Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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Many look to their <strong>in</strong>stitutions to provide the needed support and resources for digital
scholarship, but are unable to pay for the services of local technical staff. Digital humanities
facilities at some <strong>in</strong>stitutions support <strong>in</strong>novative scholars, but these <strong>in</strong>stitutions may be too
advanced for the needs of many of the scholars we <strong>in</strong>terviewed and, consequently, have limited
uptake by faculty. Some scholars, however, observed that it is easier to get technical help from
their <strong>in</strong>stitutions if the projects might produce transferable tools and technologies (Harley et al.
2010, 25).
The ability to provide both basic and advanced levels of technical assistance is thus required. In
addition, build<strong>in</strong>g tools that can be repurposed was suggested as one way of garner<strong>in</strong>g greater
<strong>in</strong>stitutional support. One project that has explored the issues of implement<strong>in</strong>g new technology and
digital methods for archaeological field research is the Silchester Roman Town 249 project, a British
research excavation project of the Roman town of Silchester from its history before the Roman
conquest until it was abandoned <strong>in</strong> the fifth century AD.
The project made extensive use of a specialized database called the Integrated Archaeological
Database (IADB), 250 which was developed <strong>in</strong> the 1980s and is now available as a web-based
application that makes use of Ajax, MySQL, and PHP (Fulford et al. 2010). “Crucial to the
<strong>in</strong>terpretation of the archaeological record,” Fulford et al. reported, “is the IADB’s capacity to build
the hierarchical relationships (archaeological matrix) which mirror the stratigraphic sequence and
enable the capture of composite, spatial plans of the <strong>in</strong>dividual context record to demonstrate the
chang<strong>in</strong>g character of occupation over time” (Fulford et al. 2010). Archaeological data can be viewed
as <strong>in</strong>dividual records, 2-D matrices, or as groups of objects.
One major challenge faced dur<strong>in</strong>g field research is site record<strong>in</strong>g; Fulford et al. observed that the
double handl<strong>in</strong>g of data was particularly problematic. To deal with this problem, the Silchester Roman
Town project first collaborated with the OGHAM (On-L<strong>in</strong>e Group Historical and Archaeological
Matrix) project, which was funded by the Jo<strong>in</strong>t Information Systems Committee (JISC), 251 and
Silchester thus <strong>in</strong>troduced the use of PDAs and rugged tablet computers for field record<strong>in</strong>g. The most
significant <strong>in</strong>sight of this first project was that direct network access was “<strong>in</strong>valuable,” particularly <strong>in</strong>
terms of communication and data management. JISC cont<strong>in</strong>ued fund<strong>in</strong>g this work through the VERA:
Virtual Environment for Research <strong>in</strong> Archaeology 252 project, and the <strong>in</strong>itial collaboration was
extended to <strong>in</strong>clude <strong>in</strong>formation and computer scientists. Baker et al. (2008) noted that the VERA
project sought “to <strong>in</strong>vestigate how archaeologists use Information Technology (IT) <strong>in</strong> the context of a
field excavation, and also for post-excavation Analysis.” The project also <strong>in</strong>troduced new tools and
technology to assist <strong>in</strong> “the archaeological processes of record<strong>in</strong>g, manipulat<strong>in</strong>g and analys<strong>in</strong>g data.”
Baker et al. underscored that one of the most important parts of the archaeological process is record<strong>in</strong>g
“contexts,” which they def<strong>in</strong>e as the “smallest identifiable unit <strong>in</strong>to which the archaeological record
can be divided and are usually the result of a physical action” (Baker et al. 2008). As contexts are
identified they are given a unique number <strong>in</strong> a site register and typically the <strong>in</strong>formation is recorded on
a paper “context card” that will track everyth<strong>in</strong>g from sketches to data. Context cards are filed <strong>in</strong> an
area folder and eventually entered manually <strong>in</strong>to a database. This process, however, is not without its
problems:
249 http://www.silchester.rdg.ac.uk/
250 http://www.iadb.org.uk/
251 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/
252 http://vera.rdg.ac.uk/