[Bcma-l] Re: Guided Tours with Headsets]

[bcma-l@museumsassn.bc.ca]

Wow!!
... and the universe shall provide ...

thanks, Donna, for picking that part and being so thorough and prompt 
with the response.
IF we can manage to get our museum back on its feet and I haven't 
completely submerged myself in 'life' and get to take part in it; I will 
definitely remember this info.
What little I read on the interpcan site struck a chord - it makes a lot 
of sense to me.
It's refreshing to get something new and positive - lately, 'round here, 
things haven't been that 'happy'. (but I shouldn't kvetch - even bigger 
places have their own crappy problems)

And since that last little 'sneak a question in at the end' ploy 
resulted in a good response I'll try it again.
This one's from way out in left field so bear with me here :)

Part of my job at the museum was dealing with the scanning and logging 
of the thousands of pictures we had.
Being a 'frontier' mountain town there's lots of pics with no 
attribution information. No metadata that would help place it in time 
and place and contextual significance. (well lots is more of a feeling 
guesstimate you understand)
So I'd give in to back of brain dreaming of what kind of tool(s) or tech 
could give me that information. Figure it out with or without my help.
Has there been any work on this sort of idea?

My first tack was to try to use the shadows and the horizon profiles to 
assist in it.
I'm originally from the prairies and the horizon is pretty useless there 
but in the mountains it's potentially more usefull.
This is how I see it being so:
Thanks to satellite mapping we have digital elevation model information 
for most if not all of BC.
That would mean we could pick a location and altitude at random and 
generate a horizon profile in all 360 degrees around that point.
Take techniques from the finger print identification/matching field and 
work out simple characterization signatures for these profiles ... 
simple strings that can be searched and compared efficiently.
If you did that and logged them in a large database it would be kind of 
like the national fingerprint database ... see where I'm going here?
Ok, if it's not clear yet let's carry on ...
Take any given picture that was taken out of doors and has a view of the 
'horizon'. Push that through some filters to get high contrast edge 
profiles for the mountain ridges. Feed that profile into the 
'fingerprint characterization' filter and you get a 'print' that can be 
compared to all the 'prints' stored in the big database.
A search would yield so many matches that match at differing numbers of 
points of comparison.
By scrutinizing the candidates with the highest matches first you might 
be able to find the proper location for your picture ... and know 
something you did not before.

SO ... I don't know how many pictures there are out there in various 
museums, archives and collections that are in this 'unknown' state. 
Would there be enough to justify an effort to make this happen?
I think the best people to do it would be university students looking at 
it as a mapping problem ... they have the time, inclination and 
technology to do this whereas I can't think of any museums that would.
And Yes I know that it wouldn't be as simple as I portray it. Lots of 
little gotchas like camera lens distortions and 'between exemplars' 3D 
skewing ... but cameras can be characterized and computer geeks love 
hard problems. The harder the problem the better it feels when you've 
licked it ... I know; I used to do that when I was young and able to put 
in 30 hour stints for months.
Generating the (potentially) millions of 'exemplar' fingerprints from 
the D.E.M. data would be an afternoon run on a university system ... the 
other end could be done on any computer that could run the software 
(probably most these days) OR a web service to all small museums and 
archives.

Anyhow ... since I'm not in a museum job right now and may not be again 
I figured I'd put that out there so at least it didn't get wasted.
:)

Again ... thanks for the info Donna.
ciao
- Les Johnson



bcma-l-admin@museumsassn.bc.ca wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: bcma-l-admin@museumsassn.bc.ca
> [mailto:bcma-l-admin@museumsassn.bc.ca] 
> Sent: Saturday, April 19, 2008 4:53 PM
>
>  Is there anywhere that docent volunteers can get trained on
> how to do that job?
> That small museums can send them too without breaking their
> budget doing it?
> (Kind of like 'winter camp for museum volunteer docents')
> Not talking here about the actual information but more about
> the ability to engage the visitors and deliver the
> information in a fun and useful fashion ... be the best
> small audience performer one can be.
>
> - Les Johnson
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: bcma-l-admin@museumsassn.bc.ca
> [mailto:bcma-l-admin@museumsassn.bc.ca] 
> Sent: Saturday, April 19, 2008 4:53 PM
>
> Thanks Les, for asking this question! 
> There are several places they can get this training either
> on their own or hosted by an organization such as a museum.
> First off, These skills as a whole are called
> Interpretation.
>
> Interpretation Canada Hosts Module 1 & 2 that do just
> that-teach people how to plan and deliver fun interactive
> rpograms and tours based on interpretive principles. These
> are hosted both by organizations such as museums and nature
> centers as well as by individual interpretive trainers.
> Their annual conference is a great way for people to learn
> intrepretive skills (This year held at Cowichan Lake Outdoor
> Centre on Vancouver Island. www.interpcan.ca
>
> Interpretive Trainers across BC (and Canada) offer one hour
> to several day training sessions for your staff inhouse or
> otherwise. They can be speciality topics such as how to lead
> a guided tour, how to design a self-guided tour and many
> other topics! Type in Interpretation Trainer in google and
> see what comes up.
>
> A national program that results in volunteers/staff being
> Certified Heritage Interpreters www.cthrc.ca teaches the
> basics. The workbook is great and more fun if several people
> work through it together. In BC, the standards are
> admininistered by www.go2hr.ca
>
> Some of the larger centers open their training if they have
> space or need to fund raise. Try to partner with them to do
> so.
>
> Donna Hill B.Sc. B.Ed. CHI
> Nanaimo, BC
> www.naturepark.com/idat
> dhill@uniserve.com
> 250-753-5246
>
>
>
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>
>
>   


-- 
Les Johnson
Technician
The Boundary Museum
Grand Forks, BC
http://www.boundarymuseum.com