Digital Archaeology & Museumsdpett@thebritishmuseum.ac.uk

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:

dpett@thebritishmuseum.ac.uk