September | 2006 | Central Unit blogs

Portable Antiquities Conference 2007

A map of all finds recorded by the Scheme 2003 - 2005 The Scheme is busy drawing up the details for the next annual Conference, held at the British Museum. The call has been extended until the end of October due to academic institutions being away when this was announced. We expect the event to be well attended and have some very interesting and academic discussions. The published proceedings will make interesting reading. I’d like to also make this a podcast as well, but the speakers are never keen to be recorded!

CALL FOR PAPERS

17-18 April 2007, British Museum, London

The Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) is a voluntary scheme to record archaeological objects found by the public. A main aim of the Scheme is to ‘advance knowledge of the history and archaeology of England and Wales by systematically recording archaeological objects found by the public’. The data collated is published in an online database (http://www.findsdatabase.org.uk/) and also made available to Historic Environment Records, academics and researchers. This dataset offers an invaluable source for understanding artefact types and their use as well as the wider historic environment.

Submissions

Submissions are invited on any aspect of archaeological or historical research using Portable Antiquities Scheme data (at least as a component) to advance knowledge of finds or the historic environment. Papers should be no longer than 40 minutes. It is planned that the conference proceedings will be published within one year, and it will be necessary for contributors to submit their paper for publication soon after the conference.

Submissions, outlining the nature of the proposed paper and no longer than 200 words, should be sent to Dr Michael Lewis, Deputy Head of Portable Antiquities & Treasure, Department of Portable Antiquities & Treasure, British Museum, London, WC1B 3DG, by 30 October 2006.

Thornborough Henges Rally report

Download the Thornborough Henges Rally report

Over at the British Archaeological Jobs Resouce site (http://www.bajr.org/), a document has been produced as an independent report on the recent metal detecting rally on the land around Thornborough’s Henges (not on the protected area). The Henges have been at the centre of a large legal battle revolving around Tarmac’s desire to quarry the area. More information on this can be found at Timewatch‘s website.

Described by English Heritage as the most important ancient site between Stonehenge and the Orkneys

David Connolly volunteered to help the two local FLOs (Simon Holmes and David Evans) record objects and to aid him with his understanding of the (possibly) polarised views of archaeologists and metal detectorists. This has been subjected to some critical discussion on various fora and mailing lists, and I think we have to promulgate this piece of work for others to read. This version has been rewritten by David if you notice any changes.

To summarise, 215 records were created with 46 new finders recording with the Scheme. The details of these objects will appear on our database when the FLOs have entered their details.

Durga dismantled

Vibrant green, but not the Hulk

The Durga is coming down in the Great Court, and I was a bit slow getting over there to take any decent photos. So I’ve only got some individual photos of the straw and plaster figurines which have been taken down from their framework before their immersion in the Thames. You can view these in our gallery, but until I get the URL rewrite module working again, I won’t give you the full link.

Just an update on this, check the BBC article for more context on this exhibit.

Accessibility and this site

Imap from the Tate We entered the Museum sector accessibility competition for websites earlier this year, which is an annual event in memory of a girl who was an employee of the British Museum. This is called the Jodi Mattes award, and I’ve worked quite hard to try and make this website much more accessible. We didn’t win, but we did get shortlisted for the prizes, which were listed on the 24 Hour Museum website and included:

Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery website
Finds, by The Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS)
i-MAP ‘The Everyday Transformed’, by Tate Modern
Their Reading Futures, by the Reading Agency
The History of Wolverhampton, by Wolverhampton Arts and Museums Service
Speaking Volumes, by Wakefield Library and Information Service

The winner for this award was the Tate’s sponsored site, which allowed partially sighted and blind people to have access to artwork using raised images, a truly innovative way to serve up cultural content to the world. As for us, I tried to make our site as accessible as possible, as cheaply as possible and at a more basic architectural level. I’ve been heavily influenced by resources available on teh web, including design sites such as a list apart and 456bereastreet. I think that this quote from Robert Nyman makes complete sense:

To me, it is all about making web sites accessible to people with disabilities and at the same time to people using different operating systems, web browsers and devices.

The code for finds.org.uk is now divorced entirely from style, with CSS driving the aesthethics of this site completely, as you may be able to see from the switching style sheets employed throughout the site. This uses PHP code as the driver for this function – see alistapart for further info on this. It’s not difficult, but does create an overhead for maintaining stylesheets several times (so think before doing it!) I haven’t implemented it here on the blog before you say! I’ve also made sure that links are labelled with title tags and with a good semiology, alt tags are filled in correctly and tables are employed as they should be and a print style sheet is used to produce printer friendly articles. This is an easy thing to achieve and should be done by more sites. Far quicker than PDF generation.

There’s certain tools that you can use to aid development of accessible websites; these include:

Firefox web browser
Web Developer extension for Firefox
The Fangs extension for Firefox
The text-based browser Lynx
W3C HTML and CSS validation tools
A range of browsers installed on your machine for interoperable testing (not easy to achieve in a locked down, enterprise environment where Gates is king.
Accessibility checking tools – TAW, WebXACT (aka Bobby),Cynthia Says

Two other tools that I find incredibly useful are the “x-ray” and “professor x” extensions for firefox (you may notice that I don’t like IE.)
There’s a wide range of other people’s musings on accessibility out there, Robert Johanssen is particularly useful if you delve into his archive. Have a read of his 3 part article on accessiblity benchmarks, and also read the responses to see how peers feel.
You may even recognise some of his tutorials in play on this site. After all, I only fell into technology as a career by accident, so I am still learning!

As for other Museums that have paid close attention to accessibility; the British Museum has implemented audio description of it’s Compass collections and the National Maritime Museum won the first ever Jodi award. There’s more out there that are now trying to meet WACG. But this all harks back to basics – get your webstandards right and the blocks will be solid. There’s a Biblical parable that could be seen as an analogue to this…..Matthew 7:24-27

Saying that, if you find any problems with rendering of this site, please do get in touch with me and I’ll try and fix it. Saying that, why am I writing this at nearly midnight, surely I should do this at work.

Durga: Creating an image of the goddess

Durga display I’ve been watching the flickr feed for the British Museum, waiting for someone to post pictures of the Durga: Creating an image of the goddess exhibition that is currently on display within the Museum’s Great Court. This construction is all part of the Bengal season at the BM, and to quote the BM website, this is what it is all about:

The Great Court is where Craftsmen from Bengal are creating a spectacular image of the goddess Durga killing the buffalo-headed demon Mahisha. The image is being made using straw, clay and paint, and visitors will be able to view the whole process, from the construction of the initial wooden structure, to the painting of the giant figures on the tableau, which are then ornamented and dressed. This is a chance to witness the remarkable skills of the West Bengali craftsmen creating the Durga; a rare sight outside of Bengal.

Taboo The finished product is now on display, and is really worth coming down to the Museum to check out. Fantastic colours and some magical drumming that takes at various times through out the day. I imagine there will be some videos on youtube soon….. I’ll try and get over to the Great Court tomorrow and take some more photos to add to the Scheme’s image gallery. Only 2 days left to go, so be quick if you want to come and see it! There’s also the added attraction of the paintings of the poet Tagore, a friend of Ghandi and a Nobel Prize winner for Literature. This is in the Museum’s new short duration gallery showroom in room 3, just on the right as you enter the doors into the Museum.

There’s two other exhibitions that may well interest many in the coming months:

Power and Taboo: Sacred objects from the Pacific – free
The Past from Above – £6

I’m personally more interested in the second, as I’ve always liked aerial photographs of archaeological sites, and I’ve seen the book that this is based on.

Museum review time

The British Museum has just released the review for the period 2004-2006, and it’s sitting on my desk right now. (You may have seen comments on this in the Sunday Times…) The Scheme features a couple of times, and the Director has this to say about the direction that the web should head in the coming years:

The Internet continues to provide a means of disseminating knowledge and ideas generated by the Museum’s collection, complementing physical access. In these past two years, the Museum has given its successful exhibition programme a virtual afterlife, enabling world audiences to participate in what can be seen in London. The challenge for the coming years will be to transform the website into a public space for multilateral cross-cultural enquiry, to make it not merely a source of information about the collection and the Museum, but a natural extension of its core purpose to be a laboratory of comparative cultural investigation.

The last sentence of Neil Macgregor’s statement is perhaps key to what happens to the BM’s web presence, and is quite a challenge.

Other museums have released their reports recently, you can see the Victoria and Albert’s online, and their review remarks on their website:

The web year was formidably successful,with over 10 million visits to the V&A website (compared with 6.5 million last year).There were blogs, podcasts and downloads for avid web users; [...snip...] The V&A leads world museums in web participation, with so much material on its sites created by visitors.

They do indeed provide a focus for other museums to aspire too, but they aren’t the only ones who actually do this. Is it high quality material, has it added value to:

the collection
the Museum
the visitor’s experience
understanding

Quite a hard thing to judge objectively! It’s interesting to see that the BM had 8.8 million visits for the same period as the VAM, not that much variance. Does this suggest a defined market? Probably not, new innovations, access to museum collections online via apis etc will increase web traffic dramatically. I’d like to make PAS data available for all to use, but the really interesting stuff is too sensitive and is governed by environmental and data protection laws. The images are of course free to use! Maybe authenticated usage over web services will be the way we can achieve greater access.

Microformats implemented (on the blog at least)

Warning this post is not about archaeology or museums. Look away now if easily bored by techie stuff.

I’ve now played around with the code of the template that runs the pages of this blog (still a few things to edit and fix to make the Information Architecture more slick) and I’ve added some microformat code. If you installed TAILS for firefox (mentioned in the previous post), you’ll see the icon shown below (green squares).

If you click on this icon, you will then see (click on image for a bigger version):

This lists the formats that have been identified on the page, in this case 7 blog posts denoted by a pencil symbol and 7 contact cards denoted by a person card. If you then click on one of the post titles you get the content, tags, permalink and title as shown below; if you click on the arrow, it will take you straight back to the story.

If you click go back to object list, then choose the contact option, you will see that the tags that I have added to the HTML produce the contact fullname and the author’s website link. In this case it’s me and that’s my personal website where I play around before changing things to work.

To achieve this, you need to fiddle with your code, feel free to look at my source code as I looked at the microformats page to work out what I should do to produce this. I’ve probably done it wrong, let me know if I have, as after all I’m learning too.

The basic classes (you can of course have multiple classes in CSS to achieve the desired result) you need to add to your template for a blog post to be recognised are:

hentry
entry-head
entry-title
entry-meta
entry-content
tag seems to be picked up by the rel=”tag” code

To create a contact you need to add the following classes:

vcard
URL
fn

Some wordpress themes have this functionality built in at source, so you won’t need to do this and vanilla also has microformats in the members pages (if you install the extension). Tomorrow, I’m going to be adding the hCard tags to our contacts pages for our main website. Shouldn’t be hard, should it?

Oh and you may have noticed the addition of the flickr images on the sidebar, it’s done using sidebar widgets and a flickr RSS plugin for the Britishmuseum tagged images. Not sure if it is worth it, but I am based there.

Download antiquities theme

If anyone’s interested, they can download my theme for this blog. I wouldn’t thought it would be of use. But you never know.

Blogging in the Museum sector and development

I started this post around 6 months ago, and never got round to finishing it, probably distracted by the end of the rugby season. I’ve been looking around for Museum sector blogs for a while, just to see if there’s much to be learnt from, what standards are being employed etc. I see that Tom Goskar has been doing much the same over at Past Thinking>>. The Museums Computing Group mailing list recently carried a message from Mike Ellis at the Science Museum, London regarding their development blog; it is interesting for me to find out that another national museum is about to revamp their web presence as well.

Looking at their Dana Centre web pages, they’re attempting to meet web standards, have made use of RSS auto discovery, look as though they have tried to use semantic markup – only 9 validation errors. There’s a few accessibility problems, such as red/orange (depends on your monitor) text on the same colour background, no link titles etc. Easy to resolve though.

However, at least they are trying to implement social software – discussion and blogs, good stuff. If institutions are going to create new websites, they have to buy Content Management Systems that allow you to create web standards based sites, valid and accessible. It’s not hard and there’s loads written on the web about how to achieve the outcomes. Saying that, time I checked my code again….

There’s some good stuff out there about creating and improving museum blogs, for example Leslie Madsen-Brooks gives you ten rules – I break a few, too apathethic and no one really wants to read my rambles for cardinal rule 2!

Perhaps the most comprehensive survey of Museum blogging that I’ve seen can be found over at Museum Blogs, which has some use of AJAX functionality in it’s design – for example the add blog and about page transition effects. There seems to be under representation of UK based institutions, will this change over time? I guess so as the social interaction begins to be accepted and seen as beneficial to Museum’s core objectives such as diversity and engagement. This topic is also seen as a session at the Museums and the Web Conference in SanFran in 2007:
Museum 2.0 Services
- Podcasting, Blogging, RSS, Social Tagging,
- Folksonomy, Wikis, Cell Phone Tours …
- Museum Mashups

Ideally Museum’s should make their collections data available via an API to allow creativity to flourish on the web. You’ll see more traffic driven to your website, and possibly (or should that be definitely) new avenues for research and interaction with collections. Time will tell…. as Bob Marley sang.

I’m currently playing with AJAX hacks from O’Reilly to see what I can use, not sure about accessibility or web standards implications though. ~~I’ve also got to get round to upgrading the wordpress edition that this runs on, someone give me an assistant please!~~ Strike that, I’ve just done it. Still wouldn’t mind an assistant(s)….

The other development that I’m about to incorporate into our design is Microformats. Microformats can be described as:

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging).

So does that make it clear, thought not. Well to elaborate take a look at their wiki and you’ll possibly get a clearer understanding. The casual web user won’t notice any difference I’m sure once implemented. However, Firefox users can take advantage of a plugin called TAILS. You’ll be able to get contact information and download vcards for use with your email client direct from the page, is that useful, you tell me.

There’s also been a few developments over at TheyWorkForYou, where a recent API has been launched that allows you to query ministerial debates and information. Not quite sure how I can use it just yet, but I have some ideas that may need a license to be acquired from Parliament first.

Kevin Leahy FSA wins award for Cleatham Anglo-Saxon cemetery

Kevin Leahy, pictured in action at Kelmarsh, has won a prestigious award at the Festival of Science. Congratulations sir! The section reproduced below comes from the SALON newsletter.

Kevin Leahy at Kelmarsh

Congratulations are due to our Fellow Dr Kevin Leahy whose presentation on the Cleatham Anglo-Saxon cemetery won top prize for the presentation of heritage research at last week’s Festival of Science hosted by the Conference of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held at the University of East Anglia. Sponsored by the Royal Archaeological Institute, English Heritage, Cadw, Historic Scotland, The Environment and Heritage Service (an agency within DOE (NI)) and the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government (Republic of Ireland), the aim of the presentation awards is to promote the results of research in ways that engage a wider audience.

Cleatham is a very difficult site to present to a lay audience, and Kevin overcame this problem through the use of computer graphics and distribution maps to show how the Cleatham assemblage could be analysed using information on the size and decoration of the urns, the fabrics in which they were made, the associated finds and stratigraphic relationships. The result was the creation of a chronological sequence for more than 1,200 decorated urns of mid-fifth-century to later seventh-century date.

The sequencing was made possible by the large number of urns that were buried in pits dug through earlier urns that must, therefore, be of later date. There were also groups of urns buried together that must have been of the same date. By combining these sequences and relationships it was possible to construct a matrix showing that the decoration on the urns could be divided into five phases. This in turn enabled the grave goods found within the urns to be put in order, providing a key to the early Anglo-Saxon period.

The audience was thus given an insight into archaeological method and an idea of the information that it is possible to extract from an early Anglo-Saxon burial site; the site was dug by volunteers under the direction of Scunthorpe Museum between 1984 and 1989.

The Cleatham cemetery is now fully written up and is to be published by the Council for British Archaeology under the title Interrupting the Pots: the Excavation of the Cleatham Anglo-Saxon Cemetery with a hard copy, printed synopsis of around 86,000 words and a main catalogue that will be published electronically and will be made available online.

‘Having spent many years on this project it is good to see it getting some recognition’, Kevin said after being awarded the £1,500 first prize (there is a second prize of £500 and a prize for young researchers, the under-30 prize of £500).