Archaetech

I was at the CAA conference/ArchCamp 4 in York last week and, as ever, my tardiness in reporting has been shown up by masterblogger Jo and wikiwunderkind Kayt. There was some nice stuff as ever although admittedly much of it was incremental rather than revolutionary. It was mainly a great opportunity to see where everyone’s at these days. I particularly liked Chris Green’s work on a temporal GIS - it gives you a variety of options for showing the likelihood of elements occuring within a given timeframe - so I’m keen to try it out when he makes the code available.

The paper I gave was pretty well received so the main reason for this post is to upload an older version of it that I gave at the Methods Network Workshop on Geospatial Computing last year. There’s a bit more gubbins in this about Ptolemy’s Geography which is increasingly becoming a personal obsession of mine, but from about halfway through it more or less follows the same track as the CAA paper. I should add that I’ve changed my views on a couple of things since then - I wouldn’t include ‘imprecision’ as one of the facets as all maps are imprecise to some degree; I might include ‘Oriented & Non-Oriented’ as new facet - but I think it still makes an interesting discussion piece. My biggest concern with it is that I don’t have enough knowledge of GI Science to know whether this kind of thing has all been done before, so any feedback, positive or negative is greatly welcome.

Ptolemy’s Error: Truths and falsehoods in heterogeneous spatial data

Ptolemy’s Error Powerpoint

With all the ruthless efficiency of a John West trawler, Southampton University has purged its new website of the much-beloved Dolphin logo. Although it also raises some catering-related quandaries as to how to replace the yet-more-beloved dolphin biscuits, I’m mainly concerned that it leaves our corporate image with no sense of porpoise.

“Come with us now on a journey through Time and Space…”

I’ve always wanted to say that. Well, I have since I first saw The Mighty Boosh anyway, and last week I finally got the chance, and completely failed to use it. I was running a symposium/workshop entitled Space & Time: Methods in Geospatial Computing for Mapping the Past with Stuart Dunn and, all things considered, it went quite well. It was funded by the Methods Network (thanks guys) and run in conjunction with the Arts & Humanities E-Science Theme lectures on Space and Time. There were three sessions, on Scale, Heterogeneity and Standards and Metadata, and a lot of time set aside for discussion. One of the nice aspects about it was also a high proportion of participants from other disciplines, although I confess to not having spent nearly enough time collaring them for a chat during the coffee breaks. I even flagrantly seized the opportunity to bandy about some thoughts of my own, of which (slightly) more later.

So what came out of it? The two most interesting developments for me were a growing interest in Agent-Based Modelling (ABM) and increasing realisation that there are massive developments going on in geocomputing which threaten to leave the Humanities community behind. (There’s also discussion of these and other topics over at www.arts-humanities.net)

Agents Myth

I’ll confess to not having previously been one ABM’s greatest fans, but the presentations by Tony Wilkinson and Mark Lake in the session on scale have given me some serious food for thought. For those who haven’t come across it, ABM is type of computational modelling in which programmatic ‘agents’ are given a rule set and framework in which to operate and then left to their own devices in order to observe how they behave. In this way reserachers can attempt to model real world behaviour and see how large scale patterns can ‘emerge’ from smaller ones. Part of my skepticism was due to a (perhaps) unfounded perception that ABM was attempting to make ’strong claims’ about its results. Obviously not to the degree of individual agent histories, but to the extent that one might say, ‘these are the factors which led to outcome X and this is how they interoperate’. Criticisms of this view range from the problem of equifinality (i.e. that a variety of different processes might potentially lead to X, and it’s not possible to ascertain which), to whether such massive generalisations over complex systems can provide any meaningful results at all. Mark gave a particularly impressive critique of the process, which rather than undermining its validity, actually left me thinking that (at least in the hands of a reflective and reflexive research community) it could be a valuable tool. When used as an experimental ‘laboratory’, it can throw up all sorts of interesting insights and possibilities which might not otherwise occur to the researcher.

This resonated with me quite strongly because it feels the Network Analysis (NA) is faced with much the same challenges. There’s a fairly small user community, all using related but distinct approaches, and there is a danger of attempting to ‘over-sell’ the method, thereby putting off colleagues who might otherwise be interested. It feels to me that NA in the humanities has also reached the stage where we need to be brave enough to critique our own methodologies in order to establish firm theoretical ground. If we don’t, it may unnecessarily become a passing fad.

Mass Mashing

The second interesting development for me was the widely-made observation that not only has basic geocomputing become available to the public, but that in a very short space of time it has become hugely influentioal in the web (and thereby cultural) sphere. Huge quantities of spatial data are becoming available all the time, often created by people with their own implicit or explicit agenda. Whilst professional archaeologists shouldn’t turn their backs on traditional methods of dissemination, if we don’t utilise common dialacts (such as KML and GeoRSS) as well, there’s a real danger that we will not participate in that wider public dialogue. Nobody owns the past, and our role as academics and professionals can only influence, not direct, other people’s views, but it is important to make sure that we don’t just end talking to ourselves.

The Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing Like the Truth

During the session on Heterogeneity, I gave a paper entitled ‘Ptolemy’s Error: Truths and Falsehoods in Heteregeneous Spatial Data’. It brought together a few thoughts I’ve had recently on the nature of ‘truth’ in mapping, along with some observations on Ptolemy’s World Map. Don’t know how much sense it made but it seemed to be well received, so I’ll post it online here shortly. All feedback greatly welcomed

Well, after two and a half thoroughly enjoyable years at Oxford Archaeology, I’m finally hanging up my hard-hat and heading off for pastures new. In fact I’m reascending the ivory tower to do a PhD at Southampton University’s School of Electronics and Computer Sciences on ‘Semantic Web methods for the integration of heterogeneous archaeological datasets’ which is going to be cool. The datasets in question are excavations from Roman ports around the Western Mediterranean - Italy, France, Spain, North Africa. That’s going to be cool too. The output will hopefully be some new insights into Roman maritime trade. And that’s going to be really really cool. So on the whole I’m a pretty happy bunny.

On the other hand it also leaves vacant my position at Oxford Archaeology - which is about as good a job as you can get that doesn’t involve swanning around international holiday destinations with a laptop (come to think of it, it involves some of that too ). It’s currently a bit of a mish-mash of software development, spatial tech and profile-raising/conferencing although there’s the flexibility to play to the job-holder’s strengths. An interest in all things ‘Open‘ is, let’s face it, going to go down well with the boss. Most importantly, it requires a lot of interfacing between archaeologists and IT folks so a good understanding of both cultures is vital. We’re likley to be taking on someone soon (August/September) so if you’re interested in applying (or know someone who would be) then drop me or Chris Puttick a line.

Mapping The Past

I’m currently organising a symposium at the National E-Science Centre with Stuart Dunn entitled Space/Time: Methods in Geospatial Computing for Mapping the Past. As something of a forerunner to it there’s an online interview with Stuart and I over at Digital Arts and Humanities where we get to ramble on/sling mud/character assassinate/etc.

It’s quite good fun.

I just wrote this article for with my colleagues Jo and Chris for Oxford Archaeology’s in-house newsletter. The idea was to write a reasonably light-hearted intro to our policy of Open Archaeology for non-techies. I’ve no idea whether it will interest anyone else but for what it’s worth, here it is:

Open Archaeology

Leif Isaksen, Jo Cook & Chris Puttick

‘Open Archaeology’ is a phrase that tends to get bandied about quite a lot in certain circles these days. But what exactly does it mean? Ultimately it stems from the view that the value of archaeology, like many other knowledge industries, lies in two related but distinct concepts. The first is that the information must in some way be accurate, either in describing the world or in reflecting the opinions of those who describe it. This is something that archaeologists, in general, do fairly well. The second is that the information must be available to others so that it can enrich their understanding as well. As a discipline, this is something that we tend to do rather badly. Open Archaeology is about the social, methodological and technical dynamics that will allow us to do it better, and hence make our work mean more to the people we’re doing it for (which hopefully isn’t just ourselves).

So what does that mean for you and me? First of all we need to think through our place in the whole lifecycle of archaeological exploration. Whether you’re writing reports over a hot desk at the Storey Institute or at the business end of a shovel, the work we do is just part of a long chain that ultimately ends up…where? We’d probably like to think that it wasn’t in a basement filing cabinet bearing a ‘beware of the leopard’ sign, but far too frequently that’s exactly the case. We preserve by record and then preserve our records in administrative formaldehyde. Then we wonder why nobody but archaeologists ever seems to give a hoot about our latest groundbreaking discovery. Which is a shame, because we certainly don’t do this for the money. But can we do anything about it?

The answer is yes. We live in an information age in which you no longer have to go to the Bodleian library to find out who scored the German goals in the 1966 World Cup Final. In the era of Wikipedia and Facebook, it’s possible for us to find out what we want, when we want, and how we want (as well as who said so). For example, our databases and grey literature contain information about several thousand projects including where and when they happened, who did them, and what they found there. It would be great if every time we did a new excavation we could get an instant report on what we had done nearby. It would be even greater if we could immediately find out what everyone had done nearby. And the NMR, and the SMR, and who we hired plant from, etc., etc., etc. Life would be easier, costs would be lower (and thus wages higher), our significant others would think we did something useful for a change and, most of all, archaeology would be a more valuable resource for archaeologists and non-archaeologists alike. So much for the dream, what’s the reality?

Successful information sharing is based on three principles: Open Data, Open Standards, and Open Technologies (that’s why we call it Open Archaeology). Open Data means that we are willing to share our data so that others can use it as well. Partly because it makes them more likely to share theirs with us, and partly because it was never ours to begin with. Archaeology is not the domain of archaeologists, it the shared heritage of a nation (of humanity, even). Open Standards are the rules by which we share it. There are many ways to tell people your ideas, from MIDAS-compliant web-feeds to sketches on the back of a cigarette packet. Both have their place, but Open Standards like the former make life much quicker and cheaper in the long (and medium) run. And cigarettes are so expensive these days. Open Technologies mean that I don’t have to pay through the nose just so I can see the trench CAD plan you just sent me. ‘Open Source’ software (to use the jargon) also means that I don’t have to be content to use my computer just as it is. I, or my geeky pals in the IT department, can change it to fit my needs.

‘OK, sounds reasonable enough I suppose. So what’s Oxford Archaeology doing about it then?’ Well, we’ve got a lot of work to do. Some of it is technical, but most of it is about all of us contributing to making our stuff more available. Amongst the specific projects we are committed to are:

• seeking funding to digitise our legacy data (approximately 1.7m items!)

• providing access to our data as soon as we are able, including the raw data in the form of context sheets, site photographs and images of key artefacts

• IT tools for everyone’s use (established and experimental) such as wikis to facilitate discussion, and project teams blogs to help record the process of discovery, interpretation and re-interpretation.

• a content management system that will enable us to visibly credit people for all the work they do - internally and externally.

At the end of the day, Open Archaeology isn’t really anything new after all. It’s just what ‘Archaeology’ ought to be.

One of the remarkable things about the emergent Mashup Culture is that you never quite know when you’re going to find yourself repurposed. Whilst doing a little a blog admin this evening (OK, I admit it, I wanted to check my stats) I was intrigued to note that my last post had been linked to by

http://petcommunity.net/6-pet-community-june-21-2007-729-pm

Now, seeing as my entire pet inventory runs to two dead cats (and an affection for icanhascheezburger.com) a little further investigation seemed in order. Much to my bewilderment, there on the petcommunity newsfeed was a snippet of my post nestled between other feeds, either mourning the untimely demise of ‘Snuggles’ and asking about “good value gerbil insurance”, or informing readers of new fish in stock at Skipton Pet Centre (better than old fish in the skip at Stockton Pet Centre, I guess), or headlining with - the rather alarmist - “Trouble in Puppy Paradise”. It was only after starting to read about one unfortunate young lady’s troubles in coming out to the lesbian community that I began to realise that both us seemed to be attending the wrong party (as it were). In fact it appears that we had been aggregated on the basis of our posts containing the word ‘pet’ (as in ‘pet projects’) and ‘community’ (as in ‘community driven’).

So there you go, folks. Be careful what you post about because you might just wind up there. Or thereabouts. Right, I’m off to buy some gerbil insurance.

PS If you’ve turned up hoping for something interesting/relevant to read then I can do no better than redirect you to Mia’s latest post.

On Tuesday I headed off for an interesting day in York and a bit of a natter with the ADS gang. The idea was to bounce around some ideas for collaboration with Antiquist, as well as get their angle on the future of archaeological data repositories and much else besides. The thoughts below are my take on some topics arising from the discussion (mainly with Stuart Jeffrey and Julian Richards, though with fleeting conversations with most of the rest of the team as well).

Data Sharing

One of the things that most people seem agreed upon these days is that a distributed model for data sharing is a Good Thing, but that it’s not so easy to accomplish in practice. Whilst an important debate as to the legal and ethical aspects of making this data available continues to unfold, one of the other pieces of the jigsaw revolves around agreeing on data standards, and what ought to be done if organisations can’t (or won’t) comply with them. A few developments seem to be taking this closer to reality however, and the view from ADS is that we may be closer than we think. The first factor, which I touched on in my last post, is that a number of repositories are beginning to expose their data as web services, albeit privately, and these may begin to emerge as de facto standards. This is not a fact that will please everyone. Legitimate concerns about transparency need to be raised, and, prior to seeing the documentation which is currently lacking, it’s hard to know how viable they are for general uptake, although Stuart seems positive that they are generally based on standards advocated by e.g., FISH. Markup Languages like KML have also demonstrated that it is possible for useful standards to emerge from organisations who have developed them for their own needs. The real issue lies in whether those organisations will release them for open management by the community or whether they will want to maintain control of them.

This relates heavily to the second aspect of the problem – for a distributed network of repositories to function, they all have to sing from the same songsheet, and the idea of using HEIRNET as a registry of web services would be predicated on that fact. In some ways these next few months could be interesting as we begin to move away from a situation in which there are no immediate solutions to providing archaeological web services to one in in which there could be several potential candidates. As is frequently the case with such things, the one most likely to gain acceptance is the one which gains the most adherents early on. I, for one, will be voicing support for the most open and community-driven. With that in mind, I look forward to seeing a few more specifications popping up in the weeks ahead. Let battle commence.

Search Party

Stuart gave me a demo of the ArchaeoBrowser which I liked a lot (and a nod to Stewart Waller for the nice interface) but also provides a cautionary tale about using proprietary software solutions. Effectively it’s a browsing tool for archaeological entities across the entire UK drawn from a large number of HEIRs. He was at pains to point out that the dataset is not yet perfect, but it contains a million+ records and uses faceted classification in order to give an ultra-quick search result which can be done either spatially or semantically. The system has its drawbacks – the indexing has be done on the entire aggregated dataset so effectively it has to copy their data and hold it centrally. The final results ultimately point the user back to a URL hosted at the original HEIR, there is potential for broken links and there’s no live updating (a problem I’m familiar with from the VLMA). On the other hand, the ability to cross search and retrieve heterogeneous data in a common format using a common schema is really cool. But there’s a final twist. ADUIRI, the company who created the groovy but proprietary indexing software have ceased to exist. That means there’s some serious work to be done before any new information can be introduced to the system, if at all.

York have also just received a grant from the recent AHRC-JISC-EPSRC funding round to undertake their Archaeotools project which will look at further methods for data mining an ever increasing mountain of material. By using Natural Language Processing to harvest data from grey literature, it could revolutionise our understanding of what’s ‘out there’. And I’m glad to hear they’re committed to using OS solutions this time round

The Great Antiquist Jamboree/CodeCamp/SwapShop/Thing

One of the ideas we knocked about was something I’ve also discussed with Mark Lake, Dave Wheatley & Graeme Earl – namely to get the Antiquist CodeCamp (OK, so we do really need a new name for it) off the ground. The plan as such is to have an annual event over several days in which Master’s students from the various Arch/IT courses can attend workshops run by professional practitioners and tackle pet projects with help from their peers. As well as providing skills which would be of immediate benefit to the students, it would also be a practical exercise in collaboration and a great opportunity for them to network. There may be some work to do in getting the university beancounters to see the benefit in all this, but if the students get on board as well then the logistical problems will hopefully take care of themselves (yes, I know that’s naïve, but sometimes you just have to think positive).

Internet Archaeology

Lastly, one comment from Judith Winters, the editor of Internet Archaeology, really fired my imagination. Mike Charno gave us a demo of an integrated IA article and ADS dataset which were an examplar of the LEAP project at CAA UK earlier this year. I found the ability to have an article which actually has the complete supporting data embedded within it revolutionary, so I was delighted to hear that once the practicalities of this kind of integration have been ironed out they hope to start partnering with folks outside York/ADS on similar projects (cf. StORe).

Now where did I put that Crossbones report…?

Finally back in the saddle after a month exploring the delights of Memphis and Locombia, I spent an extremely enjoyable day at the HEIRNET Data Sans Frontières conference and it raised a few points worth blogging about.

The first is that it felt as though there is increasing acceptance that standalone data provision websites - i.e. those that attempt to provide the data they hold in a strictly defined and limited fashion - are failing to attain their potential because you cannot second-guess the user. The result is unnecessarily large overheads and dissatisfied customers (whoever they may be). The only solution is to separate your data model from its representation so that others can find new ways to repurpose and ‘mash-up’ your information. It’s generally these green shoots of innovation that make the internet the all-things-to-all-people powertool that it is today.

So warm, fluffy feelings all round then? Well maybe - but there’s a long way to go yet. Perhaps illustrative of some of the things left to be done was the response to a question I asked as to whether the new data access websites offered by English Heritage and the SWISH Partnership (representing Scotland & Wales) were built upon publicly accessible web services so that other websites could use their data. SWISH seemed to be on the ball - not yet, was the answer, but it’s very much on our agenda. About EH’s HeritageGateway, however, there was considerably more conferring. And then came the thunderbolt, in the friendly form of Crispin Flower of Exegesis who’s been working on the system (I paraphrase considerably):
‘Yes - the HeritageGateway site does build upon web services offered by contributing data providers.’

And are they public?

‘Well, that all depends on the resource provider because they generally host their own data and maintain rights over it.’

So in other words, all that, e.g., Middleshire County Council now have to do to make their HER available for computational use is push the big red button marked “toggle public web service” and away we go?

‘Metaphorically, yes.’

Well I’ll be damned. OK - so it’s not quiiiite that simple, because the HeritageGateway can’t yet cover all counties (there are still a number of councils out there who’s IT budget only runs to fixing the toaster), and those web services there are aren’t fully documented yet, but most of all it’s up to us, all of us, to persuade those data providers that can to push that big red button. So I shall start by personally offering to buy a round for the entire IT team of the first council to do it.

The other thing the conference brought up, in conjunction with a later conversation I had with my friend Gabby Bodard, of the Digital Classicist, is that community fever seems to be spreading. Now this is undeniably a Good Thing. Antiquist, Dijklas, DigiMed, IOSA, Methods Network, EPOCH, FISH, the HEIRNET discussion forum, and so on, all provide important services and fora for thought and collaboration. But there is currently a danger that in our unquestionable desire to be relevant and useful, we build the same fences and suffer the same mission creep as the standalone websites we criticize. My open question to all those groups (and any I’ve inevitably missed out) is: how can we build an ecosystem of communties that directly interact with, and support, the services and resources provided by others?

Answers by WebFeed please.

Welcome back to Part II of the CompAppArch and ClassAssoc executive summaries. If you missed all the calorific goodness of Part I you can find it here. This installment is something of a lucky dip, focussing on, well, whatever else my capricious little mind has found absorbing in the past couple of weeks. It’ll start off with a few random papers and conversations from CAA followed by some general musings on CA in Birmingham.

CAA (cont.)

First, as promised in Part I, comes mention of Sorin Hermon (PIN, Florence) and Joanna Nikodem (University of Bielsko-Biala, Poland)’s work on a ‘3D Modelling Pipeline’. Those of you who have heard my Crossbones shpiel will know that I’m quite in favour of ‘ugly’ 3D. Call it the bare bones if you will (and I have), but I’m talking about the kind of stuff that enables you to do serious analysis, even if you wouldn’t bring it home to meet your mother. Sorin and Joanna have created an application that pipes a MySQL database together with the marvellous OS 3D software Blender in order to autoconstruct building hypotheses. The DB enables the user to manipulate variables associated with confidence and the like, whilst a model of the building itself is automatically constructed by Blender using template components. The result is that different possible alternatives can be explored with ease whilst being transparent about the source data. I haven’t checked out the Blender API yet, but I played with the tool itself a while back and, and at least to non-3dsmaxers like myself, it looks pretty darn cool.

Some 3D underwater projects that seem worth checking out are one using Multi-beam Sonar Data, and another one looking at the submarine H. L. Hunley. This was the first submarine to successfully attack and sink another warvessel, but catastrophe struck shortly afterwards and it sunk killing all 9 men on board (their victims were somewhat more fortunate, being able to cling to the rigging of their ship as it lay in the shallow waters of Charleston Harbour). The wreck was found recently, raised in 2000 and a major project is now underway to excavate it. Besides its remarkable condition, I was amazed by the fact that it was single skinned and just 4′ high by 3.5′ feet wide.

The GRASS workshop held by Ben Ducke finally gave me the opportunity to play around with the GRASS/Paraview/QGIS dreamteam that gets talked about so much these days. And the verdict is: IBTFAD (which leaves me a dollar up ). I’ve already been working with QGIS for a pet project on Ptolemy’s Geography, and it’s a nice tool for hauling data in from every-which-where. It doesn’t have a lot of bite when it comes to any kind of geoprocessing though so they’ve built a nice cuddly frontend to the GRASS toolbox that let’s you do things in a relatively painfree fashion. Paraview, on the other hand, is seriously hardcore 3d visualization technology. Ben (or one of his buddies) has stuck the whole lot, along with portable UNIX into a pendrive-friendly 600MB directory so that you can run it all from USB. It’s a neat trick and works pretty well, but you still need to know the basics of UNIX if those all important first few hours aren’t going to make your brain bleed. That’s where things began to get interesting…

…After the workshop I had a chat with Ben and several others, including Scott Madry, Robert Hecht and Martijn van Leusen, to figure out how we might make OS GIS a more viable alternative to the huge wedges of cash we voluntarily hand out for multiple licenses of proprietary software. That’s not to say that ArcGIS might not have its place, rather that it still seems to be standard practice to pay first and ask questions later. The outcome is our intention to create a consortium of archaeologists commited to:

a) identifying what critical features may still be lacking in OS GIS for archaeologists (e.g. essential cartographical tools)

b) implementing them

c) (most importantly) documenting the whole lot

I’ll blog about this further once we’ve got a website up - possibly over at OSGeo:Archaeology?

CA

It’s probably not the done thing to say, but Birmingham University always reminds me a little of st custard’s. I vaguely recall being told by someone that it was built by a madman, but that may have been idle speculation on their part. In any case, I didn’t get to see a lot of it as the conference was held in the Crowne Plaza Hotel which has a rather fetching view of Queensway. That’s actually quite a shame as I think the Birmingham cityscape is about as close as modern Brits can get to experiencing ancient Rome. It’s almost as if a sort of mania took over and people just kept building impossibly large buildings on top of one another in a kind of giant’s playground. No particular sense of function or propriety, just sodding big buildings. I love it.

I was there to give a paper on a panel with some chums of mine from the Digital Classicist. For those of you unacquainted this sterling institution, they’re an online community/hub/resource centre for, well, classicists working digitally I guess. Their focus is frequently more textual than us archae-types so I was presenting on the use of Network Analysis as an approach to understanding ancient conceptions of space. I fear that the 5.00am start needed to get me there for 8.00 may have taken my edge off my performance somewhat but the conversations afterwards were great - especially with Melissa Terras, who’s PhD work on auto-text recognition of the Vindolanda Tablets was ridiculously impressive. Although I hang around Arundel House (home of DC and Methods Network) whenever I can, it seems there’s a lot more potential for collaborative work than currently takes place and not enough folks at both CAA and DRH/A.

The rest of the proceedings were enjoyable enough - some interesting papers on pedagogy and porticoes in Rome, but most fascinating (not to mention frustrating) was the plenary lecture given by Prof. Margaret Mullett on ‘History and Truth, Lies and Fiction: Byzantium and the Classical Tradition 25 Years on’. The reason for this was that the Classical Association conference and 40th Byzantine Studies Spring Symposium fell together so it was an address to both. As a classicist I hasten to add that I understood barely any of it, but my byzantinist sources inform me that they didn’t fare much better. Having said that, I did learn that

a) the 1140s were one of the most dynamic decades for literature in all of European history, and

b) there’s a Byzantine play (called ‘the Virgin’s Voice’?) set over the crucifixion and resurrection, in which Mary’s dialogue is taken principally from Euripides’ Medea.

Now that’s got to be worth reading.

Well, this has taken a lot longer than it should but it’s probably time to pull my finger out and write up some thoughts on CAA and CA as promised. Fortunately Kayt has done much of the hard work of describing the sophisticated cut and thrust of post-prandial Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology conversation at exclusive eateries such as the Tadjiki Tearoom, 12 Apostel, and a variety of sausage stands. ArchCamp Drei has also been reported in some detail, so that just leaves me to cover the light-hearted frippery of the conference proper Following that, a small update on the Friday of the Classical Association’s annual bash at Birmingham University. The fact I’m trying to fit this in with a half-a-dozen other things before my jaunt to Colombia means I’m going to have to write it over two posts. Don’t you just love a cliff-hanger?

As with most conferences of CAA’s size, the hardest part of being a participant is choosing which sessions to attend. This year there were 8 parallel tracks (occasionally on similar subjects, which cost me half my audience whilst presenting Crossbones :-/). Although many of the papers were interesting there wasn’t a great deal that felt groundbreaking. Nonetheless, two sessions in particular left me with lots to reflect on, viz. ‘Intelligent Knowledge Retrieval’ (chaired by Elisabeth Jerem), and ‘Asking Questions - Setting Standards’ (chaired by David Wheatley). I’ll cover each session in its own section in Part I, followed by some of the choicer tidbits from other ones and CA in Part II.

Intelligent Knowledge Retrieval

Having got the feeling feeling that Archaeology is still somewhat behind the curve when it come to data storage, with Object databases (or should that be Associative DBs?) implemented relationally, and RDF still an esoteric whisper, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this session. It turned out to be a terrific mix of projects which seemed both to break new ground whilst being disarmingly honest about their limitations.

First out the gate was HyperRecord, a REST-based data network put together by the Capitoline Museums, Bibliotheca Hertziana and a variety of other partners. The premise was relatively simple. Each data provider exposes all their records, be they text records, images, multimedia or whatever, as XML using Universal Resource Names (URNs). The record can also refer to other URNs, and so repositories can then send requests to other datastores for any other information they may hold with relevance to that URN. Because URNs don’t just refer to things, but concepts as well (such as ‘Minoan’, or ‘porcelain’), this can be a very powerful tool indeed. In fact the concern is that it could be a little too powerful. There could be some serious scalability issues if it ever becomes popular, but that wasn’t really what grabbed my attention. The great news is that the partners were putting all their stuff online in XML for free.

No, you didn’t misread that.

Online.

XML.

Free.

When we asked how they would get other organisations to do the same, Klaus Werner, presenting, was honest enough to give the expected answer - “we believe this is the way forward and we hope that others will see from it that openness is an advantage”. Let’s hope they do.

Second was an interesting content repository, TARCHNA, that combined CIDOC CRMed data with expert-written content, so that you could easily swing from factoid to overview and back again. This one specifically focussed on those wiley Etruscans but the model could be used with any reasonably focussed CH dataset. And the use of CRM suggests it might not be too hard to merge different projects to a certain degree. The biggest downside is probably the most over-laboured acronym I’ve heard since forever (Towards ARChaeological Heritage New Accessability? Give me a break…). It’s also designed to be standalone, so integration possibilities may not have been entirely thought through, but I wouldn’t want to judge that from here. Currently it looks very nice indeed.

Third, was Hans ‘Paai’ Paijman’s really interesting work using Vector Space Modelling and Supervised Machine Learning to automatically markup semantically important words and phrases, like dates, out of Archaeological grey literature. And because it uses CRM categories, you can then search over approximately synonymous stuff (e.g. ‘Augustan’/'1 A.D’.) His stuff is specifically designed to work with documents in Dutch but again, the principle is applicable across the board. Using it to start exploring the vast back catalogue of data available in the UK could throw up some really fascinating results, including where we excavate and what time periods archaeologists tend to focus on.

Asking Questions - Setting Standards

Unfortunately I missed the first part of this session which was held on Thursday afternoon and only managed parts 2 & 3 on Friday Morning (by which time my constitution finally seemed to be adapting once again to hearty German fayre). All the papers presented were very interesting, but the following two seem particularly worthy of comment.

First of all, one of Sorin Hermon’s projects from the PIN stable got me all excited for the second time that week (the other project to be described later). The Archive Mapper for Archaeology (AMA) is a mapping tool that converts relational databases into CIDOC-CRM encoding on the fly. Sure, you’ve got to decide on the mapping yourself, but once it’s done you can handle the database in either way. This is really important because one of the biggest problems in CRM uptake is that it’s notoriously difficult for non-techies to get their head around. If you can have your cake and eat it, then things might really take off. There wasn’t a lot of fanfar around this, and there might be all sorts of problems around performance, etc. but, if it really does what it says it does, this would get my vote for the Paper-most-likely-be-a-success-and-retire-to-a-beach-house-in-Malibu.

Next, Karina Rodriguez-Echevarria rolled out another potential barnstormer. OK, so there was enough business jargon to kill even the most jaded of archaeological practitioners - but the message was in complete harmony with the Antiquist philosophy. Rather than working in isolation in the bizarre hope that our own research project/business model/heritage policy will bring us and our departments untold success (whilst making the same dumb mistakes and paying the same high price as everyone else), let’s sit down and chat once in a while. Y’know, kick around a few ideas maybe - even help each other (OK, so the last one’s crazy talk). The so-called Network of Excellence Centres (I did warn you about the jargon) are intended to do just that - bringing together CH practitioners within a regional context as well as to other local networks. Antiquist is currently in discussion to see how we we can mutually support our respective communities.

Stop Press

Whilst I was trawling through the accumulated flotsam and jetsam that had drifted into my blog-aggregator, a couple of pearls bobbed to the surface. You know, the kind of things that put an irrepressible smile on your face even after a 24-hour stint without your nicorette tabs. First was the following YouTubeVideo which Mia Ridge reported on. It’s some 3D magic done by one of the Max-Planck-Institutes (of which I’ve been a fan since I did some work with them on the Virtual Lightbox for Museums and Archives). Now if only I could find just a single decent photo of myself

Secondly, hats off to Steve White at Online-Archaeology for the most obvious/brilliant addition to an archaeological map I’ve seen anywhere so far. It’s Wikipedia in a Googlemap. Genius.