In preparation of a Digital Marker, social re-activation of collected materials at a workshop is often the first step. Stakeholders exchange experiences and recollections of a location as well as bring forward their print, image and media materials for sorting, scanning and annotation.
The abandoned Crumbles Castle Centre in Islington, London is the pilot location used in this guide. A call for contributions of photographs, newsletters and artworks from families past and present, play leaders and social workers unearthed a collection of material related to their individual and shared experiences of the adventure playground project.
Workshops prepared groups to capture these documents into collections of images, recordings and texts.
A specially co-ordinated group each with their own camera or smartphone, scanned the castle to create a 3D model.
Stories were recorded and shared between young people and visitors to the playground.
Selections from each session are uploaded to SD storage of the platform. Each post is reviewed on smartphone or laptop screen before being registered collectively by ‘Friends of Crumbles Castle’ on their Digital Marker.
A Playworkers workshop is scheduled with Islington Play for 19/09/20 with wider community sessions to follow. A second workshop is taking place with Friends of Crumbles.
Meet-up to review shared histories and refresh memories together.
Digitise photograph, print and text documents using smartphone cameras and flatbed scanners, all quick and fun process that everyone can contribute to.
Sort and annotate collected materials ready for upload to the Digital Marker. Those A3 and A4 archive boxes, poly sleeves, coloured card, labels and paperclips are going to be useful!
A great selection of OCR, editing, metadata tagging and labelling apps are available for free. Using a range of low-cost smartphone tripod/copy stand and lighting add-ons helps this processing.
Add the photograph, video and or audio recordings of your workshop activities.
Generate PDF’s of scanned documents for easy storage, print and distribution. Abbyy Fine Reader allows search within a PDF. Tesseract is an OCR engine where documents can be batch processed.
Backup everything to USB thumb drives, solid-state drives (SSD) and network-attached storage (NAS).
Please review the Captured workshop files already uploaded to this Digital Marker.
Whilst Crumbles Castle is no longer accessible the 3D model generated can be used in its place for further virtual explorations and future experimentation.
3D Scanathon – Photogrammetry
An open call, bringing a group together with many digital cameras to systematically capture interior and exterior views and textures.
The group follows the orchestrated scanning process, photographing the environment inside and out. Collected images are synthesised into a 3D model using photogrammetry software.
Resources
- Digital camera/Smartphone
- SD card – 32/65/128 Gb
- Computer/ software
- Phone apps – Android/iOS
- VR Headset – mobile and tethered review of models.
- Workshop Delivery
This 3D model of Crumble’s castle features embedded artworks and illustrations inside and out.
Please review the Modelled workshop files uploaded to this Digital Marker.
Youth groups at Crumbles recorded their experiences and stories of the playground, their memories of being both inside and outside Crumbles Castle.
Youth spoken word, audio record
- Instruction on how to use audio recorder.
- Recordings are played back and an arrangement for use is made.
- Upload to the Digital Marker WordPress system.
Resources
- Audio recorder inc microphone
- Sound editing software
- Headphones
Data privacy and child protection limit the use of their images but in a breakthrough initiative, students arranged mask-making workshops and provided some camera equipment for the kids to use when photographing each other. Their act of authoring and using of material for a creative process sidestepped such restrictions.
Young people always find a voice through adoption of old media and techniques through experimentation to discover new forms of expression and art of play to exploit.
Reverso is the collected research and record of cultural exchange between Favela communities and a group from London visiting Sao Paulo 2017. It features workshop resources for Photogrammetry, Active Archives we are revisiting in this guide.
Please review the Recorded workshop files uploaded to this Digital Marker
You may already have a well-organised collection of images documents and recording in an archive. Including examples of project history, a timeline of evolution and changing phases can all feature on your Digital Marker.
This is certainly the case with Crumbles Castle which is held in the public collection at Islington Local History Centre at Finsbury Library where the history of the project forms part of the educational resource there.
