Very sad that Dr Andy M Jones from Cornwall Archaeological Unit has died. I'd worked and co-authored a couple of papers with him. He was constantly working on projects, his brain always fizzing with ideas and connections. We planned some "one day" Cornish rock art projects. Must make them happen.

Some very sad news from Cornwall. Our thoughts go to Andy’s family and friends.

Some thoughts on 3D structured light scanning (SLS) for archaeologists and heritage folks. tom.goskar.com/2025/09/02/e...

Just tried Perplexity's AI Deep Research tool. It made up a great looking report answering my queries about literacy levels of early medieval British stonemasons. It literally made it up, including imaginary quotes from imaginary manuscripts. It didn't use the sources I gave it either. Fail!

It’s a data processing week this week. Creating a very high resolution model of an inscribed stone to analyse every bit of its surface, including some tantalising but faint markings. The fans are revving up on my main computer. My office needed warming up anyway…

Today it's back to eroded inscriptions; tracing, and teasing individual letters out of coarse granite. Tomorrow sees me heading out for some fieldwork to clean and record another inscribed early medieval stone that also has some ogham. Will post some images once the project has been delivered!

Today is one of those days where every question I answer about an early medieval inscription, every letter identified leads to fifteen further questions. Who carved it? Could they read the inscription? Had they seen writing before? Did anyone check it? Why didn't they frame it first? Etc etc.

Issue #12 of The Spatial Heritage Review is now live! 🔗 open.substack.com/pub/nebulous... 🖼️ Tour the Pergamon Museum. 🛥️ Shackleton’s Endurance digitised. 🕶️ XR demos. 🛠️ 3D printing & ed-tech projects. 📆 Upcoming global events, surveys, tutorials. ➕ ...& much more to discover! #GLAM3D

Currently stuck on reading a very eroded part of an inscription. Even on the monument just a couple of chalk strokes indicate that there's something there. The 3D scan shows much more when you filter it correctly. But it's still quite far gone. Going to use all of the enhancements I can think of.

All day today we're running our Collections & Research Day, join us online and learn all about us and what we've got! www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E7t...

One of the difficulties of visiting a church to 3D scan something specific is then seeing other interesting things, like fragments of stone, worn out decorations, unreadable monumental inscriptions. I *might* have captured a few extras just to have a look.

Today is all about file organisation and data processing. I'm also comparing datasets collected with two cameras, one of which is an iPhone 16 Pro Max using its 48 megapixel files.

The second monument is perhaps Cornwall’s only inscribed stone situated next to a lovely warm radiator. It’s the ‘Selus’ stone in St Just Church. We’re using 3D enhancement techniques to check for missing details.

First monument of the day: the early medieval ‘Qonfal’ (personal name meaning “great wolf” according to Prof Charles Thomas in 1993) memorial in Madron Church.

Heavy rain out there down here in the far west of Cornwall. Luckily today’s fieldwork isn’t in a field, but inside two churches. And if there’s a break in the rain, outside at a third.

Time for new strings on my mandolin.

Getting ready for more fieldwork tomorrow. Three churches. One particularly exciting inscribed stone, and the overriding question of “is it a chi-rho?” It’s complicated and detail-driven work to tease out every bit of detail from coarse Cornish granite.

Today I am mainly tracing lines. Lines possibly created as a pillar with an early medieval inscription was (current hypothesis) moved by dragging it lengthways then turning it nearly 90 degrees and dragging it again. Some of those lines have been interpreted as a cross, and were later recut as one.

Today I am mainly working on Sourton cross, analysing 3D capture data of the supposed chi-rho to see if it’s really there, what form it takes, and to make some clear images of the early medieval inscription (6th-9th century).

@grahamtait.bsky.social Welcome to Bluesky!

Having a much-needed screen break from tracing decorations on an early medieval cross. Not as easy as just click and trace, but every line must have evidence and my decisions and thinking need to be documented, and that’s difficult on eroded coarse granite. Now, where’s that line again?

Today I will mainly be carefully tracing (via hi-res 3D surface and filters) what is thought to be a chi-rho carved into the top of an early medieval inscribed stone in Cornwall. Spoiler alert: it’s not a chi-rho, but a jaunty rendition of a tau-rho.

Suddenly I have lots of new followers. Thanks for following. I'm an archaeologist and mainly work enhancing and interpreting inscribed or carved stones. I use 3D capture methods to make highly detailed surface models and a variety of techniques to make them clearer. Amongst other digital things...

Very atmospheric conditions for a bit of recording today.

Beautiful day for some fieldwork. Off to record some medieval crosses in east Cornwall and West Devon to study their inscriptions.

The camera on the new iPhone 16 Pro is fantastic. Just did some photogrammetry using its full 48MP and the results were great. Clearly it’s not going to outperform a dedicated camera with a full size sensor and a good lens, but it’s always in my pocket or bag. Must try the macro next.

Just checking through my notes for a lecture with @tehm.bsky.social this evening on Midsummer fire customs in the far west of Cornwall. Which will then turn into musical procession (yes, we’re playing the music too) of the audience up to a hill to light a huge beacon. And then eat pasties.

Some thoughtful words on the 'guardrails' of Generative AI (GenAI) systems: www.time.com/6835213/the-...

A few people have asked me about how energy intensive LLMs such as ChatGPT & Gemini are to use regularly, and it's a good question (answer: lots). Energy efficiency is being tackled at both silicon and programming levels. Latest 1bit LLMs might enable new optimised chips: arxiv.org/html/2402.17...

Hooray. Just completed a course on Prompt Engineering from Vanderbilt University via Coursera. Worked at it all day every day for the last 5 days. Feeling excited at all the new things I’ve learned and keen to put it all into (more) practice.

Interesting blog post from Shawn Graham on using LLMs in historical research and connecting them to databases: electricarchaeology.ca/2024/02/06/l...

@raynewman.bsky.social Have you heard that the Star Inn and Penzance Brewing Company are closing and going up for sale? www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwal...

The Swedish Lion: a specialist AI model can now accurately read and interpret handwritten texts in Swedish from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, achieving an accuracy rate of 95%. It will enable already millions of already digitised documents to be searched.

I've been playing with ChatGPT 4 to see how useful it can be for research and decided to blog about it. I focus on not using the giant erratic pool of knowledge in the LLM but instead on using it with my own data plus some other uses. TL;DR It's useful but not perfect: tom.goskar.com/2024/02/13/u...

Just having a read through the BlueSky privacy policy. They don’t respect the “Do Not Track” preferences and collect a lot of data. I had hoped that it would be a little more enlightened as the company is allegedly a “public benefit corporation”. I’ll watch this space…

Fantastic to see that the Vesuvius Challenge (to read CT-scanned crispy carbonised Roman papyrus scrolls from Herculaneum) has succeeded ($700K prize money and lots of very talented people). Many pages of new text from the ancient world, and promise for thousands more in the future: scrollprize.org

Doing some audio restoration of some wax cylinder recordings (a sideline of mine). I've just heard someone say that they're often "like listening to someone brushing their teeth in a rain storm". Best description yet. #audiorestoration

Making some last-minute changes to my presentation called “Teasing information from stones in Cornwall” in Penzance this evening. Sold out, apparently - 120 seats! No pressure then…

Creating a very simple and plain static website for a project using GitHub Pages. Also uploading 3D models, and adding readme files to the repository. A refreshing change from bloated WordPress installs. The only thing that needs updating is the content, which is the whole point of it.

A couple of days into 2024 and I’m already reading some great papers and wrangling some 3D surface data. HNY!

Amusing myself by training a chatbot (LLM) with the contents of 19th century books on Cornwall and asking it all sorts of questions. Now I need to find a better OCR method as rubbish in = rubbish out. Lots of potential in specialised LLMs.

As it's December, here's my piece from last year on a curious Christmastime folk tradition from West Cornwall called "guise dancing".

Archaeologists who use digital imaging might be pleased to know that there is finally some amazing new software for Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) called Relight RTI: vcg.isti.cnr.it/relight/ Really nice UI for creating RTI images and a variety of web-based viewers on export 👍

@tehm.bsky.social Welcome!

I quite like the self-verification on here. My username is now @tom.goskar.com as I own the domain goskar.com and obvs the subdomain 'tom'.

So, there seems to be quite a large number of digital archaeologists and humanists on Mastodon. A large number of archaeologists still hanging out on X, and a few of us over here. And some of us in all three places. I think I need to just choose one.

Here we go again! I'm still on Twitter/X and Mastodon. Let's see how this one stacks up.