Stranger in These Parts – An Interactive Fiction for Teaching

One of the things I want my students to engage with in my ‘cities and countryside in antiquity’ class is the idea that in antiquity, one navigates space not with a two dimensional top-down mental map, but rather as a series of what-comes-next. That navigating required socializing, asking directions, paying attention to landmarks.  I’m in part inspired by R. Ling’s 1990 article, Stranger in Town, and in part by Elijah Meek’s and Walter Scheidel’s ORBIS project. Elijah and I have in fact been talking about marrying a text-based interface for Orbis for this very reason.

But I’m also interested in gaming, simulation and storytelling for their own merits, so I’m trying my hand at an interactive fiction written using Inform 7  along the same lines. Instead of interfacing directly with the model represented in Orbis, I’ve queried Orbis for travel data, and have begun to write a bit of a narrative around it. (One could’ve composed this in Latin, in which case you’d get not just the spatial ideas, but also the language learning too!).

Anyway, I present to you version 0.1, a beta (perhaps ‘alpha’ is more appropriate) for ‘Stranger in These Parts‘, by Shawn Graham. I’m using Playfic to host it. I’d be happy to hear your thoughts. (And a hint to get going: check to see what you’ve got on you, and ‘ask Eros’ about things…)

Obviously, some things are lacking at the moment. I’ll want the player to be able to select different modes of transport sometimes (and thus to skip settings). There’s a point system, but it’s meant more to signal to the students that there is more to find. Depending on which NPCs a student talks with, different kinds of routes should become available. Time passes within the IF, and so night time matters – no travel then.  As far as I know, there’s no such thing as multi-player IF or head-to-head IF, but that’d be fun if it were possible: can you get to Pompeii before your classmates?

In terms of the learning exercise, the students will play through this, and then explore the same territory in Orbis. In the light of their readings and experiences, I’ll be asking them to reflect on the Roman experience of space. Once we’ve done that, now being suitably disabused of 21st century views of how to navigate space, we’ll start looking at the landscape archaeology of other ancient cultures.

That’s the plan, at any rate.

 

I know that I know nothing

Commuting in Ottawa is an interesting experience. It seems the entire city disappears in the summer, beguiling one into thinking that a commute that takes 30 – 40 minutes in August will continue to be 30 – 40 minutes in September.

This morning, I was pushing 1 hr and 40 minutes. On the plus side, this gives me the opportunity to listen to the podcasts from Scholars’ Lab, from the University of Virginia (available via iTunes U).  As I listen to this excellent series of talks (one talk per commute…) I realize just how profoundly shallow my knowledge is of the latest happenings in Digital Humanities – and that’s a good thing! For instance, I learned about Intrasis, a system from Sweden for recording archaeological sites (or indeed, any kind of knowledge) that focuses on generating relationships from the data, rather than specifying beforehand a relationships table (and it melds very well with GIS). This is cool. I learned also about Heurist, a tool for managing research.  Also ‘Heml’ – the Historical Event Markup and Linking Project, lead by Bruce Robertson. As I listened to this last talk, as Bruce described the problems of marking up events/places/persons using non-Gregorian calendars and so on, it struck me that this problem was rather similar to the one of defining sites in a GIS – what do you do when the boundaries are fuzzy? How do you avoid the in-built precision of dots-on-a-map, or URLS that lead to one specific location? Time is Space, as Einstein taught us….

The upshot is, I feel very humbled when I listen to these in-depth and fascinating talks – I feel rather out of my depth. At the same time, I am excited to be able to participate in such a fast moving field.  Hopefully, my small contributions to agent modeling for history generate the same kind of excitement for others!

Second Site: Keith Challis’ work on archaeological visualization

I learned this morning of Keith Challis’ blog, ‘Second Site‘. Keith is a researcher with Birmingham University’s ‘Visual and Spatial Technology Center’.

Keith is exploring ways of using game engines to render & explore archaeological landscapes (a great use of LIDAR if ever I saw one).  In a recent post, ‘Ideas of Landscape‘ he writes,

One of the key ideas behind using computer games to visualise archaeological landscapes is that they take us away from the god-like view from above that typical computer-based visualisation provides.  In Ideas of Landscape, Matthew Johnson reflects on the dichotomy between the romantic, Wordsworthian view of landscape, rooted amongst other things in the view from above, and Hoskin’s assertion that “the real work [in the study of landscape] is accomplished by the men and women with muddy boots…”
Computer visualisation, particularly of remotely collected landscape data (for example the airborne lidar used here) has almost inevitably forced us to explore only one path; landscapes become data objects, interpreted as a whole and understood as abstract entities, devoid of sense and experience.

The first person view of game-based visualisation places us back in the realm of “muddy boots” landscape is explored and experienced, like Hoskins we “explore England on foot”.  Does that improve our understanding of landscape?  At one level probably not, arguably morphology of landscape is best appreciated from above, but landscape is more than form and function, and the relationship between elements of landscape is better appreciated from the ground.

This connected (in my head, at least), with some ideas I’ve long held, about the way landscape-as-social-network can give us something of that ‘muddy boots’ experience, in terms of landscape as culture.  That at least is the premise of one paper of mine, ‘The Space Between’ (full text)

The key thing to remember I suppose is that the cartographic understanding of landscape is a fairly recent innovation, and that we miss important aspects of human interaction with the land if the map is our only tool.

Virtual Worlds: and the most powerful graphics engine there is

Virtual worlds are not all about stunning immersive 3d graphics. No, to riff on the old Infocom advertisement, it’s your brain that matters most.  That’s right folks, the text adventure. Long time readers of this blog will know that I have experimented with this kind of immersive virtual world building for archaeological and historical purposes. But, with one thing and another, that all got put on a back shelf.

Today, I discover via Jeremiah McCall’s Historical Simulations / Serious Games in the Classroom site Interactive Fiction (text adventure) games about Viking Sagas – part of Christopher Fee’s English 401 course at Gettysburg College.

Yes, complete interactive fictions about various parts of the Viking world! (see the list below). I’m downloading these to my netbook to play on my next plane journey.

Now, interactive fiction can be quite complex, with interactions and artificial intelligence as compelling as anything generated in 3d – see the work of Emily Short. And while creating immersive 3d can be quite complex and costly in hardware/software, Inform 7 allows its generation quite easily (AND as a bonus teaches a lot about effective world building!)

Explore the Sites and Sagas of the Ancient and Medieval North Atlantic through one of Settings of The Secret of Otter’s Ransom IF Adventure Game:The earliest version of the Otter’s Ransom game was designed to be extremely simple, and to illustrate the pedagogical aims of the project as well as the ease of composing with Inform 7 software: In this iteration the game contains no graphics or links, utilizes very little in the way of software functions, tricks, or “bells and whistles,” and contains a number of rooms in each of sixteen different game settings; as the project progresses, more rooms, objects and situations will be added by the students and instructor of English 401, as well as appropriate “bells and whistles” and relevant links to pertinent multimedia objects from the Medieval North Atlantic project.

Using simple, plain English commands such as “go east,” “take spear-head,” “look at sign” and “open door” to navigate, the player may move through each game setting; moreover, as a by-product of playing the game successfully, a player concurrently may learn a great deal about a number of specific historical sites, as well as about such overarching themes as the history of Viking raids on monasteries, the character of several of the main Norse gods, and the volatile mix of paganism and Christianity in Viking Britain. The earliest form of the game is open-ended in each of the sixteen settings, but eventually the complete “meta-game” of The Secret of Otter’s Ransom will end when the player gathers the necessary magical knowledge to break an ancient curse, which concurrently will require that player to piece together enough historical and cultural information to pass an exit quiz.

Play all-text versions of the site games from The Secret of Otter’s Ransom using the Frotz game-playing software.

Play versions of the site games which include relevant images using the Windows Glulxe game-playing software.

In order to view images the player must “take” them, as in “take inscription;” very large images may come up as “[MORE]” which indicates that text will scroll off the screen when the image is displayed. Simply hit the return key once or twice and the image will be displayed.

We hope that you will enjoy engaging in adventure-style exploration of Viking sites and objects from the Ancient and Medieval North Atlantic!

Start by saving one of the following modules onto your desktop; next click the above game-playing software. When you try to open the Frotz software (you may have to click “Run” twice) your computer will ask you to select which game you’d like to play; simply select the module on your desktop to begin your adventure; you may have to search for “All Files.” Each game setting includes a short paragraph describing tips, traps, and techniques of playing:

Andreas Ragnarok Cross

Balladoole Ship Burial

Braaid Farmstead

Broch of Gurness

Brough of Birsay Settlement

Brussels Cross

Chesters Roman Fort

Cronk ny Merriu Fortlet

Cunningsburgh Quarry

Helgafell Settlement

Hvamm Settlement

Hadrian’s Wall

Jarlshof Settlement

Knock y Doonee Ship Burial

Laugar Hot Spring

Lindisfarne Priory

Maes Howe Chambered Cairn

Maughold – Go for a Wild Ride

Maughold- Look for the Sign of the Boar’s Head

Maughold – The Secret of the Otter Stone

Mousa Broch

Ring of Brodgar

Rushen Abbey Christian Lady

Ruthwell Cross

Shetland Magical Adventure

Skara Brae

Stones of Stenness

Sullom Voe Portage

Tap O’Noth Hillfort

Temple of Mithras at Carrawburgh

Ting Wall Holm Assembly Place

Tynwald Assembly Place

Yell Boat Burial

Seminars on GIS & Archaeology

seen over at Stoa.org

Contemporary Roles for Spatial Analysis in Archaeology

The UCL Institute of Archaeology Seminar Series (January–March 2010)
31-34 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PY
Mondays 4pm, Room 612 (followed by a wine reception)

Timetable

11 January 2010 – Benjamin Ducke (Oxford Archaeology)
‘Science without software no longer. Archaeological data analysis and the Open Source paradigm’

18 January 2010 – Chris Green (University of Leicester)
‘Temporal GIS and archaeology’

25 January 2010 – Tony Wilkinson (Durham University)
‘From household to region: incorporating agency into the interpretation of regional settlement’

1 February 2010 – Tim Williams (University College London)
‘Earth viewers and GIS in archaeological resource management: access and accessibility’

8 February 2010 – Luke Premo (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology)
‘A spatially explicit model of Early Stone Age archaeological landscapes’

15 February 2010 (Reading Week – no seminar)

22 February 2010 – Frederic Fol Leymarie (Goldsmiths College)
‘Advances in 3D procedural modelling with applications to archaeology’

1 March 2010 – Michael Barton (Arizona State University)
‘Stories of the past or science of the future? Archaeology and computational social science’

8 March 2010 – Irmela Herzog (Archaeological Heritage Management of the Rhineland)
‘Patterns of movement, least cost paths and our understanding of the archaeological record’

15 March 2010 – Kate Devlin (Goldsmiths College)
‘Illuminating virtual reconstructions of past environments’

22 March 2010 – Mark Lake (University College London)
‘Rewind and fast‐forward: how archaeological GIS analyses recapitulate general theory’

I know Luke Premo and Mark Lake have both been doing ABM work; maybe somebody could record these lectures and post them somewhere… I’m still in no danger of being anywhere near London.

I’ve been reading around historians’ use of GIS lately; I think the archaeologists are far in the lead – but there’s still the problem of moving from using GIS to recognise patterns to using GIS to explain the patterns it seems to me.

Of course, I’m happy to be wrong on that.

2006 ‘Networks, Agent-Based Modeling, and the Antonine Itineraries’. In The Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 19.1: 45-64.

It occurred to me that some of you might like to read this.

04_Graham

I’ve got some other papers kicking around that I would like to expose to a wider readership; I’ll post those too, once I find them on this machine again… my how cluttered things can get!

I’ve been thinking of doing this for some time, but the kick in the pants I needed was courtesy of http://publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com/2009/06/please-post-your-papers-on-internet.html

Abstract:

This paper presents a way of looking at Roman space from a Roman perspective, and suggests ways in which this point of view might open up new approaches in Roman archaeology. It turns on one conception of Roman space in particular, preserved for us in the Antonine Itineraries. Working from a position that considers the context of the itineraries as movement-through-space, this paper presents an investigation using social network analysis and agent-based simulation to re-animate the itineraries. The itineraries for Iberia, Gaul, Italy, and Britain are considered. The results of the social network analysis suggest structural differences in the way that the itineraries presented space to the reader/traveler. The results of the simulation of information diffusion through these regions following the routes in the itineraries suggest ways that this conception of space affected the cultural and material development of these regions. Suggestions for extending the basic model for more complicated archaeolgoical analyses are presented.

The Space Between: The Geography of Social Networks in the Tiber Valley

The following is somewhere in the publication chain, and has been there since about 2004. Reference:

(in press) ‘The Space Between: Places and Connections in the Tiber Valley’ in Coarelli, F. and Patterson, H. (eds) Mercator Placidissimus: the Tiber Valley in Antiquity. New research in the upper and middle river valley. (Proceedings of the Conference held at the British School at Rome, 27-28 Feb. 2004). Rome. British School at Rome – Edizioni QVASAR.

The Space Between:

The Geography of Social Networks in the Tiber Valley

In a Far Side cartoon by Gary Larson, a man with a crumpled map wants to get from point B to point A. The farmer responds, ‘Beats me, sonny. Most people want to go the other way’. The joke underscores the fact that most people have a mental diagram of how places interconnect. That mental diagram is laid out as a list and it depends on the sequence of way-points along the way, a series of connections from place to place. It is more like the London Tube map than the OS or IGM maps.

In the Roman world, space was understood as an itinerary, as a sequence of what comes next[1]. In the Tiber Valley Project[2], we use a GIS to understand the spatial relationships between sites and places, with a very Euclidian understanding of space as a plane viewed from on high. How we represent space, and how the Romans understood space, are completely at odds with one another, and so we miss important elements of the experience of living in the Tiber Valley. When viewed from on high, it is too easy to put too much emphasis on ‘South-Etruria’, ‘Sabina’, ‘left bank’, ‘right bank’ and the ‘Tiber as a Barrier’, as mental categories, almost in isolation from one another. Recent work by Horden and Purcell puts the emphasis on understanding the ancient Mediterranean as a series of interconnected micro-regions[3]. They argue that we must understand the connections to understand ancient life. Yet, we use the GIS simply to represent locations, rather than to understand what might be called a ‘geography of relations’. We neglect that places were understood in the past to have particular relationships with other places, and the way we use GIS reinforces this neglect[4].

What happens if, informed by a network perspective, we look at the geography of the Tiber Valley from a point of view that puts the emphasis on those interconnections? The ‘science of networks’ has developed rapidly over the last few years[5], and it is expressly concerned with understanding the processes that occur on the network structures we find. That is, if we have put dots on the map, the science of networks might be able to tell us something of what happened in the space between those dots and what those dots represent. Batty makes the important point that what might appear to be random in Euclidean space (our dots on the map), can in fact be rather ordered in terms of networks[6]. This paper concentrates first on the problem of representing these connections, and then turns to possible avenues to explore their meaning. It aims to demonstrate the potential power of a network science point of view for understanding the Roman world.

Representing space

In this volume, there are many maps of the middle Tiber Valley. North is always at the top of the map. There is no real reason why we do this, other than the dictates of convention. Since that is how we learn to read maps, that is why we do it. But it does have an effect on how we interpret the information displayed on the map. Rome is always at the bottom of these maps. Even if we did not know a single thing about the City of Rome, there is an implicit assumption, by displaying the map in this way, that everything and everyone must make its way to Rome.

There is empirical evidence to suggest that how we display information on a map affects how we interpret it[7]. At conferences or in the lecture hall, even the size of the screen has an effect on how we interpret the interrelatedness of the information displayed, especially when we are displaying point-data. Researchers have discovered that, when viewing point-data displayed on a screen (what the viewers implicitly recognize as a map), people are more inclined to associate points together in the vertical dimension, rather than in the horizontal.[8] That is, up-down relationships are more likely to be seen in the patterning, rather than left-right. Viewers tend to regard points in the up-down dimension as being more alike, more similar, even when the distance between them is exactly the same as for the horizontal points.

Is the Tiber a barrier or a bridge? When we display the information in our GIS as convention would dictate, we naturally focus on north-south relationships, rather than east-west. We should rethink that. Set your GIS to display maps with west at the top, and see what else becomes apparent. Fig. 1 represents the distribution of stamped bricks (from the British School at Rome collection) in South Etruria. There is seemingly no pattern to this distribution, at least by eye. But when the same information is displayed as in fig. 2, with a 90° rotation, suddenly east-west and trans-Tiber connections jump to the fore (compare with fig. 6 below).

If how we display and represent space affects how we interpret the importance of relationships between places, should we expect the Roman conception of space to have had any different effect? We can approach this problem of understanding the connections between places from another angle, this time using our best guide to the Roman understanding of how places are connected: the Antonine Itineraries. In the Itineraries, the sequence of towns to visit to get from one part of the empire to any other part is listed. Instead of looking at these itineraries plotted on a map, we can follow the lead of Henry Beck, the inventor of the Tube Map, and represent the Itineraries as a network diagram, where the points are the towns, connected to the next town in the itinerary. This network diagram is a social network diagram, because it indicates something of the social, commercial, and cultural interactions between individual towns (for why else would one want to get from town A to town B?).

Geography and social network analysis

Some urban geographers now argue for an understanding of cities and settlement structures in terms of social relationships and their intensity where different social networks intersect[9]. Social life works across various networks, and cities are the foci of multiple overlapping social networks (think of the Third-World immigrants in modern Rome who peddle trinkets to North American tourists. Here in one city are two worlds that overlap, occasionally touch, but are entirely foreign to one another). Networks extend beyond the city, linking different cities together in different ways, but they also incorporate every point in between along the continuum of settlement types from humble rural farmsteads upwards. In this view, cities themselves are nodes of social relations in time and space. At any given time a city will be a node in any number of different networks of power and influence[10].

Networks do not exist independently of the people within them, and it is not enough that mere interconnections should exist. Individuals matter. Individuals must make something of these interconnections, for the networks to work[11]. This idea can be seen to underlie Laurence’s recent discussion of the transformation of Britain into a Roman province[12]. He explicitly considers the Itineraries as evidence for the purposeful reconfiguration of existing networks, over which people, goods, and capital flowed, into a distinctly Roman pattern.

An example from Italy concerns the creation of fora (market-centres) and the process of establishing control in newly centuriated land, instances where individual élite intervene in the landscape. This process represents the conscious decision to warp and reconfigure local network patterns[13]. This process is visible at Forum Novum, a settlement established in the 2nd century BC, upstream from Rome along the Aia tributary of the Tiber, in the Sabina region. A town centre was built, as well as a market for the surrounding farms. There was much ostentatious display and the typical self-aggrandizement of the local elite who paid for the development, including an aqueduct and an amphitheatre for games[14]. Yet, it never grew into a town as such, and there was little in the way of housing. Even today its modern successor, Vescovio, is not much more than a church and a restaurant. After the initial capitalization on the intersecting trade and farming networks in the river valley where Forum Novum is situated brought the settlement into being, those networks were evidently not sufficient to transform it from a minor centre. This is because of its end-point positioning in relationship to other settlements in the networks of trade and communications in the Tiber Valley, more on which below.

A network approach to cities and settlements can be more than metaphorical. Social network analysis[15], which normally considers the ‘vertices’ or ‘nodes’ in a network to be individual persons, can be adapted for our purposes to look for connections within and across cities and space. This is why we reconsidered the Itineraries as a type of social network. Then we can ask, what does position here vis-à-vis other ‘nodes’ imply for the dynamics of interaction and the overall global structure? When we consider the connections between towns today from that perspective, we find occasional long distance links. These are the motorways and so on which allow travel from one city to another without stopping in the little towns in between. These long distance links are important, because they let information travel across the network in a much quicker route than would otherwise be possible. They turn the network into what is known in network science as a ‘small-world’[16]. A small world is simply one in which, locally, most ‘nodes’ (be they people or cities) are tightly linked to neighbouring nodes, but a few long-distance connections have the global effect of shortening the average number of steps it takes to get from one node to any other node chosen at random, as in fig. 3[17]. That is to say, global characteristics of the network emerge from local interactions. When the lights went out in North America, London, and Italy in the summer of 2003, this was because the electricity grid has similar long distance connections that allowed errors to travel quickly and accumulate. In an economic network, the same ‘small-world’ principal allows capital to accumulate and be used effectively. In a social network, it allows certain people to become indispensable because they effectively can control where the information goes. They can control who knows what.

The Itineraries do not have any of these long-distance connections (fig. 4). The Roman world was not ‘small’ in the sense described above. There are some sea-connections in the Itineraries, but not enough to actually affect the way information travels through such a network. This means that, from a network analysis point of view, the interconnections between towns in the Empire are exceedingly fragile. Only a few ‘links’ would have to be broken, for the whole network to appear fragmented. Throughout human history, the majority of people never travelled much further than a handful of miles from their place of birth. Geographic knowledge of distance places therefore had to be provided through some other agency. On this evidence, to the Roman who wanted to travel some distance using these Itineraries, it would not take much bad news to persuade him that a particular route was blocked.

Yet appearances can be deceiving

When we actually examine the road network (fig. 5, a detail of the Roman roads around Rome), it is clear that there are many alternative routes, many different ways to get from point A to point B. This discrepancy is the crux of the matter. The global picture of how places interact available to a Roman in the form of the itineraries provides only for a limited number of ways to get from A to B, while the local picture, known to the people who live in an area, suggest multiple pathways.

Batty argues that in transportation systems, the adding of new layers to existing systems – such as canals to road networks, rail to canal networks – has the effect of creating small-world conditions[18]. In this sense, the cursus publicus as a rapid specialized communications system for the Emperor[19], overlaid on the existing transport system, may have created small-world conditions for the Emperor’s intelligence network, with all the attendant implications for wealth and knowledge condensation[20].

Local routes and pathways

To understand local multiple pathways, and their implications for how geography was understood, the gravity settlement model developed by Rihll and Wilson[21] was used to study the interconnections between sites using stamped brick, identified during the South Etruria Survey, in the Tiber Valley. Rihll and Wilson’s process works on modelling the amount of interaction between places, based on the assumption that places closer together will be more likely to interact, than places further apart. This mathematical model is not built on any other geographic information, other than the relative positioning of each site, based on its x and y coordinates. While a multitude of sites used brick, comparatively few used stamped bricks. Not every brick was stamped, of course, but the presence of a stamped brick probably indicates a larger shipment of brick. Patterns of supply can reflect the social ties of the builders, so the distribution of different stamp types can be used as an indicator of the degree to which the owners/builders of a site were engaged in the games of competitive display with each other, both in the countryside and the Metropolis[22].

What was interesting about this model applied to the Tiber Valley was the way it suggested interactions changed over time (fig. 6, the output from this model). To the naked eye, the distribution of sites using stamped brick does not appear appreciably different from one period to the next. Yet, to the model, subtle differences in positioning create different network patterns of interaction. At some periods, strong trans-Tiber connections are suggested amongst sites using stamped brick; other times, more north-and-south connections; sometimes certain main roads are implied, such as the via Cassia; other times, the use of the Tiber is implied as the route for these interactions. It is interesting to note how the east-west connections suggested by this model recall the same connections apparent to the eye when we turned the map in fig. 1 ninety degrees. These are as much social interactions as geographical interactions, and so suggest a much more complicated geography than one in which every product uniformly makes its way to the bottom of our map, to Rome.

These interactions also are implied in the archaeometry of stamped bricks. Seventy-five stamped bricks from the Tiber valley were tested using X-ray fluorescence[23]. The results were then correlated with the information on the stamps. Contrary to what we would expect it seems that not all bricks carrying the same stamp type were made from the same clays. There are also cases where multiple land-owners exploited the same clay sources. Some of the tested bricks were transported up the valley from where they were made; others were transported down stream; still others from one side of the valley to the other. This seemingly goes against our functionalist, cost-of-transport view of the economy, but it does point to a somewhat neglected side of the consumer city model: the social relationships that mediated trade[24].

The local and the global

Assume for a moment that all trade flows downstream, and like the Roman informed by the Antonine Itinerary we recognize only one route from point A to point B. It is here, in the discrepancy between local and global knowledge of geography, that an individual or community can make money and impact the economy. In trade, it is not the cost that matters so much as the profit that can be made. So for the well-connected individual (as in fig. 7) it should be easy to work out the discrepancy between the local and the global – between what she knows, and what her buyers know. It is ‘she’ because the single most important individual in the social network of the brick industry, the individual who sat in the very centre, was Domitia Lucilla, mother of Marcus Aurelius[25]. Over 200 people can be connected to her in only a few steps, making the industry a small-world, and putting her in a position to control the flow of information in the trade. She would have known, as a function of her position in the network, about clay sources and building contracts, about the amount of profit that could be made for a given distance of trade, whether upstream, downstream, overland, or overseas. To be able to call on clients, to be able to use the resources of skilled slaves, to have the right connections, allowed Domitia Lucilla and other well-connected individuals to get the material to where it was wanted with a minimum of fuss.

However, because of the way geographic knowledge was formulated in the Roman world, the perception of cost-of-transport could well have been out of kilter with the reality. The person buying would not necessarily have known the routes, the difficulties, except in the broadest possible terms. That meant that the buyer would find a certain cost level to be acceptable, even when that cost was in reality much higher than circumstances should have actually dictated. Today it would be similar to the way that, if we are not plumbers, we are at the mercy of the “cow-boy” who tells us the work is going to take longer and cost more than in truth it does. Most emperors were not, almost by definition, stupid men. Why do they invest so much in the brick trade? It may be that a significant factor is the discrepancy between the local and the global which makes the otherwise humble building trade economically valuable (remembering that brick making was an adjunct to agriculture), and allows it to function in the way that is visible archaeometrically. This is in line with what people such as Janet DeLaine have suggested concerning ideologies of construction, and the use of so-called ‘exotic’ materials[26]. ‘Exotic’ was in the eye of the beholder, and could even apply to something as humble as brick, if it seemed that it was difficult to obtain. That difficulty depended on how one perceived space, and the interconnections between places.

Conclusion

In the Tiber Valley, the relationships between places change over time, and they are not in the patterns we expect. As Batty argued[27], we need to move from representing locations, to representing relationships. If merely we study the ‘dots on the map’, we miss important facets of the way the social and economic geography of the Roman world worked. ‘Dots on the map’ represents a local understanding of space. To get to the global, as preserved for us in works such as the Antonine Itineraries, we need to explore the space between the two levels. Network science offers us a formal methodology for exploring the space between the local and the global. Networks are not static, nor are they deterministic. They evolve, for they change in response to the decisions people make, but they also influence those decisions. They can even make brick exotic.

Abstract

In displaying archaeological information as points on a map, we lose elements of the social and economic geography of the region we are studying. This paper suggests a methodology for exploring the space between our ‘dots-on-the-map’, based on the rapidly developing ‘science of networks’. It takes as a case study the distribution of sites using stamped brick in the Tiber Valley. It suggests that contradictions between local and global understandings of spatial relationships were exploitable economic opportunities.

Visualizzando i dati archeologici come punti su una mappa, perdiamo elementi della geografia socio-economica dell’area che stiamo studiando. Questo contributo suggerisce una metodologia per esplorare lo spazio compreso tra i “puntini”, basata sui costanti sviluppi della “scienza delle relazioni”. Come esempio, si è scelto la distribuzione dei bolli laterizi nella valle del Tevere. Tale esempio suggerisce che le contraddizioni tra le percezioni locali e globali delle relazioni spaziali potevano essere sfruttate a livello economico.

Bibliography

Barabàsi 2002: A.L. Barabàsi, Linked: The New Science of Networks, Cambridge 2002.

Batty 2003: M. Batty, Network Geography: Relations, Interactions, Scaling and Spatial Processes in GIS [Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis Working Paper #63, at www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/working_papers/paper63.pdf]. To be published in D. Unwin (ed.), Re-Presenting GIS, Chichester 2003.

Borgatti et al. 1996: S.P. Borgatti – M.G. Everett – L.C. Freeman, UCINET IV Version 1.64 [Natick, MA, Analytic Technologies URL: http:www.analytic.com], 1996.

Borgatti 2002: S.P. Borgatti, Keyplayer v.1.1 [Natick, MA, Analytic Technologies URL: http:www.analytic.com.] 2002.

Bouchaud 2000: J.P. Bouchaud – M. Mézard, Wealth Condensation in a Simple Model of Economy, in Physica CCLXXXII, 2000, p. 536.

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Buchanan 2002: M. Buchanan, Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks, New York 2002.

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Acknowledgements: Thanks to Mark Wakefield for the computer modeling. Thanks also to Thea Politis, and Rick Valin for comments, and to the BSR for access to the South Etruria Collection of stamped bricks. Errors remain my own. The original research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Overseas Research Studentship Scheme administered by the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals of the Universities of the UK.

[1] Brodersen 2001.

[2] Patterson-Millett 1998; Patterson 2004.

[3] Horden-Purcell 2000.

[4] Cf. Batty 2003, pp. 2-3 on the difference between ‘Geographic Information Systems’ and ‘Geographic Information Science’.

[5] Barabasi 2002; Watts 2003 for recent syntheses of the topic.

[6] Batty 2003, p. 5.

[7] Montello et al. 2003, pp. 316-331.

[8] Montello et al. 2003, p. 317.

[9] Massey et al. 1999, p. vii.

[10] Massey et al. 1999, pp. 42-49, 100-136.

[11] Massey et al. 1999, pp. 161-163.

[12] Laurence 2001a.

[13] Cf. Laurence 2001b, p. 596, 598 on the space-economy of Roman Italy.

[14] Gaffney et al. 2001.

[15] For the basics of which, see Wasserman-Faust 1994.

[16] The most accessible discussion of the characteristics of a ‘small-world’ is Watts 2003, pp. 69-100. Cf. also Watts-Strogatz 1998.

[17] Watts 1999.

[18] Batty 2003, pp. 18-20.

[19] Cf. Kolb 2001.

[20] Bouchaud-Mézard 2000, p. 536, and Buchanan 2002, pp. 195-196.

[21] Rihll-Wilson 1991.

[22] Graham 2002, pp. 100-7; Graham forthcoming on using the Tiber as infrastructure; cf. De Laine 2002.

[23] Graham 2002, pp. 52-73.

[24] Wallace Hadrill 1991

[25] Cf. Graham forthcoming on controlling the brick industry.

[26] De Laine 2002

[27] Batty 2003

Platial and Pleiades – rss feeds

I’ve become a beta-tester on Platial. The RSS feed tool seems to work better on the testing side of the site, although it is still somewhat quirky. The screenshot shows what you get once you submit a feed – in this case, the atom geo-referenced feed from the Pleiades Project. Now, what I would’ve expected, is that Platial automatically extracted the geographic coordinates for each item in the feed, and mapped it. That’s not what happens – rather, the Platial tool is expecting that you’ve added a feed that doesn’t contain geographic info (say, a list of church suppers in your area), and then you punch in the address, city, state, or lat/long coordinates. Now, that is indeed a handy tool for non-georeferenced feeds, but defeats my purpose. At least for today.

I’ve also tried using automatic feed generators for third party sites, things like Feedity on Archaeology magazine’s archaeological news page with Platial, and with Yahoo Pipes. I’d like to see where in the world things are happening! To date, not much success (Feedity tosses in advertisements which – I’m guessing – cause problems). I suppose were I handy with coding etc I could make it all work… but again, that’d be defeating the purpose.

platialpic.JPG

Yahoo Pipes and the Pleiades Project

I recently wrote about trying to get Platial to map various kinds of data. Today I tried Yahoo Pipes. Again, the task was relatively straightforward: can I get an RSS feed of archaeological data – such as ancient places in the (non-mapped) Pleaides website database – onto a map without having to point-and-click each individual place?

First of all, I searched the various existing pipes that others have created. A pipe, by the way, is a collection of different modules ‘piped’ together to mash together different kinds of, and sources of, data. The pipe updates itself when the in-coming data changes. I found the geo-annotated Reuters news pipe, by el80n. This pipe collects information from the Reuters news-feed, extracts the locational information from it, finds out the actual coordinates for that location, and then displays the result on a yahoo map.

pipe1.JPGI swapped the feed from Reuters to Pleiades’ Archaic places, and la voila. A number of the sites from that list turned up on the map. Now, there’re a few bugs in it. The place-extractor looks at the feed, and grabs the first ‘obvious’ place name. In Reuters, that’s the modern name. In Pleaides, that’s the ancient name. The database that contains the geocoding only has modern names, so things get a little odd. For instance, Artamis (modern Messa), gets mapped to an island in the South China Sea. There’s a query builder in the pipe, so I need to figure out how to get it to grab the modern name, while labeling the map with the ancient name.

All of this took about an hour. I had never used pipes before, and all I really did was swap feeds. Imagine what somebody who knew what they were doing could accomplish! You may view the live result here.

pipe2.JPG

TinyMap vs. Platial

I should not complain too much about Platial, as it is still in beta-testing, and the various bugs no doubt will be ironed out. I look forward to the map-from-rss feature – even rss feeds that are not geocoded can be imported (although you have to point-and-click to get the information where you want it). This will be an enormous boon when you’re dealing for instance with something like the Pleiades project. Their database has an enormous amount of information spatial information concerning ancient places. A person can subscribe to their Archaic places feed, for instance, and get the whole list. They do provide KML files for each individual point, but nothing (as far as I can tell) in the aggregate (and you have to dig down the document tree to fin ’em). So I tried to get Platial to import the whole list from the feed, and then I was prepared to spend the time properly dragging things into place.

Platial burped, and that was that.

If I was going to have to drag-and-drop each individual record, I thought there might perhaps be an easier interface to use. Platial after all fancies itself something of a social-networking site (you can mash up your information with information from some one else’s map)… but as Gabby mentioned in an earlier comment, what if you’re out in the field, and you want someone back at the office to have a quick map of something you’ve found, without having to register, create a profile, etc etc? Tinymap is your answer. You go to http://www.tinymap.net, zoom in on the region your working on (or punch in the decimal coordinates), drag and drop some Points-of-Interest, annotate appropriate, hit save and your done. The site gives you a unique URL for your map, and you email that back to the office. So here is a sample, with some information from Pleiades: http://www.tinymap.net/CNztQCq7hlQ/

For quick and easy maps, TinyMap wins hands-down over Platial. Platial is better for more complicated maps with greater functionality – eventually.