FPAN 3D modelling and printing Internship - Week 1

My name is Trevor Colaneri and I am in the start of my second year in the Public History MA program at UCF as well as being a current teacher for OCPS as 6th grade World History and 7th grade Civics teacher.

My internship with the East Central FPAN office focuses on the comparison of the two most popular 3D printing methods being FDM plastic printing and SLA resin printing. The project consists of the creation of five 3D models using low-cost photogrammetry as well as their subsequent printing and preparation. I will print and prepare those artifacts printed on the resin printer while Emily Dietrich will print those same models on FPAN’s FDM printer where then both sets of prints can be compared on their replication abilities. The culmination of this project with FPAN will be the presentation of a co-authored paper on our findings at the Society for Historical Archaeology 2021 conference.

FDM printing has, for the past few years, been the most common, cheapest, and readily available 3D printing method that is available recreationally and commercially. However, in the past 2-3 years resin printers have started to become more widely available recreationally while also becoming more economically feasible. Resin SLA printers excel in small objects with a lot of detail but generally struggle with larger objects for a variety of reason with the most important being the print bed’s size. FDM printers generally counter by being able to print much larger objects with the struggle of small detailed oriented objects.

The goal of this internship is to compare these two affordable printing methods using a small collection of artifacts and compare the results to evaluate any notable differences between the two as well as the printing process associated with each.

The skills I hope to gain from the internship would be the creation of 3D models using photogrammetry as well as developing and continuing my practice and understanding of 3D printing. These skills directly relate to my thesis and will assist me greatly in learning the process of photogrammetry, metashape, and printing which will save me time later on during the actual project portion for my thesis.

Week 1 VLP

This week I started my involvement with the VLP project by watching the first three episodes of Ken Burn’s Vietnam and reading the first two chapters of The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien as well as looking at storyboarding guides to get a fresh idea on how to best craft a story surrounding a particular Veteran. I enjoyed how both the documentary by Burn and the book by O’Brien tackled this question of shaping a narrative in different ways. Ken Burn’s series follows the lives of certain veterans in relation to major political and cultural events. Whilst talking about the events that largely predated the Vietnam war, the use of first person testimonies always would ground the narrative into the events that would come, or would result immediately after a decision. The documentary also takes a very dark and emotional vibe in order to truly make the viewer feel a sympathetic link to these events suck as using the thumping sound of a helicopter closing in, or the tense static sounds of a radio break to enhance a story about communication, even to the sound of gunshots as Diem and his brother were assassinated in a coup. It wasn’t just audio that lent itself to these veterans stories but chilling images and videos, that could either set the scene for a veterans story or lend itself to the brutality they witnessed. While I am not advocated for such a shock and awe narrative, the expert use of sound and images are witnessed to such a resounding impact and help create an effective narrative.

              The Things They Carried  based off my initial reading, seems to take a singular and down to earth view of a few characters, although still humane and emotional. The story follows the Vietnam war through the eyes of a particular group of soldiers with reprieves that seem to be about the meta of constructing this narrative. The opening chapter makes it a theme to always mention the things each solider carried; the physical weight of their equipment, the emotional weight of loved ones or lost soldiers, the mental weight of what boring, arduous, and at random times dangerous work, to even the moral weight of responsibility serving as the explanation of their presence in Vietnam. This constant reminder of all thus weight allows the reader to see this explanation for the reactions of certain individuals and humanize them more.

              While I do not know who the veterans are yet for our story crafting, some of the threads I liked where the way to also have the veteran humanized, either through visual or auditory cues, to just making them more of the center point. Another interesting thread is how the veteran can serve as the center of the story or can be the human, emotional centerpiece that connects the larger political and cultural narrative. For a project that encompasses one veteran and their individual story unknown, Ill have to wait and see what group I am in and what type of story will serve as the basis.

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Testing our Toolbox

Working Title - Working Title: “Testing our Toolbox”

150-Word Abstract

A whole host of digital tools exist to help represent data and tell a compelling story. Each of these tools, important in their own right, are limited in some capacity and while each tool has a purpose and style, the visualization of their dataset can vary drastically if represented on different tools due to their limiting focus. This is an area worthy of research; a comparative test that uses the same datasets that could then be applied to a variety of tools which when subjugated to analysis reveal their limitations and focus and its effect on their storytelling capabilities. While each tool generally makes an appealing case for their use and offer no shortage of showcases for the uses of their tool, the dataset is never the same, making the judgement to use a tool for their research an arduous task. Knowing the comparative qualities, capabilities, and limitations of a variety of tools can help students and scholars make a more informed decision when deciding which tools would fix their research interest best.

Principal Data Sources

I am using the PhD dissertation of David Klingle as a source for most of my data, this dissertation is entitled: “Burial in Florida: Culture, Ritual, Health, and Status: The Archaic to Seminole Periods.” I decided to use this source because his dissertation explains the different in cultural periods of Florida’s history before the Seminole tribe. He speaks to the burial and ritual practices which are great for contextualizing these sites and the people who lived there. Additionally he also lays out important sites relating to each of the different cultures allowing me to choose those most prominent, and varied temporally and geographically.

This data set will also allow me to site a scholarly source directly which adds credibility to the narrative.

Visualization Platform(s)

Visual eyes is the main platform, additionally I will branch out into different tools for visualization. Microsoft Sway and website building tools for blogs make great use of static visualization and storytelling and I feel are important to bring into the fold of my research as static visualization, especially those tools that are available for this, is incredibly popular and remain an effective way to express a story even though they lack an interactive element. Other interactive tools like timelineJS, and story maps provide more variety for testing their presentation of this information. As this project progresses, even outside the timeframe for the class I wish to expand the number of tools to really craft an analysis of how these tools handle and can represent the information given to them.

Environmental Scan for my Project

My own project is to construct a story of Florida’s paleo-Native American sites across different digital tools using the same information and data to test each tool with how it handles and presents information differently. The different digital tools will include those with a mapping component, time line component, pictorial components, interactive components, as well as static components to critically evaluate a variety of different tools on their story telling capabilities. An important component of this project is to analyze how each tool presents the same story in a different way based on its function, features, limitations, and ease of use. My scan of the environment on this particular topic has, so far, produced no other copies of research similar to the tools test I seek to employ. Most similarities I have seen have only been websites from the digital humanities department at different universities offering descriptive lists of each tool and occasional showcases for each tool. However, these showcases are not using the same dataset, crafted information, or creator such as seen on UCF’s center for digital research’s website found here: https://chdr.cah.ucf.edu/projects.html.  Other websites that list tools and there function can be found here: https://libguides.mit.edu/c.php?g=176357&p=1158575 and https://libguides.utk.edu/dh/tools.

                Other projects that can serve as a point of similarity for my project use a tool or method to present Native American history. While not using the same information or a variety of different tools, the closeness to the concept of Florida Paleo-Native American history and digital presentation should be noted. Such projects can be found here: https://lostworlds.org/exhibits/florida/public-indian-sites-florida/ this project serves to spatially layout a variety of different publicly accessible sites on interactive map on a website to host different information. Another would be found here: http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=3&psid=201 which seeks to present a whole host of information on Florida Native American history segmented by topic in as a static webpage but does not present any visual storytelling aspect and simply serves as printed text available on a digital space. A third project could be the Florida Department of State’s Native American Heritage Trail pdf  which serves as a digital presentation that is visually appealing and serves to tell a contextualized story yet does so in a static, but readably available way.

                My project will differ from those already in the field by presenting the same information through a variety of different tools and methods including both interactive and static to provide a way to contextualize each tool on a standard for comparative means.

ASSERT: steps to forming the project

Ask- How can we use interactive visualization to better educate K-12 and public audiences on the prehistory and history of native Americans in Florida?

Search- The data that I searched for that fits within the scope of the question I seek to answer is mainly secondary sources and online resources. Some of these resources include online information from Florida’s Division of Historical Resources, and Florida Anthropological societies. Other secondary source information would be some of the bureau of archaeological research journals on particular sites in order to compile a list of archaeological sites, dates, and cultures. Other data would be photos from these sites or of primary source materials to compliment the information.

Structure-The main takeaway from the chapter on structure was the LATCH acronym. Structuring the data in terms of location such as a map through visualeyes can express the geographic information of each of these sites and cultures, time can also apply through visualeyes and the map in order to display potential causality. Structuring data geographically, temporally, and culturally is how I envision answering this question.

Envision- This chapter for my particular interest is somewhat limited in application but qualitative analysis would be useful in analyze the data structures. But most analysis of data has to happen after representing it in order to see trends and adapt the project to become more publicly oriented.

Represent- As far as representing the information goes, using visualeyes is probably the best way to represent my data. Dealing with a time frame from 13,000 BCE -1600 CE is easiest to comprehend on a timeline, yet the temporal locations and their geographic relations would be lost if just a timeline were to be used. Which is why I believe visualeyes would be the best tool as of right now. Being able to represent the data on a map, its temporal location, and the written word and photographs all integrated on the same webpage makes it an easy choice. The additional use of having pop-ups which can display smaller segments of information lends itself to public use by making the project easier to navigate for the interested party. The timeline grouping feature of visualeyes is also phenomenal for this project because it allows the anthropologic temporal-cultural groups, such as Weeden island culture, eastern woodland, or mortuary pond, to be presented chronologically which assist in the general understanding of these sites to the lay public.

Tell- The story I hope to tell through this project is one that seeks to convey the known archaeological and anthropological past of Florida prehistory in a way that is understandable to the general public. The map and timeline can serve as useful tools for contextualizing the past but the overall narrative is where I hope to tell a story that can educate the public but while activity being broken up by location and temporal cultural classifications.

Ask a question, Search for data

Bill’s introduction seeks to set interactive visualization into context by first exploring why visualization is important. He does this by providing many examples that serve his argument with one such example being Anscombe’s Quartet which on paper have similar trends in data but once visualized showed how different the data set appears on a graph. Bill then dives into a history of data visualization and its progression until the internet and how the internet impacted visualization and including its introduction into the scholarly field. Bill also debates theories and methods behind visualization including a list of useful models to creative a valuable interactive visualization project before putting forth his own model which we will be using in this class.

The ASSERT model stands for ask a question, search for information, structure the data, envision the answer, represent the visualization, and tell a story. It’s the first two categories that the class this week is to focus on. My general topic of interest relates to Florida during the paleolithic era moving into pre-Seminole time and my initial reaction is to want to map it in some visually interactive way but I found a static map was already done, and based off of Bill’s recommendations in forming a question I am running into difficulty when looking at a new way to frame this. I intend to frame this as a public history project with the audience being the lay public and this project serving as a point of public education and engagement about the change over time in Florida’s pre-contact period because I often find the dominate narrative claims that the Seminole tribe has lived in Florida for thousands of years https://www.archaeologicalconservancy.org/event/floridas-mangrove-tour-2019/.  With this focus in mind, representing change over time in Florida prehistory, I moved the second stage of Bill’s model.

Searching for information on this topic is something I already have done. Many archaeological journals and press releases exists and were not too difficult to find and each describes the culture surrounding each site. What will be interesting is if any questions come second, as Bill describes it, from the data and finding the best tool to represent this data in a helpful and interactive way to transcend the purpose of the map provided by Florida’s Division of Historical Resources.

Bill’s introduction and first two chapters raise interesting concepts about tailoring a project to an audience.  A scholar that realizes the constraints of k-12 teaching due to standardized testing and their needs being different than that of the lay public, or key interest groups, or graduate students, is refreshing. This awareness of different groups within the public sphere and the attention span, background knowledge, and computer limitations that may be different in each group provide a thoughtful backdrop when it comes to designing the visual aspect of the project or structing the data. I feel that for my project, this will all come together in structing the data and testing different visualization models to determine which audience I’ll tailor the project towards, and which model will help me best tell my story. I feel like this is why Bill’s model is so versatile, because perhaps your target audience is the most important aspect that drives your project, or your data,  or your initial question, and this process for data visualization can lend itself towards all of these aspects and can widen the berth of projects that find this process a helpful.

Question for Bill: Interactive visualization seems to lend itself well to the Public historian’s tool kit. How would you address concerns over ‘Is the format of interactive visualization useful for or as scholarship?’