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)

Front of Index card – updated by Stuart Needham c.1970s

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:

3D Models in Bronze Age studies - Why?

Enthused other institutions

Export as JSON

Easy to transform to other formats

Enrich and link data to

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

The End

With thanks to the: MicroPasts core team

Prof. Andrew Bevan, Dr Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert, Dr Chiara Bonnachi, Dr Jennifer Wexler

The MicroPasts contributors, who number over 1000. If you have ideas for crowd-sourcing via our platform,

we are ready to help.