This paper explores the application of Recogito Studio for annotating unstructured museum data to create semantic links and visualisations. The study focuses on a sample dataset from National Museums Scotland, which includes metadata about navigational instruments from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The authors aimed to develop methods for converting unstructured data into structured formats using Recogito Studio. Recogito Studio facilitates semantic annotation by allowing users to highlight and tag entities and relationships in texts and images, and link places to online gazetteers. The data model was developed using Linked Art and CIDOC CRM standards, with some bespoke terminology. Annotations focused on unstructured text fields, using Recogito Studio’s Geo-Tagger plugin to identify and tag geographical locations. The geo-tagged data was exported and visualised using Peripleo, requiring several data transformations to ensure compatibility. A user evaluation with cultural heritage professionals revealed usability challenges and areas for improvement, with Recogito Studio receiving a UMUX score of 73.3 and recommendations include enhancing geo-tagging, incorporating Named Entity Recognition, and developing automated workflows for Linked Open Data production.

This archive lists similar to 8000 Bronze Age British axeheads, alongside associated compositional analyses, isotopic measurements and radiocarbon dates. It integrates several major existing data collection efforts and published catalogues, whilst also providing a self-consistent basic typology. It is archived as four related flat-sheet text files and could be reused to support quantitative assessment of geographic and temporal patterns in metalwork style, deposition, recovery, hoard co-occurrence and/ or metallurgicalcompositions to name just a few salient topics.

Abstract This chapter discusses how digital technology, methods, theory, and practice could transcend the physical limitations of museum and archaeological spaces. This chapter will consider how the digital realm, including social media and multimedia, can bring to life the collections and narratives for audiences on and off site. It will not be exhaustive as the panoply of digital experiences is beyond the space and scope of this handbook. What it does highlight is how low-cost, reproducible technology could be used to enable multi-vocality, democratic co-creative tools and platforms, immersive experiences, and new ways of working which can transcend the digital divide and be available to institutions of varying levels of digital maturity. One of the major challenges in presenting such initiatives is the rate of technological change and the pace of platform attrition and churn, meaning that many of the projects presented here will be superseded.

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the outcomes of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Arts and Humanities Research Council funded (AHRC) Creative Economy Engagement Fellowships, a practice-driven research, development programme and knowledge transfer activity. The guiding principles and methods behind these Fellowships were to make use of low cost, replicable 3D scanning of the Museum's collection, whilst working with an educational technology startup and a 3D printing artisan workshop to determine how their technologies could be exploited whilst focusing on user-centred design. This chapter demonstrates how Early Career Researchers (ECRs) can gain valuable career progression and creative industries experience whilst combining digital technologies, audience engagement and research and implement them in a short time frame.

This software record holds version 1.1 of the codebase (2015 - 2021) for the Portable Antiquities Scheme's (PAS) database. This is a repository for the current generation of the Portable Antiquities Scheme Website, a British Museum project that encourages the voluntary recording of archaeological artefacts found by the public in England and Wales. $$ $$These artefacts are found while carrying out a wide range of activities including metal-detecting. The first record was made in 1998, the half-million mark was reached in March 2010, and the millionth object, a Roman coin from the Seaton hoard, was recorded in September 2014. The current total stands at 1.6 million objects and nearly 1 million records and 600, 000 images.$$ $$The live version of the database can be accessed via $\href{https://finds.org.uk/database}{\text{https://finds.org.uk/database}}$ $$ $$There is a copy of this version of the codebase that can also be accessed in Zenodo and the version controlled repository is available in Github (see related links below). $$ $$More information about the code itself, technology stack and how to deploy the database can be found in the “README.md” file and on Github in the wiki system.

This paper draws upon the experience of several years of running a multi-application crowdsourcing platform, as well as a longitudinal evaluation of participant profiles, motivations and behaviour, to argue that heritage crowdsourcing cannot straightforwardly be considered a democratising form of cultural participation. While we agree that crowdsourcing helps expand public engagement with state-funded activities at Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums, we also note that, the involved public cohort is not radically different in socio-demographic make-up to the one that physically visits such institutions, being for example financially better-off with high levels of formal education. In shedding light on issues of participation and cultural citizenship, through a both theoretically and empirically rich discussion, this paper casts light on the current impact of heritage crowdsourcing, in terms of both its strengths and weaknesses. The study will also be useful for cultural heritage policy and practice, museum management and curatorship to potentially guide the choices and strategies of funders and organisations alike.

The Day of Archaeology (http://www.dayofarchaeology.com) was a volunteer-led international archaeological blogging event that ran from 2011 to 2017. The project asked people who define themselves as archaeologists to submit one or more blog posts about their working day on a chosen day in June or July. This article explores the history of the Day of Archaeology project and the practicalities of running a large-scale collaborative blogging project, before examining some of the topics covered in the posts. An assessment of the impact of the project follows. Overall, we hope in this work to answer some of the basic questions regarding this type of collaborative, online, global engagement – what we did, who we reached, what they talked about – and also to provide some insights for any other similar initiatives that may follow us in the future.

A group of respondents discuss the implications of using 3D imaging technology in for accessibility, teaching, and research. This Conversation brings together a polyphony of voices, drawn from a range of positions in the small but growing world of digital art history. Similarly, possessing a plurality of reproductions that oribit the designated original is like peering through a selection of lenses. Together, they bring in and out of focus the various meanings of the object of study and enhance its presentation to a broad and complex array of audiences.

This is just a minor improvement. It adds missing libraries into the documentation for installing PYBOSSA as well as to Vagrant.

This article reviews existing case studies in the ‘crowd-funding’ of community archaeology, as well as offering preliminary results from a small-scale experiment conducted alongside the wider crowd-sourcing efforts of the MicroPasts project (http://micropasts.org). In so-doing, it also considers the possible role of a hybrid reward- and donation-based model for micro-financing collaborative archaeological research. The article concludes with a summary of the key lessons drawn from experiences of crowd-funding archaeology so far, and highlights their particular implications for community archaeology.