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Modernity is rarely associated with ruins. In our everyday comprehension ruins rather bring to mind ancient and enchanted monumental structures; an archaeological dream world featuring celebrities such as Machu Picchu, Pompeii and Angkor Wat. Yet never have so many... ruinmemories http://ruinmemories.org

This blog post looks at the open access debate, and notes how sustainability is as much of an ideological and political question as it is a financial issue. It is intended to follow up on previous blog posts (first, second, third) that discussed how the Aaron Swartz prosecution and death highlighted tremendous injustices in the legal framework governing scholarly communications.

At this year’s Society for American Archaeology (SAA) conference in Honolulu, I took part in discussions about open access in various forums, including the Digital Data Interest Group and a forum sponsored by the SAA Committee on Ethics. Sarah Kansa, a member of the SAA Publications Committee has also been participating in open access debates. There’s very little to report just yet, except that the issue of open access is clearly on the agenda of archaeology’s professional societies. The Obama Administration’s (Feb 2013) move to require open access of federally funded research outputs has clearly raised the stakes and urgency of the open access issue. This policy move followed years of advocacy efforts, culminating with a petition signed by over 65,000 people.

In these debates, open access has little explicit opposition as an ideal. Rather, resistance to open access focuses on fears of financial “sustainability.” The leaders of professional societies tend to cling to the status quo because they do not see a way to underwrite the costs of open access publication.

So let’s look at the issue of sustainability more closely.

Any form of publication has costs. Quality publication costs more. With Open Context, we’re working to develop editorial processes to publish higher-quality data, and we’re getting a better understanding of the required labor costs. As a publisher (but also as an academic author), I am very aware of the real costs and effort involved in publication.

However, publication costs make up only a fraction of the larger costs of doing quality research. Good research requires costly training, facilities, and in archaeology, it often requires access to remote locations, workers, labs, equipment, curation, site conservation, etc. Often these costs are financed with public funding (or publicly-regulated philanthropy). But even in cases where research costs are not directly financed through public support, field work is a highly regulated activity. Archaeological field work is almost universally governed or, in the case of Cultural Resource Management (CRM), mandated by public laws and agencies.

Since dissemination is an integral aspect of archaeological research, archaeological dissemination practices also should work toward building public knowledge goods. The open access critique of status quo publishing, is that conventional publishing models subvert the public interest and do not produce public goods, despite public financing of research. Conventional publishing channels public support of research (which finances and regulates all the facilities and the effort that occurs before an article even reaches an editor) into private “all-rights reserved” intellectual property.

One may argue that archaeology has gotten along just fine for many, many decades of conventional publishing, so why change it? There are two reasons, both involve the Web. First, the Web makes global distribution (copying content from servers like the one serving this blog, to clients like the browser you’re using) very cheap and easy. (Note: I said copying and distributing content is cheap; producing quality content is still expensive, as explained above). Cheap and easy copying and distribution is critical. It’s why open access is even on the agenda.

Second, the low cost of Web-based digital dissemination has helped to spark a political and legal context that makes open access increasingly needed for ethical, research, and instructional reasons. Cheap and easy copying and distribution represents a threat to traditional media business models, including publication business models. In response to this threat, media conglomerates have pushed for “the best laws money can buy,” (quoting copyright scholar, Pam Samuelson) and have pressured legislative bodies and law enforcement agencies to enact stricter controls, more intrusive surveillance, and harsher (actually oppressive) punishments for copying.

Unfortunately, these laws not only apply to popular music and movies, they also govern scholarly communications. Worse, many commercial scientific publishers actively promote and lobby to further strengthen these laws, leading to loss of privacy, invasive surveillance, and ever more draconian penalties. This transformed legal context, together with massive industry consolidation, makes conventional academic publishing very different from the “good ol’ days” before the Web. Here are some highlights of just how bad, in a legal sense, the publishing situation has become:

• Many researchers (CRM, adjunct) without regular university affiliations, who beg university-library logins from friends and colleagues, are effectively a criminalized underclass, facing grave legal risks. How many of us do this on a regular basis? These practices violate the same sort of violations of terms-of-service that made Aaron Swartz face 50 years in prison. For instance, JSTOR’s terms of service (that Aaron Swartz allegedly violated in his felony charges) specifically prohibited actions like sharing logins.
• Sharing papers (mainly in email, but also on social networking sites like Academia.edu) also carries risks. These risks are mainly in civil (not criminal) law, but that could change if something like SOPA passes. Mass copyright lawsuits with financially ruinous penalties do happen, some involving 100,000 people at a time, including children.
• In 2007, law Prof. John Tehranian published a study where he calculated a jaw-dropping $4.5 billion (yes, with a b) in potential copyright liability involved in routine academic research and instructional activities over the course of a single year.
• Copyright has expanded in scope into a more or less absolute and perpetual property right. No US copyrighted works entered into the public domain last year. None. If archaeologists only communicate their results as all-rights-reserved intellectual property, they’re clearly engaged in a form of appropriation. The (more or less) absolute (no fair use) and perpetual (de facto unlimited copyright terms) nature of these property rights increasingly excludes all uses, save commercial transactions. Doesn’t that reduce the scholarly record of the past into commodities? Doesn’t this put mainstream archeology uncomfortably close to the antiquities trade?

Killed by Sustainability?

Archaeology’s professional societies need to consider arguments about “sustainability” carefully. If we make financial sustainability our only concern in scholarly publishing, we undermine the whole point of research as a publicly supported pursuit. Our field is not sustainable, it does not turn a profit, and it requires continued public support (or public mandates in the case of CRM) to survive. We have to ask where monetizing the work of archaeology to make it “sustainable” only succeeds in breaking or distorting our field beyond recognition.

Open Access and Open Data can reduce overall costs and increase research opportunities. But open access is hard to sustain if the locus of sustainability rests solely on individual organizations and projects. A recent court case helps to illustrate this. Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and SAGE sued Georgia State University over e-reserves to curtail “fair-use” (limitations in copyright law to allow research, instruction, critique, free speech). The suit was dismissed, but at the cost of over $3 million in legal fees to the university, and appeals are still pending. $3 million could have fully endowed a new professor chair in archaeology, relieved student debt, funded research, or underwritten a new high-quality open access publishing venue. Worse, the high cost of defending against such charges, even when dismissed(!), creates a chilling effect. Though the publishers lost in this round, fair use is notoriously ambiguous and risky to defend in court. The risks involved will no doubt motivate university administrators to make it much more cumbersome and costly for faculty and students to exchange publications in instruction. This legal dispute will only contribute to the general bloat of overhead and administrative hassles that increasingly burden scholarly life. Sadly, we lack clear information or accounting of the insidious costs of copyright protectionism. This greatly complicates policy making.

The Georgia State University case highlights the dangers of thinking about “sustainability” too narrowly. Standard paywalls and strong copyright ended up benefiting nobody but the attorneys. Fixating on narrowly defined notions of sustainability leads to what economists call a collective action problem. Each individual project or organization tries to survive so they have a strong incentive to monetize their intellectual property (paywalls, absolutism in copyright). Damaging negative externalities (legal risks and costly barriers) are problems for others. Thus, the current system clearly pits the interests of professional societies and publishers against those of society members, students, adjuncts, researchers lacking affiliations, libraries, funding agencies, and the public. We should not forget that university administrators find cutting archaeology, like the rest of the humanities and social sciences, very tempting and easy. The high costs of publication in STEM fields leave less money for both open and paywalled humanities publications.

Ignoring these issues and failing to address the collective action problems just reinforces and promotes an ideology that activities that can’t be monetized are not worth pursuing. I see this as particularly dangerous for archaeology, since our field is highly dependent on laws to protect heritage from the negative impacts of market forces.

Let’s put it more bluntly. Our professional societies seem willing to accept that paywalls, whose breach means 50 years in a federal prison (such as the JSTOR / Aaron Swartz affair), are a necessary cost of doing business. If so, what is wrong with bulldozers plowing through archaeological sites without restriction or mitigation. Isn’t that a necessary cost of doing business in construction? Or what is wrong with a university closing an anthropology department and canceling subscriptions to archeological journals? Can’t that be justified in the name of sustainability? What negative externalities can’t be defended for reasons of sustainability?

Where do we go from here?

If recent history is any guide, our professional societies will likely attempt to undermine the Obama Administration’s tentative steps to promote open access. They will likely do this out of fear, not malice. I don’t think underwriting the costs publishing peer-review open access literature are insurmountable. Financing open access is a challenge, but there are many models and many years of experimentation from which to learn. Some points:

• Green Open Access: The Whitehouse seems to have endorsed a “green” model of open access, where copies of peer-review publications become available in open access repositories after an embargo period. (Gold Open Access is another approach, where papers are immediately available, free-of-charge, under liberal licensing conditions). Green Open Access enables publishers to profit on exclusive access for a limited time. Unfortunately, green models have a limitation in that even after articles are publicly available, they are still under “all rights reserved” copyright. This may still leave reuse costly and and difficult. Routine reuse such duplication of a previously published image for comparison as well as innovative approaches to text-mining can still be stymied in costly and complex licensing and permissions negotiations. Nevertheless, despite these problems, public mandates for green open access would still represent tremendous progress.
• Article Processing Fees (Gold Open Access): Article processing fees, such as the $1350 – $1500 charged by the Public Library of Science (PLOS) for immediate, free-of-charge, open access publishing in their journals, represents the most widely known model. This level of expense is far too high for archaeology, a field struggling with much more limited grant and publication budgets. But smaller author-side fees may be feasible via subsidizing publication costs from other sources. Such subsidies may be an ethical necessity, since any fee to publish represents a barrier. A “pay-to-say” model of open access, while less legally dangerous in terms of copyright and access, can also have equity problems. This issue just reinforces my overall point that under-financing research and research dissemination leads to many dysfunctions.
• Membership Fees: PeerJ, an important new commercial publisher, believes it can make a profit publishing free and open peer-review papers financed with only $495 in membership dues levied on contributing authors per year. That price-point starts approaching feasibility for some archaeologists, though most will still need more subsidized support. PeerJ, which only recently launched, is currently focusing on biomedical sciences. It remains to be seen if its model can be extended to archaeology.
• Redirection and Subsidies: The points above note that subsidies likely need to play an important role to finance open access. The most obvious source for such subsidies comes form redirecting library subscription income to directly underwriting open access publication costs. The particle physics community recently made this shift, where libraries, physics journals, and other stakeholder came together to form the SCOAP3 consortium that now finances open access publishing. This kind of approach needs to be explored for archaeology.

The Need to Reinvest in Public Goods

It may be that archaeology’s professional societies can find no viable path to finance open access with existing funding. Archaeology is clearly underfunded and it may be too hard to find an acceptable mix of subsidies, advertising, author-side fees, and member fees to pay for open access. If that is the case, we shouldn’t count on libraries to continue paying subscriptions and supporting the current model much longer; a lack of public support inescapably bites one way or another. Even Harvard University, blessed with higher education’s deepest pockets, claimed it can no longer afford the costs of paywall scholarship. For reasons of sustainability (oh the irony!), Harvard urged its faculty to publish in open access venues.

Professional societies need to openly acknowledge the costs and risks (especially draconian legal risks) of our current publishing model. If open access is too hard to finance with given resources, we need to clearly communicate to public and private granting foundations and other financial supporters the severity of our financial situation and the costs of under-investing in the public good. Pretending that all is fine and well with our current paywall approach to publishing will do nothing to solve our discipline’s financial problems. Worse, it will only perpetuate a crippling ideology that research endeavors need to be more “business-like” (profit seeking) to be worth pursuing.

Academic institutions, including archaeology’s professional societies, have drunk the Kool-Aid of sustainability for too long. They have hiked tuition and fees raising student debt loads to dangerous and unprecedented levels, off-loaded teaching to an abused and disposable class of continent adjunct faculty (a process now rapidly accelerating with the rise of online courses- aka MOOCs), and have resisted open access reform efforts to break the grip of monopolistic publishers. Sustainability justifies all of these moves. But the real cost of these sustainability efforts leaves a scorched-Earth impact on the public good, undermining the whole point and rationale for the existence of higher education and research societies in the first place.

Sustainability is really a political issue. It cannot be divorced from larger debates about privatization, public goods, wealth inequalities, and how and why we conduct research. Instead of simply accepting the ideology of privatizing and monetizing everything – the ideology that underlies many ideas of “sustainability” – our professional societies should loudly highlight the inequities, risks, and real costs of our current publishing regime. If we can’t fund open access with available financing, we are under-supported. Our professional societies should use the issue of open access as the focus of capital campaigns and public policy efforts to support ethical practice in research and research dissemination.

It’s high time we get out of the ideological trap at the center of most debates about sustainability, and make a clear case that publication needs to reflect our scholarly values and our obligations to the public.

There is always something to learn from Sherlock Holmes. It is a good sign that an archaeologist has been often identified with the private detective: The Sherlock Holmes type detective has become a common association with archaeology. Although the detective... Dawid Kobiałka

I wrote this paper for a session at the 2011 Meeting of the American Association of Anthropology in Montreal called Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Anthropology: What is the status of our descriptions? It is about time I... Christopher Witmore http://traumwerk.stanford.edu:3455/witmore/Home

Today sees the launch of the new DigVentures project, Saints & Secrets: the Lost History of Leiston Abbey.

The now-ruined 14th century Leiston Abbey has never been fully excavated, and represents an extremely rare opportunity to join in with an evaluation to investigate and record a medieval monastery. You can read all about the planned programme of archaeological works.

The eagle-eyed will spot that the crowdfunding element of the site is not built on any of the major players, such as Sponsume, as it was last year. It’s built right into the DigVentures website itself, transforming the website into an archaeological crowdfunding platform.

But that was not the only interesting piece of news revealed today. DigVentures are also offering the use of their crowdfunding platform to other archaeological groups. Will this see the soft launch of a new way of funding archaeological investigations? Keep your eyes on DigVentures, for there are great things afoot.

I was responsible for building and designing the site architecture, and I’m looking forward to joining the rest of the DigVentures team to actually get my hands dirty this year!

 

 

 

Have you ever looked down when you’re walking about outside (do you walk about much)? We’re often encouraged to look up when we’re in the middle of towns and cities to admire the architecture of urbanisation above the modern, slightly jarring, signage of our high street shops.

But do you look down?

Local foundries made street ironmongery – that’s stuff like manhole covers, gutter grills, bollards, lamp-posts and railings. Here in Cornwall foundries were better known for building gigantic pumping and winding engines for the mining industry. Names like Harvey and Holman are household names, still.

Some of their iron and steel founding can be seen in our towns even though many have been replaced with less distinctive metalwork.

So next time you are out and about, take a look down, check out where that hydrant cover was made and by whom. I’m going to start collecting photographs of Cornish street ironmongery. If you want to add your own, just leave a comment or link us to your own images.

Penzance

 

Truro

Last week I was in Truro which turned out to be a real find for Cornish ironwork. This gallery traces my route from Old County Hall to Truro Cathedral. Avondale Road was most interesting, the site of ironmongery from four different Cornish foundries.

Newlyn and Mousehole

Some additions from Newlyn and Mousehole, including an unusual triangular manhole cover. All made by local founders N. Holman, St Just.

A session at the US TAG 2013, Chicago Co-organizers: Alicia Jiménez (alicia.jimenez(at)stanford.edu) and Alfredo González-Ruibal (alfredo.gonzalez-ruibal(at)incipit.csic.es) Archaeology leans heavily on typologies and similarities. Narratives about cultural change, the spreading of ideas and diasporas are often linked to things that look... Alfredo Gonzalez Ruibal

Geevor, near Pendeen, one of Cornwall’s last mineral mines, now a heritage site and museum.

Cornwall Councillor Bert Biscoe today published a really thought-provoking article on the recommencement of mining in Cornwall:

To manicure or mine, Cornwall’s modern dilemma.

Amongst other points he raises the issues of the tensions between preservation, environmental sustainability and economic gain; he also makes the point many of us have been thinking about not really articulating, that will this perceived economic boon really benefit the Cornish economy in terms of jobs, incomes and keeping a fair share of the profits? Considering the international consortium that is spear-heading the prospecting who is asking the right questions and seeking these assurances of local communities and Cornwall as a whole?

Surely our politicians can’t be so naïve to assume that any mining back in Cornwall is somehow a manna from heaven?

But that is not the point of this post. I have no quarrel with these excellent points.

Cllr Biscoe’s article begins with this sentence:

“Good news that Cornish tin has quickly become economic to mine. It is no shock to those who, like many Cornishmen all over the World, closely study the metals markets and geology. It offers an opportunity to rekindle skills and wealth generation and also to place Cornwall once again in the forefront of economic life – innovating, supplying, managing risk and prospecting.”

That such a statement could come so naturally, and be made without need for qualification in this day and age seems to me astonishing.

The Hypatia Trust recently commenced a project called History 51: Unveiling Women in Cornwall and Scilly. History 51 aims to rebalance Cornish narratives about the past by flooding public consciousness with information on the lives and achievements of women both in traditionally male industries and walks of life, as well as those dominated by women. The project is based on the Elizabeth Treffry Collection whose books, archives and reference material bring together just some of the work of and about women in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly.

Yesterday I attended an excellent field trip organised by the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall to Wheal Jane, Baldhu, near Truro. I later posted to the Elizabeth Treffry Collection’s Facebook group  how heartening it was so see so many women working at Wheal Jane in internationally-important laboratories processing and analysing minerals and ore, and much more besides.

Cllr Biscoe’s starting sentence of course did not intend to be sexist but in the context of the above, what does it say about Cornish identity and heritage more generally? That such a statement could come so naturally, and be made without need for qualification in this day and age seems to me astonishing.

To me this highlights the great gulf between our public narrative, dominated by (small c) conservative politicians and the fear-mongering media, and reality. The irony here is that much of the management of Cornish heritage is under the care of women.

We clearly have a lot of work to do. The parlance of Cornish history, identity and heritage is entirely dominated by stories of men and a masculine take on the past.

You seldom read the words of women who have something to say about Cornwall and Cornishness.

You will note that women make up more than half of our population, always have done and always will–we are the 51%.

One commentator on Facebook said:

“A lecturer on Cornish mining told me (this century) that women didn’t use to work underground in Cornish mines because a Cornishman was too much of a genetleman [sic].”

Cornwall used to a hotbed for radicalism and thinking differently. Think about what Methodism and Non-Conformism used to be about?

This conscious and unconscious privileging of some occupations over others has just reinforced the partial narratives of our past. Why do we romanticise and get nostalgic about those at the rock face but not about our midwives? Why do we privilege ‘bread winning’ occupations over ‘bread making’ occupations?

Women are just as much to blame for maintaining the silence of their female ancestors because they loyally adhere to what they have been made to believe are the most ‘important’ aspects of their heritage.

The emphasis on Cousin Jacks in the parlance of the World Heritage Site is regrettable. This stems both from folklore and school education. It then enters our history books, then onto our heritage interpretation and then into the vocabulary of the marketeers and PR officers.

Cornwall used to a hotbed for radicalism and thinking differently. Think about what Methodism and Non-Conformism used to be about? I find it very frustrating that this has been displaced by a general feeling of apathy, lack of aspiration and fear. Its impact on girls and women, boys and men, is plain to see in almost every Cornish town.

If only both boys and girls in Cornwall were given the opportunity to learn more about the diversity in their heritage, things may start to change. But while we privilege the vocabulary and narratives of men  we are a long way off.

Archaeology has been for many years identified with its own method, that of excavation. It is the way the public sees archaeology and many archaeologists think of themselves too (e.g. Holtorf 2007). However, Rodney Harrison recently pointed out the crucial... Dawid Kobiałka

Mitch Allen, a publisher that I greatly respect, commented on my blog posts about Aaron Swartz and scholarly communications in archaeology. His comments got me thinking again about the issue in some depth, and I want to take the opportunity to write about it in preparation for the SAA conference in Hawaii.

Allen thought I was probably overstating the legal issues associated with sharing logins and sharing files to get scholarly publications. Sadly, I don’t think my statements were hyperbole:

• Sharing logins to gain access to university library systems can involve grave legal risks. It violates the same sort of violations of terms-of-service that made Aaron Swartz face 50 years in prison. For instance, JSTOR’s terms of service (that Swartz allegedly violated in his felony charges) specifically prohibited actions like sharing logins.
• Sharing papers (mainly in email, but also social networking sites) also carries risks, mainly in civil and not criminal law (but that could change if something like SOPA passes). Mass copyright lawsuits with financially ruinous penalties happen- even involving 100,000 people at a time, including children.
• Litigiousness has entered the scholarly domain. University presses are suing universities over e-reserves to curtail “fair-use” (limitations in copyright law to allow research, instruction, critique, free speech).
• Law Prof. John Tehranian published a study where he calculated a jaw-dropping $4.5 billion in potential copyright liability involved in routine academic research and instructional activities over the course of a single year.

I think the evidence is clear that current intellectual property rules carry significant legal risks for everyone. It’s worse for researchers at the margins of the profession who lack their own institutional logins.

Normative Publishing Practices and Antiquities Trading

Network security laws and copyright laws are unjust because they carry such disproportionate penalties. Huge commercial scientific publishers like Elsevier push to further strengthen these draconian laws. Elsevier lobbied in favor of SOPA, a bill that would have made even non-commercial infringement a felony offense. That would have put many routine library activities at risk. Copyright has expanded in scope into a more or less absolute and perpetual property right. No US copyrighted works entered into the public domain last year.

Like it or not (and I don’t), this legal context shapes academic communication and shapes its ethics. Regarding my point about the antiquities trade, yes, that was purposeful polemic to highlight these ethical issues. To expand on this point, if archaeologists only communicate their results as all-rights-reserved intellectual property, they’re clearly engaged in a form of appropriation. The (more or less) absolute (no fair use) and perpetual (de facto unlimited copyright terms) nature of these property rights increasingly excludes all uses, save commercial transactions. Doesn’t that reduce the scholarly record of the past into commodities?

Status quo publishing practices also carry similar destructive externalities as the antiquities trade. In the antiquities trade, only beautiful or rare objects get valued and contextual information is neglected and destroyed because it has no market value. How different is Academia then, when researchers think that only the final polished article or monograph has any value? What happens to all of that rich contextual information that can’t be squeezed into a 10 page paper? While researchers have very different and much more pro-social goals than antiquities traders, publishing incentives and practices clearly need to better align to those goals.

Open Access and Commerce

Lastly, the open access and open data movements are not anti-commercial. The public good that comes from public financing of research means making information resources that can be used commercially. The normative definitions of “Open Data” explicitly allow for commercial uses, as do open access publishers like PLoS. With Open Context, we happily work with commercial publishers to try to build incentives for the better treatment of primary data.

While Open Data and Open Access are not (usually) anti-commercial, these movements are anti-monopoly. They grew in response to the increasing absurdities of global intellectual property regimes that perpetuate monopolies of big media conglomerates. My objection to the status quo is not that publishing involves commerce, I object to fact that we’re largely failing to make any public goods (despite public funding), since the vast majority of academic communication happens in a monopolistic and exclusionary way.

Getting Past the Dysfunctional Status Quo

Something is obviously very screwed-up when university presses sue universities over e-reserves and many researchers lack the means to legally participate in their discipline’s communications. I don’t think the current situation works to anyone’s interest, except for large conglomerates like Elsevier. It certainly doesn’t help small publishers like Left Coast Press, since the cost escalations of the big commercial science publishers mean less budget to buy humanities and social science books (as eloquently noted by Cathy Davidson). It is self-defeating for archaeology’s professional societies to fight (or avoid) open access, since they are simply helping to perpetuate cost-escalations in the areas of scientific publishing (chemistry, biology, computer science) that university administrators prioritize over the humanities and social sciences. Our professional societies need to consider this larger economic reality when determining their positions on open access.

The work of publishers like Mitch Allen are important to the health of archaeology. His efforts add value and quality to archaeological communications. I am very open to debate about what constitutes the right balance between public and private in archaeology’s information resources and also a debate about how we finance quality publishing. However, I stand by my point that our current policy of investing almost nothing in public (open) information resources hurts our discipline and puts many of its practitioners in legal jeopardy.

UPDATE

Lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation just posted a piece about the issues of felony violations of terms of service. Look at Point 4, substitute Pandora with JSTOR or a university library and you’ll see how all this applies to scholarship. See also this discussion of library licensing terms, since:

It is, however, very clear that licensing terms, which govern an increasingly large proportion of our collections, are a fundamental issue in the present and future usability of library resources by our campus populations.

 

 

NOTE: This has been recycled from: http://pelagios-project.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-portable-antiquities-scheme-joins.html Hacking Pelagios RDF in the ISAW library, June 2012

Earlier in 2012, the excellent Linked Ancient World Data Institute was held in New York at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW). During this symposium, Leif and Elton convinced many participants that they should contribute their data to the Pelagios project, and I was one of them.

I work for a project based at the British Museum called the Portable Antiquities Scheme which encourages members of the public within England and Wales to voluntarily record objects that they discover whilst pursuing their hobbies (such as metal-detecting or gardening). The centrepiece of this projects is a publicly accessible database which has been on-line in various guises for over 13 years and the latest version is now in the position to produce interoperable data much more easily than previously.

The Portable Antiquities Scheme database

Within the database that I have designed and built (using Zend Framework, jQuery, Solr and Twitter Bootstrap), we now hold records for over 812,000 objects, with a high proportion of these being Roman coin records (175,000+ at the time of writing, some with more than 1 coin per record). Many of these coins have mints attached (over 51,000 are available to all access levels on our database, with a further 30,000 or so held back due to our workflow model.) To align these mints with a Pleiades place identifier was straightforward due to the limited number of places that are involved, with the simple addition of columns to our database. Where possible, these mints have also been assigned identifiers from Nomisma, Geonames and Yahoo!’s WOEID system (although that might be on the way out with the recent BOSS news), however some mints I haven’t been able to assign – for instance ‘mint moving with Republican issuer‘ or ‘C‘ mint which has an unknown location.

Once these identifiers were assigned to the database, it allowed easy creation of  RDF for use by the Pelagios project and it also facilitated use of their widgets to enhance our site further. To create the RDF for ingestion by Pelagios, our solr search index dumps XML via a cron job cUrl request, which is transformed by XSLT every Sunday night to our server and uses s3sync to send the dump to Amazon S3 (where we have incremental snapshots). These data grow at the rate of around 100 – 200 coins a week, depending on staff time, knowledge and whether the state of the coin allows one to attribute a mint (around 45% of the time.) The PAS database also has the facility for error reporting and commenting on records, so if you use the attributions provided through Pelagios and find a mistake, do tell us!

At some point in the future, I plan to try and match data extracted from natural language processing (using Yahoo geo tools and OpenCalais) against Pleiades identifiers and attempt to make more annotations available to researchers and Pelagios.

For example, this object WMID-3FE965, the Staffordshire Moorlands patera or trulla (shown below):

Has the following inscription with place names:

This is a list of four forts located at the western end of Hadrian’s Wall; Bowness (MAIS), Drumburgh (COGGABATA), Stanwix (UXELODUNUM) and Castlesteads (CAMMOGLANNA). it incorporates the name of an individual, AELIUS DRACO and a further place-name, RIGOREVALI. Which can further be given Pleiades identifiers as such:

1. Bowness: 89239
2. Drumburgh: 89151
3. Stanwix: 967060430
4. Castlesteads: 89133

Integrating the Pelagios widget and awld.js

Using Pleiades and Nomisma identifers allows the PAS database to enrich records further via the use of rdfa in view scripts and by the incorporation of the Pelagios widget and the ISAW javascript library on a variety of pages. For example, the screenshot below gives a view of a gold aureus of Nero recorded in the North East of England with the Pelagios widget activated:

The pelagios widget embedded on a coin record:
DUR-B4E094 

The javascript library by Nick Rabinowitz and Sebastian Heath also allows for enriched web pages, this page for Nero shows the libary in action:

 

These emperor pages also pull in various resources from third party websites (such as Adrian Murdoch’s excellent talking head video biographies of Roman emperors), data from dbpedia, nomisma, viaf and the site’s internal search engine. The same approach is also used, but in a more pared down way for all other issuer periods on our website, for example: Cnut the Great.

Integrating Johan’s map tiles Following on from Johan’s posting on the magnificent set of map tiles that he’s produced for the Pelagios project (and as seen in use over at the Pleiades site and OCRE), I’ve now integrated these into our mapping system. I’ve done it slightly differently to the examples that Johan gave; due to the volume of traffic that we serve up, it wasn’t fair to saddle the Pelagios team with extra bandwidth. Therefore, Johan provided zipped downloads of the map tiles and I store these on our server (if you’re a low traffic site, feel free to use our tile store): Imperium map layer, with parish boundary. Zoom level 10.

The map zoom has been set to the level (10 for Great Britain) at which we decided site security was ensured for the discovery points (although Johan has made tiles available to level 11). This complements the other layers we use:

• Open Street Map
• terrain
• satellite
• soil map
• Stamen map watercolor
• Stamen map toner
• NLS historic OS maps

Each find spot is also reverse geocoded for a WOEID and Geonames identifier to be produced, elevation to obtained and subsequently we link to Aaron Straup Cope’s excellent woedb for further enhancement of place data.  We also serve up boundaries derived from the Ordnance Survey Opendata BoundaryLine dataset, split from shapefiles and converted to KML by ogr2ogr scripts. The incorporation of this layer allows researchers (over 300 projects currently use our data) to interpret the results that they get from searches on our database against the road network and settlement data much more easily and has already gathered many positive comments from our staff and research colleagues.

By contributing to the Pelagios project, we hope that people will find our resources more easily and that we in turn can promote the efforts of all the fantastic projects that have been involved in this programme. What we’ve managed to implement from joining the Pelagios project already outweighs the time spent coding the changes to our system. If you run a database or website with ancient world references, you should join too!