[open-archaeology] [Antiquist] Re: Heritage Method Store Proposal

[Cameron Neylon]

 Federico:
I entirely agree- this has been something I've been thinking about quite a
lot recently and am really keen to get started on soon. It is, however
something quite different from the method store i think.

The idea that we can enrich our records with information from amatuer
archaeologists and other interested people is one that a lot of
archaeologists I've dicsussed it with seem quite sceptical about- but I
think the idea that we can crowd-source archaeological data has a lot of
advantages and could be a very powerful resource- especially in areas where
there are not the curatorial resources to manage cultural heritage
effectively. It is something that came up at the AARG conference recently
and that Anthony Beck, Oscar Aldred, I and others discussed fairly
extensively over the weekend. I'm busy tonight but would be delighted to
discuss how´we can do more in future!

Best,

David


On 22 September 2010 16:50, Federico Morando <federico.morando at gmail.com>wrote:

> Dear All,
>
> I would like to add a perspective about this interesting topic: as a
> by-product of this (admittedly quite ambitious) project, some simple
> methodologies (and possibly some related how-to) could be recommended to
> various hobbyist and amateurs (e.g. coin collectors) wanting to share
> information online.
>
> In fact, this suggestion comes from the fact that I'm interested in these
> topics from two points of view: as a researcher working on public sector
> information (and content) related issues from a multidisciplinary point of
> view (law, technology & economics), taking into account the possibilities of
> interactions between information held by - say - public universities and
> user generated content; as a ancient coin collector (with a specific
> interest in relationships between amateurs and professionals and in legal
> schemes trying to minimize abuses and looting, maximizing the circulation of
> information: e.g. the portable antiquities scheme in UK and relates norms).
>
> For instance, coin collectors frequently share online pictures and other
> infos about their collections, but they tend to do so ignoring (at least in
> part) best practices and/or standards which could help in making a
> scientific use of these pieces of information (nonetheless, I think that
> today websites such as http://wildwinds.com/ may help archaeologists
> without a strong numismatic background in identifying ancient coins). The
> kind of how-to which could help coin collectors making their information
> more usable for researchers includes, for instance, best practices to add
> semantic information to online collections of pictures of ancient coins (RDF
> related technologies, such as RDFa, ontologies and dictionaries, etc.).
>
> Similarly, exposing some information about their findings, also
> archaeologist could sometimes benefit from interactions with amateurs: for
> instance, I have some friends working as archaeologist and they had to admit
> more than once that I know more than them (or their colleagues on a given
> excavation) about certain kinds of coins (e.g. late Roman bronzes or Celtic
> coins of northern Italy). That happens simply because I'm specialized on a
> very narrow subset of potentially archaeologically relevant knowledge, but
> this already allowed me to casually help one of them in identifying a worn
> coin simply looking at a picture, while my friend did not have many clues to
> start its identification (in fact, to me that flat bronze disk was clearly a
> Republican Roman as, but from the stratigraphic information one would have
> been pushed to think about medieval coins...).
> [There is interesting research going on in various fields about
> crowd-sourcing and I think that - up to a certain points - something could
> be done also in archaeology... it has been done for complex mathematical
> problems, but NASA also did that with a certain success for identifying
> craters on Mars, for instance...]
>
> So, to make a long story short, I think it could be nice to think about
> methodologies (and software tools) creating a bridge between professional
> archaeologist and various kind of amateurs. More specifically, I would
> suggest to do some pilot work on ancient coins, simply because there are big
> communities of coin collectors online, because researchers in this field
> always used the work of collectors quite intensively (many well known
> ancient coins catalogues have been written by collectors in the past), but
> also because I would happily volunteer as collector participating in such a
> pilot and/or proposing this idea to other collectors.
>
> Best,
>
> Federico
>
>
>
> On 09/21/2010 06:57 PM, Stefano Costa wrote:
>
>> Il giorno mar, 21/09/2010 alle 10.09 +0100, Leif Isaksen ha scritto:
>>
>>
>>> - As a separate issue, a few of us have been toying with the idea of
>>> setting up a Stack Exchange site for Technology in the Humanities
>>> (http://area51.stackexchange.com/). This would have to be quite a
>>> large affair in order to work (i.e. we'd need to rope in antiquisters,
>>> digital classicists, HASTACers, and so on in order to reach a
>>> functioning scale) but it's Q&A format would nicely complement both
>>> the mailing lists (which are good for announcements and making
>>> personal contacts) on the one hand and more substantial knowledge
>>> articles such as the proposed methods wiki on the other. In any case,
>>> if anyone is interested in the initial phase of getting it off the
>>> ground please get in touch offlist.
>>>
>>>
>> I will reply in more detail later, but for the moment being I'd like to
>> point out that a very similar web platform is already available on OKFN
>> infrastructure, e.g. see http://ask.okfn.org/en/
>>
>> The major difference (and advantage, IMHO) would be in self-hosting and
>> capability to license everything under CC-BY.
>>
>> I've started drafting the current proposal at
>> http://archeo.okfnpad.org/methodology-store - please feel free to
>> contribute.
>>
>> Ciao,
>> steko
>>
>>
>>
>
>


On 22 September 2010 16:50, Federico Morando <federico.morando at gmail.com>wrote:

> Dear All,
>
> I would like to add a perspective about this interesting topic: as a
> by-product of this (admittedly quite ambitious) project, some simple
> methodologies (and possibly some related how-to) could be recommended to
> various hobbyist and amateurs (e.g. coin collectors) wanting to share
> information online.
>
> In fact, this suggestion comes from the fact that I'm interested in these
> topics from two points of view: as a researcher working on public sector
> information (and content) related issues from a multidisciplinary point of
> view (law, technology & economics), taking into account the possibilities of
> interactions between information held by - say - public universities and
> user generated content; as a ancient coin collector (with a specific
> interest in relationships between amateurs and professionals and in legal
> schemes trying to minimize abuses and looting, maximizing the circulation of
> information: e.g. the portable antiquities scheme in UK and relates norms).
>
> For instance, coin collectors frequently share online pictures and other
> infos about their collections, but they tend to do so ignoring (at least in
> part) best practices and/or standards which could help in making a
> scientific use of these pieces of information (nonetheless, I think that
> today websites such as http://wildwinds.com/ may help archaeologists
> without a strong numismatic background in identifying ancient coins). The
> kind of how-to which could help coin collectors making their information
> more usable for researchers includes, for instance, best practices to add
> semantic information to online collections of pictures of ancient coins (RDF
> related technologies, such as RDFa, ontologies and dictionaries, etc.).
>
> Similarly, exposing some information about their findings, also
> archaeologist could sometimes benefit from interactions with amateurs: for
> instance, I have some friends working as archaeologist and they had to admit
> more than once that I know more than them (or their colleagues on a given
> excavation) about certain kinds of coins (e.g. late Roman bronzes or Celtic
> coins of northern Italy). That happens simply because I'm specialized on a
> very narrow subset of potentially archaeologically relevant knowledge, but
> this already allowed me to casually help one of them in identifying a worn
> coin simply looking at a picture, while my friend did not have many clues to
> start its identification (in fact, to me that flat bronze disk was clearly a
> Republican Roman as, but from the stratigraphic information one would have
> been pushed to think about medieval coins...).
> [There is interesting research going on in various fields about
> crowd-sourcing and I think that - up to a certain points - something could
> be done also in archaeology... it has been done for complex mathematical
> problems, but NASA also did that with a certain success for identifying
> craters on Mars, for instance...]
>
> So, to make a long story short, I think it could be nice to think about
> methodologies (and software tools) creating a bridge between professional
> archaeologist and various kind of amateurs. More specifically, I would
> suggest to do some pilot work on ancient coins, simply because there are big
> communities of coin collectors online, because researchers in this field
> always used the work of collectors quite intensively (many well known
> ancient coins catalogues have been written by collectors in the past), but
> also because I would happily volunteer as collector participating in such a
> pilot and/or proposing this idea to other collectors.
>
> Best,
>
> Federico
>
>
>
> On 09/21/2010 06:57 PM, Stefano Costa wrote:
>
>> Il giorno mar, 21/09/2010 alle 10.09 +0100, Leif Isaksen ha scritto:
>>
>>
>>> - As a separate issue, a few of us have been toying with the idea of
>>> setting up a Stack Exchange site for Technology in the Humanities
>>> (http://area51.stackexchange.com/). This would have to be quite a
>>> large affair in order to work (i.e. we'd need to rope in antiquisters,
>>> digital classicists, HASTACers, and so on in order to reach a
>>> functioning scale) but it's Q&A format would nicely complement both
>>> the mailing lists (which are good for announcements and making
>>> personal contacts) on the one hand and more substantial knowledge
>>> articles such as the proposed methods wiki on the other. In any case,
>>> if anyone is interested in the initial phase of getting it off the
>>> ground please get in touch offlist.
>>>
>>>
>> I will reply in more detail later, but for the moment being I'd like to
>> point out that a very similar web platform is already available on OKFN
>> infrastructure, e.g. see http://ask.okfn.org/en/
>>
>> The major difference (and advantage, IMHO) would be in self-hosting and
>> capability to license everything under CC-BY.
>>
>> I've started drafting the current proposal at
>> http://archeo.okfnpad.org/methodology-store - please feel free to
>> contribute.
>>
>> Ciao,
>> steko
>>
>>
>>
>
>
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