Providing virtual access to fieldwork
We have learned that a Student Centredness grant application that the Portus Project was a partner on has been funded. The bid led by Dr Rex Taylor will design, test and evaluate a methodology for virtual fieldwork that will be appropriate to disciplines with fieldwork components from across the University. The resulting environment will be particularly suited to students who are limited in their ability to participate in fieldwork projects, for mobility, visual or other reasons. In addition the virtual access, which will work at multiple scales e.g. from the landscape to the object, will be accessible to all students as a means to support their field practice. In the case of Portus we are going to integrate many of the spatial and other datasets we capture on site into a tool that provides them in a contextually relevant way. We anticipate this to make extensive use of web mapping (hopefully informing and benefiting from the new CIP in Web Based Maps) and virtual objects, and also to use the facilities of the Digital Humanities Distributed Lab which was also funded by the Student Centredness fund.