Today was a very productive day for us! We programmed inside all day, taking a few short breaks occasionally.
Brent worked on his temperature program, successfully making a 3D temperature model with data from last year's expedition. Erik is waiting patiently for Google to update their Sketch-Up software and is working to acquire high-quality satellite images so that he can overlaying cistern sonar scans onto physical locations in Google Earth. Billy was working diligently on his particle filter program in order to remove noise from the cistern maps. Tyler and Tim were working to improve the ways in which we can process the still images collected via GoPro in order to see more features of the cisterns and caves. Jeff was continuing to fill holes in cistern walls, then Erik would take them and turn the cistern into a 3D model using Unity3D.
I had a lot of progress made today as well. We have successfully upload Omeka onto the VM Server that Cal Poly gave us and I am currently working on getting the information that we have, and want, up onto the website so it is easily accessible for other archeologists.
The other part of my project is working to create an online example curriculum for educators on the topic of Water and Society in Malta. There are many extra files and widgets that have to be downloaded onto the server for the site to work properly, but many have been quite stubborn the past couple days. However, I am slowly making my way through it with lots of help from everyone. It is slowly starting to look like an actual database!
The problem currently is that when the files are downloaded to my computer, not all of the documents in the files stay together; for some unknown reason, they separate as the files are downloaded, so when I try to upload the files to Omeka, some documents are missing, making the widgets unable to work correctly. So I am going through and figuring out which documents are still connected with the files and which ones are not.
Also! We were very lucky to have a guest speaker come and present to us in our apartment. David Cardona is a local Archeologist from the University of Malta who specializes in Maltese Roman Architecture and just received his Master's Degree in the Fall. He has been deeply involved in a local project that was working to get more information about the decorative architecture in Malta before, during and slightly after the Roman Empire. He described how he and his team found various Roman artifacts (like columns, marble, pottery, and other various fragments) and with the help of documentation, came to the conclusion that Maltese architecture at one time was very heavily influenced by Roman taste. One of the problems he illustrated was difficultly in finding the original locations of some pieces. Many pieces of stone and marble have been moved and transported to different homes and collections over the years without any record, creating some mystery as to where various sites were in Malta's distant past. Mr. Cardona's presentation was very interesting and we are very excited, because tomorrow we will be going to Hagar Qim and Mnajdra, two prehistoric temples, and in 2 weeks - when we are doing cistern mapping in Mdina and Rabat - we should be able to visit a Roman Villa in Rabat and see some of the architectural features that he described.
We are all very excited and can't wait to go see the temple ruins before running off to Sicily!!
Until tomorrow!
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