Site upgrades

June 29th, 2007 by daniel pett

Over the last week, I’ve been adding some new features to the Scheme’s main website – http://www.finds.org.uk – and I hope that these prove to be useful additions. These include:

  1. New Google map for showing regional recording areas and locations of FLOs
  2. Upgraded profiles, now showing recording districts, local coroners locations and FLO location, quarterly recording stats and overall periodic statistical breakdowns
  3. List of coroners offices – useful for Treasure queries
  4. Created KML files for Coroners and FLOs – please feel free to reuse these!
Center of map
FLO
Finds Liaison Officers

I have plans for expanding the FLO pages, with more statistics and presentations that they give to their local finders, MLA groups and other interested parties. Soon I’ll be adding RSS feeds of their latest finds and adding geoRSS overlays to the maps to give some spatial context. I’m also toying with introducing WordPress MU for all our staff to write their own blogs if they want to. These posts can then be integrated into our system.

I’m also wondering if the menu system needs overhauling as we’re adding more and more content….. Any comments out there?

Posted in Techie stuff, web | Comments (1)

Archaeology and Poker – an unlikely combo

June 21st, 2007 by daniel pett

The latest edition of Archaeology magazine from America has just run a story relating to the US military trying to raise the awareness of it’s troops towards archaeology in the territories that they are currently occupying.

To read more about this intiative, there’s two webpages that expand on this idea:

Archaeology magazine
Washington Post

Solitaire cards - US military copyright

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Posted in archaeology, Archaeology in the media | Comments (1)

Peter Ucko obituary

June 21st, 2007 by daniel pett

Some of the people who read this site might have studied at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL or at various other institutions where Peter Ucko taught. He unfortunately passed away last week and several obituaries are now being published.

Peter John Ucko, archaeologist: born London 27 July 1938; Lecturer in Anthropology, University College London 1962-72, Director, Institute of Archaeology and Professor of Comparative Archaeology 1996-2006 (Emeritus); Principal, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies 1972-81; Professor of Archaeology, Southampton University 1981-96; died London 14 June 2007. ……

In 1996, he was appointed director of the Institute of Archaeology at UCL, Britain’s leading centre of teaching and research. There were grumbles from crusty colleagues. But the maverick Ucko was now, beyond challenge, the most creative figure in British archaeology. In 1997, he launched the first courses in Public Archaeology, typically redefining it as a critical audit of the profession’s ethics in areas as diverse as the handling of the indigenous dead and archaeology in the media.

The Independent obituary, written by Neal Ascherson, can be read online now.

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Cleatham cemetery write up online

June 18th, 2007 by daniel pett

One of our Finds Advisers, Kevin Leahy, has just had one of his major pieces of research and excavation work released for access by all on the Archaeological Data Service website.

Kevin Leahy’s report on the excavation, Interrupting the Pots; Excavation of Cleatham Anglo-Saxon Cemetery was published in 2007 as Council for British Archaeology Research Report, 155. This digital resource is intended to make the data upon which the report was based available. It includes the full catalogues as a relational database together with images and the meta-data defining the terms used. While it can be used by itself it is best understood as being complementary to the hard copy synthesis.

I’m not sure, but I think this is the work that Kevin won a major prize for earlier this year….Kevin?

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Posted in archaeology, Database | Comments (1)

Rome Reborn 1.0

June 17th, 2007 by daniel pett

I found this on the technorati RSS feed today, and I think it might be of interest to our Romanist following. It is exactly the sort of thing that we should do at the BM with regards to excavated sites etc. I haven’t gone in depth into this to find out how it was created, but I wonder if the models could be geo referenced and if they are in sketch up (which indeed they look to be), dumped into Google Earth. Would be a fantastic resource if so! Apologies if this has been done already!

Rome Reborn 1.0

And if you’re really into Rome, the series starts again on BBC 2 this Wednesday, can’t wait….

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Posted in Geospatial, Museums, Techie stuff | Comments (0)

Celtic Coin Index – work in progress

June 1st, 2007 by daniel pett

The Celtic Coin IndexSince March 2007, I have been engaged with the construction of a new Celtic Coin Index (CCI). This is a project that has been running at Oxford University since 1960 and records all known examples of Iron Age coins found. It was previously put online by Hooker and Perron and has been available since 2001. This has not been updated since, but has quite rightly been cited as a wonderful resource for numismatists and the layman.

Iron Age coins mappedThe Scheme was approached to build on the work of the CCI in early 2005, however, my programming skills were not really up to the task and we did not have any money (neither did they!) to engage a development team. Since then, I have taught myself more about PHP programming and interactive design and have now built a new version of the CCI. This is still in beta phase for a few more months, I want to get feedback, clean up the code and enhance certain aspects of the site. It is the most complex thing I have built, and there will be some bugs inevitably. There’s a few CSS discrepancies, but they will be ironed out shortly. I need a better testing environment at work!

So what is different to the old CCI?

  1. Built on LAMP platform (linux, apache, MySQL and PHP
  2. Revised database schema, with new data incorporated
  3. Uses AJAX to enhance user experience
  4. Uses google sitemaps to tell Google what to index
  5. Uses an integrated Google map to visualise the distributed findspots of these coins
  6. Dynamic image generation from searches – typology can be done on the fly
  7. Variety of layers added to map to demonstrate distribution of other artefacts
  8. Allows users to use social web techniques such as bookmarking and voting
  9. Permission based browsing for researchers
  10. Multiple download formats for data XML (DCN & MIDAS), RSS, geoRSS (simple – thinking about GML), CSV, JSON, txt and KML
  11. Graphs can be drawn for data comparisons
  12. Images can be downloaded for academic use
  13. PAS data is incorporated
  14. Grid references have been cleaned and coins relocated on dry land
  15. Data entry system for adding new coins
  16. Tagging introduced for user classification of coins
  17. Integrated with a wordpress blog for discussion articles on Iron Age coins to be posted.
  18. Incorporates microformats
  19. An OAI interface has been implemented so that external organisations can consume these data for other services
  20. A documented RESTful API has been built – details available on demand – so that these data could be mashed up on other sites. Please do!!!! Fully ready by the end of June.

There are a few other things being considered for inclusion within the database’s framework, but perhaps most prominently, the ability to record your own coin on the database if it is not recorded elsewhere.

So what has been the cost for creating this resource; my time (approx 1 hour a day) and £3000 for an intern to clean the data for spatial analysis and to teach her GIS. The fruits of this work will be written up in a separate paper.

I hope that the new resource proves useful to academics, numismatists and anyone interested in coins.

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Posted in Database, News, research, Techie stuff, web | Comments (5)

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