Digital Time-Travels: Communicating Historical GIS and TGIS-Information in Museum Environments

Paper in proceeding, 2009

The Digital Time Travels Project is an interdisciplinary, collaborative initiative which seeks to develop and evaluate new methods for the distribution and representation of digital archaeological information to the public. Toward that end, the project has developed two tools for museum and online use: The first is a physical, tactile model of the Göta Älv river valley in western Sweden, which has been combined with an overhead projector that project a TGIS-based animation of the valleys natural and cultural landscape development from roughly 12500 BP to the present onto the surface of the model. The model is designed to be touched, with various components such as archaeological sites, shoreline locations, and land elevation changes represented by different textures which are also intended to make the model more accessible to the visually impaired. Secondly, a computer application which uses GIS data, 3D scans of archaeological objects, 3D reconstructions and animations of past sites and landscapes to present information about the past in an interactive, multilingual format via touch screen interfaces as well as on the World Wide Web (web). Both the museum exhibit and the web application are under evaluation in order to determine how they are used and how to improve them. In this presentation we outline the development of these tools, evaluate their use, and discuss future plans for their improvement. The museum exhibition opened at Lödöse Museum, in the center of the Göta River Valley on June 13th 2009, and a web version of the computer application will later become available through the project website.