About Matthew Coller
My PhD project investigates methods to visualise the ancient past, on all timescales: historical, archaeological and geological. I am following the visualisation principles of the "Digital Earth System", best known through their implementation in GoogleEarth. My project asks what we might see if we could take GoogleEarth back through a time-warp: 'satellite' images of ancient coastlines, archaeological sites and reconstructions, empires growing and declining, the loci of historical figures on their journeys through time. So far I have developed a spatio-temporal visualisation prototype showing the ancient Australasian continent through time, with a zoomable timeline and a vast array of content visualisations. There is tremendous potential to express the 'time and place' aspects of humanities topics such as history and archaeology.
History and archaeology are intimately connected with questions of what happened “where” and “when”, but traditional paper-based representations (eg. maps and timelines) are quite restrictive in what they can represent. I’m interested in sharing skills and ideas with others on … Continue reading →
