New Philadelphia: using augmented reality to interpret slavery and reconstruction era historical sites

Does a historical site lose its significance or become less worthy of interpretation if there are no surviving buildings? Can technology help present the stories of disadvantaged and disenfranchised groups whose heritage lacks well-preserved architecture or material culture? The emerging technology of augmented reality (AR) offers new ways of designing and shaping the public’s experience when visiting landmarks by enabling an unprecedented means to combine 3D historical visualization with historical landmarks. This especially applies to underrepresented groups whose heritages have not been well served by traditional modes of preservation and interpretation due to a variety of factors. These range from disadvantages relating to material culture to a greater emphasis on intangible heritage which have placed them outside the bounds of what archaeologist Laurajane Smith calls authorised heritage discourse. A project at the New Philadelphia National Historic Landmark, located in Pike County Illinois, seeks to address these issues through AR. The technology, while offering opportunities for historical interpretation, poses challenges in terms of designing AR systems that coordinate content presentation with specific locations as well as developing virtual historical content with varying levels of source materials.     

Spatial optimisation of fire service coverage: a case study of Brisbane,Australia

In the context of changing demand for fire services, spatial optimisation of fire coverage has attracted little scholarly attention despite its potential to improve emergency response and to inform future service planning for fire stations. Drawing on small area population forecasts, this paper extends the application of the Maximum Coverage Location Model to compute and delineate the spatial coverage of current and proposed new fire stations to align with population growth estimates for Brisbane, Australia. Our results reveal important gaps in fire cover that are likely to emerge as a result of predicted population growth, the spatial patterns of which varies across the Brisbane metropolitan area. We draw on these results to delineate a series of new potential sites for fire stations to ameliorate the reduction in spatial coverage as a consequence of predicted population growth demonstrating the utility of our analytic approach for decision‐making and operational planning in the fire services.     

COUNTERFACTUAL SPATIAL DISTRIBUTIONS

Recent contributions provide researchers with a useful toolbox to estimate counterfactual distributions of scalar random variables. These techniques have been widely applied in the literature. Typically, the dependent variable of interest has been a scalar and little consideration has been given to spatial factors. In this paper we propose a simple method to construct the counterfactual distribution of the location of a variable across space. We apply the spatial counterfactual technique to assess how much changes in individual characteristics of Hispanics in the Washington DC area account for changes in the distribution of their residential location choices.     

Project SAMPHIRE: Crowd Sourcing Maritime Archaeology data off Scotland's West Coast

Perhaps the greatest barrier to effective management of underwater cultural heritage is the lack of data on the nature and location of offshore archaeological resources. This is a problem shared with terrestrial archaeology, but is particularly acute due to the limitations of survey techniques in the underwater environment. In Scotland <15% of known ship losses from the last 200 years have been located and the record is far less comprehensive for earlier periods, verging on a near total data gap. Most known archaeological sites in Scottish waters have been discovered through large-scale sonar survey of relatively low resolution and a considerable bias has been introduced in the archaeological record; this has favored the discovery and documentation of larger and more recent, often upstanding, metal shipwrecks. This article presents the methods and results from a three-year project designed to reduce this bias by demonstrating large-scale prospecting for maritime archaeology through a community-based crowd-sourcing approach. Project SAMPHIRE (the Scottish Atlantic Maritime Past: Heritage, Investigation, Research and Education Project) was geographically focused on the west coast of the Scottish mainland and was undertaken between 2013 and 2015, resulting in a large number of new archaeological discoveries, including shipwrecks, aircraft, and other material of a much more varied nature than what is typically found through large-scale hydrographic surveys.