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<< News >> Micropasts - help research over 30,000 Bronze Age tools and weapons

Submitted by Andy B on Tuesday, 22 April 2014  Page Views: 4652

Neolithic and Bronze Age
Micropasts - help research over 30,000 Bronze Age tools and weapons
Micropasts - help research over 30,000 Bronze Age tools and weapons submitted by dodomad : IMG_0385 Image copyright: MicroPasts (Micro Pasts), hosted on Flickr and displayed under the terms of their API. (Vote or comment on this photo)
A new joint project by the British Museum and the UCL Institute of Archaeology is seeking online contributions from 'members of the public' [sic - ugh] to enhance a major British Bronze Age archive and artefact collection.

The project team, co-led by Professor Andrew Bevan (UCL Institute of Archaeology) and Daniel Pett (British Museum), have photographed hoards of Bronze Age (ca. 2500 BC - 800 BC) metal objects and scanned thousands of paper records of further metal artefacts from British prehistory.

They are now asking for public assistance in modelling, transcribing and locating these archaeological finds via a dedicated "crowd-sourcing" website [oh please try and sound a little less patronising Mr Press Release writer - MegP Ed]: http://crowdsourced.micropasts.org/ The website is powered by an open source Pybossa citizen science framework.

Neil Wilkin, the curator of Bronze Age collections at the British Museum, is seeking online help from anyone interested in British prehistoric archaeology [That's more like it... - Ed] to research and enriching our knowledge of the first national catalogue of Bronze Age objects in the UK.

This record contains over 30,000 Bronze Age tools and weapons that were discovered during the 19th and 20th centuries, and complements the current Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) database of metal object finds.

The catalogue contains index cards detailing object find spots and types, alongside detail line drawings and a wide range of further information about the object's context of discovery. The catalogue itself also has a long and special history. It was a major archaeological initiative first founded in 1913 and then moved to the British Museum in the 1920s. For over 70 years, it represented the highest standards of Bronze Age artefact studies.

"This information has long been known to be an extremely important untapped resource," says curator Wilkin, "Metal finds are not only crucial forms of evidence for dating Britain's prehistoric past, but also tell us a great deal about prehistoric society and economy. Once we have digitised the thousands of objects in this catalogue, they can be incorporated into the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) website. The result will be the largest national database of prehistoric metal finds anywhere in the world and a near-comprehensive view of what we currently know about such finds in the UK. This will allow rethinking of almost everything we currently know about the use of metal in Bronze Age Britain, giving us a far more comprehensive view of our prehistoric past."

A further goal is to create a large series of research-quality 3D models of some of the fantastic Bronze Age metal objects held in the British Museum's collections. Neil and the MicroPasts team will be developing high quality 3D models of a selection of bronze axes recorded in the card catalogue, via the same crowd-sourcing platform. Today, these models can easily be constructed from ordinary digital photographs, but an important step in creating a really good model is to identify the outline of the object in each photograph.

The team are asking for anyone with an interest in these prehistoric artefacts or modern digital methods to help via the crowd-sourcing platform. The resulting 3D models will not only enable them to better visualise the artefacts, but will also encourage new forms of scholarship. By exposing, for example, tiny differences in object style, they will gain new insights into how, where, and when these objects were made.

All the project's data will be made publicly available under an open licence so that anyone can use it: whether to share, discuss and protect local finds via the enhanced catalogue, to conduct their own archaeological research, or to make use of 3D models in computer-based environments and games.

Professor Bevan: "One of the things that makes MicroPasts such an exciting project is the fact that we can potentially take it in so many different future directions. We plan to create yet more crowd-sourcing applications for the platform, following both our own personal research interests and those of other university or museum researchers worldwide, but also the ideas of the contributors we attract online."

UCL researchers, Chiara Bonacchi and Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert, add that these two crowd-sourcing applications will be followed by further public collaborations both in the UK and elsewhere, and they hope that this project will start a different kind of discussion about how we research our collective past.

The MicroPasts initiative has been funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, under the Capital Funding Call for Digital Transformations in Community Research Co-Production in the Arts and Humanities

More at http://crowdsourced.micropasts.org/

Source: UCL

Micropasts - help research over 30,000 Bronze Age tools and weapons
Micropasts - help research over 30,000 Bronze Age tools and weapons submitted by dodomad : France_WingedAxe0049_France_WingedAxe0050_fb Image copyright: MicroPasts (Micro Pasts), hosted on Flickr and displayed under the terms of their API. (Vote or comment on this photo)

Micropasts - help research over 30,000 Bronze Age tools and weapons
Micropasts - help research over 30,000 Bronze Age tools and weapons submitted by dodomad : Yorks_Palstaves0019_Yorks_Palstaves0020_fb Image copyright: MicroPasts (Micro Pasts), hosted on Flickr and displayed under the terms of their API. (Vote or comment on this photo)

Micropasts - help research over 30,000 Bronze Age tools and weapons
Micropasts - help research over 30,000 Bronze Age tools and weapons submitted by dodomad : An example of a masked palstave Image copyright: MicroPasts (Micro Pasts), hosted on Flickr and displayed under the terms of their API. (Vote or comment on this photo)

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"Micropasts - help research over 30,000 Bronze Age tools and weapons" | Login/Create an Account | 6 News and Comments
  
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Citizen Archaeologists in British Museum magazine by Andy B on Thursday, 26 January 2017
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Citizen Archaeologists from British Museum magazine, Winter 2015

https://www.academia.edu/29618190/Citizen_Archaeologists
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Crowd- and Community-Fuelled Archaeology. Early Results from the MicroPasts Project by Andy B on Sunday, 15 February 2015
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Crowd- and Community-Fuelled Archaeology. Early Results from the MicroPasts Project by Bonacchi C., Bevan A., Pett D., Keinan-Schoonbaert A.

We get a namecheck on page 3!

The MicroPasts project is a novel experiment in the use of crowd-based methodologies to enable participatory archaeological research. Building on a long tradition of offline community archaeology in the UK, this initiative aims to integrate crowd-sourcing, crowd-funding and forum-based discussion to encourage groups of academics and volunteers to collaborate on the web. This paper will introduce MicroPasts, its aims, methods and initial results, with a particular emphasis on project evaluation. The evaluative work conducted over the first few months of the project already demonstrates the potential for crowd-sourced archaeological 3D modelling, especially amongst younger audiences, next to more traditional kinds of crowd-sourcing such as transcription. It has also allowed a comparative assessment of different methods for sustaining contributor participation through time and a discussion of their implications for the sustainability of the MicroPasts project and (potentially) other archaeological crowd-sourcing endeavours.

https://www.academia.edu/9302344/Crowd-_and_Community-Fuelled_Archaeology._Early_Results_from_the_MicroPasts_Project_2015_
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Re: MicroPasts at the Citizen CyberScience Summit by sem on Thursday, 24 April 2014
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1) Looks to me (cynical as ever) like an attempt to do something on-the-cheap.
2) What the hell does "crowd-sourcing" mean?
3) Crowdcrafting - try this link
http://crowdcrafting.org/
Human cognition requires more than seeing a few pictures on a website - we have other senses, so USE them.

Overall, I may give it a try.


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    Crowdsourcing by Andy B on Thursday, 24 April 2014
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    Yes, crowdsourcing is a cheesy journo word for what we have been doing on the Portal for 13 years. I have been known to use it on occasions in talks and summaries of what we do. I suppose I should go all trendy and advertise it a bit more - how about The world's no 1 ancient site 'crowdsourcing' project (ugh) The 'crowd' bit is rather patronising as a lot of the effort is put in by a few hundred dedicated and experienced individuals. Crowdcrafting is better.
    http://www.megalithic.co.uk/top.php?all=1

    However it does emphasises that anyone can take part no matter what their experience level, which is very much encouraged and all help is given to get people started. Crowdsource away!

    And did I mention the free T shirts / books for all significant contributors of information to the Portal ... :) I'm still working through these so if you are a 'significant contributor of information' please don't be shy to ask about yours.
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Re: MicroPasts at the Citizen CyberScience Summit by Blingo_von_Trumpenstein on Wednesday, 23 April 2014
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Hey this sounds great. I shall join in. 3D modelling of axes from digital photographs...hmmmmmm...
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MicroPasts at the Citizen CyberScience Summit by Andy B on Tuesday, 22 April 2014
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Andrew Bevan writes: A fun conference, hackfest, etc. has been running for the last three days at UCL, called the Citizen CyberScience Summit. [why do I always get to hear about this stuff after it's happened - MegP Ed!]

It’s been a great chance for us to track what the largest fauna in this brave new world of crowd-sourcing (i.e. mass online data creation) are up to, such as Zooniverse, Mozilla Science Lab and Crowdcrafting, as well as noting the sheer diversity of other crowd-sourcing efforts, both large and small. We got a moment to present what we are developing with MicroPasts yesterday and the presentation (without script) is embedded here

http://research.micropasts.org/2014/02/23/micropasts-at-the-citizen-cyberscience-summit/
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