Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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transparency, accessibility, availability, and objective peer review are legitimate concerns
(Flaten 2009).
As had Beacham and Denard (2003), Flaten emphasized the importance of publish<strong>in</strong>g levels of
certa<strong>in</strong>ty regard<strong>in</strong>g the data used to create a reconstruction, mak<strong>in</strong>g all the data that were utilized
explicit to the user and <strong>in</strong>form<strong>in</strong>g the user that multiple <strong>in</strong>terpretations are possible. Flaten commented
that his students were creat<strong>in</strong>g “perception models” rather than “structural models.” Students used a
variety of data, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g published excavation reports, journal articles, and photography, to create
general structural models. When there were conflict<strong>in</strong>g accounts <strong>in</strong> the data and decisions had to be
made, both the evidence and the decision made were recorded along with other metadata for the model.
Flaten reiterated that the ability to update digital reconstructions as new <strong>in</strong>formation becomes available
is one of the greatest strengths of the digital approach. Another important <strong>in</strong>sight ga<strong>in</strong>ed from this
process, Flaten observed, was that students “discover that uncerta<strong>in</strong>ty is a crucial component of
knowledge, that precision does not imply accuracy, and that questions are more important than def<strong>in</strong>ite
answers.” Through their work on Ashes2Art, students learned important lessons about how scholarly
arguments are constructed and that the creation of new knowledge is always an ongo<strong>in</strong>g conversation
rather than a f<strong>in</strong>ished product.
As this section has demonstrated, several significant archaeological projects are explor<strong>in</strong>g the use of 3-
D models and digital reconstruction. Nonetheless, the ability to preserve these projects and provide
long-term access to them has received little attention. Koller et al. (2009) have proposed creat<strong>in</strong>g open
repositories of authenticated 3-D models that are based on the model of traditional scholarly
journals. 273 Such repositories must <strong>in</strong>clude mechanisms for peer review, preservation, publication,
updat<strong>in</strong>g, and dissem<strong>in</strong>ation. In addition to the lack of a digital archive, the authors criticized the fact
that there is no central f<strong>in</strong>d<strong>in</strong>g tool to even discover whether a site or monument has been digitally
modeled, mak<strong>in</strong>g it difficult to repurpose or to learn from other scholars work. This state of affairs led
them to the follow<strong>in</strong>g conclusion:
A long-term objective, then, should be the creation of centralized, open repositories of
scientifically authenticated virtual environments of cultural heritage sites. By scientifically
authenticated, we mean that such archives should accession only 3D models that are clearly
identified with authors with appropriate professional qualifications, and whose underly<strong>in</strong>g
design documents and metadata are published along with the model. Uncerta<strong>in</strong>ties <strong>in</strong> the 3D
data and hypotheses <strong>in</strong> the reconstructions must be clearly documented and communicated to
users (Koller et al. 2009).
The ability to visualize uncerta<strong>in</strong>ty <strong>in</strong> digital models and present these results to users is also a
significant technical challenge the authors reveal, and one that has been the subject of little if any
research. The development of such repositories, however, faces a number of research challenges,
<strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g digital rights management for models, uncerta<strong>in</strong>ty visualization <strong>in</strong> 3-D reconstructions,
version control for models (e.g., different scholars may generate different versions of the same model,
models change over time), effective metadata creation, digital preservation, <strong>in</strong>teroperability, search<strong>in</strong>g
across 3-D models, the use of computational analysis tools with such a repository, and last, but by no
means least, the development of organizational structures to support them.
273 The creation of such a repository is part of their larger “SAVE: Serv<strong>in</strong>g and Archiv<strong>in</strong>g Virtual Environments” project
(http://vwhl.clas.virg<strong>in</strong>ia.edu/save.html), which when complete “will be the world’s first on-l<strong>in</strong>e, peer-reviewed journal <strong>in</strong> which scholars can publish 3D
digital models of the world’s cultural heritage (CH) sites and monuments.” On a larger scale, the nonprofit CyArk High Def<strong>in</strong>ition Heritage Network
(http://archive.cyark.org/) is work<strong>in</strong>g “to digitally preserve cultural heritage sites through collect<strong>in</strong>g, archiv<strong>in</strong>g and provid<strong>in</strong>g open access to data created
by laser scann<strong>in</strong>g, digital model<strong>in</strong>g, and other state-of-the-art technologies.”