Oxford Archaeology have recently given their website a complete facelift. In a bold move, visitors to their ‘old’ domain name www.oxfordarch.co.uk are redirected to http://www.thehumanjourney.net/ where the front page contains none of the usual blurb about the company, just a menu and a large showcase image, currently a “Study for the female heidelbergensis face based on the Broken Hill skull”. It’s a compelling and powerful image.
They have moved much of their content over to a Joomla CMS, and employ some other open source projects such as Gallery. We are promised much more innovation as part of their “Open Archaeology” programme.
Continue reading ‘New look Oxford Archaeology website’
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Those resourceful people at the Megalithic Portal have just announced that all of the 15582 sites in their database are now available in a single KMZ file, ready to load into Google Earth.
The file is 1.6MB, and it slows Google Earth down a bit, but it’s a small price to pay for having all of that information available in such an accessible way. I think that a big “well done” is deserved to the people involved with making the resource!
Andy Burnham made the announcement after a long thread on the British Archaeology email list (Britarch) entitled “Why don’t we share more?”, which brought up many issues about the state of archaeological and historical data held electronically in the UK. There is much fear about opening up data, ranging from lack of time to do so, dangers of looting if specific coordinates were released, and issues of data exchange and standard terminologies.
It’s worth looking at the Britarch archives for August 2006 to get an idea of the issues of what is involved, and some of the attitudes of people working with such data in the profession. The message that sparked it all off is here.
If resourceful people like those at the Megalithic Portal could get their hands on ‘the data’ imagine the possibilities…
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I’m a little slow on blogging this, but it’s too good to let it pass.
Most people know that archaeologists don’t spend their time running from falling boulders, or climbing out of snake pits, or being sucked into the sky by tornados. Or do they?
On Thursday last week (17th August 2006) a group of five archaeologists were sheltering from a storm in their site hut, in Baston, Lincolnshire, when it was whipped into the air by a freak tornado, and dropped to the ground some 70 feet away.
Archaeology can be full of danger and adventure after all…
Full story (from the BBC): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/lincolnshire/5261198.stm
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I’ve just been having a look at the statistics for pastthinking.com to get an idea of whether anyone is actually reading this, and the results are surprising. Web professionals know that putting an exact figure on the amount of people who have visited (either once or repeatedly) is tricky to get right, and that is backed up by my experience elsewhere. For that website, I use 3 statistical packages to monitor and log visitor information (SmarterStats, UrchinStats, and Google Analytics), and they all give wildly different results.
Although I use Google Analytics on pastthinking.com, I rarely look at it, as I prefer the simplicity of Analog, an open source and refreshingly basic website statistics application. I prefer to go on successful page requests rather than the hazy and often misused “hits” or “unique visitors”.
Last month (July 2006), Past Thinking served out over 35,000 pages of information, which, for a humble heritage-computing blog isn’t bad at all.
What are people using to browse this blog? Well, for a change, thankfully IE isn’t the dominant force here:
If you combine the open source browsers, they outnumber Internet Exploiter by a nice margin. It’s interesting to see Google’s feedfetcher making an appearance, but still not matched by the frequency of Technoratibot.
More analyses soon - perhaps some comparisons with those from Google Analytic.
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Today, I’ve just discovered that the Portable Antiquities Scheme, a voluntary scheme to record archaeological objects found by members of the public in England and Wales, have a blog and a whole slew of RSS feeds.
The PAS blog covers pretty much everything done by the Scheme, from technical notes about the website the the information contained withing the PAS database, to spotlighting particular finds of note. It’s an interesting read for techies and non-techies alike.
At the time of writing, the latest post covers the scheme’s usage of open source software. It’s nice to read something like this from a fellow heritage professional:
It should be recognised that IE sucks by now.
Yes!
I’m reading the post as I write this, I confess, and it’s just mentioned me as a “guru”. Well I never! Moreimportantly, it’s mentioned that the PAS will be implementing geotagging later in the summer, which is heartening, as I’ve been very keen to see this applied to in a heritage context. Well done, guys!
Link: Portable Antiquities Scheme blog
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