Open Objects reports that the London Archaeological Archive and Research Centre (LAARC) are conducting an excavation at the Michael Faraday School in Southwark, London, and are posting much of the information online, as events happen.
They have a wiki, a collection of photos on Flickr, and videos on YouTube, which are all updated throughout each day of the project.
All we need now is a live streaming webcam with IRC chatroom via ustream.tv :-)
It’s great to see this happen - to see archaeologists embracing these technologies to feed people’s interest in the past, and take advantage of the immediacy of the sense of discovery.
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Regular readers of Past Thinking might have noticed that the previous post “Learn medieval Latin online” wasn’t written by me:
Without further ado, I’d like to introduce Tehmina Goskar as a new author on Past Thinking.
Tehmina is well known in the spheres of museums and medieval history, and is also the only person I know whose website comes up as the number 1 result in a Google search for just their first name..
Even more astute readers (if you don’t already know us) will spot that we share the same surname - that’s because we’re married :-)
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Much of our past is contained in documents few of us can read, let alone understand and interpret. The National Archives have created a set of online tutorials in beginner’s and advanced medieval Latin and palaeography, or, how to read old handwriting. It is the first time a course like this has been offered, free and online. It will be interesting to see who will take on the twelve-lesson challenges. It claims it does not require prior knowledge of classical Latin (usually what we were taught - those of us that were - at school) and is suitable for beginners or those who want to refresh their skills.
Can an online experience be more satisfying than learning in a classroom of people where you hesitate with your ablatives and datives? Will anyone come out of these courses able to have a good stab at old documents in an archive and to debate hotly with another how many minims a word contains? Will these courses be able to convey the importance of grammatic jargon that goes with learning Latin, and still inspire through the gems contained in documents such as Domesday book?
Although I am reading many documents in medieval Latin at the moment, I am going to take the online medieval Latin challenge and report back with a comparison with my book-based and classroom experience.
Medieval Latin, Beginners’ Level (1086-1733)
www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/Latin/Beginners
Medieval Latin, Advanced Level (1086 - 1733)
www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/Latin/Advanced
Palaeography, Reading Old Handwriting (1500-1800)
www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/Palaeography
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As promised, here is a re-recording of the talk that I gave at the Museums Association Digital Dialogues conference. It is, of course, available as a podcast.
Feel free to comment here. If there’s interest, I’ll also post my presentation for people to download.
If you’d like to subscribe to this and future podcasts from Past Thinking, the feed URL is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/pastthinking
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Podcasts: should museums listen? [18:21m]:
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Tomorrow, I’ll be giving a paper at the Digital Dialogues conference in the Victoria and Albert Museum. I may well re-record my talk and release it as a podcast here on Past Thinking, if people are interested.
I won’t be talking about how to podcast, there’s plenty of guides and forums for that, but rather introducing people to what it is, why do it, and who’s doing it, whilst touching briefly on video and vodcasting.
If you’re already going, I’ll see you there, and if you’re not, check back here soon and have a listen.
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I urge you to try out the new Celtic Coin Index website. Dan Pett has built the website for this fabulous resource from scratch, and it’s packed with modern features such as Google Maps, RSS, GeoRSS, tag clouds, and even an API (coming soon).
The site is still in beta for the time being. Dan has had just one hour per day to work on this since March, and is pretty much self-taught.
I think you’ll agree, that this new site raises the bar for heritage websites in general.
Link: Celtic Coin Index (beta)
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