Digitally Preserving Alberta's Diverse Cultural Heritage Project

It is official, our page for the Stampede Elm is now live on our digital heritage archive. While you can still see this tree in person, you can also visit the tree virtually, learn about its history and our capture techniques, and download the scanning data at https://alberta.preserve.ucalgary.ca/sites/stampede-elm/ .

If you're keeping up with our social media, then you know we recently digitally documented the Stampede Elm tree! We are currently in the process of creating the archive page (to be released very soon) but are looking for more photos of the elm! If you have any, especially any older photos, that you would be happy for us to post to our archive gallery with an image credit, please contact us via Facebook or send an email to [email protected]

What better way to start a Friday morning than the release of a new site on our Alberta archive! Our newest addition to alberta.preserve.ucalgary.ca is the Foreman's House at Bar U Ranch. Building during one of the earliest phases of construction at this amazing historic site, you can now virtually tour the small log cabin at https://alberta.preserve.ucalgary.ca//bar-u-ranch-log-cab/ .

Spent a beautiful sunny day out at the #calgarystampede grounds documenting the Stampede Elm before upcoming development. Read more about the project at https://www.google.com//825fcda2-b6e8-4d94-837b-b695e/amp/ and stay tuned for the archive page coming soon!

Staying inside today? Need something to do? We suggest you virtually explore from local heritage by checking out our newest archive page- the Piggery at Bar U Ranch. Oink oink! Find it at https://alberta.preserve.ucalgary.ca/s/bar-u-ranch-piggery/ and while you're at it, go on a virtual trip through Alberta from our Explore portal: https://alberta.preserve.ucalgary.ca/explore/ . Most of all, stay safe everyone!

What a great project! https://strathmoretimes.com//archeology-and-culture-comb/

Some exciting news for your snowy week: the newest page on our online heritage archive has now been released! This is a stone circle site in southern Alberta that we were invited to record along side the Archaeology Society of Alberta - Lethbridge Centre last year! Check it out on our archive at https://preserve.ucalgary.ca/si/an-albertan-tent-ring-site/ and let us know how many stone circles can you see?

Have you been missing conferences during the COVID-19 pandemic? Well we've got you covered today with a throwback to the 2019 CAA International meetings. Now released online you can watch the presentation given by research group member Madisen Hvidberg in Kraków, Poland last year at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3awn26bjOq8&feature=youtu.be and visit our archive page to learn more about the Perrenoud Homestead, https://preserve.ucalgary.ca/sites/perrenoud-homestead/

Congrats to our friends at Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump!

"The annual Orange Shirt Day on September 30th opens the door to global conversation on all aspects of Residential Schools. It is an opportunity to create meaningful discussion about the effects of Residential Schools and the legacy they have left behind. A discussion all Canadians can tune into and create bridges with each other for reconciliation. A day for survivors to be reaffirmed that they matter, and so do those that have been affected. Every Child Matters, even if they are an adult, from now on." https://www.orangeshirtday.org/about-us.html

Wednesday Sept. 30 is Orange Shirt day, an event created in 2013 to promote awareness of the Indian Residential School system and the dramatic impact it has had... on Indigenous communities for over 100 years. If you can, please consider wearing an orange shirt to mark this important annual event. #artsindigenous

To follow up on our earlier post, we've been hard at work processing the data from Bar U Ranch. Check out the processed point cloud at https://youtu.be/kfT-tKHJGTs

This past week the team have been out at Bar U Ranch National Historic Site with @parks.canada scanning two of their historic buildings that are going to be restored in the near future. The z&f 5010x was used for the exterior and the z&f 5016 for the interior of both buildings. Fred Stimpson founded the ranch in 1882, which gained international repute under the management of George Lane as a centre of breeding excellence for cattle and purebred Percheron horses. The ranch ove...r time became incorporated into larger operations and eventually divided up and sold. The original headquarters, which has one of the largest collections of original buildings, was bought by Friends of the Bar U and @parks.canada in 1991 and opened to the public in 1995. #albertaheritage #digitalheritage #laserscanning #prairie #ranching #nationalhistoricsite #livinghistory @ Bar U Ranch

Are you sad about the last week of summer? Well let us brighten your day by allowing you to virtually visit Frank Slide and Turtle Mountain through our newest archive page! Check it out at https://preserve.ucalgary.ca//frank-slide-and-turtle-moun/

Here is a socially distanced two-thumbs up for a job well done! This week we wrapped up the documentation project at Old Sun Community College and we cannot say thank you enough to our partners at Old Sun and Siksika for inviting us out and being wonderful hosts while we were on site, to the students who came out to work with us, and to our partners from engineering for helping us with this amazing project.

This course can be taken for free or with a small fee to gain a certificate. "Bear said as a Native Studies professor, she is often asked how people can better themselves when it comes to understanding Canada’s history with Indigenous people she believes the course is a simple step to do that." https://trib.al/ucDVdxj

It has been an amazing first week of documentation at Old Sun College. Using three different laser scanners we have so far documented almost all of the interior of the building. With various other equipment we have also surveyed in target locations and collected many gigabytes of videos, photos, and interviews to document the documenting! Huge thank you to our partnerships with Siksika and the Geomatics Engineering Department at the University of Calgary for all of your help with this project; we have had a team of 10 on site this week with a mix of these different backgrounds (plus an uncountable number of individuals to help us get to this point) and we couldn't be doing this without you. Stay tuned in Instagram (@capture2preserv) for more frequent updates next week, but here are a few pictures from the first week of the project.

If you haven't followed us on Instagram yet, you should so you can see daily updates and stories from the ongoing documentation project of Old Sun Community College! Find us at @capture2preserv

A short experimental time lapse of documentation in the library at Old Sun College this morning. Students working on this project are learning not only about terrestrial laser scanning but also a variety of other recording methods. This 360 timelapse is the first of many different projects we be conducting while laser scanning the interior and exterior of the building.