Gangs of San Francisco

Mission Mission posted about these great t-shirts that celebrate the “Gangs of San Francisco.”  Other gangs include the Sutro Speedsters, an ice-skating team from 1897 and the Bear Flag Rebels of 1846.  Each shirt has a bit of history about the city included.  It’s a fun way to learn more about the city and declare [...]

Embedded Interpretation pt. II

I posted on the Presidio class blog about how to construct your own memory map/interpretation. It works on the One Laptop Per Child laptops as well!
Here’s the link:
http://remixpresidio.wordpress.com/2008/06/04/using-flickr-to-geospatially-embed-archaeological-interpretation/
PS: If anyone can help me debug Mbedr, it would be much appreciated.

Presidio Memory Maps

For the next three weeks I’m helping to teach a class at the Presidio of San Francisco on digital documentation, cultural heritage, and interpretive trails.  It’s an intensive course, 8+ hour days for the undergraduates and more like 12-13 hour days for me.  For the first day, I had the students create memory maps using [...]

Pervasive Play at the San Francisco Presidio

As I mentioned in my SAA paper back in 2007, ubiquitous computing has great potential for interpretation and outreach in archaeology.  I’m very inspired by Jane McGonigal’s PhD on ubiquitous computing and pervasive play and have decided to test the viability of the format for education.  It’s always hard to make educational games fun, but [...]

Climbing Trees

So we finally had a full day of archaeological outreach at the Presidio, where we were able to work through our full program with a group of kids. At times I’ve been pretty tired of outreach, and wanting to get back to archaeology proper, but being able to interact with these kids was actually [...]

Presidio Comics

More Presidio education comics posted. I’m not sure about the last one–should I just leave the thought balloons blank?
Click to enlarge the prints; there are four in all.

PS: I did not actually participate in this dig and am slightly baffled by the methodology, but that’s neither here nor there.

Emplaced vs. Virtual Interpretation

Oof, gotta take a break from negotiating the “visual turn” in text. Sometimes I wish I could just make a film to show at my orals this spring. Anyway, I was chatting with a friend about the recent virtual worlds conference in San Francisco about the world of Second Life and other recreated [...]

Californios at the Presidio

I was looking through Barb Voss’ excellent dissertation on the Presidio, and was struck by a particular footnote:
“I wonder, however, how the Californios – almost none of whom had ever been to Spain, and who rarely met non-clerical Spanish nationals – understood and defined “Spanishness” amongst themselves; I can only assume that it had little [...]