Layered horizons: A geospatial humanities research platform

© 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). In this demo we showcase Layered Horizons, a Virtual Reality (VR) experience we have developed for use in an ARC-funded research project, Waves of Words: Mapping and Modelling Australia's Pacific Past. This platform allows users to connect different geospatial datasets (for our purposes, from the humanities and social sciences) into layers that can then be explored by the use of natural gesture and body movement. This kind of interaction design in VR takes full advantage of the media's affordances, without relying on metaphors from other interactive media, yet being familiar enough as to engender intuitive and meaningful use. We demonstrate how the platform is currently being used to connect linguistic data (word lists) with archaeological data (e.g. on the spread of bananas through the Asia-Pacific region, or canoe styles found in different locations) and anthropological data (e.g. shared cultural features like chieftainship systems or kinship systems). Taking into account what we also know about Pacific navigation and simulated canoe travel, we can therefore build a complex layered map of the region over time that allows us to better discover probable human migration and contact patterns

The ‘No-Interface’ Interface for Research VR

In this paper we outline a paradigm that has existed in interface and interaction design for Virtual Reality (VR) since the first wave of VR in the 1980s and 90s. Focussing in particular on VR as a research tool, we argue that the field has moved away from immediate, embodied interaction towards interface paradigms adopted from desktop software and computer gaming. We introduce a VR experience we have developed for use in a research project, Layered Horizons, and discuss how it fits within the alternative tradition of the ‘no interface’ interface, where interaction is triggered by body movement and natural gestures. We discuss what this means for our project. We argue that this kind of interaction design in VR takes full advantage of the media’s affordances, without relying on metaphors from other interactive media, yet being familiar enough as to engender intuitive and meaningful use

NURA YAMAN (‘COUNTRY SPEAKS’): LANGUAGE, PEOPLE AND PLACE IN SERIOUS GAMES

Layered Horizons is a series of serious virtual reality (VR) games [1] that entice users to playfully explore linguistic information across the Asia-Pacific. This essay focuses on Barrawao, a version of the game based on the region now known as Sydney, Australia—a region consisting of complex language ecologies, in which speakers are often multilingual in a variety of traditional languages, and are connected to this traditional linguistic landscape through protocols, beliefs, and identity. This essay argues that interfaces for games generally are influenced by a ‘monolingual mindset’ [2] which leads to simplistic models of language, with each mapped to a single region. Games are localized by swapping one language for another, without regard to cultural considerations or the realities of the Country (e.g. people, place, linguistic and cultural environment) in which the languages are embedded. Translations of game content and interfaces are often generated by machine learning or other automatic processes which, disconnected from context, can reproduce frameworks of colonialization and globalization. This essay considers the interrelationships between machine, human, language and environment, and discusses the ethical and practical impacts of machines mediating between language and Country. We argue that, if co-created with people who have a deep knowledge of the physical and linguistic landscape, VR provides opportunities to mitigate a potential disconnect, through the embodied experience of the game––the literal use of the body as an interface––and the recreation of place in a virtual world to provide critical context for language. We relate the responsibilities people have to their Country in the physical world with the responsibilities we have to our machine worlds of code and data, and connect this to the concept of Data Sovereignty

Playful interfaces to the archive and the embodied experience of data

© 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited. Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the possibility for the galleries, libraries, archives and museums sector to employ playful, immersive discovery interfaces for their collections and raise awareness of some of the considerations that go into the decision to use such technology and the creation of the interfaces. Design/methodology/approach: This is a case study approach using the methodology of research through design. The paper introduces two examples of immersive interfaces to archival data created by the authors, using these as a springboard for discussing the different kinds of embodied experiences that users have with different kinds of immersion, for example, the exploration of the archive on a flat screen, a data “cave” or arena, or virtual reality. Findings: The role of such interfaces in communicating with the audience of an archive is considered, for example, in allowing users to detect structure in data, particularly in understanding the role of geographic or other spatial elements in a collection, and in shifting the locus of knowledge production from individual to community. It is argued that these different experiences draw on different metaphors in terms of users’ prior experience with more well-known technologies, for example, “a performance” vs “a tool” vs “a background to a conversation”. Originality/value: The two example interfaces discussed here are original creations by the authors of this paper. They are the first uses of mixed reality for interfacing with the archives in question. One is the first mixed reality interface to an audio archive. The discussion has implications for the future of interfaces to galleries, archives, libraries and museums more generally

Glossopticon: Visualising archival data

© 2019 IEEE. Glossopticon is a Virtual Reality (VR)-based information visualisation system that presents heritage audio recordings in the archival linguistic data of the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) collection. This paper will outline the project, the way it has used VR to visualise information and how it has been used on multiple levels-from public exhibition piece, to research tool-and in doing so provides an exemplar of the notion of the collaborative, interdisciplinary project as a basic unit of scholarly investigation within the digital humanities

Layered Horizons: Vanuatu (v1.0)

“Layered Horizons” is a Research through Design and digital humanities project that brings together disparate data sets from linguistics, anthropology, geography and archaeology-within virtual reality (VR)-to create interactive information visualisations which use gesture-based controls to allow a user to interact with information in an embodied manner. A user is literally surrounded by the information as environment and interacts with it in a direct and embodied manner. “Layered Horizons: Vanuatu (v1.0)” represents an iteration of the project focusing on the Vanuatu region

''Sometimes is lies'': Narrative and identity in two mixed-origin island languages

We compare Pitkern-Norf ’k and Palmerston narratives to each other and to narrative construction in other more well-known English dialects. This will demonstrate that narratives of these two beach community languages differ from the latter in many parallel ways. We discuss the narrative types ‘historical stories’ and ‘tall tales’ taken from the historical record and from our own fieldwork on Palmerston Island and Norfolk Island. Stories the islanders tell about themselves and their history will be the main focus as these illustrate the islanders’ conception of their identity. Pertinent questions of historicity arise when multiple conflicting accounts of an event exist, or when the islanders’ own oral histories differ from the information in the European colonial record.Rachel Hendery, Peter Mühlhäusler, and Joshua Nas

Barrawao

Barrawao seeks to bring about an understanding of the deep connection between Language and Country in an embodied and experiential manner. Barrawao can be translated as “to fly or to make haste” from the D’harawal language