Preservation Technology Podcasts (U.S. National Park Service)

Episodes

August 1, 2008

1. Who Wants to Preserve a Cemetery? (Episode 1)

Transcript

Kevin Ammons:Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast. I’m Kevin Ammons and today we are talking to Jason Church a conservator with the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Jason coordinates the Center’s very successful series of cemetery monument conservation workshops.

Kevin Ammons: Welcome Jason, I understand you used to live in a graveyard.

Jason Church: Kevin, that is true. I used to live in a graveyard. My wife, daughter, and I all lived in Laurel Grove South Cemetery in Savannah Georgia which is an all African American Victorian Rural Movement Cemetery. We were there as live-in caretakers for about almost two years. It’s always a good conversation starter at a party. “Well when we used to live in a cemetery…” It was a fun place to live we had good times there.

Kevin Ammons: Well most people don’t think, well I want to grow up and preserve cemeteries. What brought you into the field?

Jason Church: Actually I’m probably one of the few people that can narrow that down. Fourth grade North Carolina history class my teacher Ms. Lucas made us all do local history projects, and I was living in Wilmington, North Carolina and did a video tour of Oakdale Cemetery there in Wilmington. I got to know the caretaker he took me around told me all kinds of crazy stories and my dad and I would go there on the weekends and hang out with the caretaker. We even skipped school and worked together a few times to go. He took us in one of the mausoleums, the things a normal person wouldn’t get to see and I was always sort of interested and after that I did a lot of projects in graduate school. I did the graduate program in historic preservation at Savanna College of Art and Design and of course kept on focusing on cemetery. It ended up being a career.

Kevin Ammons: So tell us about the workshop. What are you teaching folks?

Jason Church: This year were covering all the basics we’re talking about cleaning techniques on stone, consolidation techniques, adhesive repairs, and both reinforced and unreinforced. We are also looking at patch fields and of course resetting a monument. And all of that this year will be focused on slate and brown stone which is sort of our unique spin on this workshop in the past we’ve looked at things like bronze, zinc, wooden fences, wooden grave markers, brick mausoleums, and vaulting that sort of thing. So every year it changes up a little bit and that’s good for the people that take the workshop year after year. We get the same people that occasionally will come back to get sort of the new techniques. This year it is being held in New England. It will be in New England this is the first time we have ever taken it to New England which is really important for us. New England is a very important area for cemetery conservation that’s of course the oldest cemeteries in the country and that’s where cemetery conservation really started was in New England so its very important for us to go there. We haven’t done it before and we are really looking forward to going there. It will be in New London Connecticut.

Kevin Ammons: I understand this workshop will focus on brown stone and slate. What made those materials so popular in New England and are they still used today?

Jason Church: Well they don’t use them as much today. There’s a few slate carpenters still in New England doing really beautiful work. That’s a very specialized thing that isn’t being used as much. I don’t know of any brown stone that is still being used but I could definitely be wrong about that. Slate and brownstone were really used especially in the slate because that was a very familiar material you have a lot in Europe, England, and in the British Isles. So it was sort of coming over with the people. They knew how to work that but it was also their material especially the brown stone that was very easy to get out of the ground so with minimal effort and not a lot of technology and tooling the pioneers of that area of the early New England settlers were able to carve and do some very beautiful work with the material. That was fairly easy to acquire.

Kevin Ammons: I understand the workshops have been held all over the country how do you determine where to host a workshop?

Jason Church: Well, we have moved this all over the country this is the 6th year we’ve done the workshop. We try to hold them in different regions to draw the people interested in this topic from that region. It works fairly well. We’ve discovered a lot of people from other regions also come for a little bit of a vacation as well and to see new thing and to look at new problems that they might not have. The reason we bring it to different regions also is to try to focus on different materials like the slate and brown stone of New England and the way that we choose this originally was areas that really needed. This issue of people who were calling us repeatedly saying were having a lot of concern in our area or a lot of interest in our area could you come here we have a lot of people interested we have a great case study for you to work at.

Jason Church: It changes because we’ve done so many of them now that now we have a large map of the US. I have mapped out everyone that we have taught classes to and were trying to start feeling in gaps where haven’t we been where haven’t we taught people and that’s sort of what’s helping us choose the new locations. Then we find partners in that and a really important thing to get us to come to an area is how good our partner is. We might not have the resource in that area so we’re looking for good partners who can help us come into that area and help us advertise help us learn that area that were going to hold the workshop at. Well as I said before it is hard to imagine folks wanting to work on cemeteries for a living yet the workshops have been going strong since 2003.

Kevin Ammons: What kind of people come to the cemetery monument conservation workshops?

Jason Church: Well that’s one good thing about our workshops we actually see a pretty wide diverse group. We have a real wide audience which is a real plus for the workshop because not only do you get to meet a large group of instructors we have a very small teacher to student ratio. We have anywhere from eight to ten instructors and we have the workshop at 32 participants.

Jason Church: So yeah, you get a lot of hands on time with each instructor but also you really get to network with other people that come from different disciplines and different areas. We get professional conservators. we get small church sections who maybe only want to do a few grave markers that you know have small cemeteries. A lot of people come in from national cemeteries that oversee pretty large groups of graves. A lot of city planners who maybe are not necessary going to do the work themselves, but they are looking to speculate the work out to professionals. So they don’t need to know what is the right way to do it, what should they be looking for in contract bids. So we have a really large group and of course we have lately a lot of retirees who are retired from some other occupation who are wanting to get into this in retirement age.

Jason Church: Genealogy is the fastest growing hobby in America right now so we are starting to get that baby boomer generation coming in to take these professional workshops and start doing it from time to time. Have these workshops branched out to other audiences too? Well when it started out we had just this three day hands on workshop like we will be holding in New England and that’s three days very intense hands on out in the field but we realized maybe we weren’t locating all of the audiences we needed. So we’ve actually branched off into three workshops in the series.

Jason Church: We have a much more hands on much more intensive five day workshop and that’s a week long. It takes a lot of time out so it’s really professional that really needs this sort of hands on intense workshop that covers a lot of complex issues.

Jason Church: But more important, we also teach a basics workshop and these are for a little bit larger groups. We take about 40 participants for these workshops. We hold them at different areas of the country as well and these are one day workshops that last about four to five hours. It’s mostly inside lecture with a hands on cleaning demonstration. In the inside lecture we talk about documentation of cemeteries. We talk about condition survey, how to identify the material that you’re looking at, and then of course the dos and don’ts of cleaning and usually a different topic each time we talk to our partners which are usually state preservation organizations on a different topic. Sometimes they want to look at well how do you do simple resetting or they want to look at trying to convey the importance of iron fencing or the importance of grave surrounds to a group.

Jason Church: The basics workshop really brings in that genealogist group. The small church sextons, a lot of DAR and Sons of Confederate veterans. A lot of groups like that that are really passionate about cemeteries who are doing the work and really want to know the right way to do it.

Kevin Ammons: Do you see any unmet needs or any other audiences out there that you plan to address in the future?

Jason Church: Sure there are a lot of materials involved in cemeteries. Most of our workshops are involved around stone and that’s one of the things we started branching out from to look at iron work, bronze, and zincs possibly start looking at more materials in cemeteries. We’ve done wood that sort of thing to try to hit audiences that maybe know about the stone work in cemetery but are maybe curious and need information about uh things like the fencing or the iron work. We talked to most groups. We do a lot of work with the Monument Builders of America that’s a really good group to work with cause they are really in the cemetery the most. They’re the ones there ancestors put the headstones in originally that sort of thing. So we done a lot of work with those that’s been a really good audience for us as well.

Kevin Ammons: Thanks for being here Jason.

Jason Church: No thank you Kevin.

Kevin Ammons: If you would like to learn more about the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training and the Cemetery Monument Conservation workshops visit our website at ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

Kevin Ammons interviews Jason Church, a conservator with the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Jason coordinates the Center’s very successful series of cemetery monument conservation workshops.

February 6, 2009

2. Entry Level Landscape Management and Preservation Training (Episode 2)

Transcript

Charlie Pepper outlines the youth training program which has been successful at preparing young men and women for job placement. Pepper directs the Historic Landscape Preservation and Maintenance program at the Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation.

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In the second episode of The Preservation Technology Podcast, Kevin Ammons interviews Charlie Pepper who directs the Historic Landscape Preservation and Maintenance program

May 8, 2009

3. Rapid Documentation of Historic Resources (Episode 3)

Transcript

Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast. I’m Kevin Ammons and today we are talking to Dr. Barrett Kennedy, professor of architecture at Louisiana State University College of Design.

Kevin Ammons: Dr. Kennedy is working with NCPTT to develop a strategy for the rapid documentation of historic resources. Welcome to podcast, Barrett.

Barrett Kennedy: Hey Kevin. It’s good to be here.

Kevin Ammons: Last time I saw you, Barrett, you were hovering precariously about 30 feet over Front Street in Natchitoches with a camera. Was that related to this new technique?

Barrett Kennedy: Yeah, that’s right, Kevin, but as I recall, it was your folks at the center that got me sky high over Cane River Lake. It was all strictly in the line of duty I guess, but let me you, it was a perspective rarely equaled in Louisiana.

But the project that we’re talking about involved improvements to stabilize the road bed, upgrade utilities and add some barrier free access components to Front Street. It was a classic conflict of interest between preservation and progress, and the work threatened the historic integrity of the street with its distinctive pattern brickwork. Natchitoches was looking for a way to quickly, accurately, and of course inexpensively document the existing appearance of about 4 blocks of historic brick paving. Project was set and on ready and time was of the essence, so we really were coming in on the last moment.

I’d been working on a rapid documentation project with the NCPTT, so on behalf of the city and the Cane River Heritage area, the center approached me with the Front Street problem. Well we were glad to rise to the challenge and we decided to use some technologies that we’d been working with, which were GPS enabled digital cameras as a means to comprehensively document all of the paving in the project zone.

What we did was place reference targets on the street surface and used a bucket lift, or a cherry picker, to position a photographer at an elevation of about 40 feet above the street, and then we systematically moved the lift along the street, capturing high resolution digital imagery. We were then able to take those images and load them into a GIS system and create a dimensionally accurate, spatial photo mosaic of the Front Street brick work.

The images were also loaded into Google Earth to facilitate access to that photographic record. The photo mosaic could then be used to guide the process of relaying the historic brick and replicating the distinctive patterns once all of the other roadway improvements were completed. Kevin, I understand that the finished street work looks good and the project represents a successful balance between preservation and safety.

Kevin Ammons: Your current project with NCPTT is to develop and test geospatially enabled digital video documentation. Wow, that’s a mouthful. Can you walk us through it?

Barrett Kennedy: Well, I’ll try, Kevin. You’re right, it is a mouthful, but conceptually it’s pretty simple. It’s a natural progression from the use of GPS enabled still photography that I was just talking about.

The difference is that we are substituting a digital video stream for the still imagery. In this sense, the geospatial video refers to the melding of video and GPS technologies. The data collection equipment that we use enables us to embed a GPS data stream, or in other words, location data, on one of the audio tracks of the digital video tape. We can still include a recording of commentary or other environmental sounds on the other audio track as a supplement to that audio/video record.

Kevin Ammons: What exactly is spatial data?

Barrett Kennedy: Well the term spatial data indicates data that references location relative to space and time. So it’s a geographical construct of latitude, longitude, altitude, and date, for example.

The spatial reference allows us to use a GIS system to manage multiple, diverse layers of information, in relationship with a global relation or physical place. Maps are a useful and familiar way of representing and visualizing these multidimensional layers of information in a GIS system. For example, Google Maps and Google Earth are components of a simple, user-friendly spatial data management system.

Kevin Ammons: How did this collaborative effort with NCPTT begin?

Barrett Kennedy: Well, Kevin the operational premise is that documentation is fundamental to successful heritage conservation, and accurate fulsome documentation is essential for the integration for heritage conservation into a broad range of resource management and planning activities, particularly in places that are subject to a high risk of human induced disaster.

So, what we were looking for was a means to rapidly and inexpensively capture the data that characterizes large areas, for example, extensive cultural landscapes, streetscapes, and historic districts. Examples of this might include Cane River National Heritage Area or one of New Orleans’ many National Register historic districts.

Well, we’ve worked with the NCPTT on several internet related information management and distance learning projects over the past ten years or so and felt like the center would be a natural partner for this project. Consequently we applied for and received support from the Preservation Training and Technology grants program to explore how emerging spatially enabled technologies could advance resource documentation methods and facilitate better informed heritage stewardship. Importantly, in a place like Louisiana, this also means informed disaster planning and preparedness.

So we were just mobilizing our project in August of 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi, closely followed by Hurricane Rita. So what was conceived as a research exercise to explore techniques for rapid documentation in anticipation of a disaster became an all too real incident response and mitigation challenge. Well, the U.S., as you know, never encountered a disaster of the magnitude of Katrina.

In the midst of the chaotic response effort we recognized that timely access to spatial data was absolutely essential in responding to the disaster, and as a consequence we developed the LSU GIS Clearing House to collect, index, and disseminate spatially referenced data to a variety of federal, state, and local agencies.

Kevin, I should mention that our team received a national award from the Association of American Geographers for these efforts, but to continue as we indexed the assorted spatial sets, we were frustrated that field collected data was inconsistent and too often incomplete and unreliable.

This affirmed our original premise that a new method for rapid spatially enabled data collection would improve the consistency and reliability of the data and make it more useful not just in disaster planning, but also, as we came to realize, in disaster response and mitigation efforts. We felt that the digital video was a key element in our approach because of its low-cost data richness and rapid technological advancement. So, working with a research partner from the University of Ireland, we acquired a prototype GPS enabled video system that was being developed for roadway and pipeline inspection applications.

We configured an inexpensive data collection system on this foundation that consisted of three video cameras with wide angle lenses and mounted these on suction cups on a vehicle so that they recorded the view perpendicular to the video, that is, each side of the road way and the road straight ahead as we moved down the roadway at about 15 to 20 miles an hour. We began testing this configuration in January of 2006 in the lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, which was one of the areas most profoundly impacted by Hurricane Katrina and Rita.

Kevin, at the same time we also explored the use of spatially enabled PDAs and digital still photography so that we could deploy mobile digital survey forms that ensured data consistency and rapid data transfer to legacy GIS systems. This represents the interactive data entry component that we’re currently working to integrate with the spatial video system.

Kevin Ammons: How is this technique different from traditional documentation strategies?

Barrett Kennedy: The fundamental difference that we’re talking about here is that we’re working with a digital environment from the outset, whether with a spatially enabled video, or the PDAs and the still imagery.

Obviously, this approach is going to be faster, far more robust, and more scalable than using paper forms, with the ability as well to capture spatial data, video and audio commentary, and other kinds of data in a digital environment.

Importantly, where effective triage is critical for the protection of threatened resources, this configuration can be quickly employed to disaster scenes, ensuring the rapid collection of data, which in turn, can be uploaded to internet enabled GIS systems for analysis by experts off-site. In other words, analyzed by folks virtually anywhere in the internet world.

Kevin Ammons: Is this only useful in disaster context?

Barrett Kennedy: No, Kevin.

Remember, we originally conceived this of approach as a way to rapidly and inexpensively document landscapes and streetscapes as part of a proactive strategy of anticipating threats to heritage resources, whether those threats might be slow and incremental or sudden and cataclysmic.

The idea is to capture the data, then return to the office and do the analysis on an as needed basis. The appropriate expert can review the data stream and supplement the database with their analysis. As I said earlier, we see documentation as a key to preservation, so the more effective we are in anticipatory documentation, the better prepared we’ll be for planning efforts and disaster response efforts.

Kevin Ammons: Any particular problems associated with this technique?

Barrett Kennedy: Well, yes, Kevin. Since we don’t have the resources of Google at our disposal, it has been a challenging learning curve for us.

But since we’re compelled to take this affordable, cost-effective approach, we’re reminded constantly to focus on really practical applications of these complex, rapidly evolving technologies. For instance, we’re asking simple questions that the information must approach and capture and how that might critically inform initial disaster response and mitigation efforts.

At the same time, as we develop a fundamental understanding of the technologies and their developmental trajectory, our prototyping efforts can help us better understand how we can effectively assimilate the technologies into our work processes and become more effective as stewards of our heritage assets.

Going forward, we know that we can anticipate higher resolution digital video cameras with crisp wide angle and telephoto optics, and we certainly expect greater sensitivity and accuracy in our GPS devices, as well as more robust information management and analysis systems with friendlier user interfaces. All of this technology is coming, but it’s the kind of prototyping that I’m talking about here that prepares us to take best advantage of the technological advances as they become available and affordable.

The data collection process is pretty straight forward and I expect that the ongoing advances in audio/video technologies will resolve many of the technical problems that we’ve encountered.

Even so, remember the project was conceived as broadly inclusive and the real challenge is in configuring a user friendly interface that invites participation of a wide range of area experts. These might be the historical architects, landscape architects, planners, engineers, historians, and others as well as a broad cross-section of public constituencies, from governmental agencies and preservation commissions to neighborhood associations and homeowners.

As we go forward, we will be looking for ways to meld the technologies into readily accessible, interactive applications that can deliver useful information across the internet to all of these constituencies.

Kevin Ammons: Are there opportunities for greater collaboration?

Barrett Kennedy: Well, what we’d like to do is test the approach across a representative range of sights and settings and bring a variety of disciplines together to interact and contribute to the developmental process over these prototyping efforts.

This means we’re actively looking for potential partners and projects that might help with the prototyping as part of an overall planning and management strategy.

Having said that, Kevin, I want to reiterate that we’ll continue to be interested in opportunities to respond to the rapid documentation needs that we encounter in the wake of disaster events.

Kevin Ammons: Barrett, thanks for being here.

Barrett Kennedy: Really, Kevin, it’s been my pleasure and I enjoyed the opportunity to speak with you. Thanks very much.

Kevin Ammons speaks with Dr. Barrett Kennedy, professor of architecture at Louisiana State University College of Design.

May 29, 2009

4. National Park Service Geophysics Training at Los Adaes (Episode 4)

Transcript

I’m David Morgan, and I am the chief of archeology and collections at the National Center for Preservation, Technology and Training. And we are out here at the state historic site Los Adaes, which is a late 18th century colonial fort and mission where Steve De Vore from the Midwest Archeological Center from the National Park Service is hosting his 19th annual course on geophysics. And what we are doing is using a variety of instruments that rely on principles of geology and physics to try and locate archeology features without having to disturb the earth.

Steve has assembled about 10 different instructors and about 18-20 different participants here that we are hosting for classroom opportunities at the National Center and then we are using Los Adaes as a field-training site out here. And it ranges from everything to power parachutes flying thermal cameras to ground penetrating radar, electrical resistively, conductivity, magnetism. We are essentially using all the things we can borrow from earth sciences to image things below the ground without actually having to dig.

I’m Steven De Vore. I am an archaeologist with the National Park Services Midwest Archaeological Center. This is part of a workshop that we have been putting on archaeological perception using a variety of different kinds of geophysical tools and other types of remote sensing to have an idea what is under the ground prior to doing excavations or in lieu of doing excavations.

In the long run getting the information out to people that these things, that we can cover a substantial area. I can do with some of the magnetometers; you can cover 6 to 10 acres a day. If you go with just a shovel testing with just a group of three, which would basically, what a geophysical crew would amount to. I don’t think you could shovel test that much area in one day and be able to deal with all the material you would be coming up with. In fact, I am almost certain you can’t.

In excavations, in order to excavate you are removing materials from the ground. If you don’t take good documentation on what you are doing then you are going to lose that information. With the geophysical information, we aren’t removing anything from the ground. We are just looking at what’s buried in the ground, looking at the physical properties that they represent. Now sometimes the interpretation may get we may have problems with that. It may not be quite what we thought it was. But then again, the data is there and people can look at it and they can come to their own conclusions.

It is fairly cost effective. You can cover large areas in a short time. You can process it. You can have it available overnight, next day you can come out in the field and have it all in one map so you can see what is going on, you can actually then ground truth it, check spots, see what those things are. What those anomalies are, see what the other features are. And it helps to further interpret the site.

I’m Rinita Dalan and I work at University Minnesota Moorhead in Moorhead, Minnesota. Hopefully if we have some nice anomalies that the surface surveys are finding then we will put the down-hole in for some of those anomalies and get some information on a vertical event you know, where do they start and where do they stop and we wont have that information from the surface surveys. We will get some information on if there is layering within them. If we put some down-holes close together maybe we can get some horizontal extent in. We can say something about the strength of that anomaly and then compare it to some across the site or maybe at some other sites.

So we can have a signature for something to look for. We can even model what maybe what a magnetometer would expect to see. So we could get a lot of information that could help us interpret those other surface surveys. We often see layering in archaeological sites, cultural layers, house floors, occupation layers. We see layers in soils at different horizons. As it turns out this property is very sensitive to a lot of environmental variables like climate and time, people how they affect the soil. And so there is a potential to learn about those things by studying this property. So ya. When we look underground it hardly ever is homogeneous. It would be a pretty easy problem for geophysics if it was. It often is layered and so it is good to know that to know how it affects other methods. And to just learn about that. Archeologists are all about stratigraphy.

That is what we record. We want to know that layering.

I’m Andrea White and I am the Greater New Orleans Regional Archaeologist and so I am affiliated with the University of New Orleans and also the division of archaeology regional program. I chose to come to the seminar because working in an urban environment; I wanted to see what types of options I had with remote sensing equipment. What types of options I had that had deep deposits and very complicated deposits, multicomponent sites and so I wanted to see what options I had in terms of the different types of equipment, but you never know where you might end up in the future so it is always good to have an interest and knowledge with these types of things so you will know how to talk to people who you might hire to do these types of things.

What I like about here what I think is really cool it is almost like an exhibition except it is at a really cool archeological site. So we can go around to all the different venders and remote sensing operators and talk to them about their equipment, what are the price ranges of some of the equipment, what they do, what sites they are good at, what sites they might not be so good at and you get to see and actually use some of the equipment. So I think that is kind of neat. To see how things would work and see how functional it is like in a real live field setting. So far I have found the ground penetrating radar to be pretty useful. It can give you time slices or depth slices where you can actually see the different deposits. So I think that is kind of neat and might be something that is applicable to the type of environment I work with as an archeologist. Well, I think in addition to learning the different remote sensing technology, you also get to meet a lot of different people, and I think that is a plus. You get to make connections and I think that is a benefit as well. It also makes it more fun too.

My name is Dennis Jones and I work with the Louisiana Division of Archaeology which is part of the department of culture, recreation and tourism. The work that I do with the division of archaeology. There is a lot of research that goes on in advance of development it is called contract archaeology and it is required by federal and state law. And increasingly use of remote sensing and geophysical techniques are important for archaeological sites or in planning out to study preserving archaeological sites. And I needed to familiarize myself with these various techniques and technologies so when I encounter them with people doing them I’ll understand how they are doing them and if they are doing them correctly and sufficiently.

My name is Kris Lockyear and I am a lecturer of Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology University College London. I came on the course as a student five years ago and enjoyed it so much I persuaded them to invite me back as an instructor and I come back every year since. So it’s a bit of a busman’s holiday, but it is good fun. I teach resistance survey which is a method that works by passing an electric current through the soil and measuring variance in the resistance of that electric current which you can then plant on a map to give you plans of walls and ditches and so on. That is the technique I mainly use on my site. But they should have a really good feel for the variety of different techniques available. Their strengths and weaknesses. When you would use them. How much they cost. Realistic appreciation of what they are going to get out of it.

The downside of programs like CSI is you get this picture of a skeleton in the GPR data. The GPR data never actually looks like that. It is completely sort of false. So a realistic appreciation of what the techniques can do. The sorts of situations when you can use them and that sort of thing. And then to know enough of one technique or commission someone else to do it and be able to talk the same language as a specialist so they get the right technique for the right assignment. I get to see lots of bits of technology that I wouldn’t normally get to see in my daily rounds of things. I have never been anywhere with so much kitty in one place before. Because people bring their latest equipment I get to see the newest models and things. It is a really easy way of me keeping up with developments in the field. The other big thing I get is to be able to meet with other like-minded archeologists and get to talk them about problems and issues. Get to show them things I have been doing and them show me things they have been doing. And just the fun of doing it actually. I quite enjoy this week.

NCPTT staff go on-site to the National Park Service 19th Annual Workshop on Geophysics and the Technology of Archeology.

June 18, 2009

5. Second Life as an Archaeological Tool (Episode 5)

Transcript

Kevin Ammons: Welcome Ruth! How did you find yourself at Berkley exploring the notion of Second Life as an archeological tool?

Ruth Tringham: Well it sort of developed out of my work with digital forms of visualization things like multimedia 3D modeling and of neolithic archaeological sites in southeast Europe and in Anatolian more recently with Çatalhöyük. I actually did know anything about Second Life. It must of been in the early 2000’s because I had been doing this visualization multimedia stuff for – all through the 90’s – at least the last part of the 90’s. But then I was working with this digital technologist I suppose is not really that he is somebody who worked with museums and digital technology called Noah Whitman. He started working with us on a project called Remixing Çatalhöyük and I can tell you about that a little later but while we were working on that, which was really a method of sharing our Çatalhöyük media database with the public, he introduced me to Second Life. He said, “Have you seen this? You might be interested in this.”

Ruth Tringham: And so I of course immediately said “Oh my God, it’s exactly what I have been waiting for!” And it was! And it was early in 2007 that our team UC Berkley with the students, archaeologists, and media specialist began using Second Life to develop a virtual reconstruction of this iconic Neolithic settlement at Çatalhöyük in present day Turkey and the way this project was conceived was as complimentary to this concurrent project of Remixing Çatalhöyük which is this online exhibition and resource. So we purchased our virtual island. We were so enthusiastic about it that we actually purchased a virtual land thanks to our contacts in the UC Berkley information technology service.

Ruth Tringham: We were especially thankful of the support of this guy called David Greenbound and we named it Okapi Island which might seem weird because what is Okapi which is an east African animal got to do with Çatalhöyük in Turkey. Okapi Island island is actually named after our sponsor which is the open knowledge and the public interest program who the that was our program that was creating this Remixing Çatalhöyük the sharing of Çatalhöyük through open knowledge software. Open knowledge the idea that all of our data should be sharable through a Creative Commons License, a Share Alike attribution but it is ambiguous whether we would allow it for commercial use. But the problem at this point is that these media and the data and everything else that we do is sharable without the constriction or the copyright or the royalty type of license.

Ruth Tringham: So that was what Okapi Island is all about as well. So the team meets face to face Okapi Island team meets face to face every week in our computer laboratory call the MACTiA, the People in Multimedia Authoring Center for Teaching in Anthropology at Berkley. In world we meet on our virtual property in Second Life. Actually, currently one of our undergraduate students team member is leading these meetings through teaching a decal, what is called a decal course at Berkley, for ten registered students. Decal course is short for democratization of teaching. So I sponsor this course but I do it since I am on sabbatical I do it off in world in Second Life from my home. And I’m doing it along with my college and archeology and new media doctoral student Cally Morgan and she and Noah Witman and our long time colleague Michael Ashley. We find that Second Life is the potential as a way of embedding archaeological research that is its database and its interpretations in a game like environment.

Kevin Ammons: What exactly is Second Life?

Ruth Tringham: It’s an online environment that has game-like immersion and social media functionality without game like goals and rules they say that at the heart is a sense of presence with others at the same time and in the same place and I think that is a really good way of describing it there is another definition which was provided by this group called move nations moves I do not know if you know that Second Life is a move its stands for m-u-v-e that is it stands for massively multi use of virtual environment and there are others there are other worlds like Second Life but not as open.

Ruth Tringham: They include things like open crochet there is one called Open Sim, there is once called Twinity and there another called THERE. That is t-h-e-r-e not t-h-e-i-r. And then there is another one called Coniva. I have not actually visited any of these. I know that I have visited Open Sim and it’s open source unlike Second Life which is propriety. Open Sim has much of the characteristics and even the interface of Second Life but it is its actually a little more difficult to use.

Kevin Ammons: What is it about Second Life that you think people find compelling?

Ruth Tringham: I love that question. That is because there are some things which are quite compelling and it depends on who you are whether you are going find these things compelling. I find the some of the compelling things I have talked about the events the meeting my colleagues and being able to talk to my colleagues in place in Second Life I find this very compelling. I find this whole creating a community of your island and of the people who come and visit I find that really compelling. When I am visiting a place I find that one of the things that I hate are places that are empty and there is something creepy about Second Life that will put people off and that is that if there is not any events going on. You go to visit a place your likely not to find anyone there except perhaps some of these none non player sims which I find as creepy as no one being there. So I find these empty places very, very repelling and I do not know the answer to that is but to have constant events or to at least have the idea that this island is not abandoned.

Ruth Tringham: There (should be) signs up there (that there) is going to be an event here at such and such. We do not do this. We should. I wanted us to have an event. Some kind of an event at least each month. We have not done that. We’ve had a couple each year and I think that to really make an island popular and not repelling you need to have some kind of activity there that everyone knows about each month. We tend to so to have this idea that this place is not empty because that will put people off the creepiness of the empty places I think going along with that if you visit a place and there’s nothing to do there or nothing really there is not much guidance there. You’re not sure what’s going on you just sort of twitter around you move around and birds are twittering and oh it is very beautiful and the wind is rustling people say this is poetic and so is lovely and I don’t find it myself very attractive. Many people do but I don’t. If there are assets, that can be things like gestures or scripts, available for free there are some some sites like that I find these great what I find repelling is where people are trying to make money out of there out of there building or or even money out of something else there actually trying to sell I find the commercial sites quit repelling about Second Life some people don’t some people find this is as fun as eBay or something like that I’m not an eBay person so you can see I don’t really go for any of this buying in Second Life.

Kevin Ammons: What can Second Life offer archaeologist in the realm of interpretation that other traditional approaches can not?

Ruth Tringham: One of the things about Second Life is that you as a residence you can create your own game like place context you can create buildings you could create. They won’t look as good as some of the game engines, but they are you do have it in your power to create these built environments and so that is one of the things which can really attract people. I think like heritage professionals possibly to use Second Life rather than to try to use something like some of the more famous game engines.

Ruth Tringham: I mean the famous game engines they are just beautiful they are just fantastic and I would love to do that. But if you remember Myst, the Myst stuff is very beautiful but the movement through it is for the most part quit clumsy.

Kevin Ammons: Is this something that you imagine will be possible for archeology when you embarked on your new career as a new professor?

Ruth Tringham: When I started excavating or when I started being a professional archaeologist in the 1970’s I’ve dreamed of being able to enter my data and write on my own computers and so I dreamed of that and in the 1980’s I got my own computer and could enter my own data into an Excel or something like that whatever the equivalent of Excel was later on and in the 1980s I dreamed I would be able to create models of Neolithic buildings in three dimensions like architectural cardboard models and that I would be able to model prehistoric scenes and access. That’s what I dreamed in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2002, I was in a conference talking about game engines. There were these gamers at this conference called Siggraph Campfire and I was invited to go there with Michael Ashley because we’d been working on these hypermedia things about archeology and bringing in three dimensional imagery into thinking about places in the past. So we were invited to this 2002 conference and there were all these gaming people and laser scanning people and high tech people who showed us what they could do.

Ruth Tringham: I went to another conference in 2003 in Vienna right they were using Unreal, thinking about using Unreal for archaeology. I was “Oh my God, it would be fantastic to use a gaming engine to try to think about all of the alternatives paths that people could take through their life histories!” Whether we were thinking about life histories of buildings and life histories of people and places and things for archaeology, wouldn’t it be great to embed these ideas into a game engine?

Kevin Ammons: What was the most difficult thing for you in using Second Life for archaeological interpretation?

Ruth Tringham: It is difficult. Like any modeling program, it has challenges and frustrations. But you don’t have to be a complete computer geek to do it, which is what really makes it different from many of the other MUVEs. It also makes it different from using the game engines. With game engines you have to be a real computer specialist for that. This mean going into a very different sphere of money and interaction. I mean, okay, so you have to pay for your Second Life island if you want to build on it, but you can actually always visit some of these free buildings to mess around in their sandboxes. You can come to Okapi Island and build whatever you like in our sandbox and it’s big enough to experiment. You could build a small model that would stay persistent if you wanted, so that don’t have to have your own land to build. Again, this makes it very different from many places. One of the things that I am always sorry about in Second Life is that I can’t make life messy enough. I can’t make the surfaces messy but that’s the same in any computer (virtual reality). They can’t even make the places messy with all of the the fancy gaming engines.

Kevin Ammons: Ruth thanks for joining us today.

Kevin Ammons speaks with Ruth Tringham, one of the founders of the University of California Berkley the People in Multimedia Authoring Center for Teaching in Anthropology at Berkley (MACTiA). As a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkley Ruth uses an online virtual environment called Second Life in her teaching.

July 2, 2009

6. Preservation Trades with Nancy Finegood (Episode 6)

Transcript

Kevin Ammons:Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast. I am Kevin Ammons and today we join NCPTT’s Andy Ferrell as he speaks with Nancy Finegood, executive director of the Michigan Historic Preservation Network.

Andy Ferrell: So good morning Nancy. Welcome to the podcast.

Nancy Finegood: Good morning. I am very excited to be joining you.

Andy Ferrell: NCPTT recently published online a guide titled “Introducing Preservation Trades to High School Students” which grew out of via work with Detroit’s Randolph’s Career and Technical Center. Can you tell us a little bit about this publication?

Nancy Finegood: Sure the publication actually evolved from successful grass roots program that the Michigan Historic Preservation Network began about four years ago at Detroit’s Randolph’s Career and Technical Center.

Andy Ferrell: And what was the genesis of that project?

Nancy Finegood: We were contacted by a teacher from Randolph’s school who was very interested in working with his students in rehabbing homes instead of just building new like they do for habitat and got us involve got the state historic preservation office involved and others in the Detroit community. We started the program about four years ago. The program at Randolph was so successful that we wanted to share the program with other preservation educators around the United States.

Andy Ferrell: How did this collaborate effort with NCPTT begin?

Nancy Finegood: NCPTT assisted us with funding to convene a sort of summit of experts from a wide range of preservation organizations and educational institutions. The goal of the summit was to bring together preservation educators everything from grassroots high school features to college professors from around the country to share their ideas and document their experiences and help us create this publication. One of our board members Tim Turner is a wood window restoration specialist and he was one of the instructors for the Randolph School program. He traveled to Louisiana to meet with Kirk Cordell the director of your organization and Jim felt that this program that we started in Detroit could be a model for others around the United States.

He was aware that the NCPTT had been instrumental in promoting the program at the Brooklyn High School of the Arts and he approached them to collaborate with us to create a guide so that could be utilized in programs around the entire United States. The ultimate goal of I think both programs is to train students who see appropriate preservation of historic resources as another career opportunity.

I think the major thing that we have to keep in mind is that every program needs a passionate champion to carry the piton at Randolph’s school. It was Rody Rivers the teacher that I mentioned earlier who wanted to introduce his students to preservation and tradition building schools in Brooklyn. It was Kate Burns out of Vino the director of preservation technology at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. We found that if you do not have someone in the community truly passionate to start the program and to see it through because it does take quite a bit of effort the program will not be successful. So we have been trying to reach out to different sort of champions in communities to start new programs.

Andy Ferrell: Fascinating, tell me a little bit about the students. Who were the students?

Nancy Finegood: The students were awesome. Make sure you take a look at the video that’s on the NCPTT website. You’ll see the students up close and hear some of their interviews. What was interesting was that all the students were self selected. So we didn’t say you need to learn about preservation because you are in carpentry or you need to add preservation to your cab design program.

We took the students on a tour of historic sites of Detroit in the situation in this cause and then we did a half day program an educational program about general preservation and what it means. They self selected themselves and not only did they work at a historic site. They missed some of their other class time, and they needed to commit to fulfilling their other classroom requirements. That’s a lot of work for a high school student.

The first year of our program there were ten boys and one girl. She had a hard time, but she followed through and committed to fulfilling all the requirements in her classroom and at the site that we had chosen in the community. Another requirement in order to participate was that the student’s parents or guardian had to come to an organizational meeting and agree to their participation and all 11 parents showed up and agreed which is unheard of in most school districts much less a school district like Detroit. So that was really exciting.

Andy Ferrell: That is exciting. Now how did the students enjoy working on historic buildings?

Nancy Finegood: They loved working on the Historic building. We chose Historic Fort Wayne as our laboratory. Historic Fort Wayne is owned by the city of Detroit Parks and Recreation department. It is a city that is very important to the city but had become downtrodden and was sorely in need of some help. So we chose one building on the site as their working lab which they traveled to four days a week the first year of the program.

One student told me that he heard of the fort but had never been there even though it was walking distance from his home. Another student said this was one of my favorites now that he has taken this course he can fix his grandma’s old windows instead of calling Wallsite.

Andy Ferrell: That is great that is great. The instructors were they all staff at Randolph?

Nancy Finegood: No they weren’t actually. The first year all the instructors were recruited from preservation professionals around the state. Some traveled o I would say over 100 miles round trip just to participate in the program. They were paid a small stipend the first year but really taught primarily because they felt strongly about training these students.

They would come to organizational meetings I mean their buy in was spectacular one of the instructors young preservation carpenter said I wish there was a program like this when I was in high school. It took me many years after high school to find this kind of training. The following years we had a grant from the State Historic Preservation Office to do the program. In the following years our funding diminished.

We had a little bit of help from some local foundations and others but many of this instructors wanted to see this program continue and they volunteered their time as did Randolph school teachers. We actually had kids that wanted to come out there because they had heard how wonderful the program was and of course the food was good too. So the electrical heating and cooling teacher brought his students out there to repair the furnace because there was no heat in the building so that was volunteer and additional.

There was no working plumbing which was an issue with 11 students and four teachers so the plumbing instructor brought his students out to repair the plumbing and all of these students wanted to come back. They wanted to be a part of this program. I’m sure it didn’t hurt that they were able to take a bus and leave there regular classrooms.

Andy Ferrell: Yea that’s always enticing. Now Nancy what was the major key to the success of this programs.

Nancy Finegood: I think there are lots of keys to this success. It is hard to pick just one. But I still think that having a champion is key like with Randolph. It can be a teacher we’ve seen other programs were its a local preservation advocate or preservation tradesman but there must be one person with that vision and the passion to see the program through.

It’s sort of easy to get the ball rolling you know people are interested. There is a lot of excitement but it takes perseverance to keep that ball rolling up the hill especially when you run into any kind of obstacles along the way.

Andy Ferrell: Well that’s a perfect subway into the next question. Are there any particular problems associated with this model?

Nancy Finegood: There are I think that the biggest problem associated with the model is getting buy in or convincing others of the potential career opportunity for the students in many schools unless they can see the internship or career opportunities we have a hard time getting that buy in and that can also lead to a lack of resources and like a said before primary financial funding for the program.

Andy Ferrell: Certainly. Now Nancy what are the next steps?

Nancy Finegood: Well we have already begun the next steps. In the short term the guide has been distributed widely around the country. I posted something on the statewide and local partners lister of the national trust and actually received request for 32 copies of our publication and that was just electronically. Others asked for the actual paper copy that I sent out also.

We have also started a second program in Battle Creek, Michigan as a result of this. There is a new program in Indiana that one of our experts who participated in the summit had started. We are also having conversations with folks in Ohio, New York, and Wisconsin and we primarily are having conference calls giving them extra sort of incentive to get them started.

Andy Ferrell: That is brilliant. Are there opportunities for greater collaboration?

Nancy Finegood: Definitely we would hope to collaborate with other national organizations like your own including the National Trust, the Preservation Trades Network, the Nation Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers and the World Monuments Fund.

They have all we have had conversations with all of them and in fact the National Trust wanted to summit our program for a National Award a Green Award. I have not heard back on that but they are all very interested in the program and we are hoping to collaborate with more organizations.

Andy Ferrell: Excellent. How do you envision scaling this up?

Nancy Finegood: I would like to work on greater marketing of the program using new tools like the podcast as a part of the first program. We created a video which of course can be downloaded from your site and I’d like to see some clips of that uploaded to you tube so I am working with a videographer on that to get wider exposure.

As an extent of this program this is really exciting but my organization will be running a two week program in July in Kalamazoo Michigan to train underemployed and unemployed carpenters and contractors in preservation carpentry and wood window restoration in a lower income historic neighborhood. And we are hoping that will help people see what can be done while we are training folks that need jobs so it has gone beyond the schools it has actually going out to the neighborhoods.

Andy Ferrell: Great Nancy. It has been fantastic talking to you today. Thank you very much.

Nancy Finegood: Thank you for inviting me.

Andy Ferrell speaks with Nancy Finegood, executive director of the Michigan Historic Preservation Network. NCPTT recently published online a guide titled “Introducing Preservation Trades to High School Students” which grew out of via work with Detroit’s Randolph’s Career and Technical Center.

July 16, 2009

7. Using Lasers to Remove Graffiti from Rock Art and Rock Imagery (Episode 7)

Transcript

Jason Church: This is Jason Church. I am here interviewing Claire Dean of Dean & Associates Conservation Services. How are you doing today Claire?

Claire Dean: I am doing fine Jason how about yourself?

Jason Church: Very well! So Claire you are known for conserving rock art. Can you tell us what this is and a little bit about it?

Claire Dean: Sure. Rock art is the common term for paintings and carvings on rock and in North America that is mostly associated with native communities. I personally prefer to use the term rock imagery as it’s a little more neutral and I actually use that term at the request of elders Native American elders whom I work with who actually find the word some what offensive from their cultural stand point.

Claire Dean: So if you hear me refer to it as rock imagery that’s why and typically the other two terms you hear for it pictograph which are the painted sites and petroglyphs which are the ones that are carved into rock surfaces.

Jason Church: Very good. Well recently I know you did a project where you used a portable laser to remove graffiti off of rock imagery at Joshua Tree National Park. Can you tell us a little bit about this project and the use of lasers in conservation?

Claire Dean: The project at Joshua Tree is one that I have been working on for a couple of years and actually it was a two phase project initiated by the park. The first phase was to do a condition assessment of a series of sites within the boundaries of the monument. Not all of the rock out sites were looked at but a good number of them and from that assessment and working with the cultural resource manager Jan Keswick out there at Joshua Tree.

Claire Dean: We prioritized which ones would be looked at in phase two and also what we could do with the resources available under the contract for phase two. And we had one particular site that we decided to concentrate on which happens to be located within a camp ground and perhaps one of the most popular camp grounds in the park. And it is a small painted panel a pictograph that is located inside a small wind form alpa which is a little difficult to describe. But if you imagine a huge bolder with a big scoop taken out of the middle of it so that it looks like a half formed donut.

Claire Dean: The panel was inside the donut and this bolder is located smack between two camp sites at the level of the campsites and as the area is one that is frequented by recreational climbers actually inside the camp ground the reclining roots. This particular bolder gets a lot of visitation from folks who are not technical climbers but want to do a little bit of scrambling.

Claire Dean: Consequently we also have a lot of graffiti inside that bolder so that was the one that we decided concentrate our efforts on and the graffiti in there has been building up over many years and was mostly magic marker type inscriptions along with some paint and wax crayons and pencils and a little bit of charcoal. So we decided that that is the one that we concentrate on.

Claire Dean: I was adverse to using chemicals in that location for a number of reasons just overall for an environmental point of view. I prefer not to chemical cleaning has been typically the method used to remove graffiti at sites like this. The other reason for not wanting to use chemicals is that the alkaline is extremely small and close and without any type of ventilation and especially in the temperatures which we get out there in the desert there was an added issue of health in safety for people like myself and my assistant.

Claire Dean: So we decided to use lasers or at least to try at this site. Lasers have been used in art conservation for many years in fact back in Europe where I come from we were using them I think it is safe to say before North America was and mostly in architectural settings to clean off dirt and crusts related to air pollution on cathedrals and historic buildings.

Claire Dean: Lasers have had their limits until recently because of their size a portable laser a few years ago was typically the size of a small car and you could get them onto a big scaffold thing on a building but taking them out to other locations was really not feasible also because of the power needed to keep these puppies going that just wasn’t possible.

Claire Dean: Now laser technology has moved along and we have a lot of more portable units and more controllable ones including units that we can literally take out into the field. The camp ground at Joshua Tree is developed and as much as you can drive the truck into it in about fifty feet into the site but other places where we have taken laser we use rock image sites have involved having to pack it in a little distance but it is possible to do it with a team of people.

Claire Dean: So the potential for using lasers now is much greater and this is fantastic for people like myself that are working in areas that aren’t developed. Lasers typically are a much greener type of treatment. They really the main pollution they put out is the exhaust from the generator needed to power them.

Claire Dean: The laser that we were using at Joshua Tree can run off a four-hundred watt gasoline driven generator which if you got a good generator and you are maintaining it it is not putting out that much pollution probably less than your car. So the laser itself basically does not generate any pollution other than the material it is removing which of course burns but we are talking about something on a very very small level.

Jason Church: So on an environmental level the laser is a definitely a much greener version compared to the traditional chemical methods?

Claire Dean: Yes, absolutely.

Jason Church: How does it compare as far as removing the graffiti?

Claire Dean: In the work that I have been doing and I need to acknowledge not just the help of NCPTT with this but also Dr. Margaret Abraham who has been the recipient of a large research grant from NCPTT. And she and I also have another grant from NCPTT dealing with culturally appropriate treatment for rock image sites which lasers was one. So we have two NCPTT projects here that are joined at the hip.

Claire Dean: Now the grant that we received from NCPTT which actually was awarded to the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla one of the southern nations in Oregon. we were looking at trying to find culturally appropriate treatment for rock image sites and this is because many of the Native American groups that I work with including you are not happy from a cultural and spiritual stand point. They are not happy with the use of chemicals on rock image sites and sacred sites in general.

Claire Dean: We also have some pretty strict environmental legislation in Oregon too so that prohibit the use of chemicals. And chemical treatments have pretty much been the main ones up to date that have been used at rock image sites. We have done some microbration with some form of abrasive unit. Those are problematic you have to run a generator which you do with lasers. The abrasive unit is a dry system which we have to use two because we can’t soak these sites.

Claire Dean: Water can be a major issue for reasons of causing salt problems but also literally washing the site away. So we are using the dry system we don’t have the ability to abstract dust. So it becomes an extreme messy and dusty project. Collecting the dust on tops is not really very affective the wind blows it around. It works and it certainly has its place but microabrasion is not as green as you might think in the circumstances in which we have to use it.

Claire Dean: Chemical treatments has been the other one. Typically solvents using solvents to remove paints and other materials and usually applied in a gel form or as a poultice. These again have issues of course with giving off vapors into the air with disposal of the waste materials and also health and safety for the operators because we have to wear aspirators in the field because we don’t have installation.

Claire Dean: So and also a lot of the locations that I work in are extremely warm which means we have an issue with them evaporating to fast and it is very difficult to control that in the field. So looking for these alternatives to help us out was is very important but particularly for the Native American communities.

Claire Dean: An elder who I work with regularly described it very sensitively she said how would you feel if I came into along and tipped paint stripper on your grandmother because that is exactly how they look at these sites. These sites are living places. They are not just lumps of rock with inscriptions on it.

Claire Dean: So the laser was one of the options we wanted to look at and the Native American community has been almost 100 percent positive in their reception of this. They like the concept that it is cleaning using light. They are very aware of the impact that ultraviolet light has on things outdoors and they could see a sort of direct connection between how light can get rid of paint and the everyday experiences. So we definitely have a lot of questions that are asked about the use of it.

Claire Dean: Megan and I have demonstrated the use of lasers to Native American communities on several occasions now. Only one of them has had its doubts but they weren’t completely negative. They were something they wanted to discuss and haven’t been discussing amongst themselves since. So it’s a for me it is a much cleaner alternative. It does a better job. It is more controllable. We don’t have the problems with bleeding of pigments and paints which we do when we use solvents for cleaning.

Claire Dean: While we can control that to a certain extent by our application method such as {unintelligible}. It is not that controllable especially in the field. So the laser takes care of that nicely and I also find that we have less residual staining. It is very difficult not to be left with residual staining when you chemically clean. Especially on particular surfaces that I deal with which are not dressed surfaces or finished surfaces they’re rough rock.

Claire Dean: The light emitted by a laser does seem to do some cleaning sub surface as well leaving us with less of a residue. So it has a lot of promise and we hope to be able to continue this and use it more extensively in the future.

Jason Church: Thanks Claire that answers a lot of questions I had about lasers and also chemical cleaning. So thank you very much.

Claire Dean: You are welcome anytime.

Kevin Ammons: That was Jason Church with Claire Dean. If you’d like to learn more about this technique, visit our podcast show notes at the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training website. That’s ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everyone.

Jason Church speaks with Claire Dean of Dean & Associates Conservation Services about using lasers to remove graffiti from rock art.

September 3, 2009

9. Digital Survey Methods in Archeology (Episode 9)

Transcript

David Morgan: Welcome Graeme! What is The Portus Project?

Graeme Earl: The Portus Project is basically a collaboration between a whole bunch of people in the UK and in Italy and elsewhere, and it is a project mostly directed by Southampton University, the British School of Rome, and Cambridge, and we are looking at what’s the imperial port of Rome. It was probably the biggest classical fort of the first and second century.

David Morgan: What is the project’s focus and where do you stand in terms of its schedule?

Graeme Earl: What the project is focusing on is some excavation and site survey, looking also surveying the wider landscape and, from my perspective, looking at how various kinds of technology can be used to help on an ongoing excavation and survey project. The project has been running for over ten years in total because we have had a long series of geophysical seasons–we’ve done about two hundred and fifty hectares of geophysics on the site, and plus some marine geophysics. We have done some marine geophysics on the hexagonal basins as well, so pretty much every area anywhere near the site that isn’t underneath the modern airport we have done some geophysics.

David Morgan: What kinds of archeological materials are you finding?

Graeme Earl: I mean the artifact density is quite great, but it tends to be mostly things like quite workaday items, like building material. The area where we’re excavating is the industrial and commercial center, really, so you are looking at building materials: large lumps of masonry. You are not getting the fine, beautiful kinds of finds that we perhaps excavated in Egypt, where the preservation is so much better. You are getting an awful lot of materials though. The evidence that survives underground is fantastic, but there is also quite a lot surviving above ground. The scale of it is quite difficult to appreciate, but you are looking at warehouses that are maybe a couple of hundred meters long and fifty meters wide. It’s all big stuff, so it is quite a challenge for us working there.

David Morgan: What does it mean for an archeological record to be “born digital” and how does that apply to the Portus Project?

Graeme Earl: Born digital in archeological terms normally relates to capturing data on site, as you say, in a digital fashion not using a conventional context sheet, not using conventional methods for planning and drawing up surveys and so on.

Graeme Earl: At Portus we are experimenting with a lot of these techniques to create a born digital record, but what we are also able to do is to try and see how they relate to more conventional approaches.

Graeme Earl: Is it better to have someone sat there with a computer and a wireless network and typing in context information, or typing in their geophysics grid location data straightaway?

Graeme Earl: Or is it actually better to have somebody entering data on a piece of paper…on the back of a notebook–however they want to do it–and then afterwards bring the data together and put it in some kind of digital archive.

Graeme Earl: We’ve got to end up with a digital record. At Portus we’re trying to whether actually using a born digital record helps at all in all aspects of archeological practice. I think the jury is still out on that.

David Morgan: How have archeologists adapted to creating born digital data?

Graeme Earl: It comes down to familiarity, really. If you are familiar with using a trowel and a pencil and a piece of permatrace then that’s a kind of place where you think about the archeology that you are doing. If you are really familiar with using a mouse or, I don’t know, some kind of VR equipment, or whatever –some technological process– if that is where you are most familiar, then that’s where your archeological engagement happens. That is where your interpretations derive from. The problems occur when you have someone who is very familiar with the computing, who is not so experienced , maybe, with the tactile excavation process, or vice versa, but if you are not familiar–if the computer is something that worries you–that you feel is falsely objectifying your data, for example, then it is not going to be a good thing to think with. It’s not going to be a good way of re-excavating the data.

David Morgan: What technologies have the greatest potential to yield more digital data?

Graeme Earl: Technologies that require the least change in the way that you practice. So you use something that the excavator is familiar with–the camera–bolt on a few gizmos–exciting, flashing, and whizzing things–and then you produce some new useful archeological record at the end of it.

David Morgan: What are these PTMs and how are they used?

Graeme Earl: Polynomial Texture Maps, or PTMs, are a technology that was invented by a guy called Tom Malzbender at Hewlett Packard Labs. If you are familiar with recording something like rock art panels, or if you are working with inscriptions, which is a good example from over here, what you do when you are taking that photograph is you try and get the best light. You try to get the best raking lights so you can see the details. What PTMs are, really, is a way of capturing that variability in light and shade.

Graeme Earl: A few of us in archeology have started to use this particular technique. So, there is Cultural Heritage Imaging over there in the States–you’ve been pretty much key players in it–and ourselves, trying to use it as an embedded practice within an archeological project. So as well as using it to record maybe something that is in a museum collection, or some rock art, we wanted to try and use it as a technique that was used day in and day out, just as a standard part of the post-excavation process.

I mean, one of the greatest things about the technology–you know, if you come to write a text and you want to produce a static image–you set up your virtual lights within the PTM, freeze the image, and there you’ve got just a perfectly composed finds image. You can tell people that it is amazing what they can do with a camera, a flashlight, and a shiny ball.

David Morgan: What is “virtual reality” and how do you use it in archeology?

Graeme Earl: If you want to be specific about what virtual reality is, virtual reality implies a kind of computer graphic model that you can interact with. There are lots of different terms for what this is: there is “virtual archeology,” there is “virtual reality archeology,” and there is to say “computer graphic imagery.” There is a whole host of them, but basically we’re just talking about methods primarily drawn from the film industry, and the things that makes Gladiator look beautiful, and using those kinds of technologies. Computer graphic models provide a really intuitive, quick way to convey what a really complicated interpretive process is.

David Morgan: Is there a danger inherent in the “Disneyfication” of cultural heritage?

Graeme Earl: That’s an interesting term. I would say I really don’t have any problem at all with the Disneyfication–the popularization–of cultural heritage. I think that the more people we can reach out to, and demonstrate to, the magic of Portus, or the magic of the archeology of Louisiana, the better. The more we can convey our own excitement for the discipline, which we’ve developed over however many years…if we have a chance to demonstrate or pass on that kind of excitement through maybe quite a simplified, exciting presentation, then that’s great. I think the more we do that, the more people would care about cultural heritage, and fewer bad things would happen to cultural heritage.

Graeme Earl: That doesn’t mean that we give people carte blanche to lie about the past and to present a past as if we know all of the facts, but I don’t think that you have to have a very bland, sterile presentation of the past in order to be true to your archeological principles. I think you can convey the magic and the interpretation and the flamboyance of some of the practices, as well as being true to the archeology. And I think we’ll have a lot to gain in partnerships with people like Disney or Pixar–people who know how to tell these kinds of stories. We know about the past, and if we work together we’ll be presenting better stories.

David Morgan: One of the biggest problems with virtual interpretation is missing information. How do you handle missing data?

Graeme Earl: We are very good at taking portions of information and looking up all of the other correlating data sources: things that maybe better preserved at other sites–mixing and matching but doing it in a consistent fashion, and then bringing it together to form one, or preferably a series, of interpretations. So again I don’t think the production of computer graphic models differs from any other kind of aspect of the archeological process. Again, it is incumbent upon us to be true to the data as much as we can, and to make sure the representation of the archeology is as near as possible–as close to the truth–as we understand it. I don’t think you can use technology as a way to make it any clearer what data there really are. I think we’ve been maybe a little bit too worried in the past about computer images being overly convincing or computer representations being overly kind of scientific. I think we can take a step back and say: people who are looking at these–they know all about Pixar, they know that you can make things up, but they have to trust us that we archeologists aren’t in the business of making up, but interpreting.

David Morgan: What are some of the biggest problems with the adoption of some of these new technologies?

Graeme Earl: A practical problem…a practical consideration comes down to cost and various ways of measuring it. You don’t have to have ludicrous computers. You don’t have to have very expensive software. But, to a degree the better software that you have, the more computers that you have to produce the work, the more time you have, the more person-hours you have to dedicate to the project, the better the results that you are going to get. So there is always some kind of cost implication, and computer graphics in particular is very processor intensive. The bigger the computer you have, the better the results you have quicker, so that is always a limitation.

Graeme Earl: So the great thing is the more data you get like that now–so if you get your XRF data–because the computer graphics technologies enable you to represent all of that data in a physically accurate way, you know that when you look at the image it definitely isn’t just a pretty picture, because it’s based on a simulation of the interaction between light, pigment, the surface of the marble, deeper down…the subsurface scattering within the marble. The computer graphics now are at a stage where for the first time you know that it is physically right. It doesn’t just look right, it is just physically right. The example I use is look at Shrek 1, 2, and 3, and look at Shrek’s skin. Shrek’s skin in 3…if there is a real ogre in the world, then it would look exactly like Shrek.

David Morgan: Thanks very much for joining us today Graeme.

David Morgan speaks with Graeme Earl of the University of Southampton in the UK about digital survey methods in archeology.

September 30, 2009

10. Tom Jones on Urban Ecology (Episode 10)

Transcript

Ferrell: Good morning and welcome to the podcast, Tom.

Jones: Morning Andy, how are you?

Ferrell: I’m doing great. Thanks for asking. So let’s get to the meat of this: what do you mean by urban ecology?

Jones: Well up here in Easton our definition of Urban Ecology encompasses the integration of human and natural systems that support healthful, sustainable, and productive life in a densely populated city environment, which is the situation in the West Ward in the city of Easton in Pennsylvania.

Ferrell: Ok, tell us a little more about the West Ward Urban Ecology Project.

Jones: Well the West Ward Urban Ecology Project has been funded for five years by the Wachovia Regional Foundation(Wells Fargo Regional Foundation ), and it’s a grant that’s to the Community Action Committee in the Lehigh Valley in partnership with the citizens in the West Ward and also the city of Easton which is a neighborhood of over eleven thousand people and encompasses an area that’s being determined eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Place that encompasses well over 2,300 buildings and most of them are over a hundred years of age or over at least 80 years of age.

Jones: The Urban Ecology Project is set up for significant citizen participation through the canton process. Some of the basic practices of Urban Ecology is to study the full interconnected urban ecologic system including its composition, character in relationships of natural order and human settlement, and to develop replicable and measurable standards for measuring and evaluating our practices. We are also going to seek to educate the community about Urban Ecology and the findings that we are developing.

Jones: We’re instigating a management process that is beginning to arrest the urban decay and develops improvements to insure and expand beneficial and sustainable urban ecologic systems. We’re working hard on producing sound economic conditions and growth that support healthful and social and economic capacity, stability and development that follow, sustainable development standards.

Jones: We’re going to integrate an interpretive and artistic program throughout the architectural and urban fabric for describing the urban ecology system and demonstrating its effectiveness, so that our citizens can participate and enjoy, as well as those who come here and visit us.

Ferrell: Oh wow, that is very ambitious. Tom, tell us, how did this project begin?

Jones: Well, the West Ward is the most challenged neighborhood in the city of Easton, which is a city that was started back in the 1752. It’s an area that was originally, primarily a residential section, but because of the industrial decline, that’s typical for the northeast portion of the United States; there has been a lot of disinvestment, especially in the last 20 years and then unfortunately what were originally single residential buildings were converted into multiple residential units apartments.

Jones: There has been a significant cycle of decline; the Urban Ecology direction was undertaken for the West Ward to take a more holistic approach to manage the physical space of the community, because we are set with very significant natural resources being located at the juncture of the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers and also because of the Bushkill Stream that forms a normal northern boundary of the community, which is one of Pennsylvania’s finest limestone base, native brook trout streams.

Ferrell: Great, and I understand there are students involved in this effort. Who are these students and what is the role they play in this?

Jones: One of the things that we feel that is distinct about our effort is the partnership with Lafayette College, which was originally founded by the citizens of Easton. It has one of the oldest mechanical and civil engineering departments in the United States and the College, historically has been intimately tied with the growth and development with the community.

Jones: Under a memorandum of understanding between the college and the Community Action Committee in the Lehigh Valley, they are defined a partnership for the five years where the students are working on a whole set of defined projects for community based service learning and this is beginning to encompass all the education departments at the college through the technology clinics. The mechanical engineering department has a green design laboratory and the Landis Center does a lot of community outreach that even gets involved with developing reading programs for mentoring for the disadvantaged youth in the West Ward.

Ferrell: Great, you just mentioned the Green Design Lab. What is the goal of the Green Design Lab?

Jones: The Green Design Lab, which is very prominent with Lafayette College, has made a long-term commitment to set up a true design laboratory that is headed by Dr. Erol Ulucakli, who is a mechanical engineer at Lafayette College, and we’re beginning to undertake long-term studies, not only for integrating green building concerns and historic rehabilitation for the buildings stock in the West Ward, but we’re also looking at the development of an application of new technology for energy efficiency and also new research in materials that could make residential buildings more efficient in terms of energy efficiency concerns.

Jones: The research and application of the research the we are undertaking through the Green Design Lab is dedicated to developing and applying practical methods that are affordable for low and moderate income populations and currently, this summer, working with Dr. Ulucakli and one of the mechanical engineering students, we’re doing a set of base-line study buildings which are setting up the practices and protocols on how to approach three buildings that are frame and also masonry.

Jones: Those will be the basis for our approaches for the Green Building Historic Rehabilitation programs for the West Ward, not only for the Weatherization Program but also for the Comprehensive Rehabilitation Program that we are seeking to get funded under neighborhood stabilization program funding and will be administered through the Urban Land Trust, which has just been established by the Community Action Committee in the Lehigh Valley. So the research at the college, through the Green Design Lab, will be directly applied as a benefit and experience to the populations in the West Ward and also to serve as a model for other potential cooperating communities in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

Ferrell: And I just love this project the more I hear about it, it’s fantastic. So, Tom, what is the major key to the success of this program?

Jones: In my opinion, it’s developing a true democratic process that respects citizen participation. One of the key things we constantly do here in the West Ward: we’ve developed a sub-committee structure that is composed of some key committees that work consistently and in reference to our work plan which is projected over a five-year basis.

Jones: We have a community economic opportunity committee; we have a Human Resources and Public Safety Committee; we have a natural resources committee; and we also have a Neighborhood Physical Quality Committee composed of residents inside and throughout the West Ward as well as other stakeholders in the Easton area that can just meet together, cause discussion, and also seek common resolution to a lot of the critical issues we are facing and also to effect change both programmatically and physically throughout the West Ward in a planned manner.

Jones: We also have the approach which we based on what is called the cantons we have throughout the 11,000 population base of the West Ward, we have eight Canton subdivisions and within each of those Cantons which does reference the ancient tradition of Cantons in Switzerland, which is one of the basic precedents for democracy in the western world, we go through an integrated process of seeking input from the residents and through our workshop process we define the agenda and the work plan and application and also to disseminate ideas.

Ferrell: What would have been some of the pitfalls of this process?

Jones: Well one of the pitfalls is something that we’re going to be addressing here shortly in the West Ward, is working with the people in the West Ward to understand more fully what used to be called in our high school years: civics. Often times when we’re going through this process you run through, as in any community, the difficulties of getting everyones’ voices heard and listened to besides the ones that tend to be dominant and we’ve been trying to use the nominal group technique in our workshop process to address this but we’re going to be working with potential professionals for example so that people learn how to listen to each other and also for those people who tend to be the more quiet personalities but have a lot of good ideas to find ways that their voices can be heard.

Jones: Because at the end of it, the process that we are using for the West Ward project it’s strength come from full cooperation from the people that live within the area, and they have to come from people who can speak loudly in the community development process as well as those who have more silent voices. I can start typically saying that we always need more money, but we tend to be very tough there and we also tend to focus on getting as much volunteer activity contributed as possible. We’re an economically challenged community because the neighborhood that we’re within, we have a very large portion of the population that did not achieve a high school diploma or they’re severely economically challenged but we are finding the ways and means to have these people’s voices heard and also to concentrate on creating jobs for these people so that they have economic stability, both in the present and in the future.

Ferrell: How do you imagine getting this model out in the field further applied in other places?

Jones: Under the Wachovia Regional Foundation grant we made the obligation up front to Wachovia that we would engage in dissemination. We’ve already started on that within the state of Pennsylvania. We were committed to reaching out to other communities throughout Pennsylvania to form a network of urban ecologic communities we’re already engaged in that process we already have the letters of interest from the upper main street communities in Schuylkill County of Pennsylvania, which are quite stunning but they’re very challenged, historic anthracite communities.

Jones: Next week we’re meeting in Germantown in the city of Philadelphia to discuss the initiation of our ecology network community there. We have interest from Uptown section of the city of Harrisburg, and we have a letter of expression of interest from Ridgeway all the way out in Northwest Pennsylvania in Elk County in the beautiful Allegheny Highlands and we’ve made contacts in the Pittsburg area specifically toward Braddock as well as some initial communities out there.

Jones: Our state’s Bureau of Historic Preservation for the Pennsylvania Historic Museum Commission has shown a significant initial interest here and working through Jean Cutler we’re defining how to go about exploring the development of this Urban Ecology Network within Pennsylvania. Also within the framework of that commitment of dissemination we are working also in concert through Lafayette College, which has international connection concerns, we are initiating contacts elsewhere to cooperate with a set of initial urban equality communities internationally. And our contacts have gone into India, we’re also discussing towards Madagascar and we’re evaluating going into Wales, Russia, and possibly some other points around the globe, but that’s very initial at this point in time.

Ferrell: Well, that really has a far-reaching application. And so Tom, let’s end quickly with: what are the next steps? How can we get this to the next level?

Jones: Well, what we’re doing here in the West Ward: we are going through our work plan and we are trying to approach this with a sense of humility because we are trying not only to share the things that we feel are successful but we also want to share those things that don’t work. We’re hoping for example that the integration of green building and historic rehabilitation for our low and moderate income populations in the West Ward.

Jones: We want to show and share with other people those things that work or don’t work that are practical and affordable, to basically take care where most people live in the United States, which are these older buildings that are energy inefficient and we’re hoping to be innovative there and to share that. We’re hoping that we can disseminate this idea and this approach because it’s based upon addressing some primary thematic areas that relate to Children and Families, Affordable Housing and Counseling, Neighborhood Building and the Environment, and Economic Development.

Jones: We here in Easton are trying to do the best that we can to address climate change and also the critical issues in terms of the expansion of carbon. We are in the northeast of the United States, which in the last Brooking Institution report is one of the places in the world that is most responsible for causing climate change because of our consumption of energy, historically. We’re hoping that we can grow with other communities and also go into areas that are similar to us, like our neighborhood, in terms of economic challenges and to grow together towards this and we’re looking towards state and federal agencies to take a serious look at what we’re doing here and to become active partners, hopefully with our approach and efforts.

Ferrell: Tom, thanks for talking to us today. We’re very eager to see how this develops and we wish you luck.

Jones: Thank you very much Andy; thanks for talking.

Andy Ferrell speaks with Tom Jones, an urban conservator for the West Ward Urban Ecology Project in eastern Pennsylvania. They will discuss the West Ward Ecology Project and something called the Green Design Laboratory.

October 13, 2009

11. Curriculum Development for Preservation Landscape Maintenance (Episode 11)

Transcript

the historic landscape preservation maintenance curriculum roundtable discussion at the Hampton National Historic Site in Townson, Maryland. The roundtable is hosted by the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training and the Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation.

The 15 attendees, who include National Park Service and non-National Park Service landscape professionals, gathered to discuss and identify common needs and interests around historic landscape maintenance and to provide recommendations to guide creation of a training curriculum. Join me as we hear from some of the roundtable participants.

I’m Bob Mackenzie from the Adams National Historical Park and I’m here to help throw around ideas and brainstorm about developing curricula for landscape maintenance skills or just ideas that focus on historic preservation or preservation of historic landscape, historic fabric.

What I’d like to come out of this is some idea of a primer for anyone who is working on a historic landscape, primarily field people so that they get an idea of why we do things differently. It’s a struggle sometimes to explain to a new employee or a seasonal employee who has been working in the private sector and has done it one way for so long, to try to explain to them why we do it the way that we do it and why it is important, to the whole concept of a historic fabric and why we need to protect this, why we can’t plant that, why we can’t mulch this, why we don’t use power equipment.

I’m Susan Dolan. I’m with Mount Rainer National Park. I’m a historical landscape architect. I also work in the Pacific West Regional Office in Seattle. I think that one of the most exciting things isthat we’re really defining a new position a new role, particularly for the National Park Service, speaking from that perspective, of landscape preservation maintenance specialist. We’re identifying what the central ingredients of a curriculum would be for training for that position and therefore essentially what are the qualifications or basic competencies someone would need in that role.

My name is Christian Zimmerman and I’m with Prospect Park and the Prospect Park Alliance. I think what’s been most interesting for me is the fact that there is this strong need to differentiate between regular park maintenance and historic preservation landscape maintenance in that there is a different component and with all the historic properties that are out there, including mine that there is an education component that needs to be brought to the maintenance workers.

One it would be very beneficial for them as well as to increase that skill set, and I think it would also help with a matter of pride that they are working in special places, and that it’s important that y recognize that, and the practices that they complete throughout the day are following certain guidelines, for the longevity of those historic properties.

What I really appreciate about this group and what we’ve been doing is we are focusing on the field worker. It’s not just a management approach, it is a management approach for field workers because they’re the ones who really do fulfill those requirements in maintaining our public properties, our historic properties, so I really appreciate that and the fact that we’re trying to create this curriculum.

I’m Iris Gestram; I’m the executive director of the National Association for Olmsted Parks. What I found most helpful really is the, I think the diversity of perspectives around the table and I think the discussions in terms of one getting different perspectives but also sparking my own thinking.

I think I bring a pretty diverse perspective in terms of public horticulture, historic preservation, and association management. Thinking about the resources that are out there already from the different organizations and how we might all incorporate and utilize them in a much more effective manner. I think in that way the workshop was really productive.

Hi, I’m Tom McGrath and I’m the superintendent of the Historic Preservation Training Center located in Frederick, Maryland, and we’re part of the National Park Service’s Learning and Development Division. Certainly the exciting point is the fact that we’ve been discussing training and development for the stewards; those people actually working on our historic landscapes, doing the preservation maintenance. So it’s really where the rubber meets the road.

I’m very excited any time we’re talking about addressing training needs for the rank and file National Park Service employees and also the other thing that I would say that’s exciting was the partners from the outside agencies and sites such as Monticello and Dumbarton Oaks that have really identical training needs. I was involved in the practice category and I’m glad I was because I think I can contribute to that; I’m not a landscape architect, but an architect dealing with historic structures, however, the training program that we’ve developed to deliver training opportunities to our maintenance workers dealing with historic structures, called the PAST program, would be very similar in terms of its concept and delivery methods to training our landscape preservation workers, and so there’s a lot of cross-walking we could do of delivery methods, curriculum basing preservation philosophy, but the practice, the actual using tools, using equipment safely, recognizing materials, sourcing materials, all of those kinds of areas that we discussed have direct application both in preservation for building as well as for historic landscapes. I certainly think we’ve identified a leadership group both within and outside the Park Service.

Our friends at the Olmsted Center, Charlie Pepper in particular, has long experience in exactly this field, so we would love the opportunity to share our knowledge and expertise and help expand training opportunities for those maintenance workers in the National Park Service, but also the other thing I think is very exciting to wrap up, is that we start this new program with partners and look to develop it with partners, look for application both inside and outside the Park Service and I’ve never done something exactly like that so this would be exciting and I think would help with the success and make for a much better product at the end.

Hi, I’m Beate Jensen and I’m the Buildings and Grounds Preservation Supervisor at Gari Melcher’s Home and Studio in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Yesterday and this morning we will wrap up our conversation talking about maybe starting a program that will help the people that actually maintain the gardens understand the concepts of historic preservation or landscape preservation, and why working in a garden that has history to it would be different than working in let’s say a botanical garden. I find it very exciting there is so much information out there to share with the people on the ground, and I’m realizing that there is actually more than I thought.

Hi, my name is Paul Bitzel. I am chief of resource management at Hampton National Historic Site and Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine in Baltimore, Maryland. I feel very strongly that the historic preservation ethic needs to be instilled in our younger staff, whether they’re maintenance or resource management staff.

I think the joint efforts of Charlie Pepper and Tom McGrath’s organizations within the building and landscapes preservation efforts of training Park Service staff are really important, and I think the conversations that they’re having now to basically build the boat as it sails is a cleaver way to put it, but I think that time is of the essence, and I think that their programs are a good place to start. And I do believe that reaching out to the public sector, for instance with Dumbarton Oaks and Prospect Park in New York were a great start, and we need to continue to solicit the involvement of these and other organizations that are working toward the same goals.

My name is Lucy Lawliss. I am superintendent at George Washington Birthplace National Monument and the Thomas Stone National Historic Site, and I have been there just a year. It’s my first superintendency, but I come from a background with the National Park Service in the cultural landscape program. I started in the southeast region as the first historical landscape architect and then after 10 years there, moved to Washington and was the lead for the cultural landscapes program, so the topic of historic landscape maintenance is a perfect fit for my career with the National Park Service. The exciting thing is that we had an incredible array of expertise around the table from the people who are working in the field and know what those needs are to people who’ve just sort of been watching at a higher level of management but know that there are a number of unmet needs, and so one of the really important things is to go back and see what we already have that we can reshape and reformat for a different audience.

And so I believe that there is a number of things that have been done already in the recent past with the cultural landscapes program, both in Washington, regional, park level that could be brought together as sort of as a baseline group of information that could be made available and the technology isn’t my strength, but as we sit and listen to all the interesting possibilities with the web and social networking that we could get information out there to people who are looking for these kinds of answers and trainings.

And then I think most importantly is working to develop a full curriculum so someone who over a period of time and interest and support could specialize in a trade that is critical to the longevity of our historic sites. So we are working at it from both ends. It will be really exciting to get this all done.

Today we join the historic landscape preservation maintenance curriculum roundtable discussion at the Hampton National Historic Site in Townson, Maryland. The roundtable is hosted by the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training and the Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation. The 15 attendees, who include National Park Service and non-National Park Service landscape professionals, gathered to discuss and identify common needs and interests around historic landscape maintenance and to prov

January 7, 2010

12. Green Design and the Economy of Sustainability (Episode 12)

Transcript

CLEAVER: What is your background regarding sustainability?

NELSON: Well, I have a Master’s degree in sustainable design. I went to the Martin Center at Cambridge University, and they have a sustainable design degree. And while it is focused on new construction and technology and adding to new construction, I actually focused on sustainability for the built environment and how you can add new technology to an existing building.

CLEAVER: What is your position now?

NELSON: I am the program director for the Historic Building Recovery Grant Program, which is a grant program resulting from Hurricane Katrina. We got funding to focus on historic buildings that were damaged by either Hurricane Katrina or Rita, and we have about 568 grants — historic houses that we are helping to renovate and rehabilitate.

CLEAVER: What is your definition of sustainability?

NELSON: Well, there are many definitions, but I think probably the most concise one would be any effort that creates a result that has a long-term life. Basically, any effort that can be maintained or used or reused. Sustainability is about sustaining something, and that really goes into a long term and not a quick turn around, quickly disposable product.

CLEAVER: What does the term green building mean to you?

NELSON: Well, that one is another one that is used quite a bit. A structure that requires little energy to achieve its function, but also a structure that is designed for its climate, for its location and for its use. So you don’t really want to build a glass tower in a dessert. So wherever your climate is, the location of the property, you want to design something for that area.

CLEAVER: What is embodied energy?

NELSON: Well, embodied energy is any energy that goes into making a product, which includes human labor, fossil fuels, transportation-getting it there to where ever it ends up being. So embodied energy is all the energy in a product until it gets to its end use.

CLEAVER: What features of historic buildings are environmentally friendly?

NELSON: Well one, the society has already paid for the cost of building your houses so the embodied energy is already paid for. So every product has a cost and we have already paid for that. An historic building is inherently sustainable: the products are so good that they are made out of. You can’t get them anymore that they last a long time and they have a long-term life. New material is made to be obsolete in a few years, so modern construction is not made to last, but historic properties are.

Historic buildings were built before we really had mechanical systems to give us a false environment inside, and so the buildings were designed to have passive cooling and passive heating. So most historic structures have designed in them a way for the occupant to interact with their building and to actually use the passive strategies to keep them cool or warm without using energy.

So if you were to use those features before you ever got to the mechanical system of the HVAC system then you can have a lower energy bill just from the fact of interacting with your house. We have gotten out of the habit of interacting with our buildings, and so we have very large glass windows that we leave open in the summer that take a lot of heat, and we just don’t know how to work with our buildings. And you could actually lower your power bill quite a bit if you would just interact with these.

If you take just in the South where it is hot and tropical, some of our best-known and little under-used strategies are, a lot of our buildings are built up on piers. That is for two reasons. One, because we have a very high water table and it keeps the moisture away from our building, but it also allows cool air to go underneath the structure and have a cooling effect in the summer.

Because if you look at a building and think about if you don’t turn your AC on, how are you going to keep yourself cool. The other thing that we have, is we have very tall ceilings because heat rises, it allows people to walk in a cooler area because the heat is up around the ceiling. If you don’t put a drop ceiling in and you actually use that, then you have a very effective way to keep the temperature in your house a lot cooler.

Plaster has the same effect. It is a great insulator, it absorbs and releases moisture as it comes through and it has a very cooling effect inside. The other two things that are really predominant in the South that people do not use very much now is our shutters. A lot of people think of those as a storm prevention, but actually if you use them in the summer, they not only stop the solar rays from coming into your house and heating it up and causing a large energy bill, but it keeps your house cooler because it creates an air barrier between the shutter and your glass so heat does not actually come into your building as much as it does.

The other one is our transoms because you have what is called degree days, which is a way that scientists measure how many days you use a mechanical system. Up north the degree days are heavier when it is cold–they have more cold degree-days–and in the south most of our degree days have to do with cooling our buildings off.

So for example, in a climate if you have an average of two-hundred degree-days a year where you would need to use a mechanical system to make yourself comfortable in your house. If you were to interact with your building and use your shutters when it’s hot on the south side of the building to keep it cool, if you were to come home and open your transoms above your door and allow a breeze to go through and take the heat out of your house, you could go from an average from two hundred degree-days a year to one hundred twenty five degree-days a year. So it just is really interacting with your building.

CLEAVER: How do you incorporate these ideas into your position now?

NELSON: Well because we have so many grants and we have exposure to so many people that most of our grantees have never been involved with historic preservation, so it is a really unique opportunity to educate them.

And probably the biggest education we try to give them because we interact with them over a two-year period, so you don’t try to give them all this information at once and kind of overload them, you are allowed to really work with them through a time frame that allows you to kind of give them a little bit of information and kind of build on it.

And the biggest thing that we try to do is to educate them that what you see on the TV is not your only option. And that if you have a certain amount of money, that if you start with what is already in your building and work with that, if you are trying to lower your energy bill, if you would work with what’s in your building first than your construction or rehabilitation dollar could go further because you’re not trying…if you only have $5,000 and you do it and you use that money to replace your windows with new windows because you feel that that’s what is going to give you the best bang for the dollar, but you have good windows then you could spend maybe half of that on shutters to protect your windows and then have that additional money to go somewhere else.

So the big thing that we try to do is educate the public that what they see on TV is not their only option, and that what is in most of our historic buildings, what is already in place, is something that if you learn to use it-which costs nothing to do, to interact with your building-that you can use your renovation dollars for something else. And that is probably one of the biggest things that we try to do. That is to one, teach them the value of what they have because most people don’t realize what a valuable asset you have, and then how to best interact with it and use what you currently have instead of try to replace it.

CLEAVER: If less new construction is the result of these ideas, then what is the effect on the economy?

NELSON: Well, I think that we are so used to or so in the mode of doing what we’ve always done, which is new construction, which is a large business and I understand that, but I really do think that if you were to lower new construction and go into rehabilitation of the built environment that it really does balance it out. And the reason is because you can take people that work in new construction and if you have less new construction, then those trades people can go into the rehabilitation renovation field.

I also feel that on a city-wide or development company that if you are not focused on construction than you can focus on other things, which is sustainable resources other than oil or coal. For a city, instead of having your city council do new infrastructure for new subdivision development, if you are not having to put your resources into that, you could put your resources into fixing your current infrastructure.

So I think that it all balances out, I just think that you have to look at it in a different direction. I think that less construction and more renovation of your built environment creates the same amount of jobs if not more and can create the same type of profit that companies are looking for. You just have to direct your business in a different way.

New construction, a portion of the people that work in that don’t have to be skilled, you just have to be strong and willing to work hard to where preservation is a skilled labor. It is something that you can take with you. It is like going to school, you actually get educated on it. I just think that it is a poor argument to say that new construction is the only way to go, it’s just the way that we are used to going. It’s fast, it’s a quick turnaround and I think that there are too many houses currently that are unoccupied that you could use.

I think sustainability is not just for architecture, I think it is kind of a way of thinking about things. We have the ability to change the direction that we are going. I think that we are in a consumer-based society, and I understand why we are in a consumer-based society, but instead of trying to sell five things for a dollar each, why don’t you try to sell a well-made thing for 5 dollars for one of them.

I think it is just a new direction of thinking, and I don’t think it is new. I think it is just changing the direction that society thinks. I think that being a disposable society has got to stop sooner or later, hopefully it will be sooner. And sustainability, I think, is an umbrella in which all that fits under. It is more of a recycle, reuse, not need as much, don’t throw away as much. So, but sustainability is attached to architecture because it is one of the largest energy uses that we have in society, other than automobiles, but it can really trickle down to everything. It is just a way of thinking.

Jessica Cleaver speaks with Tracy Nelson, director of the Historic Building Recovery Grant Program, about sustainability and historic preservation.

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