Zotero Maps: Visualizing Archaeology?
You can now map your Zotero Library:
Potential Use Cases:
Map Your Collection By Key Places:
Many records from library catalogs and journal databases come pre-loaded with geographic keywords. Zotero Maps lets you quickly see the relationships between the terms catalogers, authors, and publishers have assigned to the items in your collection. Similarly, as you apply your own geographic tags to items you can then explore those geographic relationships. Whether you’re looking at key locations in studies of avian flu, ethnographic work in the American southwest, or the history of the transatlantic slave trade, the tags associated with your items provide valuable geographic information.Map Places of Publication:
In many cases places of publication include crucial information about your items. If your working on a project involving the history of the book, how different media outlets cover an issue, or how different journals present distinct scientific points of view, the places in which those items are published can provide valuable insight.
In 2007, I was trying something along these lines using Platial (now deceased). Now – since you can add objects from things like Opencontext.org into your Zotero library, and describe these using tags, you could begin to build a map of not only ‘things’ but also the relevant reports etc, all from your browser, without doing any of the fancy coding stuff…
From my library:
Voyager Xdrive
I’m interested in exploring augmented realities with iPhones & other smartphones etc. Of course, where I live, you can’t actually get cell phone reception and with this being Canada, the data rates are ridiculous.
Anyway, rant aside… there are neat possibilities opening up. In an earlier post I mentioned the Wikitude World Browser, which grabs Wikipedia articles and overlays them on a ‘see-through’ type interface.
Lately, I’ve been made aware of another approach, the Voyager Xdrive. Essentially, this appears to be a hand-held guide to a historic location, with 3d reconstructions appearing at the appropriate point. My Italian is a bit rusty, and I always find it difficult when I can’t see the face of the person speaking but it seems to be quite an effective way of pulling archaeological VR off the desks of the archaeologists into the spaces where it should be understood.
I really feel the digital divide living where I do, able to read about but never able to play with these technologies…
