UC Berkeley MACTiA

U.C. Berkeley Summers Session course. May 21-June29, 2007.

Digital Documentation and Representation in Archaeology: Managing Cultural Heritage at the San Francisco Presidio

Instructors: Professor Ruth Tringham (Anthropology), Dr. Michael Ashley (CIO~CDS)

Instruction: 6 weeks, 4 units course, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9-12, 1-4

Location: Multimedia Authoring Center (MACTiA|West) of the San Francisco Presidio Archaeology Lab, located in the Officers’ Club of the Main Post, San Francisco Presidio

Note: This course has no prerquisites, although some experience in archaeology, architecture and/or history is higly recommended. It satisfies the methods requirement for the Anthropology major at UC Berkeley

Lab Fees: A $50 lab fee is charged to support the heavy use of the MACTiA facilities.

Part 2 of a movie about this course presented to the Society for California Archaeology
Course Description:

This course is about understanding what it takes to steward cultural heritage on a local and global scale. Cultural heritage in this case includes natural/cultural, historic/prehistoric, tangible/intangible places: standing and buried buildings, landscapes, neighborhoods, cities, communities – anything which is of significance for the present population enough for someone to take steps to managing its conservation, preservation and accessibility to the public.

The course guides students through the process of cultural heritage management. The first part comprises research, case studies, initial planning and team formation. The second part focuses on a digital documentation strategy for collecting, processing and cataloging a variety of different digital media and sources, including photography, 3D laser scanning, videography, oral histories, archival research, field planning, and archaeological survey.

In the third part of the course students will learn to integrate these digital media into a dataset that holistically describes the place, as well as critical analysis of how site management in conducted in the ‘real world’. We will explore various mechanisms for the representation of this information with particular focus on the use of new media as a basis for constructing narratives that imbue multiple perspectives on the heritage sites.

In the fourth and final part of the course, students learn to take these data and their narratives and apply them to the formation of a site management plan (SMP) that could fulfill standards requirements from professional organizations such as ICOMOS, UNESCO, the World Monument Fund and other international / national / local governances. The challenge for the course team is to create a compelling, inclusive SMP that could ultimately be put into practice.

Fort Winfield Scott

The main requirement for the course is participation as a member of a team to create the site management plan for the historic site of Fort Winfield Scott at the San Francisco Presidio. The project builds on the research being done earlier in 2007 by UC Berkeley interns working in collaboration with CyArk (http://www.archive.cyark.org) in preparation for a workshop at the 10th Anniversary Symposium of US/ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) to be held in April 2007 at the SF Presidio: http://www.icomos.org/usicomos/ ).

Students will work as a single production team to develop and implement a digital documentation strategy to comprehensively record Fort Winfield Scott. Each student will have her/his unique role on the team and will go in-depth into a particular digital recording methodology. All students, however, will learn the pros and cons of the different strategies. The work day will be divided between seminar discussion on theoretical and comparative studies of heritage management, discussions and brainstorming on the project in the lab, and project fieldwork.