters and monthly made a phone call on the public telephone in the high street. This generation gets stressed by not being connected 24-7. And most of the connection - social media, texting, chatting - is mobile. They access the web through a phone screen.

At the end of the session the panelists were asked what museums could do to make themselves more engaging to Millennials. All three answered with the word interactive. They felt that museums should come to them, to engage them through changing, and participatory content. This is a group that wants to be involved, but perhaps is less into self exploration than reaction – they are getting a lot of calls on their attention!

The PBS special digital media pointed to the work museums are doing as places of experimental learning. There really is no limit to what can be achieved. Stories Past is working on projects involving mixed media, social interactions and gaming. It’s a fun time to be working in this area.

How Millennial are you? Try the Pew Research Quiz. Is Millennial an age range, or a state of mind?

Being There - still going to conferences

2011-03-25T04:51:00.000-07:00

At VAM

March is conference time. Last week was a fun time at the Virginia Association of Museums conference in Portsmouth, VA. This week I am exhibiting at the Tennessee Museums Conference (TAM) in Johnson City, TN.

Personally, I love the opportunity to get to places around the States, but are conferences becoming redundant? There’s an increasing trend to offer virtual sessions and more online papers. I imagine conference organizers are trying to balance offering access while still wanting people to come. There’s the cost, and time, of travel and hotels, and long hours sitting and listening to papers that sometimes would be better read, than heard. And at the end there’s often little time for questions or debate.

And yet until we reach the singularity , there’s still a lot to be said for personal contact, networking, discussion and serendipitous conversations that come from standing in line at the bar! I enjoy conferences and I am disappointed to be missing out on two others that I’d have liked to have attended. The CAA conference is in China, and the Museums and the Web conference is in Philadelphia. I’ve attended both of these in the past, and I’m still thinking about some of the papers I heard. This was the first year in many that I didn’t attend the Society for Historical Archaeology conference, which means that there are a lot of people I won’t get to see for nearly two years. We’ll make the next one.

So, like many things, the virtual is great but it’s still not as good as the real thing!

Putting Virginia Archaeology on the map

2011-03-07T10:12:00.000-08:00

Egloff Atlas of Virginia Archaeology

Google maps seem like a natural for archaeology. Though they are not fine grained enough for a single site, they excel in showing multiple sites, or indeed any spatial content. The maps form the starting point, and content – text, images, and videos – can be layered on top, along with any type of interaction.

Stories Past created a simple map for lithics last year as part of a larger module on points and lithics. Now we’ve put up the Egloff Atlas of Virginia, named after noted Virginia archaeologist Keith Egloff.

The map shows sites in Virginia that have archaeology and you can select by region, or by specific site. The content was developed by the Council of Virginia Archaeology and the Virginia Department of Historic Resources and should serve as a way of promoting Virginia archaeology.

There are a million ways to use Google maps in interpretation and research. The development costs are low and you it comes with all the Google functionality: zooms, drag, satellite, map and street view. If the content is created through an XML file it can be easily maintained through a simple text editor. Showing routes or journeys, linking story and place, overlaying maps with layers to show distribution of artifacts across a region or country, relating time and space, showing landscape features – the list is endless as this link proves!

Review: Videogames and Education by Harry J. Brown

2011-02-27T17:37:00.001-08:00

Videogames and Education by Harry J. Brown

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Brown’s engaging read can serve as a primer for looking at video games. The first section, poetics, looks at video games through the lens of storytelling, aesthetics and film. He points out the two approaches of seeing video games: Ludologists who essentially see them as puzzles and Narratologists who see them as story. One difficulty in looking at games as stories is that they lack a clear central narrative - but this is judging them as traditional literature. At their best games weave multiple threads, with the player a part of the story, presenting perhaps a conversation, or a shared performance, more than a telling, with an end result that is more “history”, rather than novel. Perhaps games have not yet found their Dickens, as Brown suggests, but we don’t judge all literature by the most hackneyed romance novels. The great works may be just around the corner, but they won’t be like books. This book does a good job in placing games in a wider context, but also notes that they remain ‘other’ – a point Brown re-inforces by pointing out how badly games have translated into movies!

I think Gee has argued that games are inherently educational, that their structure begets learning though the problem solving required in games. Brown, I think, would be more cautious, and in several places he emphasizes that games do not replace educators, but ask them to be more like guides, than the source of all wisdom. Some of the controversy over the use of gaming in schools is more clearly as discussion of what and how students should be taught, rather than a disagreement of the efficacy of the methods. But in the second section of the book, Rhetoric, Brown talks about the rhetoric of interactivity, the idea that playing a game, or perhaps using ‘playful mechanics’, is a fundamentally different engagement for students than reading, listening or watching. It’s an engagement that he sees relating to the teaching of empathy, but it also ties into different learning styles for different students. Maybe some, but not all, students will learn better this way.

In the final section, “pedagogy” he examines education, identity and communication, and finally “modding” using the tools of gaming to create new environments. He looks at the creation of social spaces and points out that for effective learning these spaces still need to be mediated. I personally doubt that shy students are suddenly ‘freed’ by a virtual identity, bullying still occurs on the online world. But equally an online environment changes the social dynamic, and its emphasis on non-verbal communication is clearly a benefit for some students.

In most of the literature I’m reading, and in this book, there seems to be a lack of clarity at times about what video games are. Some arguments seem to relate as much to games, as video games. Do video games have to consist of an immersive space? Are we criticizing the games, or the biases, and failures, of the gamemakers. How is the aspect of social media playing out in learning? While there is discussion of MMORPG’s how does playing alone, or in a group shape the learning experience? What are the implications for distance learning?

For both fiction and non-fiction I often feel that a books ‘success’ for a reader depends when it is read. For me this book served came at the right time, broadening my understanding and leaving me with the desire both to go back and re-read certain sections and follow some threads and questions into cyber space.

View all my reviews

National Park Service - wonderful places, wonderful things

2011-02-23T11:50:00.001-08:00

The National Park Service consists not only of wonderful places; it also manages the objects and artifacts that those places possess. Working through a co-operative agreement between the National Park Service and the University of Tennessee, I’ve been leading a project to redevelop the current web catalog site, and work with parks to increase the number of items on the site.

The scope of the collections is extraordinary; more than 42 million objects including archeology, art, history, and ethnography objects, biology, paleontology, geology specimens, and historic photographs. Currently only a small percentage is available online, and graduate students at UT have been helping add records and images.

We imagine a number of different audiences coming to the site: students and educators, researchers and park visitors. We expect they’ll come with questions about the Civil War, about specific park collections, about the household belongings of John Adams, and many, many more.

The challenge is to create a site that answers the questions of a researcher looking at maritime history, as well as the casual visitor curious about the history of the Florida parks. It’s about seeing the objects not just as individual things but as part of a park, a collection, a historic theme, or an aspect of the rich cultural and bio-diversity of the United States.

The site will be available to the public in late summer.

Just put it on the web - how does a physical exhibit translate to an on-line one?

2011-02-15T11:04:00.000-08:00

It’s an issue we’ve faced several times. Exhibits are an investment of time and effort, and can be given an extended life on the web. But it isn’t a straightforward transition. Visitors see physical exhibits in a rich context. They are prepared by the journey to the institution, view the material within the physical context of the building/landscape, and can enjoy it with family and friends who can share items of interest.

On the web they can arrive at the page as the result of mild curiosity after the page is presented from a tangential search. They are likely alone, and the exhibit can appear divorced of context.

Web exhibits then have to offer something extra to compensate. All the images, video and text can be included, but it’s also possible to have the visitor engage with the material.

Providing a zoom capability doesn’t just give a bigger picture, it allows the visitor to focus on the details in the image. (And have you seen the amazing Google Art project?).
Creating virtual pathways allows visitors to see connections between different parts of the exhibit.
Allowing visitors to record and share comments contributes to the exhibit and provides great feedback.
“Playful mechanics”* can create interactions that lead visitors through the process of learning, rather than just reading about it. Asking visitors to find the items in a room connected to sewing in a nineteenth century cabin, or drag elements in order to make a building make students active learners. Note: the image is from a module for Project Archaeology on building an Earthlodge.

Finding resources at the end of an exhibit is difficult, image permissions are different, staff have moved onto new things. But the web offers a chance to recharge the exhibit, and reach those visitors from around the world who can’t come to your site, but who you still want to reach.

*Playful mechanics are not the great guys from Car Talk, but a type of interaction related to gaming. For more, much more, see the excellent Play the Past.

2011-02-08T12:58:00.000-08:00

New Digital Media and Learning as an Emerging Area and "Worked Examples" as One Way Forward by James Paul Gee

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The start of this book seemed like academic navel gazing, but he's clearly coming from a much more complex understanding of the evolution of what I know now as Digital Media and Learning. At present I'm much more interested in the work, than how the work is defined.
But the book is short and lucid, teaches me about literacies and and gets to the point: an exemplar, or worked example looking at Yu-Gi-Oh! and complex language. He breaks down the language on the cards, showing the complexity specialist language needed to understand them - and if you're playing you need to understand them quickly. And he suggests these are useful skills for learning, pointing to some literacy studies.
While he see's Yu-Gi-Oh! as an example of convergent media I think it's basically a card game - predating, I think, much of the web. Which argues that gaming in itself can be a great learning tool, outside of digital media. I think one reason why these games work is that they are played socially, competitively. The social dynamic makes a tremendous difference to their effectiveness. Would they work as well played alone? Can the computer act as an effective opponent?
Fun stuff and I'm off to read more!

View all my reviews

Archaeology, CRM and the Public

2011-02-07T10:34:00.000-08:00

Three miles of road widening in Townsend, Tennessee resulted in years of archaeology, hundreds of thousands of artifacts, report volumes, artifact images and reams of supporting documents.

The work was paid for by the Tennessee Department of Transportation and conducted by the Archaeological Research Laboratory (ARL). The ARL is creating a public volume on the dig, but they also wanted to present some of the data in an interactive format.

The ARL provided the content, Sarah Lowe, Associate Professor at UTK, ran the project and put together the design and I worked on the interface. It allows the public to explore the site through an interactive map. The whole site is presented and visitors are asked to select a time period: Archaic, Woodland, Mississippian and Cherokee. For each period, areas can be zoomed to show features, and five artifact types can be explored through artifact and feature cards.

The module is a compromise: not all artifacts are shown, later historical material wasn't included and stratigraphy is simplified through the initial selection of a time period. But it supports several important archaeological considerations. Artifacts can only be accessed through their physical context. Text supports temporal and thematic context. Exploration and discovery are part of the experience. A second part of module talks a bout the archaeological process through video interviews, news reports of the dig and overviews of the artifact types.

The module will not be a research tool, but it does include data. Most importantly process is implicit in presentation. Showing the careful methodology of excavation, the lab work, and that the artifacts exist in a physical context all help separate archaeology from pot hunting and promote not just the site but the discipline.

The web site should be available later this year.

Failing to Learn – More Games and Gee

2011-02-03T09:43:00.000-08:00

Filament games http://www.filamentgames.com/ created some educational video games, working with James Gee, author of Video Games are good for your soul (see previous blog).
Argument Wars, http://www.icivics.org/games/argument-wars, looks at legal cases. It must have been a challenging design concept. Computers aren’t good at parsing language, and this could have been a bad multiple choice game. But, by presenting possible arguments through a hand of cards, and asking players to decide which to play, and when, it make you pick a strategy. I think the cards could have been made a little more complex (larger hands, different types of cards: argument, support, evidence), but the game works, and is informative and fun.
I also liked Energy City. The first time I played I crashed and burned, but repeated play let me get more successful. It’s one of the things in their philosophy statement “Good games embrace experimentation and, by extension, failure.” It seems, with the dogged insistence on GPA that the education system at present doesn’t allow “good” kids to fail. Yet we all know that we can learn more from failure than success. By working within a framework, allowing exploration and replay we can get better – and in this case maybe learn to save the planet.

And a headline like this http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110202/ts_yblog_thelookout/tree-octopus-is-latest-evidence-the-internet-is-making-kids-dumb-says-group needs to be challenged and discussed (as indeed the reporters do!)

Review: Why Video Games are Good for Your Soul by James Paul Gee

2011-01-31T17:10:00.000-08:00

Video Games Are Good For Your Soul
Despite the outcry that gaming is a waste of time, video games make us feel good, Gee says, and what’s more they are a great learning tool.
There’s no question that people get pleasure from such gaming, that’s why they buy them but are they “good” for you? We know young children learn through play and Gee argues that video games provide learning within a structured environment, with contextual help on demand, and positive reinforcement for success. But can games teach you … anything? Can they teach you math, geography, economics…archaeology?
Gee largely focuses on immersive games. Some of what he says could equally be applied to all games – simpler computer games, but also board, card games and role play games. But the new breed of immersive worlds, he notes, let you take on a blended personality with your avatar, harnessing a set of developing skills and role playing different situations. Read Neal Stephenson’s excellent the Diamond Age to glimpse the future possibilities. Potentially games, through re-play and structured contextual environments can provide information, but more importantly learning, empathy, long term planning and critical thinking skills. And they allow failure and the possibility to try again - something often absent from public education.
It’s an interesting book, though a little repetitive in place for such a short volume, and I’d have like to have seen more educational and learning theory. (He has since published further volumes). I’d argue that there are elements in these games that can be taken advantage of quite simply – creative use of multimedia, interactive content, built in rewards and social learning. If our classrooms aren’t ready for Call of Duty can we at least develop web-enabled text books with interactive content?

Projectile Point Types and Lithic Types

2009-05-13T13:20:00.000-07:00

Stories Past is pleased to announce a new research module prepared for the Virginia Department of Historic Resources at
http://www.dhr.virginia.gov/arch_DHR/archaeo_lpc.htm

From the DHR web site:
“Projectile Point Types and Lithic Types. Using Adobe Flash, this interactive module provides information and stunning images of 44 projectile point types applicable to Virginia, and 47 lithic types from Virginia and surrounding states. The point types may be sorted by time period and general shape. A timeline chart further enhances the ability to envision point relationships. The lithics may be sorted by type of stone or by general location. A Google map presents the lithic-type locations. Reference and publication sections are included in the module.”
Stories Past president Mark Freeman stated “The project gave us a change to explore Google maps, which have huge potential. Using easily updateable XML files we were also able to provide a Flash version and text version, compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act.”

Stories Past has created a range of interactive digital exhibit, education and research projects and web sites. Please contact us about how we can help you.

Stories Past part of TAM award

2009-03-31T14:04:00.000-07:00

The Tennessee Association of museums meeting (TAM) reminded me that I really need to spend more time in Chattanooga. Conference attendees saw some great African art at the African American museum and had plenty of fun at the Children's museum. Give adults freedom from the watching eyes of children and they will bang instruments with the best of them. I was taken by the application that took your picture and then showed it back to you in different art styles – very clever.

The conference highlight had to be the exhibit award for the Oak Ridge Children’s Museum. Stories Past was very happy to be part of exhibit and pleased at our first Tennessee recognition.

Conference thoughts

2009-03-25T17:52:00.000-07:00

Just back from the CAA conference and thinking about the people I've met over the last week at TAM VAM and CAA. Many thoughts, that I'll try and tease out over the next few weeks, but thanks to everyone who stopped by the Stories Past booth at TAM and VAM, and to the folks at CAA who fired my creative juices.

Time to sleep, and think of hovering slowly over the earth peering into every field, flying through the Swiss mountains and throwing down memory markers for myself and friends .... wait that's Google Earth.

Conferences

2009-02-26T11:01:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year. Stories Past exhibited at the Society for Historical Archaeology in January (love those Canadian conferences) and now we are facing a busy Spring.
March 18-20 Tennessee Association of Museum in Chattanooga. Please visit the booth.
March 22-24 Virginia Association of Museum in Virginia Beach. Again, please come visit.
March 22-26 Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology. Just attending this one!
April 22-25 Society for American Archaeology in Atlanta. Lots of new archaeology installations to play with at the booth.