Cassidy CurtisThe academic world has started to dive into #GraffitiArchaeology in a serious way. Check out the scholars at Project INDIGO:
Back in 2002, when #GraffitiArchaeology (http://grafarc.org/flash/view.htm) was just an idea and a shoebox full of photos, we briefly considered doing it in 3D. But image-based modeling was still in its infancy-- the tech wasn't production ready, and 3D on the web wasn't a thing yet, so we opted for a 2D approach.
A lot has changed since 2002! The tech has matured, the scene is more globally connected, and scholars from both the sciences and the humanities have gotten interested in contemporary #graffiti as an area of research. They've got interesting questions! But to answer them, they need data.
That's where #ProjectIndigo comes in. For two years they've been documenting the changing graffiti on a 3-km stretch of Vienna's Donaukanal, using custom GPS hardware and state of the art photogrammetry. The result is a full 3D model with an unprecedented level of detail. I mean, check this out:
Flight along the graffiti covering the Donaukanal's left bank (2021-10-28)
Now, there are some things #ProjectIndigo is doing that we will not do with #GraffitiArchaeology, like mapping: some of the locations we cover are not known to the public, and preserving that secrecy is important (for reasons we discuss here: http://grafarc.org/news/2011/12/why-graffiti-archaeology-doesnt-have-maps/) The INDIGO folks have wisely chosen a spot that's already hyper-public, so location secrecy is a non-issue for them.
But it does raise some questions: is it possible to do this kind of thorough documentation while preserving the secrecy of a spot? Would the lack of GPS info diminish the usefulness of the data to researchers? And what kind of infrastructure would be needed to support that?