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The National Trust goes digital - Some news and some ideas

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at 14 May, 2008 in Social Networking and Heritage. 0 Comments

Professional Fundraising reports that The National Trust are to invest £4.6m in an “e-roadmap” to embrace mobile and web technologies to enhance visitor interactions at their properties.

Picture this. As you walk through the gates of a National Trust property, your phone buzzes in your pocket. A welcome message directs you to a mobile web page where you can find extra information about what to do during your visit and download an audio guide. No need to search for your membership card either – your phone, with online access to your membership details, will do the trick.

As an NT member myself, I use their website to find out information about properties, but currently this information is limited to basic details such as opening hours and facilities. I get a guidebook posted to me each year which contains similar information.

To hear that they are to invest in modern information systems is great news. I have always thought that, given the Trust’s portfolio of properties, there is fantastic potential for creating a kind of social network to go alongside it. To be able to explore more in-depth information about each property would be fantastic, but there are benefits beyond simply making more information about its properties online.

Membership

I am sure that this approach will help to boost NT membership. It will attract more younger people to join the Trust, which is essential for its future. Am I alone in thinking, when I read the NT magazine, that the adverts are mainly aimed at the retired? I would like to see more balance, and this could be a good step towards achieving that (he says, knowing little about their membership demographics).

What kind of approaches would I like to see in this new “visitor experience”? The information on the Professional Fundraiser website talks about mobile phone ownership amongst current members. I would not necessarily associate mobile ownership with computer literacy, but it does say that they are “more likely to use the internet”. Mobile data is still expensive, and location-based services are in their infancy, but if this is a long-term goal, there is fantastic potential for development here.

Location based services

Many of the Trust’s properties have extensive grounds. Using an internet-connected device with GPS (like Nokia’s N95, forthcoming GPS enabled 3G iPhone, etc) rich content could be delivered directly to the user as they wander around (or follow a suggested route on their device). Websites like Socialight already offer this kind of functionality via a Java applet than can be easily installed on your phone. I have experimented with this to good effect in Salisbury using a tour of prominent medieval buildings put together by Wessex Archaeology. You can even theoretically choose to be alerted when you walk past something in your list of interests. I’d love to see it used more widely.

Social Networking

Social networking is all the rage at the moment. It almost seems as if a day doesn’t go past without another one popping into existence. Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Ning, etc etc etc. Some of the smaller, more specialist networks are already fading away under the deluge. So why a social network for the National Trust? If they were to foster one, it could be a real, thriving success. Why? Because it has a winning formula.

What the Trust has going for it, is it’s key asset: it’s properties. Hundreds of historic houses, and hundreds of miles of coastal and countryside landscapes. It has people who visit and use them. And many of them use the internet. Scattered across the internet are photographs of Trust land, houses, objects etc, blog posts, forum discussions, etc. People are already interacting digitally in their own ways. A National Trust social networking site could act very effectively as a hub for all of this information, as well as providing its own interpretive information.

There are tools out there to make this achievable quite quickly and effectively. Google Friend Connect, for example, could be used to build a social network around properties. It would allow people to plug in to other networks such as Facebook, as well as discuss and rate properties.

User-generated content could be submitted, perhaps using a series of Flickr groups for photographs of properties that could be integrated back into their website via the Flickr API (there is already an unofficial National Trust Flickr group). Videos via YouTube. Integrate events with Upcoming, webcasts via ustream.tv could be utilised to show special events. Knit it all back together into the new NT website via web services. Visitors, potential visitors, and those who cannot get to the UK would all benefit.

Awareness

The Trust’s own content could be made available in numerous ways for people to use on their own websites perhaps under a Creative Commons license.

The Trust would benefit in return from a massive boost in awareness of their work, and hopefully help to give them a new image that appeals to an even wider audience.

The possibilities are boundless, and I’m quite excited to see what they come up with.

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Making People Believe - Article in British Archaeology Magazine

Published by

Tom Goskar

at 14 April, 2008 in Computing and Archaeology. 0 Comments

British Archaeology Magazine 100 The 100th edition of British Archaeology magazine contains a feature article co-written by myself, Leif Isaksen, and Paul Cripps. I am lucky (or unlucky?!) to grace the front cover (that’s me, bottom left next to the giant flint).

The article, entitled “Making People Believe” is about the state of archaeological computing today, where it has come from, and where we believe it is going. The official blurb is as follows:

When computers were new, the buzz was about science and sums. Now digital technology is commonplace, say Leif Isaksen, Tom Goskar and Paul Cripps, the impact on archaeology is to assist open participation and intuitive analysis. They show just a few of the ways this might happen.

I came up with the idea of writing the article after a discussion about the dwindling numbers of people studying archaeological computing at universities. Many people are still surprised when I explain what I do - the connection between archaeologists and computers isn’t one that is very often made.

We perhaps are responsible for remaining too “back stage” with our work. I felt that it was time that we did something positive for our profile, beginning with an article in an archaeology publication that people could actually buy in shops for not much money. Most archaeologists prefer to publish in relatively (relative to interested people outside the profession) obscure peer-reviewed journals that only large university libraries can afford to buy. We publish to ourselves an awful lot.

In a few months time, the text of Making People Believe will be available for free online on the British Archaeology website. It doesn’t get much more open and accessible than that (other than printing it and posting it through letterboxes).

A quick word about the title. We (the authors) had a working title, the rather unimpressive but descriptive “Archaeology in the Digital Age”, but the editor decided to choose something else for the final cut. Personally speaking, it’s not a title I particularly like, but hopefully the words of the feature itself will speak for themselves.

So if you’d like to learn how archaeologists use computers, and how silicon has become more ubiquitous than steel, as well as a raft of other excellent features, head down to your local newsagents (well, Borders and WH Smith at least) and for £4.25 the most excellent 100th edition of British Archaeology can be yours.

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Past Horizons online archaeology magazine

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Tom Goskar

at 14 March, 2008 in Archaeology. 6 Comments

David Connolly and Maggie Struckmeier of British Archaeological Jobs Resource (BAJR) fame, also run a website called Past Horizons. It highlights opportunities for amateur or professional archaeologists to participate in projects around the globe. It’s a great website, with project listings, forums for those who want to talk to others about their experiences abroad, a blog (where David and Maggie make themselves very approachable if you have a question), and now, an online magazine.

You can read Past Horizons either on Scribd or via the rather fancy full-screen digipage version, which even curls the page as you turn it, complete with playable videos. It’s well worth checking out.

Past Horizons

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Why close the Textile Conservation Centre?

Published by

Tehmina Goskar

at 12 March, 2008 in Conservation and Ramblings. 3 Comments

Conservation has been high in my thoughts recently. Largely through my current work with ICOMOS-UK (International Council on Monuments and Sites UK) I have been exposed to the vicissitudes that affect the preservation and interpretation of our heritage, whether they are the result of inappropriate development, lack of funds or lack of collective and political will to stand up for cultural heritage as a fundamental part of modern society.

However, most upsetting, shocking, and all those things has been the news that the University of Southampton has decided to close down the Textile Conservation Centre at its Winchester Campus in late 2009 only a decade after it moved here from Hampton Court Palace. The reason given is financial, in short, that the University expects all its schools to fund themselves and the TCC, it was deemed, was not able to do this. I do not want to go into all the reasons given here. You can read up on it from the links below. A quick Google search will also show the coverage of the closure in the national press.

Read the University of Southampton’s statement
Read ICON’s statement
Save the Textile Conservation Centre blog

The whole business is personally distasteful to me. I am currently undertaking freelance work for the university, it is my alma mater. I therefore feel deeply embarrassed. I was a graduate of the Textile Conservation Centre in 2001 (MA Museum Studies) and maintain that my time there was intellectually the most stimulating experience of my life. Following this, my work on their research project on deliberately concealed garments produced one of the early attempts at getting collections online - and lit my passion for using the web to communicate our heritage. It has taken me a while to gather my thoughts - even now it seems daft to be writing about this. I could be writing about the government’s decision to close the British Museum or a local authority’s decision to level an ancient monument to make way for houses or offices. The feelings such things conjour are much the same. The futility of it all. Value for money, after all, is what exactly? After the anger and astonishment, the profound sadness.

As conservation (in the sense we understand it in heritage) is in every sense about ‘past thinking’ it seemed a good idea to talk about this here. Whatever the financial case made for the TCC’s closure, what is very clear is that this was certainly not a purely financial decision. The university was not itself going to go under because the TCC was using slightly more than it was contributing in monetary terms at least. Where there is a will there is a way. Sadly, Southampton had no will to continue to support one of its own ‘key distinctors’. Neither does it have the wisdom to realise the consequences of this action. The loss is not just Southampton’s or the UK’s, but the world’s. Organisations across the globe sent their people to the TCC to gain requisite skills in textile conservation and in museology, and take them back home. The combination was unique and they produced uniquely skilled graduates, the majority of whom have found very fulfilling careers in heritage, culture and conservation.

Here is a clear case of not taking responsibility, of not listening, of mis-judging and of being dishonourable. Universities ought to exist to further the bounds of human knowledge. It perplexes me to try and understand what has gone so wrong at Southampton. The one major source of funding for the TCC was the History of Art and Design degree. With its dissolution, it lost its link with Winchester School of Art which it formed part until last year. What, therefore, was the Centre able to do? Rugs (pardon the metaphor) pulled out from under them.

The world will only realise the impact of this in many years and decades to come when the skills required to preserve deteriorating garments, upholstery and other materials are no longer readily available. What is more, the extensive research and experimentation that is required to pioneer new techniques (something that the TCC excels at by a distance) will have not been undertaken. Just as we are realising this is happening in other parts of the conservation world (look out for ICOMOS-UK’s Action on Skills conference at the Prince’s Foundation on 29-30 April) why is this happening?

I look forward to reading 10 Downing Street’s response to a petition that was set up for the government to intervene. It closes on 6 May and already has over 3200 signatures. Please sign.

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Social Networking and Heritage

Published by

Tom Goskar

at 11 February, 2008 in Social Networking. 2 Comments

I was reading Mia Ridge’s blog post on the resistance to the participatory web from within the cultural heritage sector, and combined with my planning a trip to Cornwall where I plan to see some megalithic monuments, it really started me thinking.

Where would be best to get some good, practical information about visiting stone circles, for example, in the Penzance region? Let’s start off where most people do, a Google search. Here’s my query: “stone circles penzance“. The first result is Andy Burnham’s old website giving lots of useful information on good sites to visit in the Penzance area. It provides links to the Megalithic Portal, which has its own community of users and contributors.

The second result (at the time of writing) is from The Modern Antiquarian. There I can find thousands of user-submitted photos, forum postings, practical tips on visiting from people who actually visited, and I can get involved myself and ask some questions.

Nowhere on the first few pages of results were any “official” organisations. That’s a shame. So, getting curious, I tried searching for some specific sites. I’d love to visit the fabulous Iron Age and Roman site of Carn Euny again. It’s custodian’s website, English Heritage, comes a sad 10th, only just on the first page of results. What comes first?

Heritage websites which incorporate social networking, of course! Right up there at the top is Wikipedia (which certainly has social aspects to it), then we have The Modern Antiquarian, Stone Pages (which has been around since the web began and incorporates forums), and the Megalithic Portal.

A search for the beautiful Boscawen-Un stone circle even has on the first page of results a video on YouTube complete with music inspired by a visit to the monument.

People like to talk about ancient sites, they like to share their photos and experiences. These websites are all great examples of the vibrancy of feeling about our ancient past.

So where am I going with this post? As ‘official’ heritage bodies such as museums and archaeology units begin to adopt social networking techniques and technologies into their own websites, as Mia suggests, they ought to get “…familiar with the environments in which their content might appear”. There’s a lot to be learned from what is already being done, and there’s a lot we (talking as a heritage professional) can do to help make the online heritage ’scene’ a lot more interesting for everyone.

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Wiltshire SMR goes online

Published by

Tom Goskar

at 25 January, 2008 in Mapping and Archaeology. 2 Comments

If you’re interested in the archaeology of the county of Wiltshire, you can now access the Wiltshire Sites and Monuments Record (SMR) online, complete with a map interface.

Wiltshire SMR map interface showing Old Sarum

It takes a bit of getting used to the interface, but to have this information publicly available is a step in the right direction.

Tip: find the area you are interested on the map. Click the pushpin on or near a feature that you are interested in. Then click the “In the area” tab. Select “Sites and Monuments Record” on the left. You will then see features nearest the pin. Click the name of the feature you’re interested in, and a new window with details pops up. From the details page you can view the feature exactly on a map, or on Google Maps. It will open endless new windows, but that’s a small price to pay for having this information freely available.

This is of course a boon for all the Stonehenge buffs out there, as you’ll be able to explore the surrounding landscape and get a better appreciation for what’s below the soil as well as above it.

Link: Wiltshire SMR, LocalView map interface

[Update] The map doesn’t seem to work in Firefox or any other Mozilla-based browser (such as Flock). It does work in Internet Explorer on a PC, and Safari on a Mac, however.

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Historic Photos and Folksonomies

Published by

Tom Goskar

at 17 January, 2008 in Photography and Heritage. 2 Comments

I’ve long been an advocate of folksonomies. It allows the wider community to add knowledge to resources through tags and comments, ultimately making things easier to find. A number of institutions have allowed free tagging of certain resources for a while now, such as the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, the collective STEVE museum, and of course, Wessex Archaeology’s photos on Flickr.

It seems that this idea is slowly taking off. Flickr have just announced “The Commons” project. Flickr’s blog post about this project is entitled “Many hands make light work“, which just about sums it up, really. I urge you to read it.

The Library of Congress in the USA have teamed up with Flickr to put a selection (currently about 3,000 photos from their collection of 14+ million) online. If you have a free Flickr account, you will be able to tag these photos and comment on them. The images are also being geotagged by the LoC staff. The idea of a temporal map view comes to mind…

There are two main aims to The Commons project, starting with the pilot: firstly, to increase exposure to the amazing content currently held in the public collections of civic institutions around the world, and secondly, to facilitate the collection of general knowledge about these collections, with the hope that this information can feed back into the catalogues, making them richer and easier to search.

This could be amazing. I’ll re-quote this snippet from Flickr’s blog:

“..the hope that this information can feed back into the catalogues, making them richer and easier to search.”

This will ultimately benefit not just users of Flickr, but any user of the LoC catalogue. It won’t replace the knowledge of their expert cataloguers, but complement it. This is a great example of how this approach can work both ways to benefit everyone. Read the Library of Congress‘ take on the project.

After all, it’s everyone’s past, isn’t it?

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Opening up a Roman Coffin

Published by

Tom Goskar

at 16 January, 2008 in Video and Archaeology. 1 Comment

It’s not every day that you get a phone call from an excited colleague saying “we’ve found a Roman sarcophagus - can you grab your video camera and come out?”.

This short film (hosted by the fabulous Vimeo) shows just how exciting archaeology can be!

Opening a Roman Coffin from Wessex Archaeology on Vimeo.

There is a shortened (10 minute) version on YouTube for the masses. But Vimeo wins hands down for video quality.

For the more technically inclined reader, the film was made with a Sony DCR-TRV50E MiniDV camcorder without a tripod (the tripod head went walkies), and was edited in iMovie ‘08 on a Mac.

More information about the burial can be found at Wessex Archaeology.

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A new window into our past?

Published by

Tom Goskar

at 10 January, 2008 in Technology. 1 Comment

Sorry about the cryptic title, but I’ve just stumbled upon a very interesting video by Johnny Lee demonstrating how a Nintendo Wii Remote (Wiimote) can be used to perform ‘head tracking’. It allows one person to use a screen as a ‘window’ onto a much larger image. If you get close to the screen you can see more of the image, for example. Think of looking out of a normal window, and you’re not far off what this can do. You can also look at 3D content, and look ‘behind’ objects.

Enough explaining; watch the video below, as Johnny explains all.

After watching this video all kinds of ideas popped into my head. In a museum context this could prove to be quite a compelling way of interpreting the past. Look out of a window into Victorian London, look at a reconstruction of a room and see behind objects… My brain hurts at how this kind of technology could be used.

Best of all, Johnny is giving away the software and tips on how to actually do this. Any adventurous folks out there with a Nintendo Wii fancy giving it a go?

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A Virtual Stonehenge Landscape

Published by

Tom Goskar

at 16 November, 2007 in Stonehenge, 3D and Archaeology. 2 Comments

Over the past few months I’ve been hard at work producing an animation of the Environment Agency LIDAR survey of the Stonehenge World Heritage site. The resulting video is currently playing on an HD plasma screen in the “Making History: Antiquaries In Britain, 1707–2007” exhibition at the Royal Academy in London.

Read more about the Stonehenge landscape animation over a the Wessex Archaeology Computing blog.

A Virtual Stonehenge Landscape from Wessex Archaeology on Vimeo.

For the more technical minded people, the underlying DEM (Digital Elevation Model) is 8000×8000 at a resolution of 1m. You can view the video in HD over at Vimeo.

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