RUMBI:
-- WILL : Yesterday was focused entirely on creating a poster for the National Astronomy Meeting Conference on Monday July 6th. Rumbi and I attended a session with an arts professor, Duncan, to discuss the creation of posters from an artistic perspective. The name of the session was 'The Language of Memory.' We were asked to consider our projects and our experiences up to that point and write twenty random words to describe it. Twenty colours and images were also written down. Up to this point, I had been sceptical whether Duncan's idea of a poster was the same as ours. For the NAM Conference, Rumbi and I are required to make an academic poster but the material that we made at the end of this session was more artistic. Nevertheless, it was still relevant to us in the respect that we challenged an established concept. Archaeoastronomy feels like a field that challenges and rivals archaeology which is a more established field. The concept that was challenged in this session was far more provocative. The idea was put forth that Remembrance Day should not be on any date in particular and that the commemoration is made impersonal and intrusive. It was suggested that the Two Minutes of Silence are not two minutes to remember those who died for us but two minutes where you have to remain silent. This discussion tied in nicely with our trip to the National Memorial Arboretum where we were first introduced to the idea of examining the dialogue between place and person. One of the posters designed in this session had various memorials from the Arboretum underneath the red, bold words: "Remember? You Should." It was a very forceful imposition. I went in a completely different direction from everyone else and went from an artistic to an academic approach with my poster. It was filled with text explaining why I had selected various images to epitomize five of the words I had selected earlier to describe my experience of the project. Rumbi and I later went to the City Campus to complete a first draft of the poster. PhotoShop will be used to create the final conference-standard material but for now, Microsoft PowerPoint was employed. Images of the stars in the Orion Constellation are included in the Prospects session. Artwork from Stellarium in the Western, Egyptian and Arabic Starlores are superimposed over the stars. The point being made here is how the project could be expanded to include other starlores other the Western lore which is the default on Stellarium. From the session with Duncan earlier, I was inspired to incorporate provocation into our work to make it more interesting and personal. For example, I supposed that when we take a panorama of the Lee Westwood Sports Centre, we ensure that when it is imported into Stellarium, we situate it such that at some times of year, the Orion Constellation hangs over it. This is to suggest the idea that some people who work out in the gym are vain and arrogant as Orion was. This will not be written down in our poster or introductory talk but it will be mentioned when someone asks us about what alignments we will make with our impressionistic panorama. The most important priority for me this week is to learn how to import the panoramas into Stellarium. No more panoramas will be taken until I can import one of the two panoramas that I have got. The programmes Autostitch and Gimp were used to stitch the images taken at each angle of rotation and edit the sky respectively although this had to be done on my own computer since the computer I am using in Mary Ann Evans could not obtain the relevant authorization to install Gimp. One of the most frustrating parts about this exercise was deleting the excess images obtained from Thursday and Friday. It was no small wonder that the memory card of the camera had been filled. Deleting the excess images was a very time-consuming process. It was all I had time to do before I had to return some equipment to my supervisor before going home.
In the evening, Rumbi and I had an interesting tour of the campus around the Nature Trail, with a ecology consultant, Carlos Abrahams, observing the bat species that live here. They are fond of the open woodland instead of thick forest and there are about 4 species of bat that reside on this campus. Carlos had brought with him a bat detector that he could attach to his iPhone and employ using an app that converts the ultrasonic frequencies that bats use for echolocation into sounds we can here. Echolocation works in the same way as sonar; it is a navigation system the bats use to home in one their prey (small insects like midges and moths) by timing the time of return for sound waves they send out. Low pitch sound waves are used to locate objects further away like a building or a tree while high pitch sound waves are used to locate smaller objects like insects though these sound waves do not travel as far. The bats started to come out at about ten o'clock and flutter around the southeastern corner of the football pitch behind Erasmus Darwin and the Lee Westwood Sports Centre. At the top of the campus, they flew around patches of low overgrowth by the Conflict Zone. Their presence was revealed by the fast, high screeching sounds coming from the bat detector. The most common specimen that was detected this evening was the common pipistrelle with a couple of soprano pipistrelles also detected. This tour will be definitely included in the memory maps that Rumbi and I make each week to illustrate the memories and experiences of the campus and the users of the campus. Later on in the evening, I completed a major milestone in our project. From Friday, only a few points remained to be surveyed in the light pollution survey. Missed points on the Nature Trail, New Hall and the Student Village were filled in. Thus, the light pollution survey was complete and a map created on the TeraPlot software and using Photoshop to layer it over a map of the campus. WILL:
More progresss was made on the task of importing the panoramas into Stellarium. The panoramas have been cropped into four separate parts and scaled such that their number of pixels is a number which can be represented by the base 2 raised to a power i.e. all the parts are 512x256 pixels. The resolution necessary to illustrate the experiences of people of the campus will be improved later on. The priority at the moment is to import them into Stellarium and work on them later. It is the Autostitch programme that can be used to improve resolution although with increasing resolution comes an increased time to render the panorama. The only thing that remains to be done on this task is to put the parts of this panorama into a Zip File and edit the ini. file, a file that contains the coding of the landscape. For the first time in many weeks, the Clifton Campus was alive and vibrant again with hundreds of prospective students touring the university. They would provide a fresh and interesting perspective of this site. One thing that has been found from several of the interviewees here is that they view the campus with a very functional, cynical or impersonal eye. The people that came here today on this Open Day came with a critical and open eye. Many of them were awe-inspired by the openness, modernity and spaciousness of the campus. They were implicitly saying that they like the openness and greenery of the campus. Thirteen groups of people, one of them a PGCE student and another some science staff in the Rosalind Franklin Building, were interviewed. The problem of not having a diverse enough range of people was solved today; the very first question I asked was what subject the prospective student was interested in studying. Some of the subjects mentioned were primary education (about 4 out of the 11 prospective groups), sports science, psychology, law, English, biomedical science, computer science and childhood studies. This diversity was really helpful and we got a diversity of sites that were frequently mentioned; the four most common ones were New Hall, the John Clare Lecture Theatres, the Lee Westwood Sports Centre and the Library. I repeatedly advised the prospective students to reside in the New Hall accommodation over the Peverell accommodation. The Mary Ann Evans Building and Ada Byron King were also mentioned a couple of times; the latter two, John Clare and New Hall and the greenery of the rugby pitch are all conveniently within one 360 degree field of view which definitely warrants taking a panorama somewhere along the College Drive. This will also capture the redevelopment quite nicely. Several people asked what was going to be included there and the people asked whether it was going to be the "focus" of the campus. This word to describe the redevelopment of the campus will be included in this week's memory map. The Point was also mentioned and the Student Shop which means a panorama of the Student Village could be obtained. Today largely involved independent work from me and Rumbi. We did not need to go into the campus until much later on in the evening. Most of our work was done at night. We attended the Open Dome Event, a monthly astronomy event open for the public on our campus where Dan Brown gave a talk on Pluto. The main purpose of me and Rumbi being there was to interview people to get their impressions of the campus as we had done on Wednesday. One more student was interviewed as one member of the public; interestingly, he mentioned the John Clare Lecture Theatre, a place that had yet to be mentioned by our interviewees. He also mentioned the George Eliot building, which is no longer there. As with one of our previous interviewees, it is interesting how places can fall out of relevance for people with time.
Another reason why we had to come tonight was to obtain a second panorama of the Conflict Zone at sunset conditions. It is important for us to gain multiple panoramas of the same place in different conditions to see which conditions best epitomise the memories and experiences people mentioned there. The panorama we obtained was not complete because the memory card got full. It was formatted correctly but it took six images for every angle of rotation. Nevertheless, these panoramas are only preliminary and necessary for experimentation to see how they can be imported into Stellarium. The most fulfilling part of this Friday evening was completing a large chunk of the light pollution survey. The first two times I conducted the survey, I was on my own so work was a lot slower. With Rumbi, much of the campus got completed. All of the Erasmus Darwin site and southern parts of the campus behind that building, along with the rugby pitch, the campus loop road, Lee Westwood Sports Centre, missed parts of the Conflict Zone and parts of the New Hall Accommodation and the Student Village were surveyed. All that remains to be done are parts around the John Clare Lecture Theatres, the last parts of New Hall and behind the Lionel Robbins School of Education. The software that is being used to make the contour plots, TeraPlot, requires entire rectangles of the campus, if it is represented as an array in Microsoft Excel, to be complete otherwise an error message will appear and say there are missing values in the array. The campus is inconveniently not a complete square so dummy values will be included in spaces that cannot be reached. Only one more night of surveying is required to complete the light pollution survey which will give another perspective to the campus apart from the memories and experiences of the users of the campus. The light pollution above the campus is almost a memory and experience of the campus itself. We can say this because in archaeoastronomy, we say that there is a dialogue between a landscape and the person in it. This personifies the landscape meaning the landscape itself has memory. Thus, we can say that things like the light pollution, the balancing pond and the Waterloo Oaks on the northern side of the cricket pitch are memories of the campus itself. Two panoramas of sites of the Clifton Campus were supposed to be obtained today but because of complications with the equipment and time constraints, only one panorama was obtained.
The two sites that were intended to be captured were the area around the Atom sculpture in the courtyard in front of the Erasmus Darwin building and the 3G Sports Pitch in the southwestern corner of the campus. The main complication with taking a panorama on the sports pitch is if it is being used at the same time, the final panorama stitched together will struggle to capture the parts of the image when the people are moving because of the minimal overlap. This is what happened the first time we went up to work on the sports pitch. The camera also had a faulty battery so we were stymied here. Setting up the camera on the tripod so that it is level in all directions was the main time constraint. Once this had been done, collecting data was simple. The camera was rotated by 10 degrees for every image to ensure that when they are stitched together, there is sufficient overlap between the images .for the Autostitch programme, the software used to create a panorama from the separate images. However, levelling the camera on the tripod at the Erasmus Darwin site was extremely difficult because the ground is uneven and the spirit level is extremely sensitive to any inclination. Levelling the camera alone took more than half an hour. The evenness of the ground at the 3G Pitch made the camera easier to level but there were people using it so this site had to be revisited at a later point in the day. After the first panorama was complete, a suggestion was made to include the balancing pond near the Peverell Accommodation. This would not only be an acknowledgement of the hydrology of the site and nod to a memory of the campus itself but it would also align with some aquatic constellations in the sky like Aquarius and Delphinus. In between these attempts to capture images were two more interviews to gather more data on memory points. The interviewees gave us locations like The Point and the greenhouse by the Erasmus Darwin cafeteria which overlap with points other people have given us. Perhaps these points will be ideal sites to create panoramas because of the great memories and experiences people associate with them. Tomorrow, it is hoped, weather-allowing, that a light pollution survey of the Clifton Campus, to inform the green agenda and give us another perspective of the campus, will be complete and the possibility of more panoramas will be explored. Tomorrow is the Open Dome event at our campus, where the observatory is open to members of the public and guest speakers come in to talk about things in astronomy or astrophysics. More data can be obtained from members of the public and this should give us more memory points to include in our final Stellarium landscape. |