{"id":275,"date":"2010-11-25T11:01:49","date_gmt":"2010-11-25T16:01:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=275"},"modified":"2010-11-25T09:54:10","modified_gmt":"2010-11-25T14:54:10","slug":"when-on-google-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=275","title":{"rendered":"When on Google Earth?"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the perks of working at the British School at Rome<\/a> in the late nineties on the Tiber Valley Project<\/a> was getting to play with the GIS<\/a>, especially the digitized photos of the Tiber Valley taken during the war years. We used that GIS and those photos to re-locate sites discovered during the South Etruria Survey<\/a>. It was enormous fun… but once I left the warm embrace of the BSR, GIS and aerial (or, perish the thought, satellite!) imagery was hard to come by for the lone academic. My experience was by no means unique. You had to be part of a well funded project to play with any of those toys. With the release of Google Earth in 2005, things changed rather drastically.<\/p>\n

Adrian Myers, in the latest edition of the SAA Archaeological Review<\/a> (September 2010), details many of the projects that have used GE for visualization, paedegogy, locating and mapping sites, quantifying looting, and exploring change over time. My contribution to archaeology is not so obviously useful. In early 2009, I came across \u2018Where on Google Earth<\/a>?\u2019, a game played by geologists (not to be confused with ‘Where on Google Earth<\/a>?’, a game for geographers, which I only came across this morning. Keep your eyes peeled for Why on Google Earth and How on Google Earth coming soon no doubt). One geologist grabs a screenshot showing some geological formation, posts it on a blog, and the first person to guess the formation and location gets the right to host the next round of the game. This struck me as fun, and so I posted \u2018When On Google Earth #1<\/a>\u2019.<\/p>\n

Call it \u2018Where\u2019s Waldo<\/a>?\u2019 for archaeologists, if you like. You can also think of it as a \u2018barely game<\/a>\u2019 (and here<\/a>), where you get to pretend to be an archaeologist, scouring the world for lost civilizations. As far as my forays into game design are concerned, this is far and away the most successful experiment that I\u2019ve done. The list of past winners can be viewed here<\/a> and here on its Facebook page<\/a> (talk about taking on a life of its own!).<\/p>\n

But what I\u2019m wondering… how does this game jive with professional ethics? It\u2019s just a game, right? Should I need be concerned with ethics?<\/p>\n

Myers writes that<\/p>\n

\u201cGE might even be seen as a sort of panoptic viewing technology that has the potential to do violence upon those being viewed. This perspective of GE as panopticon surfaces a complex, provoking, and perhaps irresolvable tension. Any use of GE by archaeologists should be accompanied by thoughtful discussion on this tension; over time, this discussion might result in resolution.\u201d (2010, 10)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When on Google Earth in some senses narrows the field of view; not so much panopticon <\/a>as laser-sight. The game doesn\u2019t employ any of the authentic tasks of an archaeologist, or at least, archaeology as currently practiced. Every site is stripped from its context. By extracting the site from its landscape, by focussing on \u2018what time period? Where?\u2019 the game would seem to promote a kind of antiquarian collecting. In which case, \u2018it\u2019s just a game\u2019 is no defence at all.<\/p>\n

…of course, maybe I\u2019m just put out by the fact that I haven\u2019t won a round in ages.<\/p>\n

(other games being played on Google Earth are listed here<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the perks of working at the British School at Rome in the late nineties on the Tiber Valley Project was getting to play with the GIS, especially the digitized photos of the Tiber Valley taken during the war years. We used that GIS and those photos to re-locateContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["entry","author-graham","post-275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-articles"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=275"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":300,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions\/300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=275"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}