Director To Give Keynote Address at Cultural Heritage Conference
Blog
NOV. 4, 2015
Dorot Director Matthew J. Adams will give the keynote address at the XIIth Annual International Conference for Professionals in Cultural Heritage at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. The conference is an annual, international event for professionals in the cultural heritage and advanced technologies sectors: museum professionals, librarians, archivists, audio-visual developers, architects, lawyers, cultural policy makers, plastic and performing artists working in the digital realm.
The organizers of the conference had seen Adams and two of his longtime colleagues, Michael Ashley and Adam Prins, of the Center for Digital Archaeology (CoDA) and the Jezreel Valley Regional Project (JVRP), respectively, give a presentation over the summer on digital archaeological methods employed in their excavations of the legionary base of the Roman VIth Legion at Legio. In the presentation, Adams and Ashley demonstrated Codifi, a new database system for cultural resource management and research, a collaborative development effort between CoDA and JVRP. Also highlighted in the presentation was a new method for 3D documentation of archaeological contexts and the creation manipulable models of millimeter accuracy. When integrated with Codifi, three-dimensional digital context recordings are highly interactive and conducive to interpretive work. Codifi is designed to facilitate archaeology and research at the site level and on a regional scale, managing data from hundreds of sites.
Any good technological development facilitates the wider availability of and accessibility to information, is widely applicable across disciplines, and helps humans do things better. “The digitization of resources and the challenges related to it is a serious issue in cultural heritage,” says Adams. “Archaeology is already inherently multidisciplinary, so even though we’re developing Codifi in that context, it has applications for libraries, archives, museums, cultural resource management. It’s very exciting.” Adams explored this idea of archaeology as the “ultimate discipline” in another talk, which can be seen here.
