I suppose the first is the amazing roof within the conference venue, a little more impressive than anything Bradford has to offer

Virtual keynote from Irwin Scollar

Virtual Keynotes

While i was initially quite sceptical of the Virtual Keynotes joking about how only the LBI could afford to send a camera crew around the world in preparation for a conference i found myself surprisingly moved and entertained.

” While i can’t say what a computer will look like in 100 or even 10 years at least i can be confident that the laws of physics won’t change”

Irwin Scollar

The LBI recorded talks with Pioneers of Archaeological Prospection which they have stored for research into the history of archaeological prospection. A quick glance online, it seems we’re not allowed to conduct that particular research yet..

Ludwig Boltzmann Institute

The conference began with a series of talks from those mostly associated with the LBI and there began a trend continuing throughout the conference. I’ve not had time to sift through and categorise the abstracts, largely because paper and broken pdf’s are not helpful opendata formats, but..

28% of papers were lbi or lbi partners3% were from @dart_project 3% from Hungarian national museum

— EarthsoundGeophysics (@EAG_Earthsound) June 1, 2013

This is not meant as criticism of the LBI, what organisation wouldn’t jump at such a chance to self publicise, more expressing caution towards one organisation coming to dominate the Archaeological Prospection Field.

The presentations, posters and excursions were both interesting and exciting giving a real insight into the cutting edge of Archaeological Geophysics however at times I did get the impression of postcarding. Maybe I’m just jealous but I can’t imagine a UK academic institution ever being able to catch up with the LBI’s multi-channel GPR square-kilometerage.

ISAP

The ISAP AGM was held on friday, after the only full day of talks during the conference and before the ‘Researchers Pub’. If this arrangement was designed to keep the AGM short and sweet it appeared to fail, with discussion going on for well over an hour.

Multiple issues were raised including

Committee stagnation
The Top Brass conducted the bi-annual position switch with a small amount of new blood in the form of an Editor Time-Share arrangement. The committee appear rightly concerned about this arrangement and threats were made, in the hope of ‘encouraging’ new blood. It appears to me that the committee positions dont tailor themselves towards encouraging members onto the management, perhaps a number of positions could be created for the middle ground.

Commercial engagement
Concerns were raised by attendees and over Twitter about the number of commercial groups who felt ISAP and the Conference were not useful to them. It was suggested that AP2015 could hold a session aimed at commercial archaeology, I was disappointed that the organising committee seemed decidedly non-plus. The commercial issue continues and much discussion has gone on under #AP2013 and #ISAPAfterParty.

Software

We had a lot of discussion throughout the conference  and on twitter about Software. Spawned by @EAG_Earthsounds question about the LBI’s GPR processing software which i think the following tweet somes up very well:

@popefinn can I borrow your wheel for a day? No.Can I buy it from you for an exorbitant price? No.Can I watch your slideshow? Yes, peasant

— EarthsoundGeophysics (@EAG_Earthsound) June 1, 2013

This has given me the resolve I previously lacked to make ArchaeoPY a decent Open Source python Library for Archaeology. I hope to write a further blog post before the end of the week on this..

I should add @girlwithtrowel has posted a nice document detailing the help she’d like with software

Open Archiving

Myself, @AntArch and @EAG_Earthsound revived the yearly discussion on archiving. I understand a lot of discussions went on at a previous CAA roundtable however this doesn’t seem to be open archived.

I’m hoping to write some more about how I’d like to see archaeological archiving work and some ideas on implementation in the near future.

As i said at the start i’m bound to have missed lots of important points. Please prod me if you think I should comment on anything in particular.

Before my memory and hangover fade i thought it was important to reflect on what was a fascinating CAAUK conference. I came away thinking that archaeologists working in computer science have the same interests and problems as geophysicists have to deal with on a daily basis. It seemed odd and a little disappointing that more near-surface geophysicists working in the archaeological sector chose not to attend and contribute. Issues of Open-Data, archiving, visualisation and public dissemination formed a major theme at CAA and more often than not the same solution could fit both the archaeological and geophysical model.

Another point to note was the effort the organisers had gone to to encourage commercial archaeologists to attend and talk. The conference starting late on a friday to allow field staff to attend without being forced to take an entire week off site and the low cost resulted in a full house. The makeup of the audience was definitely closer to the academic:commercial split that is seen in the non conference environment. A point I became more aware of because of the following:

The research figures from Peter Rauxloh’s presentation highlighted how under represented commercial archaeology is in the near-surface geophysical research environment. A quick glance back at the NSGG meeting schedule doesn’t show any commercial presenters other than the talk by sensys  equipment manufacturers. Compare this with Mola and LP archaeology who are actively developing new methods of archaeological computing techniques and presenting them to the community.

It seems that the ISAP conference is almost aiming to limit the number of commercial attendees through a combination of cost and midweek scheduling. This limits the grounding of archaeological prospection research and is likely to result in a larger gulf between commercial and academic research prospection methods. Something already apparent when comparing LBI’s systems with the traditional Grad-601. While it seems unlikely that the cost of the conference can be reduced without stunting its international appeal efforts should be made to disseminate to and engage with commercial geophysicists on the ground. CAAUK should be commended for enabling speakers to deliver talks remotely, allowing the questioning of speakers via social media and publishing both presentations and video online. The only extension i could suggest would be a system of live streaming.

On a final note more conferences should have cupcakes, especially if they finally discover a real use for QR codes in the process.

Finally got around to assembling my Gertboard

The data I’m working with primarily comes out of BERT2 and RES3DINV as VTK or unstructured Grid CSV files.

Originally i was visualising the data with Voxler however because its relatively expensive and its use was limited to a single workstation within University. Voxler was also unable to deal with inversion model data incorporating topography and i believed i should search for an Open Source alternative that would accompany the open Source inversion software BERT2. I settled on Paraview because it was faster and more stable than other VTK based softwares.

It also had the added benefit of allowing me to export visualizations as X3D files that with a little further processing could be incorporated into web visualizations that i can incorporate into blog posts and distribute to anyone without them having to install any bespoke software. All that is required is a HTML5 compatible browser such as Google Chrome, Firefox or IE9+

This Post is aimed at helping people go from raw data to a visualisation they can include on the web.

Preparing Data for Visualisation 

RES3DINV CSV Files

RES3DINV will export data in CSV files, the column delimiter is actually a series of spaces but Paraview can cope with that. The file header does need editing( just using a basic text editor) so that

x  y  z  ohm-m ohm-m/ohm-m

is first line in the file, followed by data.

The screenshot below shows the filtering steps required to get the data into a usable format within Paraview. All four steps are show in the left hand box and as each visualisation step in the main body.

1. Top Left – CSV File in table Format
2. Top Right – TableToPoints
3. Bottom Left – Delaunay3D
4. Bottom Right – Slice

BERT VTK Files

BERT makes visualising its data in Paraview even easier than RES3DINV. The model mesh is automatically outputted as  .VTK file that will open automatically in Paraview. You can view it without adding any filters smooth, slice, isosurface the data as you wish.

1. Left – VTK File
2. Top Right – Cell Data to Point Data
3. Bottom Right – Slice

 Getting it onto the Web

Once the data is displayed how you’d like its simple to export it onto the web. File >> Export >> X3D files.

Save the file in a convenient location. Open it with a text Editor.

Go to This converter Site, paste in the text inside the X3D file, choose X3D as the input, HTML5 as the output.

Click Convert

Copy the output text into a text file and save it with an .html extension.

Upload it to the web.

include the URL within in IFRAME tag within your website.

Click, Drag, zoom in and out… Any Visualisation you can produce in Paraview can be exported as a 3D web visualisation.

This is just scraping the surface of Paraviews capabilities in a Geophysical context. Hopefully as i progress with my research I’ll find other useful tools I can use to help people visualise their data.

Today, like almost every day between May and September this year I’ve been working on my MSc research Project. Instead of just explaining what I’ve been doing today i thought it would be more interesting to describe what is going into my individual research project.

I’m experimented with a new novel way of collecting electrical resistivity tomography data  with a zzGeo FlashRes64 which as you might expect involves a significant amount of lab and field data collection.

To allow inversion of these novel techniques far too much of my time has been devoted to developing software to allow analysis of the data, and investigation of different visualisation techniques. Though  it does make a nice change from the driving rain outside.

Before going out in the snow and rain its important to know that the data collected will be as good as possible. This means i spend a lot of time visualising different data collection techniques as point clouds as below. I promise they end up being quite relaxing.

Eventually after determining the best collection strategy, standing out in the rain and the cold for hours, extracting, converting and comparing data you do end up with a decent representation of whats beneath the surface.

Its something i found quite difficult to do but eventually through the use of good old comma-seperated-value files i managed to plot the points in Paraview. Even more exciting was being able to export the data as x3d files so the data can be displayed directly on the web.

All of us had done some programming in a variety of programming languages but bringing everyone up to speed on aspects of python and version control were really useful.

More information on the course is available from here.

We also had the fortune/misfortune of visiting the Bacchus pub (awesome) although the quality and abundance of beer did make coding the following morning a little less pleasant that it should have been.