The unique characteristics of the place where my father was
born and grew up, the village of Kamilari in South Crete, are rapidly changing and with those
changes, fewer things are left for the ones who care to remember. To preserve the memories of the local population and their
everyday life, I started developing some applications
that will hopefully help with that.
Jokingly, I describe this effort as the Facebook of our close ancestors. A digital way to
strengthen our connection with the place,
respecting the legacy and the unique
characteristics of the area that was formed in
hundreds years of history, and they are exactly
those characteristics that will be valued
more and more in the future. I will present in a few videos the applications that I
develop for the Cultural Committee of Kamilari and
aim on the preservation of the intangible
cultural heritage of the area. These applications are A WordPress website. a Piwigo CMS photo repository website which stores the old
photos, a Leaf
let web map, with the toponyms and other
geographical related information. and a virtual tour that will serve at
the same time as a virtual reality application. Kamilari is a
small village in South Crete, where a lot of changes in the physiognomy of the landscape
and the population profile are happening fast, mostly due to
the touristic activities in the wider area. Even though the
majority of the locals embrace these changes, there
is no denial that finding a way to preserve
the intangible heri
tage of the village will
benefit all. A place that keeps a unique character and
does not turn its back to the local history and
the people that formed it, earns the
appreciation of locals and foreign people alike, and
paves a way to a more sustainable future. The preservation of old
photographs plays an important role in this effort, because old photos connect us
to the past and to our recent history. Through these
photographs, we discover the life, habits and
relationships of our close ancestor
s. Preserving them allows us to
keep alive the memory of past generations and share this
cultural heritage with future ones. Preserving photographs is also
a way of learning about changing times and social conditions, as well, it
is a way to help us appreciate the present by understanding
the hardships of the past. The main focus, at
least in this phase, is the discovery,
digitization and preservation of the photos from the
inhabitants of the village. Unfortunately, the
photos are rather hard to
find, and the people
are not actively involved at this time in
the process. Hopefully, as more and more photos
are discovered and restored, more locals will
come forward to contribute their photos or
help with the identification of the people and other
information in relation to the digitized photos. These photos are either scanned or photographed in place,
if there is difficulty in moving them, or extracting
them from where they are found. All the photos are
imported into a Lightroom catalog,
where many
of Lightroom's capabilities to record additional
information for these files are used. These capabilities are
the ability to tag persons. the ability to geolocate the
location from where the photos are taken. The ability to
change the date of acquisition. the ability to add and modify
keywords and other metadata information. After the enhancement and restoration of some photos, all the
versions are stored in the same catalogue. So, one photo can have more than one
version. In the simp
lest form of enhancement, all
the modifications are done in Lightroom, using
the sliders to alter the photos to boost contrast and sharpness. However, in most cases,
Photoshop is also used to clean and enhance the files, and do some basic restoration work. There
are also cases where a combination of Photoshop and
other AI tools are used for more advanced editing and
restoration. In all the cases where Photoshop is
used, a new version of the photo is created and
stored in Lightroom's catalogue. T
hese files will be exported with all the metadata, which include
date, location, and keywords, and will be imported into
a Piwigo photo repository. Piwigo is an open source CMS that
specializes in organizing photos and presenting them and their
respective information via a website. It allows the ability to create albums, Tag Photos and utilise advanced search
capabilities to find images more easily. The Kamilari Piwigo website stores the
photos that have been scanned and restored, and it is ther
e
that users can find, download and suggest edits to
the photos of the repository. These photos, as
already mentioned, may have several versions since
some are restored and colourised. The users can access
the files in a high-resolution format, or a lower
resolution for preview purposes, or for sharing them on social media, etc. The metadata of the
photos, like tags, titles and dates, are
handled only in the Lightroom catalog and are only
displayed on the Piwigo website. When a photo is geolocat
ed in Lightroom, this information is
also automatically imported into Piwigo, and from Piwigo it
can be displayed in the Leaflet map. The tags identify a person in a
photo, and if there is a number inside brackets, this means that this particular
person is also present in the family trees, and the number is
the member ID. This ID is used to connect the
genealogical trees, info page, of a member with
the photo repository, for the photos to be
displayed in this info page. To show the area as it
is
today, and at the same time, offer the
information in an alternative and more interactive way,
a virtual tour of the area is developed. From
several points of interest, aerial spherical
panoramas are offering views to the wider area
around the village of Kamilari. These include
archaeological sites like Gortyna, Festos, Agia Triada and
Tholos Minoan Tomb of Kamilari. Other than offering scenic views of the mentioned points of
interest, there are toponyms, such as point and polygon hotspots,
tha
t complement the map of the area. The virtual tour is developed in 3DVista, which gives the
ability to view this website as a VR experience as well, if viewed of course from a
device that supports VR mode. These devices are a
variety of VR headsets, or Android smartphones
with a user VR cardboard. In the Virtual Tour,
there is also the ability to auto-play the tour, to
offer it as a form of a slideshow. This can be useful in
the case that the Virtual Tour is displayed on a touchscreen
and auto-p
lays while it is not in use. When any user touches
the screen, then the auto-play stops and the user can take
over the Virtual Tour navigation. The map that is
embedded is the web map that we will see next,
and includes the position of the panoramas available, offering an extra way to navigate
to the places of the tour. The Web Map is a
Leaflet JavaScript implementation that contains several
base maps like Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, ESRI Roadmap,
and more can be added in the future. The spatial
geographical data that are plotted on the map are the
locations of the panoramas that are shot for
the virtual tour, the local toponyms, and the
location of the acquisition of the restored old photos. The other
geographical data that is visible is a selection of
Open Street Map data that helps in the
identification of the plotted area when the raster maps are overlaid on top of the base maps. These overlaid
raster maps exist mostly to showcase the
temporal changes during the past 60 years and c
an be turned on and off by using the respective
checkboxes that appear when the user activates
them for the first time. These overlay maps are air
photos from the 1960s and 1990s. a 1:5,000 map from the
1970s, and a 1:50,000 map from the 1990s. There is also a map
of Crete from the 1860s. The locations of the toponyms and the virtual tor panoramas
are added and edited in QGIS, which interacts
with a local geodatabase. The location of the photos is added and edited in the
Lightroom catalog, using
Lightroom's map module. These data, as already seen, are automatically imported
into the Piwigo photo repository, which in turn feeds them via the web
service to the Leaflet.js web map application. The website is
developed in WordPress, and the key component
is the genealogical trees, which are family trees that can display more information
about each member of the tree and also connect this member
to the photos of the Piwigo site. One member can be a part of more than
one family tree, and ther
e is the possibility to store and display a wide
variety of information about the member. Information about
the events of the life of the member, like
dates of birth, marriage, nicknames, details, and so on. The website, of course, can present
other information about the village as well. The photos can be
used in alternative ways to build stories
in the form of timelines, or other ways that the
WordPress environment can offer. All the apps are oriented to
be used over the internet, and by all. E
ven though since the target users
are the locals, the language is only Greek. At the same time, there is the ability to host them locally
by using VR headsets and touchscreens to present
the information from all the apps. A key component in this setup is the Virtual Tour, which
can be viewed in a VR mode and has an auto-play
mode to serve as a form of slideshow when no one
is operating the touch screen. This local setup
can be installed as a small information kiosk
and can be surrounded with pri
nted material and photos. This is, hopefully,
something that we will be able to find a fund
to acquire the necessary equipment to set up in the
Cultural Committee place in the future.
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