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Engines of Emotion

This is the text of my short presentation today: This is my first presentation to this forum, so by way of introduction, let me explain that I’m interested in the power that video (or computer) games have, to tell stories in virtual (though ever more realistic) spaces. I want to explore what we can learn from games, as interpreters and storytellers of cultural heritage about telling emotionally engaging stories in the spaces that we look after. Continue reading →

Italian translation of week one topics

Excavating a burial at PortusPhoto: Hembo Pagi Eleonora has translated the summaries of the week one activities into Italian in order to support sharing of the course via Italian social media. As discussed previously the course itself runs in English and it is not possible to moderate the posts in English and Italian. This would require Italian speakers on the FutureLearn platform which is monitored 24 hours a day. So, we will continue to provide additional resources such as this where possible. Continue reading →

Topographical survey at Portus

Teaching students how to use a total station next to the Terrazza di Traiano. Photo: Hembo Pagi Hi, my name is Stephen Kay and I’m responsible for the topographical survey on the Portus Project. I am currently the Molly Cotton Fellow at the British School at Rome (www.bsr.ac.uk), one of the partner institutions for the field school. My research interests are focused on landscape archaeology, in particular on Roman urbanism in central Italy. Continue reading →

Welcome to Week One – the Port of Claudius

Frame from one of Simon Keay’s videos filmed at Portus last summer The course has just now become available! We have been working on this for a while now so it is good to be able to share the course with you properly. As you will now see the course is structured thematically, temporally and spatially. Each week we will discuss archaeological methods, object types, and also theoretical concerns. Continue reading →

Gamer data – the heart of the matter (oh dear)

Enough pussyfooting around with ludic.interest. We conducted this survey because we wanted to get an idea of what would encourage people to play a game that used mobile technology to engage players in the story that take place in a number of cultural heritage locations around Southampton. (Though in other news, our funding bid for that project fell at the second hurdle, so this research is likely to now be, both literally and metaphorically “academic. Continue reading →

Lead and the Roman water system

Half a century after lead poisoning was proposed as the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire, a wave of publications to refute this idea put an end to this theory. Although lead is no longer considered the main culprit in the decline of Roman civilization, its presence in the Roman water distribution system water is still worthy of consideration as a major public health problem. The Archaeology of Portus course will introduce some of the methods employed in this research. Continue reading →

More maths

Last time I finished with this matrix of scatter-plots, ordered by the magnitude of correlation. But what does it actually mean? Lets take a step back, and look at those derived variables. I ask R to describe the table of variables that I created previously, which include the notional ludic.interest variable and the Hard, Serious, Easy and People fun preference variables. Continue reading →

Gamer data: Fun preferences

After last week’s hair-pulling day of frustration, I’ve made I bit more progress. The survey contained seventeen questions which were based on the theory of four types of fun, set out by Nicole Lazzaro. These were 101 point  Likert scales, wherein the participant indicated their agreement with a statement, using a slider with no scale and the slider “handle” position set randomly, to reduce systematic bias. Continue reading →

Proximity!

My Gimbal beacons arrived yesterday. These are three tiny Bluetooth LE devices, not much bigger than the watch battery that powers them. They do very little more than send out a little radio signal that says “I’m me!” twice a second. There are three very different ways of using them that I can immediately think of: I’ve just tried leaving one in in each of three different rooms, then walking around the house with the the simple Gimbal manager app on my iPhone. Continue reading →

Another look at my gamer data

Click to view slideshow. I’m still wrestling with R and wishing I was a natural (or maybe just a more experienced) coder. Everything takes so long to work out and to actually do. Last time I shared the results, I was just looking at the top-line data that iSurvey shares. This time I’ve downloaded the data and sucked it into R, the command line based stats language. I start off looking at the basics. Continue reading →