Post on 22-Feb-2023
Neil Wilkin & Daniel Pett
Crowd-sourcing the British Bronze Age: MicroPasts to Collections Online and beyond
Collections Online Seminar November 2014
Overview
Funded by the AHRC until April 2014: £318,000Collaboration between British Museum & Institute of Archaeology,
A multi-faceted project:Crowd-sourcingCrowd-funding3D modeling
Building on experience
• Builds on the open model of the Portable Antiquities Scheme
• Attempts to harness known communities (24,000 contributors) and potential audiences
• Uses over a decade of digital experience of encouraging public archaeological recording
• Will provide new data for PAS and other institutional via crowdsourced data
Our principal aim...
To develop and test an online space where amateur communities of archaeological enthusiasts can collaborate with academics and professionals to:
Produce innovative OPEN ACCESS datasets via crowd-sourcing and develop new research projects for archaeology, history & heritage
- Mortimer Wheeler, (Still Digging)
“today the public has every right to its archaeology, palatably garnished; for the days of
private patronage are over, and most field archaeology now comes directly out of our rates
and taxes, whether we like it or not”
The Bronze Age Index
The Bronze Age Index at the Orsman Rd. store, East London
• 100 years in the making (circa 1913 – 1980s)
• Bronze Age ‘implements’: weapons, tools and ornaments
• 30,000 (doubled sided cards) relating to objects from museums and collections all over Britain (not just BM collections)
• Worked on by various scholars including CFC Hawkes & S Needham
Call for assistance to Museums and Collections (c. 1920)
From inception (circa1913)…to the British Museum (circa 1933)
Reverse of Index card – original paper drawings stored separately
https://www.flickr.com/photos/micropasts
Scanned cards then made available (pre-transcription) to all via flickr website
Structured data capture
Geo-referencing tool for co-ordinate capture
OpenLayers based image zoom of card
Initial results & implications (Data)
Initial results: o 57% of the Index scanned to
high quality (600dpi) on a high speed scanner (100ppm max)
o 33% of the Index has been transcribed by over 1000 contributors
Unexpected discoveries: o New/forgotten finds & hoardso Discovery of related archives
(Hawkes’ archive c/o Oxford University)
Initial results & implications (Analysis)
Bronze Age Index Card data Portable Antiquities data
First steps towards a ‘total’ dataset for Bronze Age metalwork – at last?
Middle & Late Bronze Age palstave axe data:
Next steps for the BA Index material
• Completion of scanning and transcribing process• Enrichment and consolidation of the raw data• Integrating the Bronze Age Index into the PAS database and
where applicable British Museums Collections online• Potential for use in ResearchSpace?• Making sense of the new & enriched datasets: basis for future
funding bids for Bronze Age research• Dissemination via PAS to aggregators such as Europeana• Enhancement of other museum collections such as Pitt Rivers
Museum