Digital archaeology and museums
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Transcript of Digital archaeology and museums
Digital Archaeology & [email protected]
Who am I and what do I?
• I work for the Portable Antiquities Scheme
• Responsible for Scheme’s ICT• Run the largest archaeological
database ever created online• Have access to over 480,000
objects • Curate 230,000 images• Provide advice to the British
Museum and other heritage bodies on web development
• Try to provide innovative applications for our audiences
Why is the Scheme important?
• Provides you with a wealth of research material for England and Wales
• Has a proven track record for attracting AHRC funding for second and third degrees
• Records data that would otherwise be lost to archaeologists
• It is the only project of its type in the world
Research in progress
• 23 PhDs - 3 based at UCL• 6 AHRC projects - 1 at UCL• 36 Masters• 18 Undergraduates• 12 internal • 24 personal research • You could join these researchers - ask
me afterwards
Objects by period
Objects by year
439,000 objects online this morning
GIS Analysis of data
All PAS records mapped using GIS
ACADEMIC USEACADEMIC USE
Celtic Coin index records mapped using GIS
Hadrian’s Wall
Prolific recording in Kent
ACADEMIC USEACADEMIC USE
PAS Iron Age data over CCI data
How many virtual visitors?
Year Unique Visitors Number of visits Pages viewed Pages per visit
2004 84,174 289,595 4,847,892 162005 152,711 555,289 9,639,621 182006 247,103 720,369 15,469,127 21Changed data collation to Google Analytics2007 111,338 239,293 2,365,172 10 2008 196,113 326,408 5,384,746 15
Steady increase all round - estimated 8-10,000 detectorists so we reach
around 237,000 people per annum with no discernable interest in collecting or discovering artefacts
PAS ICT Development
• Original database commissioned in 1998 – MS Access
• 6 Local installations for pilot FLOs• Data collated once per annum and
uploaded to website in basic format• SSL lost 1 year’s worth of data
when importing
Nationalisation
• 2003 – The Scheme gains HLF funding
• Staff goes from 6 recording FLOS to 36
• Alice Grant consulting produces ICT outline
• OAD commissioned to produce new database after competitive tendering
Centralised recording
• Database created• Centrally
operated and only national database of archaeological data
• New functions
Driven data collection
• FLO Scheme spine, database the nerve centre
• Data entered online and presented instantly
• Workflow for publishing• Image and data available to public and
research community• Massive increase in web use from 2003
- 2006
Typical record (atypical object)
Calamity August 06 – OAD went bust
Problems surface
• UKDFD arrives• Server hardware
failure• Legal dispute with
new owners of OAD
• Poor functions – at the time it went live was great!
• Is now 7 years old• Needs upgrading
to get in line with the modern web
• No cash to rebuild, originally spent £150k over 3 years on it
New database built in house
Zoomify on the fly
Enhanced experience
• Stable, human friendly URLs• http://www.finds.org.uk/romancoins/personific
ations/named/as/Apollo• Using the gravatar web service to provide
user avatars
Coin guides
Draw in data from dbpedia for reuse
Pull data from our database and the BM collections online to teach numismatics
Enhanced geo data via flickr shapefiles &
geoplanet
Geoplanet from Yahoo provides:1.Unique place id – woeid (links to flickr, twitter geo tags etc)2.Transformed this for places without findspot and just a place to get lat/lon and grid ref3.Obtained an elevation for findspot4.Found adjacent places
New functions – data sourcing for enhancement• Uses wide
range of 3rd party data sources
• Extensive data revisions
• Linked data
Parliamentary data
Guardian news articles about PAS
So what has this cost?
• £7,000 for 2 new servers• £2,000 for server work• Money was from grant from British Museum research board• No other money has been spent • All this has been achieved with opensource software, Applications Programming Interfaces or Linked Data
More on that at the end
@ demo time!
Staffordshire
“Rise up, o Lord, and may Thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate Thee be driven from Thy Face”
Numbers ch. 10 v.35
They let the ground keep that ancestral treasure,gold under gravel, gone to earth,as useless to men now as it ever was.
Beowulf, 3166-68
Flickr love
Opensource your life
Good enough for the USA
Omeka
Indianapolis Museum
The Scheme as a content provider
Where else is our content used?
Online:BRICKS - finds identifierPeople’s Network Discovery ServiceOffline:Academic journals, papers, original research, desk basedassessments, etc
Where else could our content be used?
The new British Museum website - for example, departmental pages could have recent finds that relate to their period (RSS or OAI-PMH to search our dbase)
The 24 Hour Museum - for example local museum pages could have feeds of local finds (RSS)
Local society websites
Historic Environment Record - XML or OAI-PMH
Web mashups - plot PAS finds, against Oxford Archaeology WMS, vs Megalithic Portal vs Museum locations (not done yet before you ask!)
Opensource/apis = collaboration
• More useful than citizen curatorship
• Information reused outside traditional silos/environments
• Interesting cross-sector results
• Enhances public value of museum work
Museums with apis
And more are coming….
Flickr and museum mashup
Wiltshire museums & Google books
What’s a mash up?
“A mashup is a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.”
Wikipedia (a flawed resource….)
It is really just synthesis……….
The Potato Masher - German grenade
What sources can we mash?
Pictures - your pictures or my picturesMapping data - place is a common bond for all of us, it gives us identityRSS feeds - a way to share your content with others in their web pages or via special software
Archaeological mash ups
• Take data
• Mix up with other dataset
• Take another dataset
• View the synthesised results
Potential sources of information - The British Museum collections database, Wessex Archaeology GIS database, UCL data, PAS data, Online Archaeology etc etc
Openplaques.org
Crowd sources blue plaque data and photos on flickr – built by Frankie Roberto, UCL Alumnus…..
Scheme & English Heritage mash
• Take a geoRSS feed of Roman objects
• Take the EH Scheduled monuments data layer
• Mash in Google maps or Earth and analyse proximities
Stonehenge World Heritage site
Walton Mash
PhD student at the Institute comparing static data from PAS, HERs and coin hoard reports to produce a synthesised map to update Richard Reece’s study of Roman coin finds. This will change our knowledge of Roman Britain to a ruralised landscape.
Pleiades project
• Innovative project to put the Barrington Atlas of the Classical World online
• Will allow anyone to use their data under licence
• Low cost dissemination http://pleiades.stoa.org/
Heritage Gateway
• Cross search HER data sets from one portal
• Access to Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Essex and English Heritage data
• We will be joining them • Why isn’t there a
nationalised recording system?
• Faster way to conduct queries of multiple resources
http://www.heritagegateway.org.uk
Facebook mashup• Organisation has a page• Add content generated by the
Scheme on flickr and rss feeds• People choose to receive the
information• You can see who else is
interested in the project• 44 Museums have a page so far• User driven• Opportunities for development
- build applications to advertise your dig, your museum, your community archaeology project
• Join Team Schadla-Hall
Team Schadla-Hall
Some of you are already mashing…..
Selected digital archaeology
And museum projects
PTM – by Tom Goskar
Thames Discovery Project
"The future has to be, without question, the museum as a publisher and broadcaster," Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum.
"The challenge is, to what extent do we remain authors, and in what sense do we become publishers providing a platform for international conversations?I am certain that in the next 10 to 15 years, there will be a limited number of people working in galleries, and more effectively working as commissioning editors working on material online.” Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate
Recent statements
Statistical analysis
Geographic reach - developed world?
Social Media - passing fad?
The British Museum
Acropolis museum
Museums on twitter
http://www.museummarketing.co.uk/?p=132
Is this indicative of quality content?
Probably not…..
The Getty on twitter
The BM on twitter
Multimedia kiosks
http://www.flickr.com/photos/eatyourgreens/4038471232/
Kiosk
Samsung & the BM
• Discover the world's history and cultures with the latest digital technology.
Outputs
Walk like an Egyptian - family created
The end.Visit our website
@ www.finds.org.ukContact me: