Last weekend I went to map an archaeological site. I had read a couple of academic archeological papers on this excavation and knew the exact location of the site.

It is a Roman tiles, bricks and ceramic workshop near the town of Chancy which worked for eight hundred years, from 1st century BC till 7th century AD.

This archaeological site was excavated, and then it was covered with earth again for preservation. Still there are antique tiles everywhere around. At that epoch it was a hi-tech enterprise, a place where the Roman Empire was actually built. And it is not completely clear why it was closed after eight centuries of production (an interesting question for today’s reality too).

As a result:

• I mapped the archaeological site on the OSM map: http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/475648607#map=17/46.13281/5.96795

• recorded and published GPS traces of the site to the OSM

• created from scratch an article in the French Wikipedia: Tuilerie romaine des Bois de Chancy . In French because the reference articles are all in French language.

• created Wikimedia commons category: Tuilerie romaine des Bois de Chancy

• created Wikidata item: Q28803317

• added wikidata=* , wikipedia=* , wikimedia_commons=* tags to the OSM object

• made ground and aerial photos for the Wikimedia category (all with GPS coordinates)

• recorded a short video in English on the site and published it to Youtube: https://youtu.be/lS1MyPfVy3o

• converted the MP4 video file to the WEBM format and published the video to the Wikimedia category

I convert video to the open WEBM format, which is accepted by Wikimedia, with the command line tool ffmpeg. Some quality is always lost in conversion, but so far it is the best variant:

ffmpeg -i source.mp4 -c:v libvpx -crf 4 -b:v 18M -c:a libvorbis destination.webm

I used a free music with Creative Commons license for the video. But it is also possible to play yourself and record any music of any composer who died more than 70 years ago. For example, for these two videos I asked my spouse to play and record the musical themes:

Battle of Morgarten

The town of Zug

The idea of deep digital mapping is that reaching a remote destination takes time and effort. So being physically at the location allows not only to map an object on the OSM map, but also to film it, to record first hand impressions, perhaps to do some investigative journalism for a Wikipedia article, and link all this to the OSM map.

I realize by now that recording and editing a video is even more difficult than making good photos. Recording a musical theme is a world in itself too. It turns out that a digital piano does not record a MP3 file, but MIDI file (musical instrument digital interface), which should be exported to a computer first and then converted to an audio file with a program like the Logic Pro X.

If you have ideas or information on developing deep digital mapping, please, let me know.