Where Past Meets Future
Back in April, I blogged about a new article on archaeological computing written by myself and two colleagues. It is entitled “Making People Believe” and appeared in the 100th edition of the Council for British Archaeology’s British Archaeology magazine.
I am happy to announce that the full text of Making People Believe is now online (without images due to restrictive copyright agreements).
Feel free to discuss the article in a comment below.
Framework Archaeology (a joint venture between Wessex Archaeology and Oxford Archaeology) have just released data from the excavations at Stansted Airport from between 1999 and 2004.
The data is released under an Attribution Non-Commercial Creative Commons license. This is good news for archaeologists and other interested parties to be able to reuse and share the data, and another step forward towards opening up data about our past.
Framework Archaeology also distribute a (Windows-based) free data viewer, which provides basic GIS functionality for viewing the Stansted and Heathrow Terminal 5 data. The installation process is simple - download the Free Viewer (as it is called) and run the installer. Then download the dataset, run the dataset installer, launch the software, and explore away…
For those that just want the raw Stansted data, the formats for download include csv, xml, gml, shp, data dictionary, photos (jpg), and sections (jpg).
The excavation data for Heathrow Terminal 5 was released by Framework Archaeology in a similar way last August.
Making data from such an important archaeological excavation is a great philosophical move, and I do hope that more organisations follow suit. The key will be to see what (if anything) people do with this data…
Professional Fundraising reports that The National Trust are to invest £4.6m in an “e-roadmap” to embrace mobile and web technologies to enhance visitor interactions at their properties.
Picture this. As you walk through the gates of a National Trust property, your phone buzzes in your pocket. A welcome message directs you to a mobile web page where you can find extra information about what to do during your visit and download an audio guide. No need to search for your membership card either – your phone, with online access to your membership details, will do the trick.
As an NT member myself, I use their website to find out information about properties, but currently this information is limited to basic details such as opening hours and facilities. I get a guidebook posted to me each year which contains similar information.
To hear that they are to invest in modern information systems is great news. I have always thought that, given the Trust’s portfolio of properties, there is fantastic potential for creating a kind of social network to go alongside it. To be able to explore more in-depth information about each property would be fantastic, but there are benefits beyond simply making more information about its properties online.
I am sure that this approach will help to boost NT membership. It will attract more younger people to join the Trust, which is essential for its future. Am I alone in thinking, when I read the NT magazine, that the adverts are mainly aimed at the retired? I would like to see more balance, and this could be a good step towards achieving that (he says, knowing little about their membership demographics).
What kind of approaches would I like to see in this new “visitor experience”? The information on the Professional Fundraiser website talks about mobile phone ownership amongst current members. I would not necessarily associate mobile ownership with computer literacy, but it does say that they are “more likely to use the internet”. Mobile data is still expensive, and location-based services are in their infancy, but if this is a long-term goal, there is fantastic potential for development here.
Many of the Trust’s properties have extensive grounds. Using an internet-connected device with GPS (like Nokia’s N95, forthcoming GPS enabled 3G iPhone, etc) rich content could be delivered directly to the user as they wander around (or follow a suggested route on their device). Websites like Socialight already offer this kind of functionality via a Java applet than can be easily installed on your phone. I have experimented with this to good effect in Salisbury using a tour of prominent medieval buildings put together by Wessex Archaeology. You can even theoretically choose to be alerted when you walk past something in your list of interests. I’d love to see it used more widely.
Social networking is all the rage at the moment. It almost seems as if a day doesn’t go past without another one popping into existence. Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Ning, etc etc etc. Some of the smaller, more specialist networks are already fading away under the deluge. So why a social network for the National Trust? If they were to foster one, it could be a real, thriving success. Why? Because it has a winning formula.
What the Trust has going for it, is it’s key asset: it’s properties. Hundreds of historic houses, and hundreds of miles of coastal and countryside landscapes. It has people who visit and use them. And many of them use the internet. Scattered across the internet are photographs of Trust land, houses, objects etc, blog posts, forum discussions, etc. People are already interacting digitally in their own ways. A National Trust social networking site could act very effectively as a hub for all of this information, as well as providing its own interpretive information.
There are tools out there to make this achievable quite quickly and effectively. Google Friend Connect, for example, could be used to build a social network around properties. It would allow people to plug in to other networks such as Facebook, as well as discuss and rate properties.
User-generated content could be submitted, perhaps using a series of Flickr groups for photographs of properties that could be integrated back into their website via the Flickr API (there is already an unofficial National Trust Flickr group). Videos via YouTube. Integrate events with Upcoming, webcasts via ustream.tv could be utilised to show special events. Knit it all back together into the new NT website via web services. Visitors, potential visitors, and those who cannot get to the UK would all benefit.
The Trust’s own content could be made available in numerous ways for people to use on their own websites perhaps under a Creative Commons license.
The Trust would benefit in return from a massive boost in awareness of their work, and hopefully help to give them a new image that appeals to an even wider audience.
The possibilities are boundless, and I’m quite excited to see what they come up with.
The 100th edition of British Archaeology magazine contains a feature article co-written by myself, Leif Isaksen, and Paul Cripps. I am lucky (or unlucky?!) to grace the front cover (that’s me, bottom left next to the giant flint).
The article, entitled “Making People Believe” is about the state of archaeological computing today, where it has come from, and where we believe it is going. The official blurb is as follows:
When computers were new, the buzz was about science and sums. Now digital technology is commonplace, say Leif Isaksen, Tom Goskar and Paul Cripps, the impact on archaeology is to assist open participation and intuitive analysis. They show just a few of the ways this might happen.
I came up with the idea of writing the article after a discussion about the dwindling numbers of people studying archaeological computing at universities. Many people are still surprised when I explain what I do - the connection between archaeologists and computers isn’t one that is very often made.
We perhaps are responsible for remaining too “back stage” with our work. I felt that it was time that we did something positive for our profile, beginning with an article in an archaeology publication that people could actually buy in shops for not much money. Most archaeologists prefer to publish in relatively (relative to interested people outside the profession) obscure peer-reviewed journals that only large university libraries can afford to buy. We publish to ourselves an awful lot.
In a few months time, the text of Making People Believe will be available for free online on the British Archaeology website. It doesn’t get much more open and accessible than that (other than printing it and posting it through letterboxes).
A quick word about the title. We (the authors) had a working title, the rather unimpressive but descriptive “Archaeology in the Digital Age”, but the editor decided to choose something else for the final cut. Personally speaking, it’s not a title I particularly like, but hopefully the words of the feature itself will speak for themselves.
So if you’d like to learn how archaeologists use computers, and how silicon has become more ubiquitous than steel, as well as a raft of other excellent features, head down to your local newsagents (well, Borders and WH Smith at least) and for £4.25 the most excellent 100th edition of British Archaeology can be yours.
David Connolly and Maggie Struckmeier of British Archaeological Jobs Resource (BAJR) fame, also run a website called Past Horizons. It highlights opportunities for amateur or professional archaeologists to participate in projects around the globe. It’s a great website, with project listings, forums for those who want to talk to others about their experiences abroad, a blog (where David and Maggie make themselves very approachable if you have a question), and now, an online magazine.
You can read Past Horizons either on Scribd or via the rather fancy full-screen digipage version, which even curls the page as you turn it, complete with playable videos. It’s well worth checking out.
I was reading Mia Ridge’s blog post on the resistance to the participatory web from within the cultural heritage sector, and combined with my planning a trip to Cornwall where I plan to see some megalithic monuments, it really started me thinking.
Where would be best to get some good, practical information about visiting stone circles, for example, in the Penzance region? Let’s start off where most people do, a Google search. Here’s my query: “stone circles penzance“. The first result is Andy Burnham’s old website giving lots of useful information on good sites to visit in the Penzance area. It provides links to the Megalithic Portal, which has its own community of users and contributors.
The second result (at the time of writing) is from The Modern Antiquarian. There I can find thousands of user-submitted photos, forum postings, practical tips on visiting from people who actually visited, and I can get involved myself and ask some questions.
Nowhere on the first few pages of results were any “official” organisations. That’s a shame. So, getting curious, I tried searching for some specific sites. I’d love to visit the fabulous Iron Age and Roman site of Carn Euny again. It’s custodian’s website, English Heritage, comes a sad 10th, only just on the first page of results. What comes first?
Heritage websites which incorporate social networking, of course! Right up there at the top is Wikipedia (which certainly has social aspects to it), then we have The Modern Antiquarian, Stone Pages (which has been around since the web began and incorporates forums), and the Megalithic Portal.
A search for the beautiful Boscawen-Un stone circle even has on the first page of results a video on YouTube complete with music inspired by a visit to the monument.
People like to talk about ancient sites, they like to share their photos and experiences. These websites are all great examples of the vibrancy of feeling about our ancient past.
So where am I going with this post? As ‘official’ heritage bodies such as museums and archaeology units begin to adopt social networking techniques and technologies into their own websites, as Mia suggests, they ought to get “…familiar with the environments in which their content might appear”. There’s a lot to be learned from what is already being done, and there’s a lot we (talking as a heritage professional) can do to help make the online heritage ’scene’ a lot more interesting for everyone.
If you’re interested in the archaeology of the county of Wiltshire, you can now access the Wiltshire Sites and Monuments Record (SMR) online, complete with a map interface.
It takes a bit of getting used to the interface, but to have this information publicly available is a step in the right direction.
Tip: find the area you are interested on the map. Click the pushpin on or near a feature that you are interested in. Then click the “In the area” tab. Select “Sites and Monuments Record” on the left. You will then see features nearest the pin. Click the name of the feature you’re interested in, and a new window with details pops up. From the details page you can view the feature exactly on a map, or on Google Maps. It will open endless new windows, but that’s a small price to pay for having this information freely available.
This is of course a boon for all the Stonehenge buffs out there, as you’ll be able to explore the surrounding landscape and get a better appreciation for what’s below the soil as well as above it.
Link: Wiltshire SMR, LocalView map interface
[Update] The map doesn’t seem to work in Firefox or any other Mozilla-based browser (such as Flock). It does work in Internet Explorer on a PC, and Safari on a Mac, however.
I’ve long been an advocate of folksonomies. It allows the wider community to add knowledge to resources through tags and comments, ultimately making things easier to find. A number of institutions have allowed free tagging of certain resources for a while now, such as the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, the collective STEVE museum, and of course, Wessex Archaeology’s photos on Flickr.
It seems that this idea is slowly taking off. Flickr have just announced “The Commons” project. Flickr’s blog post about this project is entitled “Many hands make light work“, which just about sums it up, really. I urge you to read it.
The Library of Congress in the USA have teamed up with Flickr to put a selection (currently about 3,000 photos from their collection of 14+ million) online. If you have a free Flickr account, you will be able to tag these photos and comment on them. The images are also being geotagged by the LoC staff. The idea of a temporal map view comes to mind…
There are two main aims to The Commons project, starting with the pilot: firstly, to increase exposure to the amazing content currently held in the public collections of civic institutions around the world, and secondly, to facilitate the collection of general knowledge about these collections, with the hope that this information can feed back into the catalogues, making them richer and easier to search.
This could be amazing. I’ll re-quote this snippet from Flickr’s blog:
“..the hope that this information can feed back into the catalogues, making them richer and easier to search.”
This will ultimately benefit not just users of Flickr, but any user of the LoC catalogue. It won’t replace the knowledge of their expert cataloguers, but complement it. This is a great example of how this approach can work both ways to benefit everyone. Read the Library of Congress‘ take on the project.
After all, it’s everyone’s past, isn’t it?
It’s not every day that you get a phone call from an excited colleague saying “we’ve found a Roman sarcophagus - can you grab your video camera and come out?”.
This short film (hosted by the fabulous Vimeo) shows just how exciting archaeology can be!
Opening a Roman Coffin from Wessex Archaeology on Vimeo.
There is a shortened (10 minute) version on YouTube for the masses. But Vimeo wins hands down for video quality.
For the more technically inclined reader, the film was made with a Sony DCR-TRV50E MiniDV camcorder without a tripod (the tripod head went walkies), and was edited in iMovie ‘08 on a Mac.
More information about the burial can be found at Wessex Archaeology.
Sorry about the cryptic title, but I’ve just stumbled upon a very interesting video by Johnny Lee demonstrating how a Nintendo Wii Remote (Wiimote) can be used to perform ‘head tracking’. It allows one person to use a screen as a ‘window’ onto a much larger image. If you get close to the screen you can see more of the image, for example. Think of looking out of a normal window, and you’re not far off what this can do. You can also look at 3D content, and look ‘behind’ objects.
Enough explaining; watch the video below, as Johnny explains all.
After watching this video all kinds of ideas popped into my head. In a museum context this could prove to be quite a compelling way of interpreting the past. Look out of a window into Victorian London, look at a reconstruction of a room and see behind objects… My brain hurts at how this kind of technology could be used.
Best of all, Johnny is giving away the software and tips on how to actually do this. Any adventurous folks out there with a Nintendo Wii fancy giving it a go?