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The British Museum Index

June 05, 2014 Authors: Jennifer Wexler

The index of the British Museum was a major archaeological initiative first founded in 1913 and then moved to the British Museum in the 1920s. For over 70 years, it represented the highest standards of Bronze Age artefact studies. This catalogue contains index cards detailing object find spots and types, alongside detail line drawings and a wide range of further information about the object’s…

3D Modelling of the Arreton Down Hoard

May 30, 2014 Authors: Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert

We are in the process of adding a new photo-masking application to the MicroPasts site. This is going to be a bit of a ‘pop-up shop’ as it will only include one Bronze Age British hoard, although it is one of considerable importance. A hoard is an archaeological terms for two or more objects, normally of metal, deposited together. In some cases these were buried with the intention of recovery, but…

Preparing the British Museum Bronze Age index for transcription

April 30, 2014 Authors: Jennifer Wexler

Since late 2013, the MicroPasts team has been preparing the British Museum‘s (BM) Bronze Age Index to be the first offering on our crowd-sourcing platform. This corpus consists of around 30,000 (roughly A4 sized) cards (holding information going back to as early as 1913). The majority of these are double sided and generally have text on the front and a line drawing on the reverse (there are many…

MicroPasts goes to Paris

April 27, 2014 Authors: Daniel Pett

Hi all, last week we had the opportunity to introduce the MicroPasts project at two international conferences: the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, in Austin, and the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology conference in Paris. In Paris, we discussed our experience of developing the MicroPasts platforms so far, our aims, the challenges we have…

MicroPasts Latest Tech Update

April 23, 2014 Authors: Daniel Pett

So what has been new with MicroPasts? Well, quite a lot. We have successfully launched our crowd-sourcing platform last week, and lots of people are now transcribing object cards and using the photo-masking application to delineate the outline of Bronze Age tools. From a technical perspective, we needed to take care of two main issues before launching: the first one was, naturally, to finalise the…

Hello MicroPasts, thrilled to meet you!

January 31, 2014 Authors: Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert

My name is Adi, and I’m a research associate at the UCL Institute of Archaeology. Earlier this month I joined the MicroPasts team – and I’m especially excited about this project as it feeds into my background and interests in so many ways. Before coming to London I was an archaeologist and academic back home in Israel. A few years ago, I created the West Bank and East Jerusalem Archaeological…

British Museum presentation

January 29, 2014 Authors: Daniel Pett

The MicroPasts team presented this morning on the progress of the project so far, as part of a British Museum staff breakfast presentation. The presentation (without script) is shown below as an embedded pdf from Google Drive. It starts with detailing some new work on the Portable Antiquities Scheme site (visualisations by Tracemedia and mapping improvements) that BM staff may not have seen…

Public Archaeology in response to the crisis

December 09, 2013 Authors: Chiara Bonacchi

Hello, I am just back from Public Archaeology in a time of crisis a brilliant conference organised at the Valley of the Temples, in Agrigento (Italy), where I was invited as speaker along with other Italian, Greek, Spanish and UK delegates. Organisers asked: how should archaeology change not only to survive the economic crisis, but to improve through it? The answer, I believe, lies in projects…

Welcoming "crowds" into communities

November 22, 2013 Authors: Chiara Bonacchi

Hello, This is Chiara. Before looking into methods for assessing the value/s of crowd-sourcing using the framework that I briefly outlined in my previous post, I think it important to introduce our proposed model of engagement. As the title suggests, Crowd and Community-fuelled Archaeological Research looks to engage the public through crowd-sourcing by consolidating and gradually enlarging…

Communities, engagement experiences and value

November 14, 2013 Authors: Chiara Bonacchi

Hello, In my previous post, I drew attention to the importance of assessing the value of using crowd-sourcing for joined-up research into the human past, but how to go about it? How can value be understood in this context? Value for whom? Here is some initial thinking… I am interested in studying the value resulting from experiences of engaging with crowd-sourcing through time, for different…

What value is there in crowdsourcing archaeological research?

November 05, 2013 Authors: Chiara Bonacchi

Hello, This is Chiara. I am a researcher on the AHRC-funded project Crowd and Community-fuelled Archaeological Research, at the UCL Institute of Archaeology. As part of my role, I am currently working on the development of a methodology for assessing the value of using crowdsourcing and crowd-funding to engage online communities with archaeology and the human past. In doing so, I am building on…

Crowd-sourcing, crowd-funding and archaeology

October 22, 2013 Authors: Chiara Bonacchi Daniel Pett

Hello! We are a team of researchers from University College London and the British Museum. In the past few years, we have been looking into the new opportunities provided by digital technologies for public engagement in archaeology, through several seminar series and a recent edited volume on the topic. We are now lucky enough to have funds from the AHRC to work on a project entitled Crowd and…