Instructors: Professor
Ruth Tringham (Anthropology) (tringham@berkeley.edu),
Dr. Michael Ashley (CIO~CDS) (mashley@berkeley.edu),
Colleen Morgan (GSI) (clmorgan@berkeley.edu)
Instruction: 6 weeks (May 22-June 28), 4 units studio/field course. Tuesdays and Thursdays 9-12, 1-4. Registration through UC Berkeley Summer Sessions
Location: San Francisco Presidio. In the Presidio, instruction will be split between the field location at Fort Winfield Scott and the Media Center (MACTiA West) of the Moraga Archaeology Center (MAC) in the old Officers Club on Moraga Street on the Main Post. The Archaeology Center is part of the SF Presidio Trust, who run the free shuttle Presidigo between the Presidio and Downtown San Francisco.
Note: This course has no prerequisites but experience in archaeology, architecture, or history courses will be very helpful. satisfies the methods requirement of the Anthropology major. This course satisfies the methods requirement for the Anthroplogy major at UC Berkeley.
Lab Fees: A $50 lab fee is charged to support the heavy use of the MACTiA (Multimedia Authoring Center for Teaching in Anthropology) facilities. Details will be provided at the first meeting of the class. Make check payable to the Regents of the University of California; write: “MACTiA lab fee” in the bottom left corner
Course Websites:
This website is the Public website:
Official UC Berkeley website (B-Space): Electronic resources that are restricted to UC Berkeley campus will be distributed (mostly as .pdfs) in the “Resources” area of the BSpace course website which is accessible with a Calnet ID: Log in . If you have a problem accessing the website, contact Ruth or Colleen. Electronic publications that are publicly distributed will be given their URL for you to access yourselves.
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 including examining critically case studies of other heritage plans throughout the world, strategies of digital documentation of the heritage site, integrating the media of this record into a composite document, and hands-on experience of the real planning, visualization and creation of a site management plan at Fort Winfield Scott in the San Francisco Presidio. Fort Winfield Scott was an independent base for the Coastal Command created in 1911 in the northwest corner of the Presidio. Along with the rest of the Presidio, it was decommissioned as a military base in 1994 and became under the control of the Presidio Trust and the National Park Service. Its features in need of re-purposing include a campus of beautiful buildings, ornamental gardens, and some of the largest gun emplacements ever built.
Course Goals
At the end of the course, the student should be able to:
• Demonstrate a critical understanding of the research, interpretation, and concepts of site management of the San Francisco Presidio in the context of the worldwide management of cultural heritage sites and landscapes
• Critically evaluate site management plans of cultural heritage sites and landscapes
• Locate, utilize and cite the basic sources including library, internet and professional organizations for the course themes
• Understand and apply the concepts and rules of intellectual property in the context of re-purposing and sharing of data
• Understand the concepts of the preservation, management, and archiving of digital data.
• Have gained an in-depth familiarity with the history of the San Francisco Presidio, specifically Fort Winfield Scott
• Have carried out detailed documentation of one of the three historic zones of Fort Winfield Scott
• Have gained skill and experience in one technique of digital documentation of heritage sites and applied this to an area of Fort Winfield Scott
• Collaborate to produce a working management plan for three specific areas of Fort Winfield Scott.
• Collaborate to produce a website to share the plan with the public
Assessment of Students
This course is an inquiry-based course and has no mid-term or final exam. To a large extent, students are responsible for their own learning, although we have informal in-class tests to make sure the reading is not too much for you and that you have been able to both do it and make sense of it.
The main basis for your grade in the course is participation as a member of a single production team to develop and implement a digital documentation strategy to comprehensively record and to create a 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 and other organizations for heritage documentation and planning active at the SF Presidio.
Within the Fort Winfield Scott of the SF Presidio, each student will focus their research and documentation on one of the three areas of this 1910 fort:
• The main barracks and parade ground
• the gun batteries
• the landscaped gardens, tennis courts and officers club
Each student will focus their work on one of four themes:
• Historical: the tangibles of heritage including buildings, documents, earthmoving
• Ecological: the topography, vegetation, entomology,
• Cultural: the intangibles of heritage: the interests of different local groups in and around the Presidio, their stories, and opinions; narratives of actors in this historic place.
• Political: the sustainability of the plan; public engagement and dissemination; making it work.
Each student will be guided (depending on theme chosen) into an in-depth study of a particular digital recording methodology, including:
• Still photography (including VR enhanced photography) and its editing
• Videography and Sound recording and its editing, including oral histories and their recording
• the interpretation of 3D laser (point-cloud) scans
• archival (documents and maps) research and scanning,
• Collection of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data through mapping and interpretation
With this combination, each student will have her/his unique role on the team. All students, however, will learn the pros and cons of the different strategies. Your work for the team (assignment) is divided into 6 milestones, some of which will be assessed as a team, some individually. See schedule.
Each of the weekly milestones has assignments embedded within it.
• Milestone 1 (work during Week 1): Defining the Theme teams
- Read and study the Presidio maps, handouts and website. Read Fowler chapter 1, 12 and write a paragraph about each of the themes based on reading Fowler’s book of case studies (report due on Thursday 24 May)
- Read assigned literature on your theme implications for stewards and stakeholders (report due on Tuesday 29 May)
- On Thursday 24 May you will choose your theme team
• Milestone 2 (work during Week 2): Defining the Technology teams
- Review readings on digital documentation technology, Pt 1 (report due on Thursday 31 May)
- Review readings on digital documentation technology, Pt 2 (report due on Tuesday 5 June)
• Milestone 3 (work during Week 3): Documenting the theme through digital technology
- Review selected documentation technique and theme sources, Pt. 1 (report due on Thursday 7 June)
- Review selected documentation technique and theme sources, Pt. 2 (report due on Tuesday 12 June)
• Milestone 4 (work during Week 4): Defining the Scope of the Fort Scott Project
- Review cataloging and dissemination tools (report due on Thursday 14 June)
- Write your part of the Charter for the Site Management Plan (report due on Tuesday 19 June)
• Milestone 5 (work during Week 5): Presentation of Rough Cuts/First Drafts
- Create Rough Cut/First Draft of your team’s contribution (due for presentation on Thursday 21 June)
• Milestone 6 (work during Week 6): Final Production of Sire Management Plan
- Final Product: DVD, Website, etc (due for presentation on Thursday 28 June)
The percentage of your final grade of each milestone/assignment is specified in parenthesis. Details, guidelines, and resources for each milestone and assignment will be distributed on the course websites (including the “Resources” area of the B-Space website) and discussed in class.
Course format and structure:
The work day will be divided between seminar discussion on theoretical and comparative studies of heritage management, brainstorming on the project in the Media lab, and project fieldwork at Fort Winfield Scott. Click here to see the details of the schedule
The first part (Weeks 1 and 2) comprises research on the Presidio and comparative case studies, and initial planning and the formation of theme and technology teams. In these weeks, students will learn about the strategies of recording, planning and managing cultural resources
The second part (Weeks 3 and 4) focuses on creating 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 these two weeks students will gradually focus their skill-building on one technology applying it to a specific research area of Fort Winfield Scott. You 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’.
In the third part of the course (Weeks 5 and 6), 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. 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. The challenge for the course team is to create a compelling, inclusive SMP that could ultimately be put into practice.
Reading
The reading for this course comprises readings on cultural heritage, some specifically San Francisco and its Presidio, and others including examples of cultural heritage management plans from around the world. There will also be readings about digital documentation technologies and the sustainability and preservation of digital data and media. Reading will be from a mix of online articles, photocopied articles and extracts that have been digitized for this course. These will be provided at the beginning of the class in the “Resources” area of the B-Space website. A number of reference books and articles will also be available for reading (but not borrowing) in the Media Lab at the Presidio.
Week 1:
Fowler, P.
2004 Landscapes for the World: Conserving a Global Heritage. WINDgather Press, Macclesfield, Cheshire, UK. Chapter 1, 12 (pdf in “Resources)
**More to be added**
Course Policies:
❋Participation (freely adapted from Ray Ontko’s elegant prose, http://www.ontko.com/~rayo/cs63.html)
This course is not only about learning the material in the texts, reading some new material in the library, and evaluating a few films. If it were, there would be very little reason for us to meet as a class. A good student could learn the material in about one fifth the time by studying the text carefully, working through all the assignments, and following up on many of the citations given throughout the texts and in the bibliography. Indeed, this is the point of the text.
We meet as a class for a number of reasons:
• To discuss the material, share insights that each of us may have had while working through the materials. Doing so enables us to learn more (or better) than we might as independent scholars. In discussion, we also have the opportunity to discover our misconceptions by expressing ourselves and listening carefully to others.
• To present our research to one another. By presenting the fruits of our individual labors we take a stand for what we believe to be true and put our own work in the light for review by our peers. This is perhaps the most important aspect of method in computer science, or in any discipline for that matter.
• To review the work of others. We learn not only by exploring material through independent scholarship, but also by seeing others’ approaches and solutions to similar problems.
• To develop our abilities to express our thoughts in real-time. It is one thing to be able to figure things out, and another to have the thoughts fully developed and ready for action. How well do we know the material if we can’t engage in significant discussion and inquiry?
• To collaborate with each other in the creative process and share the sense of excitement and empowerment that comes from collectively producing work that you are proud of.
Your full participation in the course, then, is essential. Engagement in the course includes, but is not limited to:
• Preparation. Do the readings carefully, inquisitively, intelligently. You are responsible for your own learning
• Punctuality. Show up to class on time.
• Attendance. Come to all the classes. The class will not work if you do not attend. In order for your absence to be considered excused, you must contact Sara Gonzalez the day of your absence from class. If three consecutive class/after-school sessions are missed due to illness, you must submit a note from the Tang Center or your physician.
• Discussion. Come prepared to ask questions, and ask them. Come prepared to answer questions, and answer them, even if you are not being tested on your preparation.
• Research. Get excited about your research. Follow as many leads as you can, as deeply as you can. Make a contribution by summarizing what you have learned so that others may follow. Be prepared to be engaged and excited in other participants’ research and film projects. The class works as a team not a series of individuals. There should be a feeling of safety and mutual trust enabling students to express themselves and provide constructive feedback to others.
• Projects and Assignments. Write and create in a way that is meaningful to others, that you would be proud to publish to the world as an expression of your intellectual integrity and character.
Participation will be a factor of your grade. .
❋Documented Learning Disability
If you have a documented learning disability and are authorized to have special arrangements for assignments and tests, please let Colleen Morgan know IN WRITING by the second week of class.
❋Grading
If you have concerns about a grade, please talk with Colleen Morgan. If you have a dispute over a grade you have received, first try to work it out with Colleen. If you are unable to resolve a grading issue, submit a written explanation of your concerns to Ruth Tringham within one week. Professor Tringham retains final decision in the grading process. She will review your concerns and consider your grade. Please be aware that she may adjust your grade in either direction.
❋Late Assignments
Late assignments will not be accepted, unless you have made arrangements with the instructors ahead of time.
❋Plagiarism
Plagiarism will not be tolerated, and will result in a failing grade for the course. See the University Student Code of Conduct for information about plagiarism.
