Spatial Data Visualisation and Beyond.

Abstract

The visualisation of spatial data is no longer limited to a fancy reconstruction on a computer screen. Archaeologists are increasingly recognising that to explore and research space we cannot just concentrate on the visual and topographic aspects of a landscape or a building, we need to understand and represent how humans move through and interact with that space. We are now beginning to understand and explore how we can ‘visualise’ that space with all of the senses, exploring what the space sounded like, smelt like and felt like. This chapter will not describe in detail explicit technological solutions (although they will of course feature), but rather it will describe the kind of workflows we can use to realise the potential of embodied, sensory immersion within GIS and other spatial representations. We will use a number of archaeological case studies that explore multi-sensory immersion in a landscape, traditional and non-traditional ‘visualisation’ of abstract data, and the use of different sensory methods to explore and recognise patterns in various spatial datasets. We will demonstrate that opening up archaeological spatial data to be experienced through other sensory modalities can open our understandings of the past in new ways. It also becomes another vector for knowledge mobilisation, of engaging the researcher and the public with the past in emotional ways.