11 posts authored by Daniel Pett

About

Authors: Daniel Pett

MicroPasts is a web platform that brings together full-time academic researchers, volunteer archaeological and historical societies and other interested members of the public to collaborate on new kinds of research about archaeology, history and heritage. It is a place where enthusiasts (of any background) can not only create high-quality research data together, but also collaboratively design and…

Learning Resources

Authors: Daniel Pett

While contributing to MicroPasts, you may have wondered about (a) the ultimate purpose of specific data collection exercises, (b) how certain archives, objects, etc. fit into the wider archaeology or history of the period/region, and (c) how you might further make use of newly created data or explore certain kinds of methods offline. We have built this page with those interests in mind, and partly…

The Bronze Age Index (BAI)

Authors: Daniel Pett

There's something quite magical about the idea of an object that is still safely in our stores being given to a child to hold and experience so far away. Back in 2013, our team was awarded Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funding to work on the MicroPasts project, which in part focused on the British Museum's locked away index cards that made up the inventory of Bronze Age implements…

Crowd-sourcing and Crowd-funding our Human Past

Authors: Daniel Pett

The MicroPasts end of first phase funding conference will be held at the Royal Geographical Society on the 31st March 2015. We look forward to welcoming you and tickets can be purchased online or via contacting us directly. The conference programme has now been finalised and features some very interesting speakers as shown below. Lunch is provided in the ticket price and there will be some free…

MicroPasts Crowd-funding

Authors: Daniel Pett Chiara Bonacchi

Hello! We’ve just launched the latest part of the MicroPasts project: a crowd-funding website. Have a look and see if you can help. Through this website, it is possible to raise up to £5,000 to fund archaeological or historical research projects that have been developed and will be undertaken collaboratively by professionals with institutional links (e.g. working in universities, museums…

MicroPasts at Digital Humanities 2014, Lausanne

Authors: Daniel Pett

The project has just been represented at the Digital Humanities 2014 conference in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Crowd-sourcing

Authors: Daniel Pett

What do we mean by crowd-sourcing? Crowd-sourcing is a relatively new digital method for collecting information, services or funds from a large group of people, in small chunks, over the internet. This practice emerged less than a decade ago in the commercial sector, where companies had been exploring ways of out-sourcing labour to potentially interested people around the world. It is sometimes…

MicroPasts goes to Paris

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

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…

British Museum presentation

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…

Crowd-sourcing, crowd-funding and archaeology

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…