Paulina will be presenting another ARF lunch talk, this time looking at different ways to model visibility in the past.
Paulina F. Przystupa–a member of The Alexandria Archive Institute team (AAI)–is preparing for another lunch talk at the Archaeological Research Facility (ARF) at University of California, Berkeley. Different from her previous brown bag, Paulina will give an in-person, streamed online lecture on 22 March 2023 at 12:10pm about modeling historical landscapes.
The ARF strives to encourage, facilitate, and expedite field and laboratory research conducted by archaeologists and related specialists engaged with the human past, and the AAI team is excited to continue to add our presence to this scholarly community.
As a future research associate at the ARF, Paulina has the chance to share her research during an informal ARF Lunch Talk session. The talk, Quadruple Take: Modeling visibility at historical children’s institutions, gives an overview of her work combining remote sensing data and geographic information system (GIS) visibility analysis. She uses these models to interpret the visual experience of the wards of children’s institutions.
The abstract for the talk is:
Viewshed analysis is a powerful tool employed by archaeologists to understand the experiences of people in the past. At their core, viewshed or visibility analyses estimate where people could see. Such estimations, however, rely on myriad assumptions including similarities between the past and present landscape–in topography and content–as well as statistical issues involved in quantification–such as the modified area unit problem (MAUP). To explore the influence of these assumptions, this talk will examine different ways of modeling and quantifying visibility from late 19th and early 20th century children’s institutions. By changing how I reconstructed historical topography, categorized modern land cover use in different ways, and defined meaningful distances I assess the influence these assumptions have on answering questions of change through time and of differences between children’s institutions designed for wards of different backgrounds.
Feel free to visit us at the ARF in person, watch the talk online by registering here, and in case you miss the live presentation, you can catch the recording on the ARF Youtube Channel some time after the talk. Hope to see you there!
