Department of Prehistory and Europe

OpenCalais tagging implemented on blog

After the Mashed Museum Day at Leicester, I was inspired to try tagging the Scheme’s blogs via the OpenCalais service provided by Reuters (incidentally, the Chairman of our Trustees is rather high up there….) This was done with two plugins created by Dan Grossman:

Both of these plugins need curl to be working on your server, so I spent yesterday getting that activated and I’m now making more use of that for other scripts.

I first used the archive tagger to see what sort of results the tagging came up with, and the results can be found within the attached excel document.
OpenCalais terms entered.

From 400+ posts, c.1300 tags were established and inserted into the blog database. These didn’t digress to greatly from the content included; however there are a number of useless tags – eg phone numbers (18 tags). The system seems relatively good at pulling out personal names, but does sometimes seem to fragment them and tag posts with first name, fullname and surname; the same can be said about some longer quango names – for example Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (gets broken into pieces). Recognition of department names was automatic as shown below:

Department for Medieval and Later Antiquities
Department of Archaeology
Department of Asia
Department of Classical and Archaeological Studies
Department of Classics
Department of Conservation
Department of Culture
Department of Museum Studies
Department of Portable Antiquities & Treasure
Department of Portable Antiquities and Treasure
Department of Prehistory & Europe
Department of Prehistory and Europe

Once the tags have been automatically inserted into the database, it is easy to go through and remove the unwanted ones from the database via the web interface. For an automatic service, I think that it performed pretty well and it is something I am now considering for the database rebuild under Zend Framework. One Museum already makes use of this, and that’s Sydney’s Powerhouse, where Seb’s team always seem to be the innovators. Would be nice if others followed their lead a bit more. At the Museum’s Mash day, Jim O’Donnell from the NMM did something similar with the Yahoo data extraction service and these can be seen on his site. I assume that we’ll see this pushed out on their main site pretty quickly.

The second plugin, for auto suggestion of tags also works pretty well and suggested sensible tags. I didn’t have to reject any and it also speeded up the production process. Therefore, I propose that this seems a valuable service, and you’ll see the tags separated by bullet points below the posts. As Steve showed at the Mash day, you can link these tags into clouds, automatic searching on flickr from the source word. Quite a few possibilities.

2005 T298, Medieval Runic Gold Fragment from Essex

corinne_mills/Treasure_act/
I’ve today come home from working away to find an email from Caroline Barton, Assistant Treasure Registrar at the British Museum part of which is as follows:

Just to inform you that Sonja Marzinzik has now completed her report on the fragment (with the aide of MS Leslie Webster) and as such I have passed the case to the coroner for her to hold the Treasure inquest. I’ve attached above a copy of the report; you’re copy of the letter to the coroner will arrive soon in the post but I thought I’d send you an copy via e-mail as your e-mail address was in the file.

The coroner should make contact with you concerning the inquest and once the coroner informs me of the inquest result I will then pass the case to the Department for Culture Media and Sport, who will deal with the case through the valuation process.

The report reads as follows

REPORT

Essex (2005 T298)
Finder: C. Mills
Date of discovery: 16/08/05 (reported to British Museum 13/09/05)
Circumstances of discovery: While searching with a metal-detector.

Object Date: Probably 9th century

Description: Runic gold fragment
An oblong, solid fragment of a larger object, roughly D-shaped in cross section and tapering in height towards one end. At the higher end, the fragment appears to have been chopped. The shorter end shows some damage and it seems that part of the underside has been cut away here.

The underside of the object is flat apart from a small dent and some minor ?cracks. The upper, curved, side is divided into two panels by a band running along the middle axis. It meets another band, that frames the lower edge of the object, at the narrower end.

The fragment is engraved on both sides with runes of the Anglo-Saxon runic alphabet, or futhorc. Only three letters survive on each face: these may be transliterated respectively as (dots indicate where further letters are missing):
(a) …G D E
(b) T Æ A…

The runes are set in relief on a recessed background, which may originally have contained niello.

Discussion: It is not clear what object this very small and damaged fragment came from. Although the shape is superficially reminiscent of a seventh-century sword pommel, cut in half, such pommel fittings are hollow, not solid like this, and the fragment is also very small, and stylistically later in date.

It is not possible to make much sense from such truncated inscriptions, but two tentative interpretations may be offered. (a), which is probably the end of a word, from its form is likely to be the end of a verb in the third person, past tense. This could have thus been part of a formula, ‘X verb Y’, as in ‘X made’ or ‘owned Y’. (b) is probably the beginning of a word; D. Parsons, Institute for Name Studies, Nottingham University, has suggested that it might be a form of the Old English ‘teah’, meaning ‘tie’, ‘fastening’ or, secondarily, ‘box’, ‘case’, ‘casket’, ‘coffer’. It is possible but unprovable that this word might be the Y element, or part of it, in the formula suggested by the [unknown] verb on the other side. If the full inscription did follow such a formula, then it follows that an X element must have preceded the verb represented by its last three letters on side (a). This would have implications for the original scale of the object.

The small letters, cut in relief against a background possibly originally inlaid with niello, are typical of ninth-century Anglo-Saxon inscriptions, such as the Æthelwulf and ‘Lancashire’ rings and the piece is likely to date to that period. The fact that the fragment has been both struck and chopped up, perhaps for use as bullion, might suggest that this took place in a context of Viking activity in the later ninth or tenth century; xxxxxxx is on the edge of an area of Scandinavian settlement focussed on Colchester.

Scientific analysis has indicated a gold content of 91-93%, silver content of 5-7% and copper content of 1-2%. The small white specks on the back are osmium/iridium/ruthenium containing inclusions, indicating that the gold came from alluvial sources. An alluvial source for gold has been identified in at least one other ninth-century Anglo-Saxon object.

Dimensions: Maximum L 0.9cm; W 0.8cm; Maximum H 0.5 cm; Minimum H 0.2cm;m Weight 3.1 grams

Note: This find qualifies as Treasure under the Treasure Act of 1996 in that it is greater than 10% gold and more than 300 years old.

Leslie Webster
Keeper
Department of Prehistory and Europe
The British Museum

Sonja Marzinzik
Curator of Insular Early Medieval Collections
Department of Prehistory and Europe
The British Museum

An experience not to be missed 23rd September

A fragment of gold runic inscription

I’ve received a couple of interesting emails from Leslie Webster, who is the Keeper at the Department of Prehistory and Europe in The British Museum with some of her thoughts about the find.

Here is some of what she tells me:

David was in yesterday and confirmed that his reading agrees with the above. These are also definitely Anglo-Saxon runes; we think that G D E represents the end of a verb, and David therefore very sensibly suggests that as this looks very like the end of the object, that T AE A must be the beginning of another word. But he will get back to us with a definitive verdict on what all this might mean.

Neither of us are sure what object this scrap might come from yet, and that will need some further thought. But having looked closely at the style and scale of the inscription, which was almost certainly originally inlaid with niello,it fits very well with a series of gold finger rings with runic and non-runic inscriptions which are conventionally dated to the 9th century. This makes it rather more likely that this tiny piece of chopped gold, though Anglo-Saxon in origin, owes its present shape to Viking intervention, and is actually a piece of Viking ‘hack-gold’, bullion intended for remelt into ingots or for exchange.

I have shown it briefly to Professor James Graham-Campbell, who is the leading expert on Viking gold and silver hoards in England, and he will be back to examine it properly in a few days. In the meantime, David, who as well as being a runologist, is head of the English Place-Name Survey, has pointed out that the area around XXXXXXX is the only part of Essex which shows clear Viking influence in the place names. So – just possibly – there may be a Viking factor at work here?

Watch this space!