SPARC Teaching Resources

These teaching resources have been created to encourage the reuse of digital archaeological data archived by SPARC, in accordance with the ‘Reusability’ FAIR principle.

Licensing

These teaching materials are made available under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license

License Image

Delving into the Boston Fingerprints Project Archive: A SPARC Teaching Resource

This repository contains teaching materials designed to introduce university level students to working with archived digital 3D models. It introduces terminology and metadata specific to digital 3D data and provides step-by-step instructions for five exercises in the reanalysis and reinterpretation of models collected through the SPARC Project. Video tutorials of each exercise are provided on the SPARC Teaching YouTube channel.

Citation

To cite these teaching materials, please use the following reference: Kasten, M. (2020) Delving into the Boston Fingerprints Project Archive: A SPARC Teaching Resource. https://github.com/ropitz/sparc_teaching.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Exercise 1: Familiarising Yourself with 3D Data in MeshLab

Exercise 2: Taking measurements in MeshLab

Exercise 3: The Basics of CloudCompare

Exercise 4: Quantitative Approaches to Interpretation

Exercise 5: Combining Visual and Metric Analyses in Artefact Interpretation

Conclusion

Reading List

Glossary

An Introduction to Digital Archaeological Reconstructions: A SPARC Teaching Resource

This repository contains teaching materials designed to introduce university level students to key considerations, issues, and current scholarship surrounding the creation of digital reconstructions of archaeological resources. Using laser scan data produced by SPARC for the Malthi Revisited project, five exercises provide step-by-step instructions to guide students through critically considering what is needed for a digital reconstruction, processing the dataset into a usable form, and deciding how to disseminate the reconstruction to a wider audience.

Citation

To cite these teaching materials, please use the following reference: Kasten, M. (2021) An Introduction to Digital Archaeological Reconstructions: A SPARC Teaching Resource. https://github.com/ropitz/sparc_teaching.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Exercise 1

Part A: Preparation

Part B: Get to Know your Data

Part C: Extracting and Cleaning Data

Exercise 2: Planning the next steps for Reconstructed Assets

Exercise 3

Part A: Mesh Cleaning and Decimating

Part B: Baking Normals in Blender

Exercise 4

Part A: How to Model Assets in Blender

Part B: Building a Prehistoric House in Blender

Part C: Texturing in Blender (optional)

Exercise 5

Part A: Outputs - Sketchfab

Part B: Outputs - Unity (optional)

Conclusion

Reflect Further: Archiving and Ethics in Digital Reconstructions

Quick Troubleshooting

All Resources

Think and Respond Worksheet: All ‘Think and Respond’ and ‘Try it yourself!’ tasks