Conference Videos

[Doug]

Hi Doug, brilliant stuff.....did you do the Scone one and if so where is it?

best wishes and thanks for doing this!

Welcome. Do you mean the royal scone conference? Yes, the videos have been posted into this thread.

Also some more videos for you all- the ACCORD project.

The ACCORD Project (Archaeology- Community Co-Design and Co-production of Research Data)

Mhairi Maxwell (ACCORD RA, Digital Design Studio, GSA), Stuart Jeffrey (ACCORD PI, Digital Design Studio, GSA), Alex Hale (ACCORD Co-I, RCAHMS), Sian Jones (ACCORD Co-I, the University of Manchester), Cara Jones (ACCORD partner, Archaeology Scotland)


The ACCORD project explores the opportunities and implications of digital visualisation technologies for community engagement and research. Our ethos is co-production and in partnership with communities, together we create three-dimensional models of heritage sites and objects. It has been said that we are all archaeologists now! (Shanks 2014), which leads to the question of why has this not yet rung true in the world of 3D modelling and 3D printing, despite the accessibility and ubiquity of many of these technologies? These techniques have remained firmly in the domain of specialists and expert forms of knowledge and/or professional priorities govern their usage. Expressions of community-based social value are rarely addressed through their application. ACCORD seeks to address this through the co-design and co-production (with the support of visualisation technologists, researchers and practitioners in community engagement) of a permanently archived and open-access research asset which integrates co-produced digital models, user generated contextual data and statements of social value. This paper will first address the barriers to community co-production of 3D visualisations and records; for example the language used and user-interface design can often be off-putting, know-how is not innate to those unfamiliar with digital platforms, and copyrights of the results are not well understood. We will then, however, go on to present the broad range of opportunities that co-production can offer; for the enhancement of community enskillment, ownership and sense of belonging.


Funded by the AHRC, ACCORD is a 15 month partnership between the Digital Design Studio at the Glasgow School of Art, Archaeology Scotland, the University of Manchester and the RCAHMS. ACCORD is one of eleven projects across the UK to be awarded funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Digital Transformations in Community Research CoProduction programme and is a partnership between the Glasgow School of Art, Archaeology Scotland, University of Manchester and the RCAHMS. For more info email Mhairi Maxwell (RA on the ACCORD project): M.Maxwell@gsa.ac.uk

[video=youtube_share;kHO13foVwxA]http://youtu.be/kHO13foVwxA[/video]

[Doug]

And another video from TAG

Paranoid Android? The future of archaeological research in the collaborative and digital economy

Brendon Wilkins and Lisa Westcott Wilkins-


Numerous community archaeology projects are undertaken every year in the UK on a wide range of sites by a variety of public, private and third sector organisations. Building on this provision, a new social, digital and collaborative economy is also emerging, creating an access step-change that has made it radically easier for communities to form. The emerging field of digital public archaeology has struggled to adequately theorise these new developments, assuming that all community archaeology projects can be simplified into one of two overarching methodological orientations: ‘top down’ or ‘bottom up.’ In the former, projects can be conceived as a stage-managed collaboration between expert and public, with the expert retaining control over design, fieldwork and analysis. In the latter, the agenda is set according to the needs of communities themselves, with the expert relinquishing control of the process into the hands of non-professionals.
Drawing on our ‘Digital Dig Team’ innovation, in this paper we will consider new approaches that enable archaeologists to co-fund, co-design, co-deliver and co-create value with their respective communities – innovations that make no sense in terms of top down or bottom up, and demand a rethink of community-based models that rely on economic theory. The digital and collaborative economy is more akin to an ecological system, where socially embedded technologies (often bracketed under the term ‘citizen science’ present archaeologists with a multitude of opportunities to do things radically differently; they open new vistas for archaeological knowledge creation, ultimately realising the value of research through a truly social method.

[video=youtube_share;kKrYSmAwnS8]http://youtu.be/kKrYSmAwnS8[/video]

[archaeologyexile]

cheers doug, found it....could you perhaps be a bit more formal about the postings.....this is brilliant but as it grows it will get harder to find specific posts!
cheers

Welcome. Do you mean the royal scone conference? Yes, the videos have been posted into this thread.

Also some more videos for you all- the ACCORD project.

[video=youtube_share;kHO13foVwxA]http://youtu.be/kHO13foVwxA[/video]

[Doug]

Yep, no problem. Will make the postings a little more formal. Thanks for the feedback.

Will add titles and abstracts where I can.

Cheers

[Doug]

The Greatest Digital Public Archaeology Tool… that we never use.

Doug Rocks-Macqueen-


It was on a Monday in 2001, the 15th of January, when one of the greatest tools for digital public engagement in Archaeology was launched, Wikipedia. The term ‘great tool’ is a bold one but the first half of this paper will lay out how Wikipedia lives up to such a term through:


Reach

Funding

Digital best practices

Principle of co-creation


Yet, more than a decade later we archaeologists barely utilise this tool. The second half of this paper looks at how we can encourage and maximise use of Wikipedia by archaeologists and those interested in Archaeology. Some of the ideas presented include:


WikiClub

Wiki Loves Archaeology style competition

Integration into the curriculum

Wikipedia as part of commercial archaeology

[video=youtube;pDJslTKRTt0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDJslTKRTt0[/video]

[Doug]

Scaling the archaeological digital data mountain

Emily La Trobe-Bateman and Sian James-


With the majority of archaeological records in the UK being created in digital formats, there is widespread expectation that access to them should be open and user-friendly. For development-related archaeological work this expectation is embedded in the term ‘preservation by record’. Where academic work is supported by research and funding bodies, open source and linked data standards are required, along with the need to include costs for long-term data management. Despite this there is insufficient clarity across the discipline over digital data standards, including metadata standards. The mechanisms for ensuring access to information are poorly developed, and too little consideration is given to the responsibility of meeting the costs of long-term digital storage. Set in a context where there are scarce resources, specialist expertise in Knowledge Organisation is unevenly distributed, and the current reward structure within the discipline is based on individual authorship, how can the importance of archaeological digital data in the public sphere be secured?
This paper will discuss the way these issues have been negotiated as part of a recent collaborative project between the University of Bangor and Gwynedd Archaeological Trust (GAT). The project, Visualising the Archaeology of Gwynedd, sought to develop a way of managing and sustaining archaeological digital data held by partners based in north-west Wales. An online image-library has been created, incorporating large collections of analogue and born-digital photographs and other digital visual data, held by GAT, the University and the Snowdonia National Park Authority. The participation of volunteers in the digitisation process, including the creation of metadata, has been vital to its success, helping to shape the project and create a model for sustainable data management.

[video=youtube;MhAA1MQxTv0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhAA1MQxTv0[/video]

[Doug]

Digital heritage interpretation and engagement

Richard Lewis-


Among other outcomes, the archaeology sector aims to engage a wider audience with archaeological data. Increasingly, digital technology is used within the heritage industry to interpret sites, following a global trend towards increased digitisation. Rising sales of portable digital technology and members of social media websites have created a new audience for engagement with issues from politics to humanitarian causes. Accordingly, heritage smartphone apps and social media pages are becoming commonplace. These developments raise concerns regarding how digital technology engages the public. To measure this, several factors must be considered, including the nature of digital engagement strategies, their appropriateness within their settings and effectiveness in achieving their aims. This allows for modification of engagement strategies to better suit the intended audience. This talk examines various digital heritage interpretation techniques for promoting interaction with the public. Based on the studies conducted during my MA dissertation, I will highlight the issues raised through an intensive desk-based analysis of digital heritage interpretation techniques. For example, top-down versus grass-roots methodologies, the utilisation of social media and some concerns raised by so-called 'techno-dystopians' are considered. The points raised here will be analysed in conjunction with a central case study of the Stonehenge Audio Tour app, by English Heritage. Forming the basis for my dissertation research, this study compares site visitors with online social media respondents to understand to what extent the public utilise available digital interpretation tools. The conclusions will examine why digital engagement appears to be low, and what can be done to combat this.

[video=youtube_share;PKr2lQrxO00]http://youtu.be/PKr2lQrxO00[/video]

[Doug]

Heritage Together: The Crowd-Sourcing of Digital Photographic Data for 3D Modelling

Ben Edwards and Seren Griffiths-


This paper will explore the results and methodology of the AHRC Connected Communities funded ‘Heritage Together’ project, a collaboration between Bangor, Aberystwyth and Manchester Metropolitan universities. The project, which is currently entering its final phase, is a crowd-sourced photogrammetric recording project focused on the megalithic monuments of north-west Wales and Anglesey. Members of the public join the project through the web portal, upload photographs of standing stones, burial monuments and other features, and the 3D models are automatically produced. The resulting textured models and the raw data are available open-access to members of the public and academics for their own unlimited use. Whilst the results of the photogrammetry are interesting in their own right, especially to prehistorians and surveyors, this paper will focus on the design and maintenance of the public element of the project, and the challenges and successes experienced in engaging people with digital archaeology.

[video=youtube_share;4h-up-eHGwY]http://youtu.be/4h-up-eHGwY[/video]

[Dinosaur]

Good to know in advance how much archaeological data will be lost when the hackers finally triumph :face-approve:

Hope people are keeping hard copies - although I've noticed that a significant proportion of archaeologists (me included) habitually print everything to read anyway

[Doug]

40 years of statistics on archaeology students: so what do we actually know?

Since 1994, when UK archaeologists have needed statistics on our university students we reach for the Higher Education Statistical Agency (HESA) data. But, we have completely ignored HESA’s predecessor, the Universities Statistical Record (USR), which has data from 1972 to 1993. Essentially we only ever talk about the last 20 years of students. This paper takes the first-time step of using both HESA and USR data to look at 40 years of students in UK archaeology statistics. The goal of which is not to reminisce about the past, but to see the long trends flowing through higher education archaeology teaching in hopes of better understanding what the future holds. Like many archaeology papers this one looks at the past to help guide our future. It lays out what we might expect from the next 40 years of teaching students archaeology at UK universities.

[video=youtube;u00_YwVfc0k]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u00_YwVfc0k[/video]