Small Finds from the Spoilheap

As of this Tuesday (January 18th), I’ll be starting a new job as Library Clerk in University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

After several months of uncertainty in what might best be described as a “difficult” job market, this is a huge relief. It’s a fixed term (rather than permanent/ ongoing) position but it represents a significant addition to family income and means that I won’t have to spend my mornings scouring the various online job listings for vacancies at libraries, museums, and other cultural resource management institutions — at least for some time to come. The job also means that I’ll have a whole new set of colleagues and the opportunity to make some new friends.

And, not insignificantly, freed from the tyranny of writing job applications, I should have more energy and time for a little more of the writing that I really want to do. I want to start writing an academic article based on my research on Roman public libraries, plan for a magnetometry project in the northeast of England, and work more successfully on this blog.

In addition to this, in fall 2011, I’ll be teaching the Introduction to Archaeology class at Rowan University’s newly consolidated Sociology & Anthropology Department. I’ve signed up to teach a Monday evening class which means that, every week, I’ll be dashing from Philadelphia to Glassboro after my day job. As with the library position, I’m excited about this. I’m looking forward to being back in the classroom again!

Back in November, there was an interesting article in the online BBC News magazine with direct relevance to the Where London Stood project and that might also be of interest to those interested in “modern ruins.” “The secrets of Britain’s abandoned villages,” by Tom Geoghegan, discusses villages and other settlements in the UK deserted in the twentieth century.

People abandoned the settlements for a variety of reasons. Sometimes general economic decline forced inhabitants to leave (e.g., Dyliffe, in Powys). Other times, natural processes such as coastal erosion took their toll (e.g., Hampton-on-Sea in Kent). And on other occasions, people were required to leave by a compulsory purchase order — either to make way for a military training ground, as in the case of Imber (in Wiltshire) and Tyneham (Dorset), or a new reservoir, as in the case of Mardale (Cumbria) and Derwent (Derbyshire).

It’s possible to find some of these sites on Google Maps. Below is an aerial photograph of Tyneham. The unroofed remains of several buildings are clearly visible:

View Larger Map

Follow the link to “View Larger Map” and it’s also possible to use Street View to see ground level photographs of some of the buildings. There appears to have been some restoration work — the 1940s telephone box is particularly striking.

Tom Geoghegan’s article includes a couple of nice gestures towards the archaeological. First, there’s this guide to finding lost villages:

• A church standing by itself is a tell-tale sign
• Bumps and lumps on landscape could be earthworks
• Different colours in soil
• Stone or brick settlements might have outline remains

Second, the article touches on some of the conflicted feelings that we have towards ruins, setting them in the context of archaeological research.

Archaeologists are happy because the remains give them an undisturbed snapshot of society, [Trevor Rowley] says, but there is an underlying sadness to these events. Although some people affected were rehoused, many others took up a life of squatting while the most unfortunate turned to vagrancy.

I think that the “underlying sadness” contributes to the fascination that these sites have for archaeologists. I also find it quite interesting that Tom Geoghegan doesn’t question the idea that archaeologists might be interested in modern remains.

Third, the article sets these twentieth century “abandonments” in the context of broader British history, indicating three other periods when significant numbers of villages “disappeared”: the fourteenth Century, as a result of depopulation in the wake of the Black Death; under the Tudors, as fields were enclosed for pasture; in the eighteenth and nineteenth Centuries, with the formation of parks for large country houses.

Overall, I think that it’s quite a nice piece of writing. It leaves me wanting to follow up on the subject and there are a number of obvious ways forward:

• The article contains a link to Stephen Fisk’s excellent Abandoned Communities website. There’s a lot of content and a great map of the sites that he discusses.
• The BBC has covered the topic previously — e.g., SUNKEN VILLAGES (BBC Inside Out – East Midlands: Monday September 1, 2003) and Lost villages revealed once again (BBC News: Saturday, 11 February 2006). In addition to using the articles as basic information resources, it might also be worth tracing when interest in the lost villages reemerges in the mass media.
• I’d also like to spend more time locating some of these sites on Google Maps. While, in many cases, the evidence of the villages simply may not survive, I’d like to see what else I can find.

There are also several books on the subject that I should try to get my hands on:

• Beresford, M. W. The Lost Villages of England. Rev. ed. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1998.
• Dyer, Christopher, and Richard Jones. Deserted Villages Revisited. Hatfield, Hertfordshire [England]: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2010.
• Rowley, Trevor and John Wood. Deserted Villages. Oxford, New York: Shire, 2008.

Finally, the subject of compulsory purchase orders and the granting of land to the Ministry of Defence also reminds me of a book that I read last spring:

• Woodward, Rachel. Military Geographies. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004.

I’ll need to revisit this and see what she says about the CPOs and forced re-locations (if anything).

Some rather sheepish apologies are in order, as things have been embarrassingly quiet on this blog for the past few months. My life has become very busy indeed and it’s been hard to keep writing with all that’s been going on.

By way of explanation:

• In February, my wife (“Z.”) accepted a position as an Assistant Professor in English at New Jersey’s Rowan University in the Department of English. She was scheduled to start her new job on September 1st, 2010.
• In April, we flew out to look for a place to live. After looking at the house, we signed a rental contract more or less on the spot. We were simply thrilled at the idea of living in a house instead of an apartment.¹
• More or less as soon as we returned from New Jersey, I handed in my notice to Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR). I would spend the next two months trying to tie up loose ends at work. The last thing that I wanted was to have the people who took over my positions (Classics Bibliographer and Art Library Operations Manager) cursing my name after I’d gone.²
• We packed all our worldly possessions into four ReloCubes® and had a professional moving company transport them across country. This left us free to drive across almost all the USA in a car rather than a massive truck. I say, “Almost,” as our new home is about forty miles west of the New Jersey coast. We saw a great deal of the country that we might never otherwise have seen. It was, at times, quite simply spectacular.
• It was also quite rushed. We made the trip in five-and-a-half days. The Midwest was kind of a blur.
• On arrival in New Jersey, I had two days in which to help select a colour scheme for the new house and begin re-decorating, before jetting off for Durham (UK) so that I could join the Binchester Roman Town excavation.³
• After the excavation, I dashed down south for a wedding in Shrewsbury. On the way, I stopped in Manchester to collect Z. (who had flown out) and my parents.
• Z. and I then flew from Manchester back to New Jersey, where we would spend the next two weeks finishing decorating the house.⁴
• We finished decorating in mid-August. Since then, my wife has finished prepping for and started teaching her classes; I have begun a full blown job search.

The decision to quit my two jobs and move across the country to an uncertain professional future was both a difficult and an easy one for me to make. SULAIR has been a tremendously supportive environment over the last four-and-a-half years. I was all too aware that I would miss the many friends that I’ve made there immensely. I had both feet planted firmly on a career ladder. All of these things and they made the decision to leave California difficult.

On the other hand, neither my wife nor I were particularly thrilled by the idea of having a transcontinental relationship for the foreseeable future. This made the decision for me to move with her easy.

As if it that weren’t enough in itself,⁵ there are actually a number of advantages in my moving to the Greater Philadelphia area too. Rents and house prices are much lower than in the San Francisco Bay Area. Philadelphia is only 15-25 minutes away, by public transport. By way of contrast, my drive to Stanford from San Francisco to Stanford was 45 minutes (by public transport, it could take three hours on a bad day). Further, Pennsylvania and New Jersey are both rich in cultural heritage and the cultural heritage industry. In terms of possible career development, there are few places in the USA where I could be better located. So far, I’ve been scouring the small ads for positions in libraries, museums, or CRM (cultural resource management) companies.

I’ve only started the process of finding a new job, but I’m actually very optimistic about the future. And, after something of a hectic summer, I think that things are beginning to calm down a little.

With luck, this should mean that I’ll be able to resume blogging more frequently …

A quick shout out for Serena Love’s blog, Tales of an Educated Scrounge, which addresses the serious subject of student debt. In covering this, she also writes about:

• The actual, if non-material, rewards of pursuing an advanced degree in archaeology or the humanities.
• The difficulties of getting a job as an academic archaeologist after six years (or more) of Ph.D. training and the kind of competition that one faces in the job market.
• Her surprise upon discovering that a professional dog-walker could be paid more than a Ph.D. graduate starting his/ her first academic job.

I don’t always agree with what she has to say and I don’t think that I’d have made some of the choices that she made. I was brought up to be wary of any debt other than a mortgage. In part, I started a Ph.D. because I wanted to be an archaeologist but work as a professional field digger was almost impossible to find.¹ But I do not think that I’d have jumped back into academia, if I’d have ever thought that I’d face substantial student loan repayments. Even though I felt that I wanted to be an archaeologist more than anything else, I don’t think I’d have been committed enough to the dream to take on a five figure debt — much less a six figure one.²

Reading Serena’s blog makes me realise how extremely lucky I’ve been in my pursuit of further education (“higher education” in American English).

I did my first two degrees in the UK in the early- to mid-nineties, a very different place than the UK of today. I squeezed through my B.A., before the days of top-up fees and while the student grant was still in place, even if it had been frozen for several years. A British Academy of Humanities post-grad fellowship funded my M.Sc.

When I moved to the States to start my Ph.D. at Stanford University, I had no idea of what an American Ph.D. actually involved³ and how long the whole process could take. Stanford University supported me, one way or another, for the first six years. Yes, I said, “Six years.” When that money dried up, I managed to land an entry-level paraprofessional job with SULAIR (Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources) which sustained me while I finished the dissertation — I was lucky to get a job with afternoon and evening shifts that left me free to write in the mornings. I took a formal leave of absence from my Ph.D. programme, which allowed me to continue to work towards the final degree without paying university fees. At the time, I would have had to find over $2,500 per term just to be a registered student and retain access to the university libraries.

It could very easily have been very different. Without the job at SULAIR, my partner and I would have been in serious trouble after my sixth year. Meanwhile, friends and relations in the UK starting university only seven years later than me had to assume student debt that would have sent me scuttling off to “the real world” before even starting my B.A.

There but for fortune etc. …

Serena’s taken the novel (I think) step of including an online contribution jar. So far, she’s raised $75 out of $115,000 that she needs to pay off her student loans. That’s not that much — if you swing by the blog, you might consider dropping a couple of dollars into the pot. The pot takes Paypal.

The third video game is Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon. As with Hellgate and Fallout 3, I’ll start with the video, make a few observations about that video, and then follow up with some thoughts based on preliminary chasing up of material online.

The following is a trailer is for the upcoming US release:

And here’s the same trailer, but with Japanese voice acting:

I’ll put my cards on the table: I’m really cheating with Fragile Dreams, as I don’t think it’s set in any one (or more) real cities. It appears to be a generic contemporary ruin — a sort of “Every-city.” Despite this, of all the video game footage that I’ve seen, this is the one that comes closest to the thoughtfulness, melancholy, and feelings of loss that we traditionally associate with the contemplation of ruins.

Note that the trailer’s opening is loaded with representations of communications technology. Abandoned railway tracks feature early and prominently. I was immediately convinced that the “red tower” (given as a destination in the first ten seconds, possibly represented as a drawing at 0:17, and possibly actually appearing at 0:47) is some kind of radio mast. And the crude drawings (0:17) that we see are oddly reminiscent of prehistoric cave art.

As the trailer stresses loneliness and isolation in a post-apocalyptic world and sets a goal of finding other people, it’s unlikely that this foregrounding of communication technology is accidental. The railway tracks point to the networks of communications and transportation in place since the nineteenth century, the tower to the ultra hi-tech, and the paintings to the earliest recorded human communication. The three together suggest “connectedness” as a human constant, something that defines what it is to be human.

The trailer moves from these technologies to scenes of the protagonist exploring the world to, in the last few seconds, reconnecting with other people. The last lines spoken are a question and answer:

“Who are you? Tell me.”
“My name is … Seto.”

I freely admit that the following claim might be pushing this a bit too far: I think that this exchange supports my notion that the trailer’s emphasis on connections is really about the larger question of human identity.

Next, Fragile Dreams is apparently a third person rather than first person game — that is, the player’s view of the world includes his/ her avatar (Seto) rather than seeing through the avatar’s eyes. After the Fallout 3 example game play trailer, I find this slightly disappointing. In my first post on games and ruins, I suggested that video games could create a sense of immersion — of being in a virtual world. I have to admit that I instinctively find first person games more immersive than third person games.

So much for initial impressions; further investigation turned up a few more hints about the game.

I was chuffed to discover evidence that the red tower is some kind of communications tower, in Gamespot’s screen shot gallery. It was a nice not to have my theory about the role of communication in the game immediately shot to pieces.

Part of the Red Tower. © 2009 NAMCO BANDAI Games Inc.

Meanwhile, additional details in the official US website and this Gamespot preview suggest the game might actually be a very immersive experience for players.

Although the characters are cartoony, the world itself looks realistic and rich in detail. I don’t think that this is untypical of anime and manga.¹ As the trailer suggests, the game is predominantly in the third person, although one can enter a first person mode to get a better look at something. Further, the preview praises the use of audio effects to locate animals, other characters, and events in a location. Soundscapes can really suck the player into the game world, even where the graphics are no longer considered state-of-the-art. In some games, I have found myself straining to hear where a particular noise is coming from — essentially tricked by the illusion of three dimensional space created by a flat screen and two speakers. (I’m thinking in particular of “first-person sneaker”, Thief: The Dark Project.)

Fragile Dreams is a game for the Wii and people rarely discuss games for the Wii without mentioning the motion-sensing controller. I have one working theory to run by everyone: the Wii remote’s motion sensors produce a stronger sense of “being there” than traditional game controllers. As with many Wii games, the remote is used to control a weapon (and the website’s list of sticks, crowbars, hammers, hatchets and bows suggests that there’ll be a lot of wild swinging of the game controllers by the player). It can also serve as a flashlight, metal detector, and even a microphone to amplify otherwise almost inaudible sounds in the game world. The player directs these devices by pointing the remote, much as one might use them in the real world. By having the player’s body actually move as it would in the spaces represented in the game, I’d expect this to increase the impression of actually being in those spaces.

Yeah, I know — it’s just a hunch and I have no idea how to test it. Yet.

The official web site and the Gamespot preview also suggest that the game will gives more “airtime” to exploration and investigation than combat.

Staying on the topic of the game controller for a few more lines, I wonder whether using the Wii remote as flashlight, metal-detector, and microphone helps to de-emphasize combat. This design decision seems to give at least as much significance to these exploratory tools and associated actions as to weapons and violence. Two technical precursors of Fragile Dreams which also used the Wii remote as a torch suggest this. Both Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and Calling use the remote as a torch or a cell/ mobile ‘phone. Both these survival horror games made combat a much smaller part of play than others in the same genre (cf. Resident Evil), with the Wii’s adaptation of Silent Hill removing combat altogether (one can shake off monsters but then one must run).

One of the “eerily calm and beautiful ruins of a civilization lost” (in the words of the official website). © 2009 NAMCO BANDAI Games Inc.

Fragile Dreams is not meant to be a survival horror game, although it does share the genre’s emphasis on exploration and investigation. Instead, the producers claim that the game’s focus is on “human drama.”² The website names and gives brief sketches of several eccentric characters we can expect to meet.³ To reveal these characters in a game’s publicity seems highly unusual to me and more in keeping with what we might expect from a film. Normally, we would only discover these non-player characters during the course of the game. This, I think, draws our attention to and helps emphasize the relationships that we’ll build as we explore.

One final interesting detail: the game world is apparently full of the ghosts of the world’s previous inhabitants. Sometimes, these are traditional ghosts (ephemeral images of people); other times, they are the lingering traces of their emotions (blobs of light). In addition, certain found objects contain the last thoughts of their previous owners. These ghostly traces are perhaps reminiscent of the stone tape theory of hauntings. But we mustn’t forget that ruins have been haunted by former inhabitants at least as far back as Volney’s The Ruins (here, for the original French text).

Inevitably, the final proof will be in the pudding but, based on all this, Fragile Dreams promises to be an extremely interesting rendering of ruins in a video game.

Yes, I have actually pre-ordered a copy.