News of the Chimera Spider aka Ruth Tringham

Two great things on the web today

Fri, 9 May 2008 22:39:42 -0700

Friday, May 16 will be International Day for Sharing Life Stories. One of the organisers is Berkeley’s own Center for Digital Storytelling. What a wonderful idea.

The second great thing is what Noah Wittman showed me today that YouTube can do. If you play a movie in Full Screen mode, you can click on the hyperlinking icon in the bottom left of the screen and all movies that are related by their tags to the movie you started with will show up as little balls. As you click on a ball it will play. Different colors for the rings denote different tags. This means that you could a group’s (class) movies tagged to show up together and you could move from one to the other. What’s great is that the tags lead you to other movies . I tried to capture it as a screenshot with SnapZ-Pro.

Chancellor’s Award for Public Service

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:19:22 -0700

Today I was thrilled and honored to be awarded the Chancellor’s Award for Public Service for Service-Learning Leadership. Great reception in the Chancellor’s mansion “University House”, sunny warm evening, yummy food. There were other awardees in various categories. My award was for the after-school program “Expedition”, that we have held at Roosevelt Middle School since 1999 and the service-learning course that has been taught to provide mentors for the 12-14 year olds.

This was my acceptance speech: “We started this project as part of an initiative funded through the UC Interactive University in 1999. Tamara Sturak had a connection with the Oakland Unified School District and was looking for a collaborator within the university. I was very interested in broadening the audience for archaeology and digital technology to K-12 students. So we were a match made in heaven, as they say. In 2001 the project transferred its funding and support base to the UC Links program run by Charles Underwood.

“The three of us, Charles, Tamara, and I, along with my dear colleague Meg Conkey who also has a great passion for outreach of archaeology, and a series of wonderful assistants, like Mike Way, have taught a service-learning course - now called Archaeology and Education - every semester since Fall 1999. This award is as much theirs as it is mine! We feel a sense of great joy and pride as generations of undergraduates have had the opportunity to experience as anthropologists the strange culture of 12-year-olds, learning through practice to be guides and friends rather than controllers. many of them have gone on to be teachers!

“I think I speak for the whole team in saying that we are all enormously appreciative of this award and the recognition that it represents for our efforts during these last ten years. I don’t know how much longer we’ll go on doing it, perhaps for ever. We would finally like to thank the children of Oakland and their teachers for allowing us to collaborate with them all these years.”

More about Expedition here

Ecocities 2008 Conference

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 22:51:57 -0700

Today on this glorious warm sunny day, I drove my lovely lavendar Zuma scooter to downtown San Francisco, to Grace Cathedral opposite the St. Francis Hotel on Nob Hill. The basement of Grace Cathedral has a conference Center and there is also a new conference center across the road. I had no idea until today! Both centers were the venue for the international Ecocities 2008 conference, organized by Richard Register. He had asked me to participate because of my activities at Çatalhöyük, which he wanted in the conference as an example of a sustainable city - the earliest in fact. Since I don’t believe Çatalhöyük was a city, I wasn’t very keen on participating. But as I realised he was also interested in having me talk about what lessons can be learned from the past for modern city sustainability, then I became very interested.

So this afternoon in the basement of Grace Cathedral, I gave a 30 minute presentation in a little session about “lessons from history and archaeology” that consisted of me and a wonderful architect/historian from Nepal, Sudarshan Raj Tiwari. About 20-30 people were in the audience and we had some good discussions. I liked Sudarshan’s talk. Both of us had a lot to say explicitly or implicitly about entropy and the need to be vigilant and watchful for its signs and their prevention or transformation.

I have put a copy of my talk in the “Performances” part of this website

El Presidio and Mesa Room Interpretive Design Kick-off meeting, San Francisco Presidio

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 09:10:34 -0700

Today was the kick-off meeting for the team that is designing the Interpretive Plan for the El Presidio and the Mesa Room (Levantar Project) at the San Francisco Presidio. The team comprises the folks from the Archaeology Lab, of course, Eric Blind, Liz Clevenger, (no Sannie sadly, as she is now back with the Army in Vallejo), Katie Ahern; then there are two of us imaginative (and hopefully creative) archaeologists Adrian Praetzellis and myself; and then there are the interpretive design professionals from New York, Nico Guillin and Susan Merrell . We brainstormed all day, starting with the Mesa Room where Nico and Susan have come up with an interactive digital table design. Then we prowled around the area of the now invisible El Presidio from the 18th-19th centuries, and thought about how this might be integrated into the Mesa Room display and the Chapel area.

I’m very interested to see how this work with the Mesa Room and its links to the planned Interpretive Trail of the Anza Esplanade can be used as the basis for our summer field course in which we will focus on the design of Interpretive Trails around the invisible El Presidio.