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Digital Art History - A Subject in Transition: Opportunities and Problems

Colin Beardon, University of Plymouth
Judy Mills and Martin Wright, Corinium Museum, Cirencester

Using Dramatic Representations to Explain Historical Artefacts on the Web

Keywords: Corinium, Roman Britain, material culture, social history, VRLM, interactive multimedia

Introduction

The MaRSH project is a collaboration between the Corinium Museum, Cirencester and the Exeter School of Arts and Design, University of Plymouth. It aims to investigate the potential of new, interactive Internet technologies to increase the public's knowledge and enthusiasm with respect to the Museum's collection of artefacts. It was partly funded by a grant from the AHRB (Arts and Humanities Research Board) Research Exchange programme. The initial four-month period for the project was extended to five months.

The Corinium Museum is a small to medium-sized museum with a particularly fine collection of artefacts from the period of the Roman occupation of Britain. It has active links with local archaeological, historical and civic societies and with many schools in the area, especially as there is a focus upon the period of Roman occupation within the United Kingdom school curriculum at Key Stage 2, or ages 7-11.

Exeter School of Arts and Design has expertise in multimedia on the world wide web, especially the use of 3D modelling in VRML. It has also developed an approach to multimedia design that sees it as needing to engage with the ideological debates of the discipline it works within (as in the Virtual Curator project1).

With this in mind, the project addresses aspects of historical explanation that are under-served by existing digital technologies. There are many attempts at putting digital catalogues online, and some notable examples of 3D modelling of buildings but, we argue, little has been done to date to address aspects of social history. We therefore decided to address the social contexts within which artefacts in the museum may have been used and to acknowledge that often there is no clearly accepted single narrative. After some discussion we decided that in the initial stages we would concentrate upon the theme of personal adornment, involving such matters as dress, hair, jewellery, etc. This theme would force us to try to highlight the personal, social and private aspects of history, rather than the grander and public aspects, and to foreground the female experience.

The project also differs from many funded projects in that its main aim is not to present material in a universal manner (i.e. to the community of Internet users in general). Rather it specifically addresses the local situation of a museum that relates strongly to the people that it serves and aims primarily to contribute to this inter-relationship.

Corinium

The present day town of Cirencester is located on the site of Corinium, which was the major Roman administrative centre for South-Western Britain. It was the second largest town in Roman Britain, only marginally smaller than London. Co-existent with its political importance, Corinium was of outstanding importance as an artistic and cultural centre and was home to one of the finest schools of provincial sculpture in Roman Britain as well as containing the largest mosaic workshop.2

Cirencester is one of the country's most fully excavated towns. It has one of the most complete archaeological archives for the Roman period, including the largest excavation and study of a fourth-century cemetery site in Western Europe.3 The latter has provided invaluable demographic information about the age, sex and health of the local population in the fourth century. The town has also yielded the largest provenanced coin collection in Roman Britain. This collection is a unique source of information not only about the economic life of the town but also changes in occupation.

Physically, Corinium was a walled town with four main gates and 26 towers and the town inside was over 1 km in diameter. Recent excavations have shown the foundations of many buildings within the town and a fairly accurate idea can be built up of what it would have looked like architecturally (Fig. 1).

{Corinium reconstruction}

Fig. 1. Artist's reconstruction of the town of Corinium from known excavations. © Cotswold District Council.

However, for a project that concerns itself with more personal matters, the town itself could form no more than backdrop and we were required to find a location that was more specific.

Within Cirencester, one of the sites that has been most fully excavated is the Beeches Road Town House, which we believe was constructed in the mid- to late-fourth century. Excavations between 1970 and 1973 revealed the full outline of the villa and a number of spectacular mosaics, including the Hare Mosaic which has now been relocated to the Museum.4 The site is of particular interest because it does not fit easily into accepted knowledge concerning that kind of building.

Working from a commissioned artist's impression of the villas (Fig. 2) we discussed at length the possibilities of using the interior spaces, as opposed to the exterior space between the villas, as the location for our multimedia piece. The conclusion was that for clearly personal matters, such as dressing, interiors were more appropriate, but for topics on the boundaries between personal and public the external space would provide many opportunities.

{Beeches Rd houses}

Fig. 2. Artist's impression of the Beeches Road town houses. © Cotswold District Council

The Technologies

The project defines the technologies that it is interested in as meeting the following criteria.

This was decided because we wanted both Internet access, and for schools and other users to be able to use the site off-line via a CD-ROM. It causes certain problems, which we will discuss later.

The main technical design issue to be addressed by the prototype was the relative advantages of 2D and 3D representations when dealing with this type of subject material. We therefore decided to focus upon two particular technologies (beyond standard HTML and JPEG). These were JavaScript for interactivity in 2D5, and VRML 2.0 for modelling and interactivity in 3D.6

Website design

The prototype website (http://www.adr.plym.ac.uk/MaRSH) produced by phase I of the project aimed to be an exploration of possibilities. Various approaches were explored and documented. From this, the most useful findings concern the overall design of a site that attempts to address social and personal history. This architecture can be explained in terms of five main components.

  1. Artefacts. Of importance here is a catalogue of selected items from the collection. For the prototype we selected 30 items and created for each object one page, which contains an image and three text fields. There is simple text about the artefact aimed at an average 7 year-old, more advanced text about the artefact for older children and adults, and additional information relevant to the object (concerning materials, customs, archaeological discoveries, etc.)
  2. Characters. In order to make the issue of personal adornment 'come alive' we decided upon a cast of characters. Again, we commissioned an artist to produce simple 2D images of the characters. We worked with an initial set of eight, and each had a web page, which included the image and a short text. The user would be required to select one of these characters and then adopt his or her identity throughout their visit.
  3. Activities. The main interest (and success) of the project so far has been to develop simple interactive pages which relate the artefacts in the Museum to some situation involving one of the characters. A scenario is proposed, such as: "An important official is coming to dinner and Julia must dress". Various activities are then presented, such as choosing a hairstyle, a hair dye, jewellery, etc. In each case a number of options are presented, but each one has some link back to the collection of artefacts. For example, nine hairstyles are proposed; four are derived from coins, three from a tombstone, one from a statue, and one from a small brass weight. Users can access the pages for these artefacts and can find out something about their historical period and social significance. When they then make a selection, the character of Julia would adopt that hairstyle and move to the next stage of dressing.
  4. Location. In order to locate these activities, we experimented with both 2D and 3D scenarios. In 2D we found vague backgrounds, with light colour washes, were preferable to near-photographic quality images. Mainly, we wanted to explore 3D models using VRML and we built detailed models of the main villa (internal and well as external), the second villa (external only), the town of Corinium (as in Fig. 1), the surrounding countryside and a typical farm located about 4 km from the town. These involved a considerable amount of work. A number of technical difficulties were encountered (e.g. different browsers rounding numbers in different ways).
  5. Narrative. In order to bind these various elements together we began to develop various narratives. The main villa was occupied by a merchant (Marcus) and his wife (Julia). Their son and his wife lived opposite and his son visited the local farms to collect wool and perform various official functions. Though not made explicit at this stage, we increasingly found that the larger narrative was necessary to give coherence to the set of actions and characters, to ensure that specific historical topics were being addressed, and to be able to introduce a more socially engaged level of description.

Internet Standards

When we chose to use Internet standards we naively thought that anything we implemented would work in the same way on any computer configured for Internet access. Alas, this is not the case. There were demonstrably different results for the same web page depending on:

We estimate that for a fully functioning product there would be more than two thousand different configurations that could produce slightly different output. Our testing meant that every page was tested on Apple and PC, on Windows 98, Windows Me and Apple OS9, on monitors sized 1024 x 768 and 800 x 600, on both IE and Netscape version 3.0 and 4.0, on Cosmoplayer and Cortona. This meant that we were reasonably confident that our web pages would work on 96 basic configurations. Sometimes, in order to achieve this, we had to compromise our initial and desired design. It was also very time consuming.

Conclusions

The project aims to address the local situation of a museum that works closely with its local community. Within this context we believe we have shown that using multimedia to address the social context of a collection of artefacts is possible. Though we have only produced a prototype to date, we believe that others could build upon this work, and we are confident that a working and useful site could be produced for this Museum within a budget of around £30,000.

The limitation of client technologies meant that for practical reasons we were unable to keep sufficient information to satisfy possible choices a user makes and to sustain the personalised imagery beyond one or two pages. A decision will eventually have to be taken to produce either a web-based product (and keep user profiles on the server) or a stand-alone product (and deliver a CD-ROM, rather than a website).

The development of 3D modelling proved to be problematic. It consumed a lot of our resources and though it was attractive to audiences (we called it the 'wow-factor') it did little to advance our serious aims. It invites the user to think in terms of TV documentary: that what they are seeing is real, when often we do not know some detail. It can also be visually overpowering, distracting the user from the main event, which may be as refined as selecting a ring. If we want to go beyond 2D then, rather than the present 3D geometries, it would be preferable to work more as the theatre does, with degrees of detail – background, middle distance, foreground, close up and microscope – and to have different kinds of operations at each level.

Finally, to give ultimate coherence to the piece we need the help of dramatic script writers, who could work within our activities and historical themes and develop the personal histories and produce the conflicts and tensions that would give the necessary realism and interest. At present we are considering exactly what form these 'interactive scripts' should take.

The full prototype website can be found at http://www.adr.plym.ac.uk/marsh/index.html

The slide presentation at CHArt 2001 can also be downloaded from http://www.adr.plym.ac.uk/marsh/down.html

November 2001

Notes

1. Beardon, C. & Worden, S. (1995), "The Virtual Curator: multimedia technologies and the roles of museums", Barrett, E. & Redmond, M. (eds.) Contextual Media: multimedia and interpretation. MIT Press, 63-86. {back to paper}

2. Darvill, T. & Gerrard, C. (1994), Cirencester Town and Landscape. C.A.T; McWhirr, A. (1976), Archaeology and History of Cirencester: B.A.R. 30. {back to paper}

3. McWhirr, A., Viner, L. & Wells, C. (1982), Romano-British Cemeteries at Cirencester. Cirencester Excavations II. Cirencester Excavation Committee: Cirencester. {back to paper}

4. McWhirr, A. (1986), Houses In Roman Cirencester. Cirencester Excavations III. Cirencester Excavation Committee: Cirencester. {back to paper}

5. Wagner, R. et al (1996), JavaScript Unleashed. Sams.net: Indianapolis. {back to paper}

6. Marrin, C. and Campbell, B. (1997), Teach Yourself VRML 2. Sams.net: Indianapolis. {back to paper}