Ancient Mayans Meet Modern Media
By Mary Hrovat
IU Alumni Magazine
January/February 2003
Reposted with permission by the Indiana University Alumni Association. This article is available in the Indiana Alumni Magazine at www.indiana.edu/~alumni/magtalk/jan-feb03/mayanmedia.html.
The Mayan cities of Chichn Itz and Uxmal in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula are far-off mysteries for most of us: the observatory El Caracol, the Ball Court, the Temple of the Warriors, with stone pillars decorated with plumed serpents. But imagine a child in a museum close to home, able to reach out and touch a 3-D image of an artifact from Chichn Itz. Or a student or scholar in an Indiana classroom taking a virtual tour and exploring the intricacies of the stepped pyramid El Castillo, designed and decorated to illustrate the Mayan calendar. The CLIOH project at IU's Informatics Research Institute is creating the digital library that will make such experiences possible.
CLIOH is an acronym for Cultural Digital Library Indexing Our Heritage; the project is named for Clio, the ancient Greek muse of history. CLIOH is led by Mathew Palakal, co-director of the IRI and professor in the department of computer and information science at IUPUI, and Susan Tennant, operations director for the IRI and clinical assistant professor of new media at IUPUI.
CLIOH has two goals. The first is to create a digital library that will preserve priceless cultural artifacts that could disappear tomorrow. The second is to develop applications that will allow educators to use the digital library in innovative ways. Palakal and Tennant agree that this effort is one-of-a-kind. Although there are many cultural preservation efforts, most of them focus on a particular location and do not include the range of activities and technologies that CLIOH is developing. CLIOH is creating a unique digital library that is intended to contain information on many sites around the world. In addition, says Tennant, CLIOH will include a curriculum and activities tied into standards of education.
CLIOH grew out of a student project. Tennant, with a degree in art and a minor in history, visited the ancient Mayan city of Chichn Itz with a group of students so that she could make a graphical recreation or virtual tour of the area for an animation class she was taking. A local guide told her about another ancient city in the Yucatan, at Uxmal, and she later led an expedition to that site as well.
The High Performance Networking Initiative and the government of Yucatan became involved because they were interested either in the communication and information technology required, or in digitally preserving the buildings and other remaining articles of the lost Mayan civilizations. CLIOH has since grown into a larger digital library, with the goal of preserving other historical sites as well. UNESCO has created a list of hundreds of endangered cultural sites around the world. Some sites are threatened by warfare and pollution. At others, nature and the passage of time are slowly eating away at ancient treasures. Timbuktu, for example, is being smothered by drifting sands, and Angkor Wat is losing ground to encroaching jungle vegetation. In some cases, sites are simply deteriorating over time, and the local government can't afford to spend money to maintain them.
CLIOH recently received permission from Cambodia to collect data at Angkor Wat. The CLIOH team has also gathered data at the Angel Mounds Native American site in Southern Indiana.
For any given archaeological site, the process begins with data collection. This is both a romantic quest into the heart of the past and a painstaking and difficult journey that requires patience, endurance, and the help of local governments. CLIOH staff must travel with expensive and sometimes delicate electronic gear — laptops, video and still digital cameras, and storage media.
The heritage sites can cover harsh terrains. "It's no vacation," says Palakal. "There's a lot of hardship, because none of these places is a five-star hotel." Tennant describes the Mayan cities as "not on the beaten path at all."
It's difficult to adapt to the hot, humid climate, they agree, and things normally taken for granted become an effort, like making sure that drinking water and food are safe and finding ways to charge the batteries and equipment in an area where electrical outlets are hard to come by. Local help is valuable in getting the job done under difficult conditions.
The travelers then return home with their treasures: 35mm slides, disks full of digital images and video, perhaps audio recordings of local music and interviews with local experts. Then it's time to put the digital library together.
The data must all be archived, and audio must be synchronized with video. The data have to be optimized for presentation over a range of network connections (both high-and low-bandwidth), and search capabilities need to be added.
To search visual and audio data, information scientists need to annotate the data and add keywords. Then people can locate and access a sequence of video by keywords in the same way they use an index in a book to find information about particular subjects. This work requires some new basic research in technologies such as streaming media, panoramic images that cover very large land areas without requiring lengthy download times, virtual reality and immersive technologies, and graphical recreation of the heritage sites.
So far, CLIOH is focused on building this database with basic digital library functionality. The next step will be to explore applications that tap into this database for education and research.
"Our dream," says Palakal, "is that people will take the data and create appropriate applications out of it." The goals for the digital library specify that the data should be accessible, searchable, integrated for quick and easy retrieval, with a userfriendly interface to support technologies such as streaming media and virtual reality. The code to catalog and index the data will be opensource, so that anyone may develop customized applications. Another goal is to provide a forum for users to share their experiences.
Once the digital library is in place, "what you can do is immense," Palakal says. Students can create their own virtual galleries, selecting images, video clips, and particular artifacts on a single theme — for example, Mayan ceremonies. They can use a timeline to create a story using these materials, or they can group them around a particular theme — for example, different symbols and their meanings.
The Mayan cities are rich with stories that can bring their culture to life. For example, several stories are connected with the Magician's Pyramid at Uxmal. One involves a dwarf who, according to legend, would someday challenge the king. When the dwarf became old enough, the king pre-empted the challenge, saying that he would allow the dwarf to live and take over the kingdom if he could build a temple in one night. That night, the dwarf won the kingdom by building the Magician's Pyramid.
"It's the story that makes it come alive," says Tennant. "We're bringing these artifacts and these stories and these archaeological treasures to life so people can experience them."
Students in a distance-learning program will be able to access this rich learning environment as well. Museum visitors of all ages may be able to take virtual tours or enter into digital stories that recreate events at a particular heritage site. Users anywhere in the world will have access to CLIOH's digital library collections.
Although the applications Palakal describes are still in the future, students already are using CLIOH. Social studies classes in Westlane Middle School in Indianapolis have used the CLIOH Web site to look for information using a list of search terms provided by Tennant. This use supported some of the Indiana standards for teaching social studies and also provided some feedback about the whether the Web site is easy to navigate. (The students had no problem.) Usability and assessment activities like these are part of CLIOH's educational component.
In the future, the CLIOH Academy will allow undergraduate and graduate students in a range of fields to do project-related work using the CLIOH digital library.
CLIOH brings together a wide range of disciplines and personnel. Archaeology and computer science are prominent, of course, but so are English, music, history, library and information science, new media, and museum studies. Faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates are all involved.
Tennant emphasizes that CLIOH is a team effort: "A huge number of people have worked hard on this. We could never have done this without students."
Jin-Shiun Yang, for example, works as a graduate research assistant doing still-image editing and formatting, video editing, file management, and CD-ROM production, among other tasks. Yang, BS'01, MS'02, also visited Angel Mounds to take photographs. She says working for CLIOH has given her "different experiences and skills that I'd never get from regular academic projects."
To Palakal, the mix of people and ideas and the enthusiasm everyone brings to the work are among the most exciting features of his work as director. It's not just a particular group that is getting excited about the project, he says — not just the computer scientists or the archaeologists or anthropologists but everybody involved.
The excitement of the historical sites themselves also makes the project rewarding. Tennant describes the brilliant civilizations that "brought such culture and such intellect into the world, and continue to inspire people."
Palakal says there is much to learn from these sites: "If they just disappear, that's a shame."
And Yang appreciates the opportunity to help use computer technology to introduce these "almost lost cultures to all of the people around the world and to future generations." CLIOH uses current and developing technology to preserve these treasures from the past. It will be exciting to watch how the project grows in the future.
Professor Javed Mostafa at SLIS was originally involved with this project.
Posted February 25, 2003