17th September 2008, 10:26 AM
I may have accidently started this topic so I suppose I should add my tuppenceworth.
My original query wasn't so much 'should developers pay for research?' because of course they should and have to in order for the results of work to say anything at all. 'Grey literature' would be a very apt term if all the reports simply described features mathematically without any interpretation. The issue (if that's not too strong a word) was the term 'research', which is a bit too open-ended and would probably terrify a lot of developers. Anyway, that isn't really a major problem.
The bigger point is should commercial archaeologists be attempting to carry out large amounts of research in areas where other people (academics in particular) have spent years? The example of medieval towns is perfect, where work might have been done piecemeal,perhaps over several decades with little bits of work published here and there when a larger overview done by someone with the time and resources would be more useful. There seems, to use the vomit-inducing expression, to be a lack of 'joined up thinking' in many cases. This is partially caused by work being carried out in isolation, but also because academics spend so much of their flipping time abroad in lovely sunny climes (erm, like Jordan). A regular review of what has been done would help. Are such things carried out? EH perhaps? I don't want to keep sounding like I'm bashing academics but we talk about research and there seems to be two different worlds.
My original query wasn't so much 'should developers pay for research?' because of course they should and have to in order for the results of work to say anything at all. 'Grey literature' would be a very apt term if all the reports simply described features mathematically without any interpretation. The issue (if that's not too strong a word) was the term 'research', which is a bit too open-ended and would probably terrify a lot of developers. Anyway, that isn't really a major problem.
The bigger point is should commercial archaeologists be attempting to carry out large amounts of research in areas where other people (academics in particular) have spent years? The example of medieval towns is perfect, where work might have been done piecemeal,perhaps over several decades with little bits of work published here and there when a larger overview done by someone with the time and resources would be more useful. There seems, to use the vomit-inducing expression, to be a lack of 'joined up thinking' in many cases. This is partially caused by work being carried out in isolation, but also because academics spend so much of their flipping time abroad in lovely sunny climes (erm, like Jordan). A regular review of what has been done would help. Are such things carried out? EH perhaps? I don't want to keep sounding like I'm bashing academics but we talk about research and there seems to be two different worlds.