Dynamic Collections: A 3D Web Infrastructure for Artifact Engagement

Abstract

Archaeological collections are crucial in heritage studies and are used every day for training archaeologists and cultural heritage specialists. The recent developments in 3D acquisition and visualization technology has contributed to the rapid emergence of a large number of 3D collections, whose production is often justified as the democratization of data and knowledge production. Despite the fact that several 3D datasets are now available online, it is not always clear how the data – once stored – may be engaged by archaeology students, and the possible challenges the students may face in the learning process. The goal of the Dynamic Collections project at Lund University is to develop a novel 3D web infrastructure designed to support higher education and research in archaeology. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020, all teaching at Lund University moved online, reinforcing the urgency for such an infrastructure. By letting a group of students test an early version of the system as part of their online teaching, we were able to study how they used and interacted with an archaeological collection in 3D and explore the intersection of digital methods and pedagogy in archaeology. This article presents the preliminary results from this experiment.

Road Salt Damage to Historical Milestones Indicates Adaptation of Winter Roads to Future Climate Change May Damage Arctic Cultural Heritage

“…Such methods not only provide for a more empirically robust assessment than ocular methods, but also facilitate the easier integration of site-specific data into landscape models derived from LiDAR and other remote sensing techniques. The data and models may then also be used for virtual reconstructions for educational purposes or prior to restauration [77,78].…”

Shaping Education and Transforming Practices

“…Together with my colleagues at Lund University and the National Research Council of Italy-CNR, I have been experiencing this process within the framework activities of the Dynamic Collections project, a (small) 3D web infrastructure designed to support higher education and research in archaeology (Ekengren et al 2021). The ongoing development of the platform is primarily driven by its use by both teachers and students; rather than focusing solely on the technological development of the platform, one of the main challenges so far has been to identify and establish routines that encourage the use of data in a way that supports critical engagement and active participation within the learning process.…”

The Dynamic Collections project: providing structured online access to digital replicas

“…The Dynamic Collections started as a result of a collaboration between the Visual Computing Lab of ISTI-CNR (Italy) and the Digital Archaeology Laboratory at Lund University (Sweden) [13]. The project has developed an online system that hosts a number of digitised artefacts coming from university and museums reference collections, and provides functionalities to create, annotate and share custom assemblages of the available objects (hence, the name dynamic collections).…”